Dobson Cries Poor

I don't really trust anything James Dobson says, and his extended whine that the liberals have run roughshod over the country and nobody can stop it doesn't ring true either. Sure the hate-crimes bill will likely pass into law, but Dobson has something of a larger game here. On other culture-war issues, Dobson and his religious right cohorts have a plan.

If President Obama nominates Judge Diane P. Wood to the Supreme Court, conservatives plan to attack her as an “outspoken” supporter of “abortion, including partial-birth abortion.”

If he nominates Judge Sonia Sotomayor, they plan to accuse her of being “willing to expand constitutional rights beyond the text of the Constitution.”

And if he nominates Kathleen M. Sullivan, a law professor at Stanford, they plan to denounce her as a “prominent supporter of homosexual marriage.”

Preparing to oppose the confirmation of Mr. Obama’s eventual choice to succeed Justice David H. Souter, who is retiring, conservative groups are working together to stockpile ammunition. Ten memorandums summarizing their research, obtained by The New York Times, provide a window onto how they hope to frame the coming debate.

This is not a strategy to defeat the nominee - Republicans have basically given up on that. This is a strategy to demonize an eventual sitting Supreme Court Justice. Right now the religious right lacks a lightning rod, and of the ones they use, the President is too popular and the rest of the Democratic leadership to unknown. They need to raise the profile of an enemy, and claim that they are powerless to stop this enemy's rise to prominence. The culture wars feed off of a sense of powerlessness. It made no sense when Republicans sat in every seat of power in Washington. But the reversal puts things back in the natural state for those on the right with a siege mentality. Armed with a new enemy, only THEN will Dobson and his charges fight back.

Now, I do believe these issues have lost their salience. That abortion poll floating around is flawed, and even if it weren't, the emphasis has waned.

Essentially, Democrats shouldn't take this bait. The religious right will always claim that they are being forcibly pushed out of the country, regardless of the concessions made or common ground sought. I don't mind President Obama's Notre Dame speech as a rhetorical instrument and an olive branch to moderates. On policy, however, the theocons will always claim they are under siege, whether true or not. Might as well give them their enemy and make some positive change in the meantime.

Oh, Sarah

I love how the wingnuts are having heart attacks today because people are daring to suggest that their beloved jockey mom might not be such a woman of the people, just because she rung up a $150,000 bill - at the RNC's expense - to buy 10 weeks' worth of clothes. They can't keep the rationalizations coming fast enough. I hope at some point they explain away the fact that this conduct may be illegal.

I just got off the phone with a well-respected and well-known tax attorney who doesn't want to be identified.

I asked him earlier in the day whether Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin can avoid paying taxes on the $150,000 worth of clothes the RNC bought her, as she and the RNC maintain. (They said the RNC now owns the clothes; she's just borrowing them.)

He said that after consulting with a number of experts as his prominent firm, he thinks the RNC and Gov. Palin are wrong.

"It's probably not a 'gift,'" he said. "The issue is whether it counts as 'income.'"

Palin's claim that the pricey duds belong to the RNC and she's just "borrowing" them and will return them later reminds him, he says, of some of the issues going on in the prosecution of Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska. (Some of the issues, he specified, not the allegations of criminality.)

"This is exactly the issue with the Stevens case," he said, "When you loan something to someone can you call it a 'loan' if upon its return it has no practical value?"

Oh yeah, well... John Edwards is girly! Al Gore is fat!

Meanwhile, Palin wasn't even trusted to pick out her own clothes - that job fell to this Rove protege:

Does the name Jeff Larson sound familiar? It should. Larson is the Karl Rove protégé who’s a principal in the robocalling firm of FLS Connect (the “FLS” stands for Tony Feather, Jeff Larson, and Tom Syndhorst, all veteran Republican political operatives). Larson’s firm is the same one that launched the scurrilous robocalls against John McCain in 2000, and that McCain has now hired to make robocalls connecting Barack Obama to Bill Ayers. He’s also well known in Minnesota for leasing his basement apartment at a steeply discounted rate to embattled Republican Senator Norm Coleman. Evidently, Larson also has quite the eye for women’s fashion. Even hateful liberals would have to admit that Palin dresses awfully nicely.

He does have a keen eye, I'll give him that.

And if you want to say "Let's get back to the issues that matter" and away from such frivolity like illegal payments and bilking contributors for personal gain, well, OK:

Dr. James Dobson today asked Gov. Sarah Palin about her private conversations with Sen. McCain about the Republican platform's planks on life and marriage.

"In your private conversations with Senator McCain is it your impression that he also strongly supports those views? I know that he did not oppose that platform when it was written. Do you think he will implement it?" [...]

Governor Palin responded: "I do, from the bottom of my heart. I am such a strong believer that McCain believes in those strong planks and we do have good conversations about some of the details too, about the different planks and what they represent."

The 2008 GOP platform is a bit more conservative than it was in 2004. If McCain is going to implement it - something of which Palin is convinced from the bottom of her heart - then that means that McCain will support a constitutional amendment to ban all abortion (including those cases where the mother was raped or was the victim of incest), a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and he will oppose government-sponsored embryonic stem cell research.

This election isn't being won or lost on the McCain-Palin ticket's extreme views. But let's be clear - they're pretty darn extreme. And women who want a government that won't criminalize their behavior and help them when in need have a choice.

Approximately 1,400 women a year – four every day – die in the United States as a result of domestic violence. And 132,000 women report that they have been victims of a rape or attempted rape, and it is estimated that an even greater number have been raped, but do not report it.

Biden wrote and passed the landmark Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) which is the strongest legislation to date that criminalizes domestic violence and other forms of violence against women, provides victims with the support they deserve, and holds batterers accountable. Signed into law in 1994, the bill funds and helps communities, nonprofit organizations, and police combat domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking.

Ain't Goin' Out Like That

James Dobson, showing the stunning lack of an ability to count, endorses Mike Huckabee, who needs practically every single delegate available to win the nomination.

Dobson knows what he's doing, of course. He wants to have an argument to make after the election is over, that the Republicans lost because they didn't pick his preferred candidate. This is how they keep the movement alive; by calling anyone who loses an apostate, anyone who wins one of their own, and anyone who loses after he wins an apostate ex post facto.

The question, of course, is how actively Dobson and the theocons will undermine McCain. Will they simply not volunteer (evangelicals made up a substantial portion of Bush's ground team)? Will they stay home? Will they run Judge Roy Moore on a third-party ticket?

The world waits, and wonders.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, McCain gets the coveted 24% endorsement.

President Bush plans to give an implicit endorsement of onetime rival John McCain's conservative bona fides tomorrow as the Arizona senator seeks to consolidate the party behind his candidacy.

In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in the morning, Bush plans to say that the nominee of the party will be a strong conservative, according to excerpts released by the White House tonight.

"We have had good debates and soon we will have a nominee who will carry the conservative banner into this election and beyond," Bush says in the excerpts. "The stakes in November are high. Prosperity and peace are in the balance. So with confidence in our vision and faith in our values, let us go forward, fight for victory and keep the White House in 2008.

That's got to be good for a 5% drop in the polls right there, no? The political version of King Midas?

Whither McCain?

I've collected a bunch of articles over the past few days about John McCain and whether he will be able to reconcile the conservative coalition and unite the party. Generally, I think that in the end, hard-core Republicans will go to the polls to vote against Obama or Clinton. However, there is a concern that they won't be happy about it, won't work to get occasional voters out, and won't do what's necessary to get McCain elected.

I mean, despite the media's fluffing of McCain, the conservative media actively hates him (Bill Bennett and his disclosure problem excepted). There are so many news items that can be dug up to "prove" McCain's liberalism, in particular his flirtation with the Democrats after losing to Bush in 2000. Never mind McCain's actually flip-flopped back to the conservative position on practically all of his "maverick" legislation, and even on his signature issue of campaign finance reform, McCain has made liberal use of soft money, in addition to trying to get out of the Presidential public financing system. Here's Joe Conason.

Created after his failed presidential run in 2000, the Reform Institute is a hybrid between a domestic issues think tank and a tasty sugar teat for campaign staffers. Among its senior fellows is former Mexican Cabinet member Juan Hernandez, who also heads the McCain campaign's outreach to Hispanic voters. Other Reform Institute employees have included lobbyist and political consultant Rick Davis, long a member of the McCain inner circle and now his campaign manager.

The sweetest aspect of the Reform Institute -- aside from its commitment to research on immigration reform, campaign finance and other liberal concerns that the senator no longer finds so relevant -- is that its own financing is not subject to the regulations and disclosures of federal election law. In practice, that has meant not only that the McCain crowd could sop up subsidies from foundations run by liberal Democrats but that corporate donors with issues before the Commerce Committee could chip in a few bucks, too. Or a few thousand bucks, or even 50,000 bucks or more, like the executives of Cablevision (under the name CSC Holdings) and Echostar, communications firms with substantial issues at stake before McCain's committee.

Then there was that contribution from American International Group, whose executives had been quite concerned in 2000 about McCain's vow to stop AIG from profiting illicitly on insurance overcharges ripped off from the Boston "Big Dig" project. Sen. John Kerry got most of the blame for the demise of McCain's reform bill, which would have banned insurance giants like AIG from overcharging federal projects and reaping windfalls from investing that money. But it was actually McCain who killed his own bill -- and nobody seems to have checked back to discover that AIG later donated more than $50,000 to the Reform Institute. How much more? That might be a relevant question now, notably because Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the McCain backer who ran AIG in those days, has since been forced to relinquish the company under threat of criminal prosecution.

But this has proven cold comfort for the haters from the right on John McCain. James Dobson is now on record saying that he'll never support the Arizona Senator, and crackpot Richard Viguerie is asking for a NEW candidate to come in, Fred Thompson 2.0 as Josh Marshall calls in, to take McCain down.

I think the media-hungry conservatives want to hold on to their own power, and a McCain win in November is almost more debilitating to them than a McCain loss. They don't want to spread the "myth" that Republicans can win without their support; it would break the stranglehold they think they have on the party. Only they don't; McCain's Senate colleagues, who don't even like him all that much, are reassessing him, and certainly they'd fall in line behind him when he becomes the nominee. Establishment organs like the Wall Street Journal are twisting themselves in knots to argue for a McCain candidacy, arguing that he is needed because a lot of Supreme Court justices are old and will need to be replaced... um, isn't John 72 going on 100? Is that the argument you really want to make?

Conservative James Joyner took a look at this the other day, and came to some interesting conclusions:

Perhaps “conservatives” are now a minority, even among Republican primary voters? If so, given that there are virtually no conservatives remaining in the Democratic Party these days and that voters who aren’t aligned with either party are almost by definition non-ideological, that would mean that conservatives are a small minority, indeed, among the American electorate.

Alternatively, perhaps the definition of “conservative” has become so narrow and esoteric that it’s become virtually meaningless? [...]

The Conservative Movement has morphed from a handful of intellectual true believers trying to shape the debate into something approaching a civil religion with loyalty tests and a clericy that has the power to excommunicate.

John McCain was part of the 1980 wave that rolled into Congress on Ronald Reagan’s coattails. Indeed, McCain was among those Reagan was honored to stand with at 1974’s CPAC convention. But someone with an 82 percent lifetime ACU rating is considered a traitor to the cause. Much better, apparently, to flip 180 degrees on election eve and spout the right Party Line talking points.

As I wrote last year from CPAC, when throngs of so-called conservatives lined up for Ann Coulter’s autograph moments after she referred to John Edwards as a “faggot,” “Somehow, I can’t imagine Ronald Reagan being pleased.” Yet, the modern Conservative Moment seems to be dominated by the shrill nonsense of Coulter and Jonah Goldberg[*] and Michael Savage and Neil Boortz. In short, the Conservative Movement is no longer particularly “conservative” at all.

Yep. And they have a powerful need not to be marginalized. If so, the entire house of cards that is the wingnut welfare system comes crashing down. I have to conclude that the movement will actively work to stop John McCain in November, just as the establishment of the Democratic party worked to stop George McGovern in 1972, and once again, the derailment will come from the ideological right. Their ideas discredited, their movement endangered, they must resort to sabotage to save themselves.

I'd Really Like To Believe The Hype.

When it was floated over the weekend that some Christian conservatives were thinking about a third-party effort should the socially moderate (but a warmonger to the extreme) Rudy Giuliani be nominated by the Republicans, I thought "GO THIRD-PARTY PEOPLE!" And Rasmussen has polled it, adding to my shouts of "GO THIRD-PARTY PEOPLE!"

If Rudy Giuliani wins the Republican nomination and a third party campaign is backed by Christian conservative leaders, 27% of Republican voters say they’d vote for the third party option rather than Giuliani. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that a three-way race with Hillary Clinton would end up with the former First Lady getting 46% of the vote, Giuliani with 30% and the third-party option picking up 14%. In head-to-head match-ups with Clinton, Giuliani is much more competitive.

People do seem to be forgetting that there's enough money behind this Unity 08 nonsense that there is likely to already be a third-party candidate on the ballot that reflects a center-right perspective, that would almost certainly draw votes away from the Republicans. This would just make that more so. Judge Roy Moore would absolutely get 10-15% of the vote against two New Yawkahs, and could win Alabama. It would be a disaster for the GOP.

Which is why I think it's a lot of hype. Dobson and Robertson and those guys are political operatives first, and I could hardly see them willingly giving away the power they've accumulated over the Bush years.

UPDATE: I'm happy to be wrong about this, and according to SpongeDob, I am:

After two hours of deliberation, we voted on a resolution that can be summarized as follows: If neither of the two major political parties nominates an individual who pledges himself or herself to the sanctity of human life, we will join others in voting for a minor-party candidate. Those agreeing with the proposition were invited to stand. The result was almost unanimous.

There's a little wiggle room here, but not much. You almost want to see Rudy get the nomination, now.

Tales of Failed Presidential Campaigns

No, I'm not talking about Alan Keyes. Turns out John McCain might be headed to blood banks to round up some ready cash.

"The campaign has raised only $3.7 million to date for the quarter," a longtime, influential friend of the Arizona Republican told The Washington Times.

"The hope was to reach $4.5 million, about a third of what was raised in the 'disastrous' second quarter,' " said the McCain supporter, who has access to the senator's daily campaign operations.

The figures he cited — although anything but rosy — mask the even worse state of the campaign's finances, said the source, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect his relationship with the senator.

"Those are gross numbers, not net," the friend said. "Plus the campaign is carrying $2.5 to $3 million in debt. [He's] done for."

For context, Ron Paul raised an equivalent amount in the 2nd quarter.

And then there's Freddie, whose Tragical Memory Tour hit a major roadblock to his effort to woo social conservatives. Seems that Dr. Dobson is as unimpressed as... everyone else.

According to a private e-mail obtained by the AP, influential evangelical leader James Dobson told friends he will not be backing Fred Thompson's candidacy for president [...]

Said Dobson: "Isn't Thompson the candidate who is opposed to a Constitutional amendment to protect marriage, believes there should be 50 different definitions of marriage in the U.S., favors McCain-Feingold, won't talk at all about what he believes, and can't speak his way out of a paper bag on the campaign trail?" Dobson wrote. "He has no passion, no zeal and no apparent 'want to.' And yet he is apparently the Great Hope that burns in the breasts of many conservative Christians? Well, not for me, my brothers. Not for me!"

That's two down, only eight to go for Keyes. Keyes! He's got 621 signers to his "Pledge For America's Revival"! That's more votes than he got in Illinois in 2004!

Major Internal White House Battle Over Iran

There are a host of conflicting signals coming out of the US on Iran, which suggests a war within the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House itself over whether or not to attack. It's very hard to decipher who is winning this debate. While Cheney usually has the upper hand in these fights (after all, it's his Administration), he's outnumbered these days, more so than when Rumsfeld was at his side. And it appears the commanders are very reluctant to go along with any attack plans for Iran as well.

Let's chart this battle on the flip.

We know that the US announced this week that it plans to engage in bilateral talks with Iran over the Iraq crisis and how it can be managed. But the Vice President was very quick to qualify that the two sides would only be talking with respect to Iraq. On other issues, such as the country's nuclear program, neoconservatives are continuing to press for attack. Take a look at what John Bolton said today:

A nuclear Iran would be as dangerous as “Hitler marching into the Rhineland” in 1936 and should be prevented by Western military strikes if necessary, according to a leading hawk who recently left the Bush administration.

John Bolton, who still has close links to the Bush administration, told The Daily Telegraph that the European Union had to "get more serious" about Iran and recognise that its diplomatic attempts to halt Iran's enrichment programme had failed.

Iran has "clearly mastered the enrichment technology now...they're not stopping, they're making progress and our time is limited", he said. Economic sanctions "with pain" had to be the next step, followed by attempting to overthrow the theocratic regime and, ultimately, military action to destroy nuclear sites.

Mr Bolton's stark warning appeared to be borne out yesterday by leaks about an inspection by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of Iran's main nuclear installation at Natanz on Sunday.

This is eerily similar to the Iraq debate, when neoconservative claims about the need to attack quickly were buttressed by leaked information coming out of the New York Times, possibly provided by the same group of people that are quoting it.

Inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency have concluded that Iran appears to have solved most of its technological problems and is now beginning to enrich uranium on a far larger scale than before, according to the agency’s top officials [...]

In a short-notice inspection of Iran’s operations in the main nuclear facility at Natanz on Sunday, conducted in advance of a report to the United Nations Security Council due early next week, the inspectors found that Iranian engineers were already using roughly 1,300 centrifuges and were producing fuel suitable for nuclear reactors, according to diplomats and nuclear experts here.

However, scrolling down the article, we see that the IAEA qualifies their finding:

It is unclear whether Iran can sustain its recent progress. Major setbacks are common in uranium enrichment, and experts say it is entirely possible that miscalculation, equipment failures or sabotage — something the United States is believed to have attempted in the past — could prevent the Iranian government from reaching its goal of producing fuel on what President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran boasts is “an industrial scale.”

The material produced so far would have to undergo further enrichment before it could be transformed into bomb-grade material. To accomplish that, Iran would likely first have to evict the I.A.E.A. inspectors, as North Korea did four years ago.

Even then, it is unclear whether the Iranians have the technology to produce a weapon small enough to fit atop their missiles, a significant engineering challenge.

The fact that we are then far away from the point at which Iran can successfully enrich enough uranium for a warhead is pushed to the side and obscured, and the information which can be twisted into a campaign of fear and warmongering but right at the top.

But despite this, not everyone within the Administration is on board for this new marketing campaign, as made most clear by Admiral William Fallon, the new chief of CENTCOM, who not only denied the release of a third carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf, but also said this:

Fallon's refusal to support a further naval buildup in the Gulf reflected his firm opposition to an attack on Iran and an apparent readiness to put his career on the line to prevent it. A source who met privately with Fallon around the time of his confirmation hearing and who insists on anonymity quoted Fallon as saying that an attack on Iran "will not happen on my watch".

Asked how he could be sure, the source says, Fallon replied, "You know what choices I have. I'm a professional." Fallon said that he was not alone, according to the source, adding, "There are several of us trying to put the crazies back in the box."

Yet while one side is trying to put the crazies back into the box, the other side is inviting the crazies over for meetings, and looking to them to incite grassroots support for an attack on Iran:

President George W. Bush met privately with Focus on the Family Founder and Chairman James Dobson and approximately a dozen Christian right leaders last week to rally support for his policies on Iraq, Iran and the so-called "war on terror."

“I was invited to go to Washington DC to meet with President Bush in the White House along with 12 or 13 other leaders of the pro-family movement," Dobson disclosed on his radio program Monday. “And the topic of the discussion that day was Iraq, Iran and international terrorism. And we were together for 90 minutes and it was very enlightening and in some ways disturbing too." [...]

Dobson went on to enumerate a series of meetings convened by Christian right leaders in Washington to discuss the supposedly existential threat to the United States from a nuclear Iran.

“I heard about this danger [from Iran] not only at the White House but from other pro-family leaders that I met during that week in Washington," he said. “Many people in a position to know are talking about the possibility of losing a city to nuclear or biological or chemical attack. And if we can lose one we can lose ten.

"If we can lose ten we can lose a hundred," he added, “especially if North Korea and Russia and China pile on.”

Since the Administration is getting such internal resistance to their saber-rattling on Iran, they're taking the case directly to the base through the conduit of the theocratic right. This also has a parallel to Iraq, as one of the last people Bush met with before the invasion was Pat Robertson.

So clearly, there's a lot of argument and arm-twisting back and forth. Into this breach step the Democrats. And they are gradually becoming more united on this issue, and more importantly appear to be taking it seriously.

House Democrats, who have been divided on whether the president needs authorization from Congress to attack Iran, suggested yesterday that they are more united on the controversial issue.

But with Iran measures possibly headed to the House floor as early as today, it is unclear if Democrats have the votes to pass legislation calling for the president to seek authorization from Congress for a preemptive strike on Iran [...]

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) promised several members, including Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), and Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.), that she would allow for an up-or-down vote on an Iran amendment, though it is unclear which amendment or amendments will be voted on.

In the 109th Congress, Iran amendments offered by DeFazio and Hinchey were easily defeated.

But a new amendment by Rep. Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) could attract the most votes. His measure would prevent funds authorized in the bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from being obligated or expended to plan a contingency operation in Iran.

Andrews said in an interview that he has spoken to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) about his amendment to the pending defense authorization legislation.

The DeFazio Amendment is likely to come up for a vote today, and it's vital that you call your Representative and ask that they support it. It's going to come down to the wire to see if they can get this into the Defense Authorization Bill. With all of the turmoil surrounding where the White House is at on Iran, it's important that the Democrats are clear and direct: no funds for any activities regarding Iran without explicit authorization from the Congress.

I don't know if anyone can figure out where this will lead. What's clear is that there are still a significant number of those in power, including the Vice President and possibly the President, agitating for war with Iran. This is insanity, and those inside the Administration doing the yeoman work of trying to stop it need to be supported by the Democrats.