Completely Unnecessary

Palin’s widely anticipated stuff up on Supreme Court cases aired tonight.

The governor believes Roe v Wade should be left to the states because she’s ‘a Federalist’, but also believes there’s an inherent right to privacy in the Constitution.

I’ll leave that contradiction aside because I don’t care about Palin’s stance on abortion (and her verbal roulette in that clip probably doesn’t explain it that well anyway).

The anticipation had to do with Couric’s follow up. Palin notably couldn’t think of any other Supreme Court cases with which she disagreed - other than nameless ones that should be left to the states.

But as Jezebel commenter, lacey in ak, points out, at least one decision should have occurred to the governor. Perhaps Palin might have remembered that she filed an amicus brief in Exxon v Baker and then released a statement complaining about the decision.

That last part happened in June.

In other news, in the Senate today the bailout was strangely attached to the Paul Wellstone Mental Health Bill. Ezra Klein explains:

Tax bills have to originate in the House of Representatives. But the current thinking is that the Senate should pass a bailout bill to increase pressure on the House. So they needed to find some piece of legislation that had already passed the House but had not yet passed the Senate.

The 25 Nay votes are a strange mishmash of Senators from both sides of the aisle. It’s probably not often that Russ Feingold finds himself voting with Brownback, Sessions and Inhofe. (Also means that Feingold voted against the Wellstone bill, which must have killed him.) Dole made a bid to hang onto her Senate seat with her ‘no’ vote - who knows if it’ll work.

And, finally, the corruption trial of Senator Ted Sevens (R-AK) continues apace. Today, friend and renovator, Bill Allen, testified that while Stevens asked for an invoice, it was clear that Allen should never bill the senator for work done to ‘the chalet’.

Apparently Allen and Stevens were such close friends that they:

used to go to “boot camp” in the desert Southwest - where they would walk around, eating little and drinking only wine, “trying to get some pounds off.” [ADN via Mudflats]

I have no idea.

(Sounds pretty awesome though…)

Vaguely Related

• Ted Stevens’ Trial - Already Amazing
• Palin and Couric - Sarah’s No Leo

I’m doing some research at the moment on a beating death of a Sudanese refugee in Melbourne. Though an Australian citizen, the framing by the press largely concerned the ‘refugee problem’ in Australia, etc., etc.

Now firmly behind the 8-ball, I’ve been doing journal research for about the last three hours. Just as I was about to call it a day (or, rather, call it a dinner and then study more at the Standard), I saw an article by S. Brownback.

And wouldn’t you know it, the Senator from Kansas wrote an article for Mediterranean Quarterly in 1999 condemning the situation in Sudan, calling it a ‘genocide’:

If I bring anything to the debate on Sudan, I hope it is the ability to sound the alarm regarding the crimes against humanity and the genocide practiced by the government of Sudan. Please note my lack of polite phrasing–this is deliberate. Our failure to use the word genocide against Rwanda in 1994 helped facilitate the deaths of a reported eight hundred thousand people within a short, three-month period, even as we watched these events unfold on CNN. We should not make this mistake again.

It’s almost as if he isn’t evil just because I disagree with most of what he says. I know rationally this can’t be the case but… maybe I’m just hungry. Yesterday I had laksa with a side of mild food poisoning. Here’s hoping food w/o sickness will put my head back on straight.

* - In fairness, Brownback wrote an op-ed for the NYT explaining his stance on evolution and creation, lamenting the that in our ’sound-bite political culture, it is unrealistic to expect that every complicated issue will be addressed with the nuance or subtlety it deserves.’ I don’t agree with his views, but his justified lament gets the link.

Vaguely Related

• Today’s Palin Fail, the Wellstone Bailout and Stevens Detritus
• Andrews’ ‘Africans’ Comments Against Departmental Advice