Category: Politics

You know it isn’t very often that I find something compelling enough to make a second post of the day. But here we are.

As you are doubtlessly aware, the 2006 elections will be here in a few weeks for those of us who live in the United States. Issues you, Dear Voter, will have to decide upon include every member of the House of Representatives, a slate of state officials, a bevy of ballot initiatives, a locust swarm of local officials, and maybe even an amendment or two to the State Constitution. Your mileage will vary by jurisdiction.

Controversy on voting machines aside, the Republican party is concerned about what will happen next month. They are “focus[ing] on best bets” and trying to convince us that low taxes are the answer to all our problems (again) Allow me to gloss over the deficit and that the lions share of tax cuts have gone to people who don’t need them.

Why the sudden backtracking? Because the so-called “Values Voters” have become disenchanted with the Republican Party. Nor is the problem just a Foley Backlash:

While such issues [as gay marriage and abortion] motivated the Republicans’ social-conservative base in the past, they are overshadowed in this year’s congressional election campaign by concerns about the Iraq war, the economy and national security, according to opinion polls and political strategists. “Poverty, the wealth gap, health care — people can’t afford Medicare. Something’s got to be done about that,” Sue Harrell, a school teacher in Monroe City, Indiana, said recently.She said “Christian values” were important in previous votes but her top issues now are education and the prevalence of methamphetamine abuse and poverty in Knox County, Indiana.

Such talk has Republicans nervous and Democrats scenting opportunities to recapture the House of Representatives after 12 years in the minority, as well as reduce the Republican advantage in the Senate.

More to the point, perhaps it turns out that doing the right things on poverty, the wealth gap, health care, education, the War in Babylon, and drug abuse are “Christian values.”

In closing: goodbye, Cheyenne Mountain; East is the New West as American kids learn Mandarin; and the upcoming 3 Branches of Government Showdown on suspected terrorists and their (lack of) rights.

You would not know it to look at CNN right now. Top stories over there include speculation over whether the girls taken hostage at a Colorado high school might have been singled out based on their MySpace pages, a high school freshman who had enough and shot his principal, a filmmaker shooting off his mouth, a woman who killed her husband because her lover was hiding in the closet, police shooting a suspected cop killer, a store clerk beating up a would-be thief on camera, something entitled “Guy in neon Speedo-thingy embarrasses nation”, Anna Nicole Smith getting married again, and one actual item of importance to the whole country, it turns out Abramoff talked to people in the White House lots of times, and “people” includes Karl Rove.

Nope, it isn’t at all important that the Senate passed something called “A bill to authorize trial by military commission for violations of the law of war, and for other purposes.” Please, take a moment to find out how your Senators voted on the matter. You can read the actual text here, or you can get the short version from the Washington Post’s write-up. It wasn’t even front page news over there; go figure. But here’s the ShortWoman’s even shorter version:

• It’s ok to lock up any “individual engaged in hostilities against the United States” as an unlawful combatantant. Contrary to what many are reporting, this definition does not contain any mention of “citizenship” or “alien”. Sure, “hostilities” implies trying to do actual physical harm. But is that the definition they are using? Or could protesters be considered to be “engaged in hostilities”?
• They can gain this status by doing something against the United States, or by giving material support to someone who does. So, uh, check out charities very carefully before giving anything to anybody, mmkay?
• Such people have no rights whatsoever in American courts.
• Nevertheless, some people like Arlen Spector have gone on the record as saying Well yeah, it’s not Constitutional but that’s ok because The Courts will clean it up!
• Such people will have access to military tribunals, but they won’t get to see evidence against them, evidence in their favor may be supressed, and evidence obtained through beating someone until they say what the prosecutor wants is ok.
• Anybody who is against this is accused of “supporting the rights of terrorists who want to harm us.”

If you haven’t had enough, please check out the excellent items posted at The Moderate Voice and The Boston Globe and — just for a bit of flavor — Buzzflash, twice. Even guys who don’t talk politics like Wil Wheaton are saying this is a sad, sad day for our nation.

They no longer have any reason to hate us for our freedoms, for our freedoms are fleeting.

Nobody — at least nobody sane — is saying we have to coddle people who were captured trying to harm Americans. But torture is illegal under World Law (which supercedes our mere American law much the way Federal law supercedes State law), doesn’t work, breeds resentment and mistrust around the world, and puts Americans at risk of harsher treatment in the event of their capture anywhere in the world.

These will be no “in closing” today. This is too important.

OK, I don’t normally write about local politics. I have readers from all over the world, and I realize that the majority of you don’t particularly care about issues local to my area unless they are particularly interesting for whatever reason. However, this is in regards to a Senate race in a state with almost 6 million residents. I honestly figured I should talk about the housing data that was such bad news yesterday, particularly when correlated to the bad durable goods numbers. Just to give you an idea, Ford is having to give 0% financing to subprime borrowers to move just about everything, including trucks. As icing on the cake, the rental market is heating up in some places.

But no, instead I bring you an overview of the 2006 race for United States Senator in Washington.

Six years ago, Maria Cantwell defeated incumbent Slade Gorton (yes, he’s related to the fish stick people). That means she’s up for re-election. Although the primary is not for another month yet, her presumed opponent is Mike McGavick.

Mr. McGavick’s ads focus on nice, fuzzy, feel-good things like how great it would be if instead of politicians, we were just people working together for the common good. No talk of issues, no stances, nothing. But it turns out he supports Lieberman. And it turns out that when you scratch the surface, he’s just another Republican, with pretty much the same slate of Republican ideas, who falls in line with the President’s ideas. He’s not an outsider, but an old political behind the scenes hack who was Chief of Staff to former Senator Gorton, and then a lobbyist who tried to weaken Superfund rules.

And now he’s trying to get his “youthful” indiscretions out in the open and out of the way. Let’s start with this:

McGavick began his letter on the Web site by asking rhetorically, “What’s wrong with politics today?” Then he excoriated the tenor of his race with incumbent Cantwell, in which he said he is being attacked.

Um, sorry. When someone holds themselves up as a political candidate you can have a friendly chat and a beer with, they have to expect someone will reply “No he’s not! And sorry, what’s that got to do with anything?”

Mr. McGavick went on to confess that he was on marriage #2 (having divorced the mother of his son many years ago), and that he was arrested for drunk driving in 1993 (at the tender youthful age of 35). Oh and yeah he dismissed 450 employees after telling everyone there would be no more layoffs.

The purpose behind these revelations is to minimize their value. Don’t let them get released a week before the elections, for example. But there’s more. Getting this information out there means that he doesn’t have to actually talk about issues for a while. And Mr. McGavick doesn’t want anyone noticing that his stance on the issues is pretty much neo-con.

I hope Ms. Cantwell is in a position to say “Yes, he’s right. We need to focus on the issues, not 13 year old DUIs. So here’s where I stand. And according to Mr. McGavick’s website, he stands for this.”

On a related note, Elisa is right on times three. And now for something completely different: Bernanke “Argues for work retraining programs and other ways to ease pain caused by economic shifts; no comments on interest rates or inflation”; a scary statistic; and finally over 1800 pictures of Hello Kitty.

I used to consider myself pretty centrist. I mean, alright, I was a member of the Progressive Student Union in college, but probably its most conservative member. But I believed enough of the same things they did that we could work together for things that seemed doable and important on campus. I considered myself centrist at the turn of the millennium, when Clinton –Bill Clinton, the one that was actually President — had survived impeachment, and when Dubya was a Governor with Presidential aspirations, back when air travel didn’t mean slip-on shoes.

Then, somewhere along the line, the Center apparently took a turn to the right, and I found myself out in the cornfield among lefties, liberals, activists, and other progressives.

Or at least, that’s what I thought.

To listen to the rhetoric, “everybody” agrees we must support our troops and that means nobody can say anything bad about the Bush Administration. Because, well I don’t know, maybe the insurgents are quoting Randi Rhodes at our troops instead of trying to kill them. Well, you know my stance on that. I do support the troops: I pray for peace.

But then, yesterday, out of the blue, I read this item by Molly Ivins, who I had considered to be just a tetch to the left of me. And I realized that the center had not moved after all! The highway signs had just been changed. To quote:

The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush’s tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes.

The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do “whatever it takes” to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF?

So let me get this straight. Most Americans want to bring the troops home, have health insurance, get a living wage, have the rich pay higher taxes, cut the deficit,* and protect the environment; yet somehow that’s a crazy liberal idea? And more to the point, why can’t our elected officials who claim to be so mindful of public opinion manage to do what it turns out the sometimes overwhelming majority of us want?

I hope Howard Dean has these figures, because it seems to me the Democratic Party doesn’t need an angle so much as they need to play to Peoria, the real Peoria, not K Street. Corporations do not vote; people do.

*As an aside, I’d like to point out that if more Americans earned a living wage, they would pay taxes on that money. And if we got rid of nutty tax breaks, that would be more taxes paid too. Now, you don’t suppose that could help reduce the deficit, do you?

I do not nearly have the time I would like to explore this topic more completely, so here is the short version.

The border security bill currently under consideration in the House of Representatives contains language that would “requir[e] the Social Security Administration, Treasury Department and Department of Justice to study the concept of a machine-readable Social Security card with a photo ID.”

This is a bad, bad idea. Thanks to changes in tax law, most Americans get Social Security Numbers as babies. A photo ID Social Security Card will have to be renewed regularly to be used as identification. This will incidentally create a photo database of every American, perfect for feeding into biometric recognition devices. It is also clear — since it’s laminated — that it is intended to be the sort of thing that everyone will carry in their wallets all the time, presentable to any Government official who asks. Even the Social Security Administration advises against actually carrying your Social Security Card. This is beyond the concerns of the Liberty Coalition:

“Even setting aside concerns of intentional ‘blacklisting’ of innocent Americans, even a small error rate could mean millions of Americans forced out of work by computer mistakes,” said Liberty Coalition Policy Director James Plummer. “Homeland Security has a poor record of putting innocent Americans on secretive “no-fly” lists, and should not be entrusted with determining who is allowed is to make a living in this country.”

Let’s face it: the only reason this is being considered at all is that the States are balking and doing everything they can to keep from implementing Real ID. Good for them. Keep the pressure on your State Governments. And tell your Representative and Senators to kill this internal passport requirement.

In closing: real quotes by Tom DeLay.

In a move reminiscent of having a kegger while Mom and Dad take that weekend away, President Bush has availed himself of a little understood but perfectly legal thing known as a “recess appointment” to make John Bolton our UN Ambassador.

There’s a really good summary of what all this means over at The Moderate Voice.

If you are the sort of person who gets their news from the television, or from mainline news sources, this may come as a shocking story. However, if you spend much of your time online, you may have heard about the rumor that Vice President Dick Cheney has been in the hospital. Now there’s a funny thing right there; this is one of the 50 most talked about things on the internet right now according to the resources that measure these things on a daily basis. Yet you won’t catch so much as an “unsubstantiated report” story on any of the major news outlets, including the ones that have to fill 24 hours a day with newsspeak, including the ones that manage to make “missing white girl of the week” or anything done/said by Michael Jackson or Paris Hilton into news. This is the Vice-President of the United States of America we are talking about. This is potentially news.

The Administration doesn’t want to so as much “confirm or deny.” The hospital can’t really say much of anything because of privacy laws.

Even if Mr. Cheney was hospitalized for, um, heart related troubles, his timing could not be better. It could be announced that due to the recent recall of implantable defibrillators, doctors wanted to act with an abundance of caution and make sure Mr. Cheney’s unit was in good operating condition. That is a believable story, regardless of it’s veracity.

This is arguably the second most important man in the most important nation on earth. Silence only allows rumors to fester. Let’s have some straight talk about what is really happening.

In closing: Just Say No to Chinese interests buying American oil company Unocal. It’s bad for security, inasmuch as oil is a strategic resource. It’s bad for our economy and the economy of the world. I could probably have beefed that out, but the succinct version says it all.

Tom DeLay (R- TX) has a problem. No, not the problem about one of his “allies” breaking fundraising law. No, not the ethics violations, or even about the changes to the House Ethics Committee rules. No, not even about how he took his wife and daughter to tour sweatshops and brothels in Saipan, then decided that even though it was a protectorate of the United States he wasn’t going to do anything about what he saw there. No, this problem is not outlined in his copious Wikipedia entry.

His problem is that he was mentioned in passing on a fictional TV crime-drama. A choice quote from the producer of the show in question:

Every week, approximately 100 million people see an episode of the branded ‘Law & Order’ series. Up until today, it was my impression that all of our viewers understood that these shows are works of fiction as is stated in each episode. But I do congratulate Congressman DeLay for switching the spotlight from his own problems to an episode of a TV show.

Mr. Wolf certainly has that assessment right: Mr. Delay would like us to not pay attention to what is going on; he would rather we look not at Congress, but at Hollywood. Which is more relevant to your life? Capitol Hill or Beverly Hills?

It is bad enough that national news attention is being focused on stories of at best regional interest, such as a murder suspect spending a few days on a crane threatening to jump. No, alleged pop-star pedophiles and “runaway brides” are distracting us from closing military bases in a time of “war” and whether or not we are going to send a guy with serious diplomatic problems to be our UN Ambassador. Yes, the news is being dumbed down, and no it’s not just because sleazy-but-irrelevant stories sell. It’s getting harder and harder to get enough actual information about what is going on in the world to develop an independent opinion.

In closing, I bring you “When kitchen knives are outlawed, only outlaws will have kitchen knives,” and — Happy Memorial Day! — this disabled veteran.

Some delegates to an international telecommunications commission have been bumped because they or their employers gave campaign contributions to John Kerry. A White House spokesman was actually quoted as saying “We wanted people who would represent the Administration positively, and–call us nutty–it seemed like those who wanted to kick this Administration out of town last November would have some difficulty doing that.”

Now, I respect the idea that they want their position supported, but this is the wrong way to do it. If they want their opinion voiced in this international, non-governmental, industry meeting, they should send an FCC delegate. This decision instead sets the standard of quid pro quo, a big banner saying that governmental support is directly related to contributions. In politics, that is often considered a bad thing. Wikipedia goes so far as to call such things “a breach of the public trust and a dishonest circumventing of the democratic process for special interests.”

In a way, it is refreshingly honest to say up front that in the future, political contributions will be a matter of simple extortion, and that if you support a loser, you can expect political retribution.

Wait… did I just say that?

I really don’t intend to bore the world with yet another essay about Terri Schiavo. All I will say about her case directly is this: contrary to what some people think, she is not “someone who just needs some help to eat.” She needs help to eat because she is beyond knowing what a spoon is, beyond knowing what food is, beyond knowing how to chew and swallow. A newborn baby can cry when it is hungry; this woman cannot. Every one of the 19 judges who has examined the medical evidence has come to the conclusion that she isn’t “in there” anymore. There’s a pretty good roundup of opinions both right and left over at The Moderate Voice (gee, whoda thought?) But it seems like the thing most people can agree on is that at this point, fifteen years and 19 judges later, Congress has no business getting involved. Judge #20 agrees, and now it is before Judges #21-23.

But the thing that absolutely horrifies me about this case is the circumstances behind the “unanimous” Senate vote that pushed the case into the Federal court system. “Unanimous,” in this case, meant 3 votes. There was no quorum (def. 2). There wasn’t even a minyan. When all was said and done, they didn’t even manage to get together half of of the House of Representatives. This brings me to a scary question:

If 3 guys can get together on the Senate floor and pass any darn thing they want, what exactly is there to stop them from getting 3 guys to do the same on the House floor and ram though any darn thing the President wants?

And that, esteemed reader, is why “activist judges” are so important.