Okay, lets get down to brass tacks on this cspan crap, how much cspan do any of you actually watch in a day? How much of the live televised floor debate, house or senate? What about the committee hearings, anybody catch one of those this week? What about the nightly recaps of the day's highlights (what I usually watch as I am at work all day)? I am curious cause if you dont, then you simply arent qualified to even comment on this issue. Cspan and cspan2 are my goto channels, the first thing I flip to when i turn on the boob tube, the only unfiltered source of info about the day on the hill. I will admit to moving on if its uninteresting, but I would say I watch more of it than 95% of the populous. I can tell you from experience that anything that goes on in front of the cspan cameras is meant for the cameras, even grilling witnesses like the big bank ceo's last week. Anybody catch that, or just the faux news digested portions? The real meat has always been hashed out behind closed doors.
Other than making platitudinous statements that congress is going to ignore and which he has no power to enforce, what exactly do you expect out of BO? To not even try to put pressure on congress? Cause that is all his efforts amount to, calling them out. Further, a huge amount of what happened in the healthcare legislation debate was on cspan or the news networks (floor debates, committee hearings, and town hall meetings), more televised hours than any other major peice of legislation in history from what I understand. But, because the dipshits are out on their ears by their own doing, they make a show about nothing, and you are lapping it up. It is all a show, both from BO's side cause he cant control what congress does, and from the repubs side cause if they were involved in the negotiations. I am quite sure they would be fine with not airing their dirty laundry if they were actually involved in this anymore, eg point scorin hypocrits AGAIN.
As far as Alito, well, nobody commented on any other justice's reaction or the joint chiefs when he laid into them. To this point, none of the justices have publicly commented on the speech since, and they shouldnt, so I dont know where you are coming up with your allegations about the rest of the Court's reaction. I will leave it to a sharp legal commentator to give you my perspective on BO vs Alito:
Right-wing criticisms -- that it was Obama who acted inappropriately by using his SOTU address to condemn the Court's decision -- are just inane. Obama is an elected politician in a political branch and has every right to express his views on such a significant court ruling. While the factual claims Obama made about the ruling are subject to reasonable dispute, they're well within the realm of acceptable political rhetoric and are far from being "false"..Presidents have a long history of condemning Court rulings with which they disagree -- Republican politicians, including Presidents, have certainly never shied away from condemning Roe v. Wade in the harshest of terms -- and Obama's comments last night were entirely consistent with that practice. While Presidents do not commonly criticize the Court in the SOTU address, it is far from unprecedented either.
Justice Alito's flamboyantly insinuating himself into a pure political event, in a highly politicized manner, will only hasten the decline of the Court's reputation. On a night when both tradition and the Court's role dictate that he sit silent and inexpressive, he instead turned himself into a partisan sideshow -- a conservative Republican judge departing from protocol to openly criticize a Democratic President -- with Republicans predictably defending him and Democrats doing the opposite. Alito is now a political (rather than judicial) hero to Republicans and a political enemy of Democrats, which is exactly the role a Supreme Court Justice should not occupy.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn ... 1/28/alito
BTW, in another oped peice, this same guy basically agreed with the CU decision on 1st amendment grounds, so did I, but also like me felt it was an aggredious exercise of judicial activism to even rehear the case, much less issue such an expansive decision.
