Joe Biden: The Spiro Agnew of the Democratic Party

“I don’t want to look like a schmuck. I want you to look like a schmuck.”

-Kevin Kline in Dave

Senator Obama had his choice of huge range of individuals for vice president candidate. He could have picked Hillary Clinton, who has a solid constituency, or he could have picked Bill Richardson, who has a brain the size of the planet and represents the left well. Instead, he picked Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, who received a whopping 1% of the vote in the primaries in which he participated. Biden has a less than distinguished carrier in the Senate that includes such debacles as the Anita Hill massacre, in which Clarence Thomas was confirmed as a justice of the Supreme Court, having been publicly shamed by his assistant. Biden chaired the mess.

He also was accused of plagiarizing work of other candidates the last time he ran for president in 1988. While this is a seemingly normal thing for politicians, it’s not something I want my daughter to aspire to do.

Why, then, pick this man?

Senator Obama has put a huge effort into seeing that he is perceived as a positive campaigner. He objects to each of Senator McCain’s attack ads, and he does his best to not fight back in kind. But it’s pretty clear that at least someone thinks he needs someone to fight back. That would be Joe Biden, in the fine tradition of Spiro Agnew. This, it seems to me, is why Obama picked Biden. The man won’t make a great vice president (whatever that means), but he can be nasty, in a whithering sort of way.

How do you spell Soviet Union today?

M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I

The Wall Street Journal recently reported one of the most peculiar incidents I’ve read about in a long time: a Mississippi Supreme Court justice was ordered by the majority not to publish a dissenting opinion in what seems like a relatively pedestrian case. Dissenting opinions are nearly as important as majority opinions because first they inform us of what the other side of an issue is, and second they often turn into majority opinions of the future, either due to changes in courts or changes in law. It would be one thing for the court, by the way, to not want to reveal specific details of a case, but an entire opinion is beyond the pale.

Oh Say Can You STEAL?

America’s National Anthem is, well, a symbol of America. And so it is no small matter when someone steals it. According to NPR’s Morning Edition the Chinese have done just that, and they did so by playing a version that was arranged by a private individual named Peter Breiner. He found out about it from friends who heard them play it in that tiny itty bitty venue – an Olympics medal presentation.

File this one under the department of “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up”.

Obama v. McCain: The Courts. This one IS a Knockout

After my last lengthy spewage about Foreign Policy, I figured I’d take on something a little more straight forward. One of the largest and most lasting powers a president has is his ability to appoint judges to courts, and justices to the Supreme Court. The issues surrounding the courts are not just abortion, but privacy, freedom of speech, freedom from religion, gun control (or lack thereof), and the ability of the government to protect our environment for the next generation, just to name a few.

The current administration placed Samuel Alito and John Roberts onto the Supreme Court, making it the most conservative court in well over a century, probably dating as far back as the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which give you some idea just how far backwards we have gone. The next administration will likely see at least one Supreme Court nomination in the next four years. Justice Stevens is 88 years old. It’s almost hard to imagine how the court could shift to the right any further ith Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, considered the center of the court, but that is precisely what could happen.

Here the record of Senator McCain is crystal clear. He hasn’t waivered from it one bit. McCain is anti-choice, and he has further stated that he would like to replace the existing left side of the bench (Stevens, Ginsberg, Souter, Bryer) with people from the right. That doesn’t suit me well at all. The people on the right side of the bench, aside from taking away a woman’s right to choose, also voted to gut the Court’s own power by all but taking on Marbury v. Madison. A dysfunctional 3rd branch of the government is not what our founders had in mind.

Barack Obama is a lawyer and has tought at the University of Chicago. He is pro-choice, and in general has a more studied approach that is not subject to the strictness of ideology. This in part leaves me uncomfortable. However, given the two individuals in play, the choice is clear. McCain scores a whopping F and a low one at that on his handling of the court, while we’ll give Obama a tentative B, with perhaps as much as 70 points between them on this issue.

Another TSA Moron Story

We interrupt this serious consideration of our future presidents with Yet Another story of a stupid (and yet unnamed) TSA employee. In this case, an inspector attempted to break into planes on the tarmac. According to one report, the inspector “breached” seven out of nine planes. But in process he may have damaged sensitive avionics. This caused a delay O’Hare International Airport while the airline took corrective measures. This was stupid but not tragic because nobody was hurt– this time. It could have been both stupid and tragic had the inspector touched something he shouldn’t have, broken something, and contributed to the loss of life. Wouldn’t that have been rich?

The really stupid part is that it is not a secret that the overwhelming majority of effort to secure airplanes on the tarmac is devoted to keeping the wrong people off of the tarmac in the first place. That is largely not the responsibility of the airline, but that of the airport and the TSA. Once the inspector was on the tarmac and unsupervised, the game should have ended. It didn’t.