Good article by Bob Egelko in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Ever since California voters became the first in the nation to legalize medical marijuana in 1996, the state has faced unyielding opposition from the federal government, which insists it has the power to prohibit a drug it considers useless and dangerous.

That could all change with the next presidential election.

As the candidates prepare for a May 20 primary in Oregon, one of 12 states with a California-style law, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois has become an increasingly firm advocate of ending federal intervention and letting states make their own rules when it comes to medical marijuana.

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TalkingPointMemo’s David Kurtz, under the title “Never Thought I’d Say It”:

How far off track is Hillary’s campaign? It’s so bad even Peggy Noonan is making sense, painful as that is to say.

This is terrible. Write your Representative — and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, too. Report is by Mike Lillis in the Washington Independent.

After stealing headlines earlier in the year, the showdown between the White House and House Democrats over the renewal of controversial domestic spying legislation has faded from public debate. (In a nutshell, the administration wants to protect the phone companies from lawsuits for their role in providing the government with client information without judicial oversight — something the Senate approved but the House has thus far rejected.)

But now comes word from the American Civil Liberties Union that House Democrats may be crafting a deal with Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) to move a compromise bill. Rockefeller was one of the most vocal supporters of retroactive immunity for phone companies, which leaves groups like the ACLU spooked that any deal pushed by the West Virginian would include such a provision.

ACLU is already beating its drum of disapproval:

Make no mistake: any “compromise” that is acceptable to Senator Rockefeller and the President will undoubtedly let lawbreakers off the hook and seriously put at risk — or even end — lawsuits that may be the only way to get to the bottom of crimes that were committed by phone companies and Bush administration officials.

ACLU is urging its members to urge House leaders not to cave. And you thought it was safe to get back on the phone.

Good article by David Axe in the Washington Independent. It begins:

The tiny four-wheeled robot made it halfway to the fist-size bomb before its battery ran out of juice. It was early January 2005 in Baqubah, Iraq, a hotbed of insurgent activity. The Army officers standing at a distance cursed the tiny robot, a 25-pound remote-controlled truck equipped with cameras for investigating suspected explosive devices. The captain who had been steering the so-called “Marcbot,” Scott Holland, tossed aside the remote-control device in frustration and walked right up to the bomb. His staff held their breaths. Holland leaned over the bomb, then kicked it. It was a dud.

Holland’s encounter with the botched bomb and out-of-juice robot is all too common as U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan adopt untried new technologies to defeat evolving insurgent tactics. In previous wars, enemy infantry and artillery attacks claimed the most U.S. lives. Today makeshift bombs are the biggest killer – and robots could be one of the safest means to confront them. If only the robots worked better.

Getting more reliable and capable robots to the troops in Iraq is a possible result of one congressman’s radical plan for the Army. Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.), the powerful chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee, is seeking to revamp Army technology plans to focus on current wars, rather than looking forward to some projected future threat, as some senior Army officials prefer

For example, one ambitious weapons program that could be killed off soon aims to produce a family of new hybrid-electric armored vehicles and other weapons, all connected by an electronic communications network. The so-called Future Combat Systems, which has cost taxpayers roughly $20 billion so far, has come under fire from the Government Accountability Office for exceeding cost estimates. Other critics say the electronics network is pure fantasy. Still others contend that the new hybrid vehicles – which are still in development and should enter production in 2013 – are modeled on an outdated style of firepower-heavy conventional warfare. But the program, co-managed by Boeing and consultants SAIC, has also produced some smaller technologies, like new bomb-defeating robots, that are clearly useful in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Murtha has proposed adding another $20 billion to FCS research and development this year, in an effort to speed up these more immediately useful technologies. But there’s a caveat: in exchange for the extra cash, the Army might have to cancel the rest of the program.

Continue reading.

Oh, my. This is pretty bad—and he’s a Democrat, too:

Just 16 months into his four-year-term, Ohio’s attorney general admitted he was in over his head as he acknowledged an affair with a subordinate and his failure to stop problems that led to a sexual harassment investigation that brought down three of his aides.

Marc Dann apologized to his wife and supporters but insisted he would not step down. He took responsibility for the scandal, saying he was not prepared for the office or to run such a large agency.

“I did not create an atmosphere in my public and personal life that is consistent with the important mission of the Office of Attorney General,” the Democrat said Friday after the three aides were fired or forced out in the harassment investigation. “I am heartbroken by my failure to recognize the problems being created and by my failure to stop them.”

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So says Joe Conason:

First let me confess that I am now and have for many years considered myself a friend of Sidney Blumenthal’s, the senior advisor to Sen. Hillary Clinton and former Salon columnist. I should also acknowledge here for the record that, like a number of his other friends, I receive daily e-mails from him on a wide variety of topics. Those e-mails, which have included everything from Doonesbury cartoons to YouTube videos, screen captures, poll results, right-wing screeds and the occasional scholarly article, must number in the thousands by now because sending those blasts has been a Blumenthal habit since long before he joined the Clinton campaign earlier this year.

If this were a more sane campaign, those mundane messages would be of little interest to anyone else. But now Peter Dreier, blogging on the Huffington Post, has suggested that Blumenthal crossed a line by sending out negative articles about Sen. Barack Obama that have appeared in the right-wing media. And Dreier, along with several other bloggers, also seems to believe that the recipients of those e-mails, especially the journalists, ought to have “exposed” Blumenthal for “spreading” the calumnies and criticisms that appeared in those articles — which included some far-fetched smears of Obama and his associates.

Dreier cannot cite any specific instance that shows Blumenthal’s e-mails influenced the coverage of Obama by anyone, let alone the writers who received them or the publications where they work. In fact, at least one of the regular recipients of those messages was an outspoken Obama supporter, and others were at least sympathetic to Obama. For my part, Blumenthal certainly knows that I have sharply criticized both Clintons and the Clinton campaign and haven’t endorsed any primary candidate.

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Mark Kleiman at the Reality-Based Community lays out in detail how Sid Blumenthal has run the smear/slime machine for the Clinton campaign, with Obama as the target. Worth reading, though disgusting.

UPDATE: Correction: it’s a tempest in a teapot. Blumenthal regularly sends political trivia to his friends, including snippets for and against a variety of candidates, including Clinton. See this post.

Look at this upsetting development, reported by Glenn Greenwald:

Are House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and a small handful of “Blue Dog” Democrats working in secret to reverse one of the only worthwhile acts of Congressional Democrats since they were given control of Congress in 2006: namely, the refusal to vest the President with vast new warrantless eavesdropping powers and bequeath lawbreaking telecoms with amnesty? It certainly appears that way.

Numerous reports — both public and otherwise — suggest that Hoyer is negotiating with Jay Rockefeller to write a new FISA bill that would be agreeable to the White House and the Senate. Their strategy is to craft a bill that they can pretend is something short of amnesty for telecoms but which, in every meaningful respect, ensures an end to the telecom lawsuits. It goes without saying that no “compromise” will be acceptable to Rockefeller or the White House unless there is a guaranteed end to those lawsuits, i.e., unless the bill grants amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms.

Even Capitol Hill insiders are baffled at the impetus for this new drive to capitulate. For the first times in years, the House Democratic caucus unified to take an actual stand on an issue relating to Terrorism — all but five Blue Dogs voted for the House bill and rejected the Rockefeller/Cheney Senate bill. Even the GOP accepted that their fear-mongering campaign around the issue had failed, as there was no public outcry demanding that the President be allowed to spy on Americans without warrants or that telecoms be allowed to break the law with impunity. Key Blue Dogs have been making impressive public statements insisting that they will not reverse their position.

Hoyer’s motives, then, appear to be two-pronged: (1) he and the House Democratic leadership simply want to grant amnesty to telecoms — they favor it — because they do not want the lawsuits relating to illegal spying to proceed to resolution; and (2) they are deferring to the tiny number of Blue Dogs who favor amnesty and warrantless eavesdropping. This article from The Hill this week specifically identifies freshman Rep. Chris Carney as demanding that the House comply with the President’s demands:

Vulnerable freshman Democrats and Blue Dogs say the issue demands action.”Overall, it’s very important,” said Rep. Chris Carney (D-Pa.), a freshman member of the Blue Dog Coalition who often votes against his leadership.

Carney said that a compromise should protect national security and also respect civil liberties. “I’ve been in favor of the Senate bill. We’ll see what happens,” he said.

In early March, a new campaign was announced to begin running ads in the districts of vulnerable Democratic Congressmen like Carney whose presence in Washington is worse than worthless: it’s extremely counter-productive since they essentially eliminate the entire concept of “opposition party” by continuously pressuring Democrats to enable the most radical aspects of Republican rule for their own perceived narrow political gain.Within 24 hours, close to $50,000 was raised for that ad campaign. And the poll accompanying the fundraising campaign — which asked which of five proposed Blue Dogs should be the first target — resulted in a clear win (or, more accurately, a clear loss) for Chris Carney. The ad campaign aimed at Carney is in the process of being completed (and a professional ad coordinator to oversee and finalize that process is now needed — email me if you are one or can recommend one and I’ll pass it along).

For obvious reasons, this ad campaign is now more imperative than ever. The more funds that are available to fuel the ad campaign, the more potent the impact will be — both for Carney and in terms of the message being sent generally. Those who want to donate to the ad campaign can and are encouraged to do so here.

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More on the Clinton trade situation, reported by David Sirota:

On Monday, I wrote about Hillary Clinton airing an ad decrying the closure of a defense manufacturing factory that her husband, Bill Clinton, helped close by approving the sale of the company to a Chinese state-owned firm. Now, ABC News is running with the story, and uncovers some more ugly details. The Clinton campaign has responded not by fessing up, but by putting out more dishonest deceptions.

From Jake Tapper:

“A memo prepared for [Indiana Senator Evan] Bayh by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service earlier this year stated that the Clinton administration could have objected to the sale under CFIUS, but it did not…In 2000, also during Bill Clinton’s presidency, Magnequench purchased from UGIMAG the factory in Valparaiso that manufactured the Neo magnets. President Clinton’s administration took no steps to stop the purchases in 2000, either.”

The sale was a pretty serious national security issue, not so much because the technology was sensitive, but because the sale means our military has to rely on foreign companies for critical weaponry. Here’s Tapper:

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Mark Kleiman has this post:

Women’s Voices, Women’s Votes is a 501 c(3) nonprofit devoted to registering unmarried women to vote. It has lots of connections to the Clinton campaign; as of a year ago, the “leadership team” included Maggie Williams, her business partner Pat Griffin, and Hal Malchow, now the direct-mail honcho of the Clinton campaign.

WVWV paid for a bunch of robo-calls to black voters in North Carolina — men as well as women — in which someone identified only as “Lamont Williams” said that a voter registration packet was on its way to them and that they should sign it and mail it back to be registered to vote. The calls went out after the mail-in registration deadline, but before the deadline for one-stop registration and early voting; any voter who relied on the information in the call would wind up being disenfranchised for the upcoming primary. In addition, many of the recipients were already registered, and the calls were well-designed to cause them to doubt whether they could vote before receiving the promised package in the mail.

The calls came from an “ID blocked” number and included no reference to WVWV, which makes them illegal in North Carolina. WVWV has been caught doing similar things in black neighborhoods just before other primaries this year, including in Virginia.

So: Was this an amazing set of good-faith mistakes, or was it a series of attempts by people friendly to the Clinton campaign to suppress the black vote in order to benefit HRC against Obama?

Considering the illegal anonymity (”Lamont Williams” does not exist), the targeting of black neighborhoods rather than women (and the use of a streotypically “black” name for the caller), the unlikelihood that a well-funded, highly professional voter-registration group would not know about the registration deadlines and be unable to restrict its mailings to people not yet registered, the national pattern, and the amazingly lame response by WVWC after they were caught, what do you think?

UPDATE: Looks as though the Clinton-conspiracy idea is wrong. See this post.

Good analysis of the conflict by David Dante Troutt:

Sen. Barack Obama’s emphatic denunciation of his former pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., for a series of comments the reverend made during a sort of media tour last week involves far more than politics. Wright had reveled in a bewildering litany of racial differences and repeated his most charged political beliefs. He had characterized this tempest in the racial trope as an attack on black faith and all black churches before Obama finally cut him loose. But this spectacle is more personal than political, more universal than racial.

The nation watched this play out, riveted by the lasting mythology about human bonds — the age-old struggle between fathers and sons. The Obama-Wright breach is intriguing for its psychological familiarity — every son and every father deals with this on some level. It is as compelling as a car crash. If cultures and religions invent eternal myths as narrations of life, where does this story fit and what could it mean for Obama?

The obvious analogy is an inversion of the Oedipal struggle, where the enraged father seeks the death of his son, but accomplishes only their mutual destruction.

Try Roman mythology. Look at Wright as Saturn, the ruler of the universe, whose children were prophesied to depose him. As each child is born, he devours it. Yet, the myth goes, one gets away, Jupiter. And, as predicted, he ultimately defeats his father. This myth even reaches into astrology, where Saturn is associated with old age, melancholy and the domineering father. Jupiter — the son — represents goodness.

Then there is the Old Testament tale of Saul and David. The Lord tears the kingdom of Israel from a disobedient Saul and gives it to one better than he, David, the son of a servant. David remains loyal to Saul, fighting his battles, and becomes his son-in-law. Yet Saul’s jealousy leads him to pursue David and, in plots motivated by evil spirits, tries several times to kill him. Fleeing for his safety, David twice spares Saul’s life. Defeated in battle, Saul falls on his own sword and dies.

Finally, in Ralph Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man”— which Wright quotes regularly —there is a metaphor of crabs in a barrel pulling each other down from the sides. This famously describes the fratricidal jealousy of some blacks for the ascension of others.

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This is quite interesting. Andrew Malcolm of the LA Times reports:

Well, here’s a most interesting connection we just came across.

Everybody is talking today about how much the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s latest unrepentant militant remarks hurt his most prominent parishoner, Sen. Barack Obama, and his chances to win the Democratic presidential nomination and the general election. So much so that the Obama camp realized the latent danger overnight and the candidate was forced to speak out publicly a second time today, as The Ticket noted here earlier today.

There was little doubt left in today’s remarks by Obama, who recently said he could no more disown Wright than he could the black community. He pretty much disowned Wright today. Obama described himself as “outraged” and “saddened” by “the spectacle of what we saw yesterday.”

But now, it turns out, we should have been paying a little less attention to Wright’s speech and the histrionics of his ensuing news conference and taken a peek at….  who was sitting next to him at the head table for the National Press Club event.

It was the Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, a former editorial board member of USA Today who teaches at the Howard University School of Divinity. An ordained minister, as New York Daily News writer Errol Louis points out in today’s column, she was introduced at the press club event as the person “who organized” it.

But guess what? She’s also an ardent longtime booster of Obama’s sole remaining competitor for the Democratic nomination, none other than Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. It won’t take very much at all for Obama supporters to see in Wright’s carefully arranged Washington event that was so damaging to Obama the strategic, nefarious manipulation of the Clintons.

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Interesting. David Sirota points out a major Clinton oversight, given her experience and all:

In my upcoming book, The Uprising, one of the threads tying together the disparate forms of populism on both the Right and Left is a sense of confused frustration at a political system whose politicians employ disinformation and propaganda to make basic economic issues indecipherable. This has been no more obvious than on the issue of trade and globalization in the presidential race - and Hillary Clinton’s latest television ad (which is also a standard part of her stump speech) shows exactly what I’m talking about.

Clinton is airing this advertisement in Indiana, bemoaning the closure of a defense contractor Magnequench’s manufacturing plant in Valparaiso (she is also echoing this line in her stump speeches). Looking at the camera, she tells us she’s upset that the 200 jobs that were sent to China, and that “now America’s defense relies on Chinese spare parts.” And then comes the kicker: She tells viewers that “George Bush could have stopped it, but he didn’t.”

Clinton is certainly right that it is a tragedy that 200 American jobs were killed in a corporate deal that also exported sensitive military technology to China. But she forgets to mention that it wasn’t George Bush who was in the key position to stop it - it was Bill Clinton.

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Very good analysis in McClatchy by David Lightman. It begins:

Despite Hillary Clinton’s big win in Pennsylvania last week, the story of her campaign is often one of mismanagement and missed opportunities, and it raises questions about how she’d organize and run the White House.

“There’s a certain style to the campaign, and it shows what we might expect in a Clinton presidency: a lot of viewpoints and a messiness,” said James McCann, a political science professor at Purdue University in Indiana.

Whether that’s a good or bad trait is in the eye of the analyst. McCann called it “policymaking through trial and error,” similar to how Bill Clinton ran his administration, which to many was a big success.

But her campaign tumbled from riches to rags to rebounds — and now to hanging on for dear life. It wasn’t supposed to be that way.

Not many months ago, Clinton was the consensus front-runner, with a 30-point lead in national polls, $118 million raised in 2007 and the backing of most Democratic power brokers.

Today she trails Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in convention delegates, campaign cash and the popular vote.

How’d that happen?

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Good article by David Sirota:

If television is the nation’s mirror, then no two TV characters reflect the intensifying “two Americas” gap better than Chris Matthews and Jimmy McNulty.

A recent New York Times profile of Matthews describes a name-dropping dilettante floating between television studios and cocktail parties. The article documents the MSNBC host’s $5 million salary, three Mercedes and house in lavish Chevy Chase, Md. Yet Matthews said, “Am I part of the winner’s circle in American life? I don’t think so.”

That stupefying comment sums up a pervasive worldview in Washington that is hostile to any discussion of class divides. Call it Matthews-ism - an ideology most recently seen in the brouhaha over Barack Obama’s statement about economic dislocation.

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What in #%&^$@ has happened to the Democratic party? Look at David Sirota’s report:

In a stunning - if predictable - story, the Hill Newspaper reports that congressional Democrats are now saying that they will effectively thwart any effort to create a national health care program. Here is the key excerpt:

“Congressional Democrats are backing away from healthcare reform promises made by their two presidential candidates, saying that even if their party controls the White House and Congress, sweeping change will be difficult…Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), a member of Senate Democratic leadership and a key Hillary Clinton ally who also sits on the Finance Committee, said he is ‘not sure we have the big plan on healthcare.’…’Healthcare I feel strongly about, but I am not sure that we’re ready for a major national healthcare plan,’ Schumer said…Rep. Kendrick Meek (D-Fla.), a Clinton supporter who sits on the House Ways and Means Committee, said “the money is not necessarily there right now” to enact the plans.”

There’s a lot to unpack here.

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Below is a snippet from Froomkin’s column today, which made me think: Would Admiral Fallon be a good choice for Secretary of Defense in the next Administration? (The entire column is, as always, informative and worth reading—one particular gem was Ashcroft trying to find some distinction between waterboarding done to a US soldier by a Japanese soldier (which led to a conviction for war crimes) and waterboarding done by US forces (CIA, mainly) against supposed terrorists (no convictions as yet, but the CIA is asking for DOJ support for anticipated investigations—the same DOJ that should be prosecuting them).

Robert Burns writes for the Associated Press: “President Bush is promoting his top Iraq commander, Army Gen. David Petraeus, and replacing him with the general’s recent deputy, keeping the U.S. on its war course and handing the next president a pair of combat-tested commanders who have relentlessly defended Bush’s strategies. . . .

“The next president taking office in January would not be compelled to keep either Petraeus or [Lt. Gen. Ray] Odierno, but normally the lineup of senior commanders — as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — is not changed with administrations.

“‘There is no precedent in U.S. tradition for a new president changing these kinds of officers,’ said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an occasional adviser to Petraeus. ‘For an incoming president to change them (in 2009) would be a real statement.’”

Spencer Ackerman writes for the Washington Independent: “A potential responsibility of the next Central Command chief — if either Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes president — will be to plan for an orderly withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. But at his congressional testimony earlier this month, Petraeus conspicuously declined to say whether he would, as Iraq commander, plan for withdrawal.”

Aamer Madhani writes in the Chicago Tribune that Bush has now “laid the groundwork for the next president with a pair of generals who have spoken sternly about Iran and cautioned against pulling out of Iraq too quickly. . . .

“Petraeus’ predecessor at Centcom, [Adm. William] Fallon, abruptly resigned last month after 41 years of military service. Fallon’s views on Iran and the region in general had sometimes conflicted with the Bush administration’s outlook.

“In a profile of Fallon in Esquire magazine earlier this year, the now-retired admiral was portrayed as the one man standing in the way of Bush going to war against Iran. In announcing his resignation, Fallon said the perception that he was out of step with Bush had become a distraction.”

Via Balloon Juice:

from www.thedailyshow.com posted with vodpod

Sounds like a railroad line, but in Michelle Cottle’s fascinating account it’s more like a trainwreck. Read her article, which begins:

By the time Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle finally packed up her lovely corner office with its fresh blue carpet and mini-fridge full of Diet Coke, her exit must have come as a relief–even to many of her friends on Team Hillary. Since Iowa, colleagues had been conducting an uneasy deathwatch for her. New faces had begun popping up around Ballston (as Hillary HQ is called in honor of its suburban Virginia neighborhood), most notably Maggie Williams, Hillary’s chief of staff from her First Lady days. Initially, the campaign insisted that Williams was there merely to back up Solis Doyle, but, almost immediately, staffers began turning to Williams to solve problems and approve projects. When the inevitable strain of having two people atop the organizational chart became untenable, few questioned who would be the last woman standing. On February 10, the Sunday after Super Tuesday, Solis Doyle was officially out.

Leadership change brings disruption. And no one knows how to exploit disruption better than Mark Penn, the message master of Team Hillary. Long disdainful of Solis Doyle, Penn saw her departure as an opportunity to consolidate his authority, say insiders. He started hanging out in her old office, which had been transformed into a conference room, and taking over meetings and in-house e-mail chains she once handled (occasionally bumping up against similar efforts by Williams). At the same time, Penn’s colleagues from Burson-Marsteller, the p.r. giant of which he is chief executive, became more visible around HQ. “I think, post-Patti, he only got stronger,” says one in-house observer. Williams may have been the new chief, but Penn had his own ideas about how things should run.

Then came the news that Penn had attended a March 31 meeting with the Colombian ambassador to discuss his firm’s role in promoting a free-trade agreement specifically opposed by Clinton.…

Continue reading.