Latest From Our Writers

So it's John G. Roberts as Bush's Supreme Court nominee. While it looks like Roberts might be the male version of Edith Brown Clement (who, I argued on Monday, was the best possible choice of the bunch), the fact that Roberts is male means he's already got one strike against him. A full three-quarters of Americans wanted to see a female justice. If Roberts is confirmed, Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be the only woman on the court. It's 2005—not the time to be going backward in women's representation on the highest court in the land.

Aside from Roberts' gender, the news this morning seems to indicate that Democrats are not thrilled with Roberts but not distraught, either. In the pro column, Roberts is quite respected among his colleagues, and he doesn't seem to be an ideological candidate. "He's in the middle," said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. And legal historian David J. Garrow of Emory University, said “This is someone who’s going to end up much more in the O’Connor/Rehnquist mode than the Scalia/Thomas mode.”

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This morning, Reuters reported that the Iraqi delegation to the donor conference on reconstruction for Iraq, held in Jordan, declared that, "Unless we move fast and effectively in the next few months we will have very serious problems on our hands,'' Planning Minister Barham Salih told Reuters. "Failure is not an option because it will have dire consequences for the Iraqi people and for the region and for world security." For progressives, this should be ringing the alarm bells.

Without an improvement of basc services and facilities in Iraq, the country would likely witness a series of massive sectarian protests of the Green Zone government. Such protests, whether in Baghdad or not, would present an incredible target to insurgents. Such a scenario could indeed lead to an escalation spiral that looks and feels like civil war , but in this case, it would be a three-way guerrilla war, with the United States smack in the middle. U.S casualties would spike, atrocities would happen; the region—and its oil—would be in peril.

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News reports today indicate that President Bush is getting closer to picking his Supreme Court nominee—and he's been getting advice from all sides about what characteristics the potential justice should have. Sen. Arlen Specter, who will preside at the confirmation hearing, suggested Bush go with a politician. Sen. Mary Landrieu, one of the compromisers from the filibuster debacle, just wants it to be someone both parties can get behind (Ha. Nice chance of that.) Then there's the American people, who, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll from last week, want the new justice to be a woman—in fact, three out of four Americans favor a female nominee. And two out of three would like a Hispanic justice.

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Today, Robin Cook, former U.K. foreign minister, writes that given the current situation, the Pentagon's secret plans for withdrawal from Iraq will only make the situation worse. This raises an important point for progressives trying to find an viable and credible exit strategy for Iraq: What role should the multinational force play in such an exit strategy?

There are four major points defining the current occupation. First, the majority of Iraqis want the occupation to end. Second, the large-scale use of combat troops to prosecute the counterinsurgency mission is doing more harm than good, with the Iraqi health ministry reporting that twice as many Iraqis have been killed by the occupation as by the insurgents. Three, large parts of the Kurdish north and the Shi'a south have stayed relatively peaceful due to experienced commanders who have worked closely with local leaders to solve problems and ensure security. Lastly, the insurgency is driven by local, Iraqi politics more than vague notions of global jihad.

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Forty years ago, election reform was not about campaign contributions—it was about equal opportunity. That still should be the priority. Earlier this week, House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner Jr., R-Wis., announced that he will introduce legislation to extend the Voting Rights Act for 25 more years. And the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition is organizing a Pro-Democracy March and Rally in Atlanta on August 6 to support the Voting Rights Act.

Let's rewind back to 1965 and the Civil Rights movement. Equal voting rights was one of the major issues at stake. One of the key reasons “Bloody Sunday ”—the violent clash between police and peaceful protestors in Selma, Ala.— occurred was racial discrimination and voting inequalities.One positive outcome of that tragedy was the Voting Rights Act, which President Johnson pushed through Congress in a matter of weeks in the summer of 1965.  We've still got that act—but maybe not all of it for much longer.

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Over the last few weeks, I've been writing about the need for a progressive exit strategy for Iraq. Today, TomPaine.com presents two important pieces that are bookends around what that policy ought to be. Rami Khouri, editor of the Beirut Daily Star , challenges Blair to take the steps necessary to "drain the swamp," or, as Khouri puts it in in his article, Be Wiser Than Bush, "to respond to the legitimate needs, grievances and aspirations of the hundreds of millions of Arabs and Asians who are the enabling environment from which the terrorists emerge. "

The second piece comes from an old classmate, J. Alexander Thier, who served as an adviser to the constitutional process in Afghanistan. In his piece, Iraq's Rush To Failure, Thier makes it clear that not only is an attempt to make the August 15th logistically unlikely, any attempt to do so would exclude so many of the necessary stakeholders in Iraq that the resulting document would be worse than worthless. Indeed, pressing forward with such a short-sighted timeline and process could, "invite a conflagration that would make the insurgency look like a garden party."

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Regular readers of Uncommon Sense might remember the problems I have with www.4parents.gov. (see 4Parents Still Faulty, from May). It's ostensibly an educational website for parents of teenagers that provides advice about talking to teens about puberty, sex and making responsible choices. But in reality, it's got information that's not scientifically correct and is highly judgmental toward non-traditional families, homosexual teens and anyone who might be thinking about premarital sex. So I was glad to see Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., taking the site to task recently.

Waxman—who's a longtime critic of the Bush administration's abstinence-only approach toward sex education—requested that a panel of nationally known experts on adolescent development and sexuality review the site for accuracy and effectiveness. The results, not surprisingly, were not positive:

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I found it quite disappointing to read these words from Sen. Harry Reid, the minority leader, in response  to President Bush's speech yesterday on the war on terror:

The simple fact is that the Bush administration has refused to make the needed investments to secure American cities and towns," the senator said in a statement. "We spend more in Iraq in a single month than we spend on first responders all year. Failure in Iraq is not an option, and we will continue to support our troops but we must do more to support the war on terror here at home.

Sen.  Reid—indeed, the Democratic Party as a whole—is staring at an enormous opportunity to refocus American attention on the need to "drain the swamp" and away from the counterproductive agenda of the Bush administration. Instead, he chose to play to American insecurity.

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There's a popular maxim in Washington, D.C.: "Nothing's harder than getting fired from the federal government." Doesn't matter if you regularly show up to work inebriated (something I've witnessed personally). And apparently doesn't matter if you jeopardize national security—outing an undercover CIA agent—in the name of defending a plan for war whose stated goal is "protecting national security." This is why the folks at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington were quick to call on the White House to revoke Rove's security clearance in light of the new evidence against him.

CREW's director, Melanie Sloan, issued the following statement yesterday:

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So that open Supreme Court seat everyone's talking about...should it be a big deal? The consensus of a panel discussion I attended this morning—organized by Ms. Magazine at the National Press Club—was that it most certainly should be a big deal. Perhaps anticipating the question of whether we are all overreacting by talking, writing and e-mailing about O'Connor's seat 24/7, historian and author Ellen Chesler opened the discussion by saying: "It is not 'alarmist' to be concerned about compromises to foundational doctrines for women and for all Americans. It's realistic."

(You can watch the discussion online on C-SPAN. Scroll down the "Recent Programs" list and look for "Nat'l Press Club Forum on the Supreme Court Vacancy.")

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