For those of you wondering if the election results had any effect on The Decider, well, apparently not. The guy just renominated six previously rejected picks for the federal appeals court. One of them, William J. Haynes II, was one of the people responsible for establishing the administration's torture policy on detainees. Another, Michael Wallace, is so lame even the American Bar Association says he's not fit for the job. But extremism in the name of neo-conservative values is no vice, at least to the White House, and so he's offering these sacrificial lambs as an apparent Fuck You to the new Democratic majority.
Speaking of the Democrats, they haven't even taken charge yet and they're already squabbling and jockeying for position. The big battle now is who gets to be majority whip, number two in the House under leader Nancy Pelosi. In and of itself, these machinations are of zero interest to anybody outside Washington. But it doesn't portend well for the future: If these clowns can't even get their act together over crap like this, how will they offer a united front against the Bushinistas? This is going to be too easy for Cheney and Rove: All they'll have to do is plant seeds of distrust among Democratic leaders, and they'll vote against each other out of sheer spite.
Given these depressing developments, the return of noted racist Trent Lott to a position of power in the senate--he's now the Number Two guy for the Republicans--only ranks as an "Eh, what'r ya gonna do?" on my personal Despair Scale. Lott opposed the Martin Luther King holiday and the Voting rights Act, and famously declared that creepy segregationist Strom Thurmond should have been elected president. (He had to do the tour of shame for that last one, and while appearing on BET actually made the claim that he voted against the King holiday because, as a white man, he didn't really know how significant King was!)
Finally, mentioning Trent Lott allows me to mention that Lott Dod, a scummy but minor functionairy in The Phantom Menace was named for him, and thus I fulfill my obligatory Star Wars reference.
