“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.” - H.L. Mencken
Bush’s position—that just talking to enemies is appeasement (it’s not: giving them things of value is appeasement)—is one not shared by McCain—or at least wasn’t share by McCain until the old Straight-Talker did one of his numerous flip-flops. A while back (via TalkingPointsMemo):
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.
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.
The effort to suppress voting voter fraud in Indiana is bearing fruit—indeed, it’s so powerful it has worked backward in time: no voting fraud at any polling place has been reported for years and years. (Voting fraud happens with absentee ballots—or voting machines.) Today:
About 12 Indiana nuns were turned away Tuesday from a polling place by a fellow bride of Christ because they didn’t have state or federal identification bearing a photograph.
Sister Julie McGuire said she was forced to turn away her fellow sisters at Saint Mary’s Convent in South Bend, across the street from the University of Notre Dame, because they had been told earlier that they would need such an ID to vote.
The nuns, all in their 80s or 90s, didn’t get one but came to the precinct anyway.
“One came down this morning, and she was 98, and she said, ‘I don’t want to go do that,’” Sister McGuire said. Some showed up with outdated passports. None of them drives.
They weren’t given provisional ballots because it would be impossible to get them to a motor vehicle branch and back in the 10-day time frame allotted by the law, Sister McGuire said. “You have to remember that some of these ladies don’t walk well. They’re in wheelchairs or on walkers or electric carts.”
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.
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.
Hillary Clinton and John McCain eagerly jumped at the totally stupid summertime repeal of the gasoline tax. Obama, rightly, refuses to go along. The Washington Post has this editorial today:
If the United States had a sensible energy policy, a higher federal excise tax on motor fuels would definitely be a part of it. Few measures would more efficiently accomplish more worthy goals — strategic, social and environmental. The Congressional Budget Office has calculated that a 50-cents-per-gallon increase in gasoline taxes would contribute more than $300 billion to deficit reduction over five years, while reducing traffic congestion, dependence on Middle Eastern oil and greenhouse gases. Actually, the federal gas tax has been stuck at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993, which means that, considering inflation, it has been shrinking for the past 15 years.
Of course, enacting any gasoline tax increase, let alone an increase of half a buck, would be politically difficult in normal times. Today, when the price of regular is creeping toward $4 per gallon, it is obviously a non-starter. The best we can hope for is that politicians, especially presidential candidates, will avoid exploiting the issue for short-term political advantage. Alas, that hope was not warranted in the case of Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has followed Republican John McCain in recommending a suspension of the federal gas tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day. This would let Americans go on vacation without that one modest additional incentive to conserve. A nonpartisan budget watchdog organization, Taxpayers for Common Sense, estimates that a typical family would save just $18 per car. And, as we explained in an editorial last week, at a time of cramped supply, prices would probably bounce back to where they were with the tax, and refiners would pocket the difference.
We do not underestimate the impact of high fuel prices on families that need their cars to get to work and school. But the gas tax is one component of the per-gallon price that comes back to benefit the motoring public, in the form of funding for road construction and maintenance. Much of the rest leaves America, going to such places as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Ms. Clinton proposes a windfall profits tax on U.S. oil companies to recapture the revenue forfeited by her proposal. Similar ideas have failed in the Senate because of oil-state objections; this one undoubtedly would, too. We have to agree with Sen. Barack Obama, the only candidate who has refused to play this game. “It’s not an idea to get you through the summer,” he said. “It’s an idea to get them through an election.” His opponents no doubt hope that Mr. Obama’s stand will prove to be political suicide. We think it qualifies as political courage.
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:
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.
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.
From an email sent by the Center for American Progress:
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board that “states may require voters to present photo identification before casting ballots, upholding “an Indiana state law that requires voters to show a current government-sponsored photo ID.” The law is generally regarded as the strictest in the nationbecause it “requires a voter to present a photograph as part of an unexpired document issued either by Indiana or the federal government.” In most cases, such a requirement “can be satisfied only by a current driver’s license or a passport,” which critics “say discourages voting among the elderly and the poor.” The lead opinion, written by Justice John Paul Stevens, argued that Indiana has a “valid interest in protecting ‘the integrity and reliability of the electoral process.” However, “the case contained ‘no evidence’ of the type of voter fraud the law was ostensibly devised to detect and deter.” Writing in dissent, Justice David Souter “said that for those on whom the law had an impact, the burden was ’serious’ and the state had failed to justify it.” Though the ruling leaves “the door open to future lawsuits” that provide more evidence of discouragement and disenfranchisement, critics of voter ID laws worry “that a more likely outcome than successful lawsuits would be the spread of measures that would keep some legitimate would-be voters from the polls.” Yesterday’s decision “is not the end of the story on voter ID,” said Wendy Weiser, Deputy Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Now it’s up to legislators and courts” in the states to decide “if they are going to follow Indiana’s lead” or “if they’re going to protect the right to vote for all Americans.”
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.
It’s not just Scalia—the SCOTUS has taken a sharp turn to the right. Here is Kevin Drum’s pithy comment on the decision that upholds Indiana’s voter ID law:
The Supreme Court today upheld Indiana’s shiny new voter ID law, a law that plainly fails to address any actual problem. Or does it? From the lead opinion:
It remains true, however, that flagrant examples of such fraud in other parts of the country have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists, that occasional examples have surfaced in recent years, and that Indiana’s own experience with fraudulent voting in the 2003 Democratic primary for East Chicago Mayor — though perpetrated using absentee ballots and not in-person fraud — demonstrate that not only is the risk of voter fraud real but that it could affect the outcome of a close election.
And what are the examples of voter fraud that John Paul Stevens managed to adduce to support this paragraph? Marty Lederman tells us: (1) Boss Tweed stuffing ballot boxes in 1868, (2) a case in Washington state in which one person committed voter fraud, and (3) a 2003 case of fraud in Indiana which, as Stevens acknowledges, the new law wouldn’t cover because it was done via absentee ballot.
Presumably these were the best examples that anyone could come up with. And what do you conclude from them? That’s easy: in-person voter fraud is vanishingly rare while absentee voter fraud is, perhaps, a problem genuinely worth addressing. Needless to say, though, Indiana’s law does exactly the opposite: it requires voter ID for in-person voting and does nothing to ensure the integrity of absentee voting.
We all know why this is: it’s because, as Common Cause reminds us, restricting in-person voting tends to reduce turnout among minorities, the elderly, voters with disabilities, the poor, and the young — all of which, though CC is too polite to mention it, tend to vote Democratic. Absentee voters, by contrast, tend to vote Republican.
So what’s the real motivation for Indiana’s law? That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? And pretty shameful.
She has some harsh things to say—but they’re true:
FOR the last month, news media attention was focused on Pennsylvania and its Democratic primary. Given the gargantuan effort, what did we learn?
Well, the rancor of the campaign was covered. The amount of money spent was covered. But in Pennsylvania, as in the rest of the country this political season, the information about the candidates’ priorities, policies and principles — information that voters will need to choose the next president — too often did not make the cut. After having spent more than a year on the campaign trail with my husband, John Edwards, I’m not surprised.
Why? Here’s my guess: The vigorous press that was deemed an essential part of democracy at our country’s inception is now consigned to smaller venues, to the Internet and, in the mainstream media, to occasional articles. I am not suggesting that every journalist for a mainstream media outlet is neglecting his or her duties to the public. And I know that serious newspapers and magazines run analytical articles, and public television broadcasts longer, more probing segments.
But I am saying that every analysis that is shortened, every corner that is cut, moves us further away from the truth until what is left is the Cliffs Notes of the news, or what I call strobe-light journalism, in which the outlines are accurate enough but we cannot really see the whole picture.
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?
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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