The McCain-Lieberman Show Is Back

If it's Sunday, it's two discredited Senators who should be irrelevant.

John McCain continued his dominance over the Beltway discourse yesterday by demanding that Obama drop the public option from his health care reform bill. That would be a precondition to Republican support, says McCain, despite the fact that Republicans have throughout the process showed no inclination to support a contention from Obama that the sky is blue and water is wet, let alone anything to do with health care. It's a brilliant strategy to try and fork Obama between his base of supporters and conservative Democrats in Washington, but on the merits it's a completely silly idea.

At least McCain's partner in crime, Joe Lieberman, is more honest. He doesn't want health care reform because... he doesn't want health care reform.

In case you were wondering, Joe Lieberman said this morning on John King's show that we need to concentrate on cost controls in the health care sector in order to bring down the deficit and forget about universal coverage. We just can't cover everyone, but we have to figure out a way to cut costs dramatically because health care is bankrupting the country.

Considering that Lieberman doesn't understand that universal coverage with everyone paying in will mitigate health care inflation, and that he considers cost control the most important thing, one can only assume that he's the guy who wants to off granny --- and you too, if you don't have insurance. After all, we know that people who aren't insured get some very expensive, inadequate care if they do get sick because we require that hospitals treat people in an emergency. If cutting the deficit is the point of health care reform, then you've got to go where the money is --- sick people.

Lieberman and Richard Lugar both agree that Obama shouldn't have put Health Care on the agenda at all because there is a recession. But, of course, if the recession was over you couldn't put health care on the agenda because Lieberman and Lugar would say it would hurt the recovery. And if the economy is rolling, everyone who is willing to work should be able to get covered, so there's no need for health care reform. It's funny how that works.

Later, Lieberman actually tried to use the civil rights movement as a model for doing almost nothing on health care this year. Now, Lieberman has, throughout his career, traded off his image of being a Freedom Rider in the early 1960s. I wasn't aware that, when he was in Mississippi signing up black people to vote, his goal was to do nothing substantial for a while until the country became more comfortable with black people. If so, he'd have been the only Freedom Rider with such a mentality. I think the "justice delayed is justice that's fine with me!" crowd had only one member.

The wanker caucus in the puffed-up US Senate is verging on a majority. And of course, that's the problem, one which Ross Douthat, of all people, comes close to nailing. Conservative Democrats really don't want to do much of anything with their majority, even though the cost of doing nothing could be fatal.

What’s more, health care reform is the Democratic Party’s signature issue. Its wonks have thought longer and harder about it than any other topic. Its politicians are vastly better at talking about the subject than Republicans: if an election is fought over health care, bet on the Democrat every time. And for all the complexity involved, it’s arguably easier to tackle than other liberal priorities. It’s more popular than cap and trade, it’s less likely to split the party than immigration and it’s more amenable to technocratic interventions than income inequality.

If the Congressional Democrats can’t get a health care package through, it won’t prove that President Obama is a sellout or an incompetent. It will prove that Congress’s liberal leaders are lousy tacticians, and that its centrist deal-makers are deal-makers first, poll watchers second and loyal Democrats a distant third. And it will prove that the Democratic Party is institutionally incapable of delivering on its most significant promises.

You'd think that the instinct for self-preservation would be some kind of impetus to getting something done. So far, it hasn't emerged.

On The Legal And The Personal In The Prop. 8 Case

The Sacramento Bee will host a live webcast discussion with legal experts about the implications of the California Supreme Court's ruling on Prop. 8, on minority rights, the First Amendment, equal protection and even religious freedom. It promises to be a good discussion, and it starts at noon.

But considering that the Court has, for now, given up on its ability to protect the civil rights of the minority in the face of mob rule, the logical arguments must also incorporate the emotional ones, and what must be now taken into account are the personal stories, highlighted here by state lawmakers.

Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, confided in a Capitol press conference that her daughter is lesbian.

"This is a decision that affects all Californians in a very personal way," Skinner said of the ruling on Proposition 8.
"It impacts my family in saying that somehow my daughter's love for the woman who is her partner is not as valid as the love others have for the opposite sex."

Skinner appeared at a news conference with the Legislature's four openly gay members, all Democrats - Sen. Mark Leno, San Francisco; Sen. Christine Kehoe, San Diego; Assemblyman John Perez, Los Angeles; and Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, San Francisco.

San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, a Republican, spoke briefly at the event, noting that he has one daughter who is lesbian and the other "straight."

"They don't have the same rights today," Sanders said.

I want to add my voice to that personalization by highlighting this section of an LA Times piece on some of the 18,000 married couples, now granted separate rights than their fellow gays and lesbians.

Julie Nice, a University of San Francisco law professor specializing in constitutional and sexuality law, sees the emergence of the legally married gay class as yet another inconsistency in the nation's laws governing same-sex marriage.

"This kind of chaotic patchwork is not sustainable," Nice said of laws recognizing the right of gays to marry in five states, granting recognition to legal marriages conducted elsewhere in a few others and now California's validation of the pre-Proposition 8 marriages while denying the status to other gays [...]

Several gay couples were in attendance as West Hollywood officials sought to chart a path forward in the fight for same-sex marriage rights after the high court's decision. Although Mark Katz, 58, and Robert Goodman, 48, continue to be recognized in the state as legally married, they deemed the ruling "tragic."

"This is as if we were freed slaves living in a slave state," said Goodman, a career counselor. "We were able to keep our marriage, but none of our brothers will be able to marry."

Mark Katz is my cousin. The rhetorical bomb-throwing must run in the family. But they are wonderful people, with an adopted son, and while yesterday's ruling secured some of their civil rights, they are not satisfied with being put on a kind of island, where their friends and fellow citizens must live under a separate system.

In this sense, I understand fully the federal district court action being represented by former Bush v. Gore foes David Boies and Ted Olson to challenge their denial of marriage licenses in California. The federal judiciary has a role to play in upholding the 14th Amendment and ensure equal treatment under the law. From a practical perspective, a conservative Supreme Court may issue a 21st-century Plessy v. Ferguson and set back the cause of gay rights in the states for decades, a frightening thought. But the legal logic at work here is unassailable.

The ultimate outcome of the lawsuit depends, as usual, on Anthony Kennedy. He has been consistently good on gay rights issues, but I suspect he would only sign onto a more limited ruling saying that states must have convert civil unions and domestic partnerships into marriages, or else not recognize same-sex relationships altogether, if even that. The best case scenario - a Loving v. Virginia-style invalidation of all bans on same-sex marriage, including DOMA and state constitution amendments - would probably only be possible if someone like a (preferably LGBT) visionary like Pam Karlan or Kathleen Sullivan is appointed to the Court in time to push a 5-4 majority toward a bolder opinion.

The legal ramifications of this are truly troubling, and ought to be examined thoroughly. But my first thought turns to my cousin. And those familial connections, and the new connections forged through organizing, will eventually be how these rights are achieved for everyone. While the courts should protect minorities - Loving wasn't put to a vote - the world in which we live demands civil actions for civil rights. And so did the world of the 1950s and 1960s, actually. Contra the robots on the right, public opinion does move political action in legislatures and the judiciary.

Openly gay LA City Councilman Bill Rosendahl has some further thoughts, arguing persuasively for a national action at the national level for the same benefits and rights for gay couples, the ones heterosexual individuals and couples take for granted.

The New Republican Point Man On Judiciary

In addition to everything else, Arlen Specter was the Republican ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee. His departure necessitated the GOP to choose a replacement, and given seniority issues and the inability for a member to repeat as chair or ranking member, it was not a clear-cut solution. After a weekend of discussion, Jeff Sessions won the job for the time being.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) will take over the ranking member position on the Senate Judiciary Committee after striking a deal with his more senior colleagues over the weekend, sources confirm to The Hill.

Sessions and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) reached the deal that will allow the Alabama Republican to take over for Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.), whose departure from the GOP last week left the committee without a ranking member.

Under terms of the deal, Sessions will serve as ranking member until the 112th Congress, when he will take over the ranking member post on the Senate Budget Committee. Current Budget Committee ranking member Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) is retiring at the end of the 111th Congress.

Grassley, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, will then become ranking member on the Judiciary Committee.

In the near term, Sessions will hold the ranking member position during the confirmation hearings for Obama's next Supreme Court nominee. Which means that the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee at this important time was denied a federal judgeship by the same committee because of his racist past.

Sessions entered national politics in the mid-'80s not as a politician but as a judicial nominee. Recommended by a fellow Republican from Alabama, then-Senator Jeremiah Denton, Sessions was Ronald Reagan's choice for the U.S. District Court in Alabama in the early spring of 1986. Reagan had gotten cocky by then, as more than 200 of his uberconservative judicial appointees had been rolled out across the country without serious opposition (this was pre-Robert Bork). That is, until the 39-year-old Sessions came up for review.

Sessions was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama. The year before his nomination to federal court, he had unsuccessfully prosecuted three civil rights workers--including Albert Turner, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr.--on a tenuous case of voter fraud. The three had been working in the "Black Belt" counties of Alabama, which, after years of voting white, had begun to swing toward black candidates as voter registration drives brought in more black voters. Sessions's focus on these counties to the exclusion of others caused an uproar among civil rights leaders, especially after hours of interrogating black absentee voters produced only 14 allegedly tampered ballots out of more than 1.7 million cast in the state in the 1984 election. The activists, known as the Marion Three, were acquitted in four hours and became a cause c?l?bre. Civil rights groups charged that Sessions had been looking for voter fraud in the black community and overlooking the same violations among whites, at least partly to help reelect his friend Senator Denton.

On its own, the case might not have been enough to stain Sessions with the taint of racism, but there was more. Senate Democrats tracked down a career Justice Department employee named J. Gerald Hebert, who testified, albeit reluctantly, that in a conversation between the two men Sessions had labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) "un-American" and "Communist-inspired." Hebert said Sessions had claimed these groups "forced civil rights down the throats of people." In his confirmation hearings, Sessions sealed his own fate by saying such groups could be construed as "un-American" when "they involve themselves in promoting un-American positions" in foreign policy. Hebert testified that the young lawyer tended to "pop off" on such topics regularly, noting that Sessions had called a white civil rights lawyer a "disgrace to his race" for litigating voting rights cases. Sessions acknowledged making many of the statements attributed to him but claimed that most of the time he had been joking, saying he was sometimes "loose with [his] tongue." He further admitted to calling the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a "piece of intrusive legislation," a phrase he stood behind even in his confirmation hearings.

It got worse. Another damaging witness--a black former assistant U.S. Attorney in Alabama named Thomas Figures--testified that, during a 1981 murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he "used to think they [the Klan] were OK" until he found out some of them were "pot smokers." Sessions claimed the comment was clearly said in jest. Figures didn't see it that way. Sessions, he said, had called him "boy" and, after overhearing him chastise a secretary, warned him to "be careful what you say to white folks." Figures echoed Hebert's claims, saying he too had heard Sessions call various civil rights organizations, including the National Council of Churches and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, "un-American." Sessions denied the accusations but again admitted to frequently joking in an off-color sort of way. In his defense, he said he was not a racist, pointing out that his children went to integrated schools and that he had shared a hotel room with a black attorney several times.

During his nomination hearings, Sessions was opposed by the NAACP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, People for the American Way, and other civil rights groups. Senator Denton clung peevishly to his favored nominee until the bitter end, calling Sessions a "victim of a political conspiracy." The Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee finally voted ten to eight against sending Sessions to the Senate floor. The decisive vote was cast by the other senator from Alabama, Democrat Howell Heflin, a former Alabama Supreme Court justice, who said, "[M]y duty to the justice system is greater than any duty to any one individual."

Senate Judiciary has jurisdiction over election reform and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, as well as their prosecution of voter fraud cases, by the way.

This is like someone who flunked the driver's test running the DMV.

No Day In Court For The Schloz

The Justice Department's Inspector General report on politicization under the Bush regime was so overwhelming that they had to cut it into sections. Yesterday's release of the section concerning the Civil Rights Division once again invites us to witness the glory that is Bradley Schlozman:

In sum, we concluded, based on the results of our investigation, that Schlozman improperly considered political and ideological affiliations in the recruitment and hiring of career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division, and in doing so, he violated Department policy and federal civil service laws, and committed misconduct.

We found evidence that Schlozman told others in the Department about his success in hiring conservatives. In addition, in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Schlozman admitted making such boasts. Numerous e-mails from Schlozman described above also demonstrate that he sought conservative candidates and rejected liberal ones. Further, Schlozman admitted to Special Litigation Section Chief Cutlar in March 2007, after allegations of partisan hiring surfaced in the media: “I probably made some mistakes. . . . I probably considered politics when I shouldn’t have.” Moreover, a statistical overview of the political and ideological affiliations of attorneys hired in the Division during his tenure showed that Schlozman hired far more Republican or conservative attorneys than Democrats or liberals. At the same time, political and ideological affiliations did not appear to have been a factor when attorneys were hired without Schlozman’s involvement [...]

We concluded that Schlozman inappropriately considered political and ideological affiliations when he forced three career attorneys to transfer from the Appellate Section.

As noted above, Schlozman frequently criticized the attorney staff in the Appellate ection and talked of his plan, when he “came into power,” to move certain attorneys from the section to make room for “real Americans.” Based on our interviews and our review of numerous e-mails, we found that Schlozman used the term “real Americans” to
refer to individuals with conservative political views. Appellate Section Chief Flynn also told us that Schlozman named Appellate Section Attorneys A, B, and C as among several in the section whom he considered to be “disloyal,” “not one of us,” “against us,” “not on the team,” or “treacherous” and whom he wanted to move out of the section [...]

We concluded that Schlozman inappropriately used political and ideological affiliations in managing the assignment of cases to attorneys in the sections of the Division he oversaw. According to Section Chiefs Flynn, Cutlar, and Palmer, Schlozman placed limitations on the assignment of cases to attorneys whom Schlozman described as “libs” or “pinkos,” and he requested that “important” cases be handled by conservative attorneys he had hired. In addition, Schlozman expressly inquired about the politics of Cutlar’s nominees for performance awards.

On June 5, 2007, Schlozman testified under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee in connection with its investigation into the use of political considerations in the hiring and firing of career attorneys at the Department of Justice. At the time of his testimony, Schlozman was Associate Counsel to the Director of EOUSA.

On September 6, 2007, after resigning from the Department, Schlozman responded by letter to supplemental questions for the record posed to him in writing by several Senators as a follow-up to his Senate Judiciary testimony.

We believe that Schlozman made false statements to the Senate Judiciary Committee, both in his sworn testimony and in his written responses to the supplemental questions for the record. In this section, we describe Schlozman’s statements and the evidence that we believe demonstrates their falsity.

That's the bill of particulars, and I believe the words "preponderance of evidence" apply.

And yet, Schlozman will only see the inside of a courtroom in his continued capacity as a lawyer, despite an investigation clearly detailing numerous crimes.

Because the US Attorney in DC, after reviewing this report (which is dated July 2, 2008, and obviously held back until right before Bush leaves town), declined to prosecute.

We referred the findings from our investigation to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia in March 2008. We completed this written report of investigation in July 2008.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office informed us on January 9, 2009, of its decision to decline prosecution of Schlozman. The Interim U.S. Attorney, Jeffrey Taylor, was recused from the matter and the decision.

So, after taking ten months to decide whether or not to prosecute (ten months which happened to include an election in which one of those named in the report--Hans Von Spakovsky--served on FEC), they now release the report. Nice.

There you have the latest from the culture of accountability.

If I follow this, a Bush appointee committed crimes by hiring ideological soulmates. The Inspector General reported the crimes to Bush's Justice Department, and they held the report. The Bush appointee at the US Attorneys office in DC recused himself, and let his staffers reject the findings. And those ideologues hired through criminal practices will REMAIN in the Justice Department, protected by civil service laws, well into the future.

There's more here, including a peek into the classiness of these folks.

Slapping down "a bunch of . . . attorneys really did get the blood pumping and was even enjoyable once in a while," Schlozman wrote three years later when he left to become the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo.

Schlozman surrounded himself with like-minded officials at the Department of Justice. When he was due to meet in 2004 with John Tanner, then chief of the voting section, he asked how Tanner liked his coffee.

"Mary Frances Berry style -- black and bitter," Tanner replied by e-mail, referring to the African American woman who chaired the U.S. Civil Rights Commission from 1993 to 2004. Schlozman circulated the e-mail. "Y'all will appreciate Tanner's response," he wrote.

Did the fun ever stop?

So this is the inevitable result of an attitude of "looking forward" and making sure abuses "never happen again" instead of prosecuting clear crimes. There were civil service laws violated as well as, you know, lying to Congress. Republicans love to talk about deterrence in the criminal justice system unless they're the defendant. Likewise, the establishment Villagers love to punish the wicked with their knowing glances and poison pens and scorn, unless, you know, one of their own is in trouble.

Here's Pat Leahy.

I really wish that the current U.S. attorney's office appointed by this administration had prosecuted. I think that the only way you stop such blatant criminal violations by people who know better, people who are sworn to uphold the law, (unint.) that they know they'll go to jail for breaking the law. That's what should have been done. And just because they broke the law in the Bush administration and the Bush administration did not, or deemed not to prosecute, I think that raises real questions. Prosecution should be done no matter who breaks the law. I think about one of the people who testified that same investigation and said that, uh, "we swear an oath to President George Bush." I said, "no, you swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. That constitution is the constitution you're sworn to uphold and I'm sworn to uphold and it's the constitution that reflects all Americans." [...]

And when somebody deliberately, purposely sets out to subvert the constitution of the United States, and then lies about it, lies about it, Mr. President, I find that a heinous crime. We will see some kid who steals a car, they'll be prosecuted as they probably should. But when you have a key member of the DoJ lie about it under oath, who subverts the consitution of the United States, all the more reason to prosecute that person.

Silly Leahy. Justice is for those other people.

Massive Protest At Mormon Temple In Los Angeles

Lots of people are angry about the passage of Prop. 8 and they are just channeling that anger organically. One of the results has been street protests, and today's blocked Santa Monica Boulevard.

Hundreds of people protesting California's new ban on gay marriage demonstrated outside a Mormon temple in Westwood on Thursday, blocking traffic on a major boulevard.

The protesters claim the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints spent millions to air deceptive advertisements in support of Proposition 8, which passed on Tuesday with 52 percent of voters casting their ballots to define marriage as a heterosexual union.

If you're unfamiliar with LA, that is a HUGE temple.

There is other talk of boycotting Utah and Marriott hotels, and further street actions. This is how civil rights movements typically mature. And many are correct in the previous thread in saying that rights are not usually put to a vote. This is all being done haphazardly. Will a leader emerge from this movement?

Jules Winnfield FTW

Two pieces of very good news for No on Prop. 8. First, the latest Field Poll shows the initiative failing:

Prop 8 is down by 5 points, 44% Yes, 49% No. While one would like to see these two numbers further apart, these are pretty good numbers. And as the campaign points out, Field is just about the only pollster that has a good track record on propositions, at about 94%.

All that being said, this is still going to be a tight race. One worrisome indicator is that for those who voted already, Yes is leading. So please, please, do not let up. The progressive position tends to fare better on election day, but that requires we do all the hard GOTV work. Do not quit at 6PM when some LGBT organizations in LA have ridiculously chosen to start their party. Do not quit until that last poll closes.

Absolutely correct. I don't think this proposition will work like traditional ones, where all the undecideds break toward No. It's going to come down to turnout. If you're in the state, you can help with GOTV.

The other good news is this excellent ad, their best of the year, describing the history of discrimination in California for people of all stripes, and imploring viewers not to add to that sad legacy. And yes, that's Samuel L. Jackson.



If you want to shame the Mormons and the Knights of Columbus who would rather write their intolerance into state Constitutions across the country, remember this ad. And help defeat this proposition.

The Final Days

I fully expect one last-minute "Shocking revelation!!! Must credit Drudge!!!eleventy!1!" for each remaining day until the election. John McCain has run his entire campaign from news cycle to news cycle, and so they'll grasp on to whatever they can manage to find. Today's big hit is a 2001 interview with Barack Obama about the civil rights movement, where he lamented the movement's propensity to lean on the courts to mandate changes as opposed to building social change from the bottom up within local communities. That's pretty much all he said, but because he used the words "redistribute" and "wealth" every conservative in America figures they've cracked the Da Vinci Code and revealed Obama for the Maoist-Leninist-Marxist-Communist-socialist that he is. The key quote is this:

"And I think one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was that the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and organizing activities on the ground that are able to bring about the coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that," Obama said.

That's not only a pretty conservative (not in the political sense) argument, it's echoed by conservative legal scholars.

Now here's how the McCain campaign deliberately misinterprets it:

"Barack Obama expressed his regret that the Supreme Court hadn't been more 'radical' and described as a 'tragedy' the court's refusal to take up 'the issues of redistribution of wealth.' No wonder he wants to appoint judges that legislate from the bench," Holtz-Eakin continued.

This is reminiscent of the "global test" brouhaha from 2004, where Bush officials went ahead and misinterpreted a line from John Kerry for their own ends. It's a very common and even tired political trick.

On the substance of whether or not we should accept "redistribution of wealth" in society, perhaps it's better to flip the question. Does the McCain-Palin ticket defend the extreme concentrations of wealth - with CEOs earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute and sitting on the proceeds rather than creating jobs - that exists in this country today? The owners of the top 1% of wealth have more than the bottom 90%. The top 1% wage earners make more than the bottom 50%. Is that in any way sustainable or preferable? Can anyone look into the eyes of the 47 million who have no health care or the other 50-60 million who would go bankrupt if they tried to use theirs and tell them that extreme concentration of wealth is a positive social good?

I would put up the time-honored concept of progressive taxation against the attempt to protect the massive, depression-inducing income inequality we have today.

And furthermore, the definition of socialism, in general terms, is when the state collectivizes the ownership of the means of production and distributes wealth equally across segments of society. You know, like in Alaska.

"And Alaska—we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs. … It’s to maximize benefits for Alaskans, not an individual company, not some multinational somewhere, but for Alaskans."

The words, folks, of Sarah Palin.

Long Arc of History, Justice, Etc.

I had heard that Connecticut was going to wait out a decision on same-sex marriage until after the elections to see what happened with Prop. 8. But the state Supreme Court couldn't wait.

HARTFORD, Conn. - Connecticut's Supreme Court ruled Friday that same-sex couples have the right to marry, making the state the third behind Massachusetts and California to legalize such unions.

The divided court ruled 4-3 that gay and lesbian couples cannot be denied the freedom to marry under the state constitution, and Connecticut's civil unions law does not provide those couples with the same rights as heterosexual couples.

"I can't believe it. We're thrilled, we're absolutely overjoyed. We're finally going to be able, after 33 years, to get married," said Janet Peck of Colchester, who was a plaintiff with her partner, Carole Conklin.

"Interpreting our state constitutional provisions in accordance with firmly established equal protection principles leads inevitably to the conclusion that gay persons are entitled to marry the otherwise qualified same sex partner of their choice," Justice Richard N. Palmer wrote in the majority opinion that overturned a lower court finding.

"To decide otherwise would require us to apply one set of constitutional principles to gay persons and another to all others," Palmer wrote.

You really can't claim to promote a freedom agenda while wanting to curtail freedom to select members of society. The concept of freedom isn't about freedom for everything you LIKE - it's about diversity and tolerance and mutual respect. This latest civil rights crusade allows people of good faith to be as true as the ideals they like to wear on their sleeves.

Otherwise, they can descend to the levels of bigotry.

Donate to No on Prop. 8 in the name of freedom and equality.

Web Of Lies

The Yes On 8 team isn't hiding it anymore. Their entire argument for banning same-sex marriage has nothing to do with taking away the right of gay people to marry - if it was they'd straight-up lose. Instead, they are offering a whole array of residual effects, like claiming that this would force homosexuality to be taught in public schools (not true) and churches will lose their tax exemptions (not true) and your son will be forced at gunpoint to gay marry the neighbot boy (not true, and not what they're claiming, but it might as well be).

The entire point is to make people feel icky, to play to their base instincts, and to make it seem like a vote to ban the protected rights of hundreds of thousands of citizens is actually a vote to protect their own rights. It's Machiavellian and really ugly. The No side is fighting back, but I'm not sure their soft-pedal approach is really going to work.



I understand that they're walking a tightrope, and focusing on equality makes sense. But this is a weird meta-campaign where nobody is talking about the real issue, just their "feelings" and their faulty assumptions of what would never happen. Saying "the Yes on 8 ads are filled with lies" would be a start. This reassurance business might capture undecideds at the margins, but people need to know who the dirty tricksters are. How about a spot showing the 11,000 gay couples who have already married and ripping up their marriage licenses? How about some of these people calling out the lies and calling discrimination what it is?

There's a lot of concern right now. Two recent polls show Prop. 8 winning, though not over 50% yet. Their ads are having an effect and they have lots of money.

If you can, donate to No on 8 and give some of your time. Barack Obama may be important but our local community matters too. Pass around this ad from the Courage Campaign. Spread the word. We have to defeat this bill or else discrimination will be enshrined into our state constitution.

UPDATE: And the second after I write this, No on 8 puts out an ad calling out the lies. Good on them. Instant gratification!

What The Congress Is Doing Right (Yes, There Is Something)

I'm distressed by the lifting of the ban on offshore drilling, and the bailout bill is still fluid. But at the end of this session, the Congress is getting some good bills across the line.

After much wrangling from Senate hold king Tom Coburn, the Senate finally dislodged the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act and got it passed. This would set up a cold case unit to investigate crimes and injustices of the Civil Rights era.

The Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity Act passed the House by overwhelming margins yesterday. This would prohibit insurance agencies from limiting benefits for mental health ailments. Right now only 1/3 of all Americans suffering from mental illness receive adequate treatment, and this bill would go a long way to altering that. More here.

In addition, the House passed a credit card holder's bill of rights, which would accomplish the following.

Ends unfair, arbitrary interest rate increases, by requiring ample notice before rate hikes and permitting lenders to raise rates on existing balances only if minimum payments are more than 30 days late (except for increases caused by changes in stated variable and introductory offers)

Ends penalties on cardholders who pay on time, like charging interest on already repaid debt

Protects consumers from due date gimmicks by requiring credit card companies to mail bills 25 days (instead of 14) before the due date

Ends the credit card practice of applying consumer payments to lower interest debt first

This also passed overwhelmingly.

I'll withhold judgment to see what they do with this piece of garbage bailout bill, but Congress is not entirely useless.

LAT: No On 8

Big news today that the LA Times has come out No on 8, which, given their reach and their tendency to be something less than liberal in worldview, is very significant.

But it was Ronald M. George, chief justice of the California Supreme Court, who cut through to the essence of the issue in the May 15 opinion he wrote: "[A]ffording same-sex couples only a separate and differently named family relationship will, as a realistic matter, impose appreciable harm on same-sex couples and their children, because denying such couples access to the familiar and highly favored designation of marriage is likely to cast doubt on whether the official family relationship of same-sex couples enjoys dignity equal to that of opposite-sex couples."

In other words, the very act of denying gay and lesbian couples the right to marry -- traditionally the highest legal and societal recognition of a loving commitment -- by definition relegates them and their relationships to second-class status, separate and not all that equal.

Good for the LAT ed board, especially with their framing as a civil rights issue, which it is.

We're going to win this thing.

UPDATE: The new site for the marriage equality folks fighting this initiative is NoOnProp8.com.

The Schloz Meets His Maker?

It takes a lot for Bush's Justice Department to investigate one of its own. But that's exactly what's happening in Washington, as the politicization of the Civil Rights Division is coming to a head, with Bradley J. Schlozman, perhaps the worst of the worst, right at the front as the target.

In a report for the Huffington Post, Murray Waas reveals that a grand jury is issuing subpoenas for multiple Justice Department lawyers in the case.

The extraordinary step by the Justice Department of subpoenaing attorneys once from within its own ranks was taken because several of them refused to voluntarily give interviews to the Department Inspector General, which has been conducting its own probe of the politicization of the Civil Rights Division, the same sources said.

The grand jury has been investigating allegations that a former senior Bush administration appointee in the Civil Rights Division, Bradley Schlozman, gave false or misleading testimony on a variety of topics to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Sources close to the investigation say that the grand jury is also more broadly examining whether Schlozman and other Department officials violated civil service laws by screening Civil Rights attorneys for political affiliation while hiring them.

As far as lying to the Senate Judiciary, that's industry standard for these Bush hacks. And we know that Monica Goodling was found by the IG to exhibit the same prejudicial hiring practices, so it would be no surprise to see Schlozman take the same role in the Civil Rights Division. There clearly was a systematic effort to weed out Democrats and liberals from the career civil service and set landmines for future Democratic Presidents inside the DoJ. And as with Goodling, I'm sure this information will be readily available to the IG.

But this part intrigues me even more:

Investigators for the Inspector General have also asked whether Schlozman, while an interim U.S. attorney in Missouri, brought certain actions and even a voting fraud indictment for political ends, according to witnesses questioned by the investigators. But it is unclear whether the grand jury is going to hear testimony on that issue as well.

This is the infamous ACORN case, where Schlozman pushed bogus voter fraud claims and brought prosecutions right before a hotly contested election in Missouri in 2006, in all probability to cast doubt on the election and reflect poorly on the Democratic candidates. Here are but a few of the charges from that election:

•Schlozman, while he was acting civil rights chief, authorized a suit accusing the state of failing to eliminate legions of ineligible people from lists of registered voters. A federal judge tossed out the suit this April 13, saying Democratic Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan couldn’t police local registration rolls and noting that the government had produced no evidence of fraud.

•The Missouri General Assembly - with the White House’s help - narrowly passed a law requiring voters to show photo identification cards, which Carnahan estimated would disenfranchise 200,000 voters. The state Supreme Court voided the law as unconstitutional before the election.

•Two weeks before the election, the St. Louis Board of Elections sent letters threatening to disqualify 5,000 newly registered minority voters if they failed to verify their identities promptly, a move - instigated by a Republican appointee - that may have violated federal law. After an outcry, the board rescinded the threat.

•Five days before the election, Schlozman, then interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, announced indictments of four voter-registration workers for a Democratic-leaning group on charges of submitting phony applications, despite a Justice Department policy discouraging such action close to an election.

•In an interview with conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt a couple of days before the election, Rove said he’d just visited Missouri and had met with Republican strategists who “are well aware of” the threat of voter fraud. He said the party had “a large number of lawyers that are standing by, trained and ready to intervene” to keep the election clean.

According to Waas, one of the lawyers subpoenaed was none other than Hans von Spakovsky, a former Commissioner on the Federal Election Commission who ought to have his own legal problems to deal with - regarding his lies to the Senate Judiciary Committee and obstructing an investigation into Republican voter suppression in Minnesota. Von Spakovsky may have aided in the effort to hire and fire Civil Rights Division attorneys based on ideological factors.

It's very important that this grand jury investigation goes forward. We all know that voter suppression and intimidation is baked into the cake of Republican electoral strategy. Those responsible for this politicization need to be prosecuted and convicted in the name of accountability, but also to discredit what is truly part of the Republican plan for electoral dominance.

A Nice Day To Be A Californian

Today at 5:01pm, Mayor Gavin Newsom will officiate a private wedding ceremony between Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin. At 6:00, Mayor Ron Dellums will officiate marriage ceremonies in Alameda County, with Rep. (and new DNC member) Barbara Lee on hand, among others. All over the state, couples, regardless of gender, will engage in the basic civil right of marriage.

And all over the state, stories like this are appearing in the morning papers.

It's 9 a.m. on a Thursday and Paul Waters and Kevin Voecks are paging through photos of cakes at the Vienna Bakery in Thousand Oaks.

"Would you want something like that?" Voecks asked, pausing briefly on one.

"Hmmm," Waters replied.

It's 12 days until their wedding.

Voecks, 51, pointed to another, a four-tiered cake, with icing studs running down its side. "This one reminds me of a tuxedo shirt, it's not effeminate."

"I think bow ties here," Waters, 53, said. "And I like the wedding bells on it."

"Bow ties would be awesome!" Voecks said.

His soon-to-be mother-in-law, Peggy Waters, 80, looked on as her only son and his groom finalized the order.

"Kevin's a 10," Peggy Waters said. "All the women Paul brought home, I never liked. This is still a dream come true."

It's pretty special to witness this, although my real hope is for the day when this is unexceptional. These are our neighbors, our mail carriers, our office workers, our waitstaff, our bosses, our dogwalkers, our friends. And they have their personal lives as do we. And starting tonight, there are no barriers between us.

There is an enormous political battle ahead. But today is simple and special.

McCain's civil rights problem

John McCain is on a mission to court black voters, although it helps when you know where they actually live (South Philadelphia is largely Italian, with growing numbers of Asians and Hispanics). What would help more is if you didn't vote against the 1990 Civil Rights Act. Or really anything called the "Civil Rights Act," black people may tend to get touchy about that.

In 1990, McCain was one of the deciding votes in helping then-President George H.W. Bush sustain a veto against the relatively benign Civil Rights Act of 1990 [...]

The act was a response to a series of controversial Supreme Court decisions made the year before. In those decisions, the court overturned a 1971 ruling that required employers to prove a "business necessity" for screening out minorities and women in its hiring practices. That burden of proof, the 1989 court said, should instead be placed on the plaintiff who alleged that his or her client had been unlawfully screened.

Both the House of Representatives and the Senate, deeming this unjust, passed bills that would restore the old law. But the Bush administration objected, insisting that a reversion to the old way would amount to forcing employers to have hiring quotas. It was a controversial and somewhat dubious claim, one that the New York Times editorial page called "an unjustified charge." After all, the system had worked fine from 1971 through 1989. Nevertheless, the president vetoed the legislation.

When a motion to override the veto came to the Senate floor, there was question as to whether it would receive the 67 votes needed to pass. The environment was so charged that white supremacist David Duke watched from one section of the Senate gallery while civil rights leader Jesse Jackson stood briefly at the chamber's other end.

Ultimately, the vote fell one short: 66 to 34. Prominent Republican Senators like John H Chaffe, John Danforth, Pete Domenici, and Arlen Specter, all chose to override the veto. McCain - who had earlier voted for a watered down version of the bill, one that didn't reverse the court's decision - backed the president.

Incredibly, he's still defending his vote by saying that "I've never believed in quotas." Of course, the bill would not provide quotas so that seems like a classic Chewbacca defense.

McCain wants to play the nice guy on race, but it doesn't match up with his past. I don't think he's a racist but he certainly listens to those who would rather make things smoother for business than exhibit any sort of racial sensitivity. That's not going to, how do you say, play well.

Early Morning, April 4

(bumped. Also see Beyond the Mountaintop, a study of economic and poverty issues 40 years after the death of Dr. King.)

... shot rings out, in a Memphis sky,
free at last, they took you alive
but they could not take your pride...

And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.

And I don't mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

And so I'm happy, tonight.

I'm not worried about anything.

I'm not fearing any man!

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!!

Just to contextualize, Martin Luther King was in Memphis working with striking sanitation workers who wanted a fair contract from the city. He was a civil rights leader but understood civil rights as an economic justice issue, as an issue of equality, not just of humanity but opportunity. The workers were threatened and attacked and kept on marching for their rights. King's fight was for freedom of assembly, for equal protection, for justice in all its forms. To me, this was actually the most powerful portion of that speech:

Now the other thing we'll have to do is this: Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people. Individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively -- that means all of us together -- collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the American Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That's power right there, if we know how to pool it.

We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles. We don't need any Molotov cocktails. We just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, "God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."

And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy -- what is the other bread? -- Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on town -- downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right.

The power of collective action. The power of bottom-up organizing. The power of seeing a world where everyone is in it together, where everyone has a stake in one another. The power of fighting for justice and fairness and right, and moving mountains just by walking together. We get cynical in this medium a lot, and maybe we have a right to; after all, forty years ago they shot Dr. King for leading such a movement. But the legacy lives on, and I believe in his aphorism that "the long arc of history bends toward justice." This movement, this place where we've all gravitated, is but a small kernel of that legacy. But it's growing, and regardless of the President or the Congress or whoever it will continue to move forward. And one day, we will get there.


...oh yeah, just so you know, and want to tell a friend, John McCain voted against making Martin Luther King's birthday a holiday in 1983.

UPDATE: I guess people are killing Sen. Obama for not being in Memphis today, but I don't know, isn't it a measure of Dr. King's legacy that on this day, a black man is running for President in NORTH DAKOTA? Content of their character?

The Anti-dorsement

I haven't seen a newspaper editorial this scathing about a Presidential candidate, maybe ever. That it's the Concord (N.H.) Monitor and the candidate is leading the race for the Republican nomination in the state shows you what a mess the GOP primaries are.

Romney's main business experience is as a management consultant, a field in which smart, fast-moving specialists often advise corporations on how to reinvent themselves. His memoir is called Turnaround - the story of his successful rescue of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City - but the most stunning turnaround he has engineered is his own political career.

If you followed only his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, you might imagine Romney as a pragmatic moderate with liberal positions on numerous social issues and an ability to work well with Democrats. If you followed only his campaign for president, you'd swear he was a red-meat conservative, pandering to the religious right, whatever the cost. Pay attention to both, and you're left to wonder if there's anything at all at his core.

As a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1994, he boasted that he would be a stronger advocate of gay rights than his opponent, Ted Kennedy. These days, he makes a point of his opposition to gay marriage and adoption.

There was a time that he said he wanted to make contraception more available - and a time that he vetoed a bill to sell it over-the-counter.

The old Romney assured voters he was pro-choice on abortion. "You will not see me wavering on that," he said in 1994, and he cited the tragedy of a relative's botched illegal abortion as the reason to keep abortions safe and legal. These days, he describes himself as pro-life.

There was a time that he supported stem-cell research and cited his own wife's multiple sclerosis in explaining his thinking; such research, he reasoned, could help families like his. These days, he largely opposes it. As a candidate for governor, Romney dismissed an anti-tax pledge as a gimmick. In this race, he was the first to sign.

People can change, and intransigence is not necessarily a virtue. But Romney has yet to explain this particular set of turnarounds in a way that convinces voters they are based on anything other than his own ambition.

This has been well-known for quite some time, but in the last moments before voting, Mitt the Robo-candidate is sputtering gears. John Kerry was a fairly consistent candidate who by the conventions of the Senate made a few votes that, if you contorted yourself enough, may have been inconsistent. He was pilloried for nine long months. Romney has almost no policy position on which he did not take all possible stands. That includes whether or not his dad marched with Martin Luther King, the continuing incident whose Romney campaign-picked "eyewitnesses" have now been debunked. (Of course, there's a missing element to that story. Just because George Romney marched for civil rights doesn't mean that there's anything in Mitt Romney's current profile that would suggest HE would take any kind of positive position on that issue. Just as the sins of the father should be presented upon the son, the same with the glories of the father. Mitt wouldn't dare march in Jena, or at the commemoration in Selma, and THAT'S what matters.)

But I think we have found the area in which Romney does display perfect rigidity; he's a very proud royalist. Charlie Savage asked all of the candidates about their views on executive power. Romney's are amazing.

Romney's responses -- not to some of the questions but to every single one of them -- are beyond disturbing. The powers he claims the President possesses are definitively -- literally -- tyrannical, unrecognizable in the pre-2001 American system of government and, in some meaningful ways, even beyond what the Bush/Cheney cadre of authoritarian legal theorists have claimed.

After reviewing those responses, Marty Lederman concluded: "Romney? Let's put it this way: If you've liked Dick Cheney and David Addington, you're gonna love Mitt Romney." Anonymous Liberal similarly observed that his responses reveal that "Romney doesn't believe the president's power to be subject to any serious constraints." To say that the President's powers are not "subject to any serious constraints" -- which is exactly what Romney says -- is, of course, to posit the President as tyrant, not metaphorically or with hyperbole, but by definition.

So, you know, that's SOMETHING nobody can accuse him of being wishy-washy about.

I Sang On "Rapper's Delight" With The Sugar Hill Gang

Man, this Mitt Romney thing is getting worse and worse:

Romney has repeated the story of his father marching with King in some of his most prominent presidential campaign appearances, including the "Tonight" show with Jay Leno in May, his address on faith and politics Dec. 6 in Texas, and on NBC's "Meet The Press" on Sunday, when he was questioned about the Mormon Church's ban on full participation by black members. He said that he had cried in his car in 1978 when he heard the ban had ended, and added, "My father marched with Martin Luther King."

Mitt Romney went a step further in a 1978 interview with the Boston Herald. Talking about the Mormon Church and racial discrimination, he said: "My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit."

Yesterday, Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom acknowledged that was not true. "Mitt Romney did not march with Martin Luther King," he said in an e-mail statement to the Globe.

But only if you mean "march with Martin Luther King" in the sense of being on the same street with Martin Luther King at the same time. And that's pretty abstract.

I was going to do a series of other things Mitt Romney has done "for the cause of his brothers and sisters" in his life, but TBogg beat me to it:

August 23, 1963: Convinces Martin Luther King to conclude his "I Have A Dream" speech with "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!", instead of "I'm going to Disneyland!".

December 14, 1966: Tells Ron Karenga that Kwanzaa sounds "less gay" than "First Fruits Festival".

October 16, 1968: Offers Tommie Smith John Carlos his black socks to wear on their fists on the medal stand at the Olympics.

July 14, 1970; Plays congas on The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

November 19, 1970: Nails Angela Davis. Nine months later, Tagg Romney is born.

June 13, 1982: Convinces Michael Jackson that he thinks he would look "really swell" as a white woman.

March 3, 1991: Forgets that he is Rodney King's designated driver and King is forced to drive himself home.

March 9, 1997: Kills Biggie Smalls for "disrespecting" him.

May 13, 2005: Double-dog dares Michael Vick to top strapping a dog to the top of a station wagon.

Not the first time I wished I wrote something that TBogg wrote.

It Depends On What Your Definition of "Together" Is

Yesterday, the Boston Phoenix investigated this claim from Mitt Romney that his father "walked together with Martin Luther King" in favor of civil rights. Turns out he, um, didn't. Here's the Romney campaign's explanation:

A spokesperson for Mitt Romney now tells the Boston Phoenix that George W. Romney and Martin Luther King Jr. marched together in June, 1963 -- although possibly not on the same day or in the same city.

Romney, according to one piece of written source material provided by the campaign, made a “surprise” appearance at a small march in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in late June -- several days after King led a much larger march in Detroit. Romney spokesperson Eric Fehrnstrom suggests that these two were part of the same “series” of events, co-sponsored by King and the NAACP, and is thus consistent with Romney’s claim that “I saw my father march with Martin Luther King.”

“The record is convincing and clear – George Romney marched with Martin Luther King and other civil rights demonstrators,” Fehrnstrom wrote in an email.

Yes, it's perfectly clear: George Romney knew how to walk, Martin Luther King walked in the state of Michigan once: that means they were best friends!

Now, when Al Gore made statements that were clumsy, they were taken completely out of context and put into the worst possible light to make him appear like a "serial exaggerator." Yet here we have Romney, and really not just him on the Republican side, lying over and over again, changing their stories, endlessly parsing their own statements.

So will we seem the same media narrative placed on them?

Bye Tanner

It's pretty big Friday news dump news that John Tanner resigned. He was the chief of the DoJ's Civil Rights Division voting section. As we move into Election 2008, surely the politicized Justice Department is going to use its position of power to attempt to suppress the minority vote, as they have done practically every year of the Bush Administration. Tanner had other problems; he was flying all over creation on the public dime, and he famously said that minorities die first, and so because elderly people are the ones without identification, voter ID laws discriminate against whites. But the real reason to rid ourselves of John Tanner is because he was upholding a time-honored vote suppression strategy. The more disruption in that department, the better. Barack Obama was actually a leader in getting him removed.

Hey Barack, Where's The Leadership?

I haven't been paying too much attention to this Barack Obama/Donnie McClurkin flare-up, but from what I know Obama is just digging his own grave. McClurkin, a black preacher who is viciously anti-gay, is part of a gospel concert organized by the Obama folks in South Carolina (I guess with little vetting). Outrage began on the blogs and then the Human Rights Campaign condemned his campaign. Obama's people were reluctant to drop McClurkin from the event, tried to build grassroots support to shut the HRC up, and finally decided to have an openly gay minister open the gospel sessions. Thing is, the minister is white, which is making many unhappy.

This move is sure to piss off almost everybody, except HRC [the Human Rights Campaign], who apparently brokered the deal. Obama won't win any new black votes by getting a white gay guy to speak at a black event. Especially when there are plenty of black straight people, black gay people, families of black gay people, and friends of black gay people who could have been chosen to speak.

I have been following the reaction in the black gay community, and many but not all of the commenters are outraged by the decision. It was bad enough that McClurkin was invited in the first place, but it only adds insult to injury to ignore the longstanding concerns of the black gay community by not talking to people in the black gay community themselves. And if someone had to be invited, why not invite someone in the black gay community? Or why not invite a black mother of a gay or lesbian child? Or a local black pastor who supports the full inclusion of gays and lesbians?

The worst of it was this letter explaining his position, written by supporters.

Pastor McClurkin believes and has stated things about sexual orientation that are deeply hurtful and offensive to many Americans, most especially to gay Americans. This cannot and should not be denied.

At the same time, a great many African Americans share Pastor McClurkin's beliefs. This also cannot be ignored.

I see, the new purpose of a leader is to acknowledge injustice and allow it to fester instead of fighting it.

This is indicative of the entire Obama campaign. He has a good speechwriter, but he is hardly a leader. Martin Luther King wouldn't have said "Hey, you can't ignore that black people hate gay people, that's just how things are." He would have worked to change it, not through accomodation.

Those of us who don't want to re-run the 90s for various reasons by keeping the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton dynasty intact need to find a way to merge Obama's campaign dollars, Edwards' rhetoric, Richardson's view on residual forces and Dodd's courage into some uber-candidate as we head into Iowa. But really, all Obama is good for right now is his cash. This is just deplorable.