99 posts tagged “politics”

I’m running for President to build an America that lives up to our founding promise of equality for all – a promise that extends to our gay brothers and sisters. It’s wrong to have millions of Americans living as second-class citizens in this nation. And I ask for your support in this election so that together we can bring about real change for all LGBT Americans.

Equality is a moral imperative. That’s why throughout my career, I have fought to eliminate discrimination against LGBT Americans. In Illinois, I co-sponsored a fully inclusive bill that prohibited discrimination on the basis of both sexual orientation and gender identity, extending protection to the workplace, housing, and places of public accommodation. In the U.S. Senate, I have co-sponsored bills that would equalize tax treatment for same-sex couples and provide benefits to domestic partners of federal employees. And as president, I will place the weight of my administration behind the enactment of the Matthew Shepard Act to outlaw hate crimes and a fully inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act to outlaw workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

As your President, I will use the bully pulpit to urge states to treat same-sex couples with full equality in their family and adoption laws. I personally believe that civil unions represent the best way to secure that equal treatment. But I also believe that the federal government should not stand in the way of states that want to decide on their own how best to pursue equality for gay and lesbian couples — whether that means a domestic partnership, a civil union, or a civil marriage.

Unlike Senator Clinton, I support the complete repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) – a position I have held since before arriving in the U.S. Senate. While some say we should repeal only part of the law, I believe we should get rid of that statute altogether. Federal law should not discriminate in any way against gay and lesbian couples, which is precisely what DOMA does. I have also called for us to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and I have worked to improve the Uniting American Families Act so we can afford same-sex couples the same rights and obligations as married couples in our immigration system.

The next president must also address the HIV/AIDS epidemic. When it comes to prevention, we do not have to choose between values and science. While abstinence education should be part of any strategy, we also need to use common sense. We should have age-appropriate sex education that includes information about contraception. We should pass the JUSTICE Act to combat infection within our prison population. And we should lift the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users. In addition, local governments can protect public health by distributing contraceptives.

We also need a president who’s willing to confront the stigma – too often tied to homophobia – that continues to surround HIV/AIDS. I confronted this stigma directly in a speech to evangelicals at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, and will continue to speak out as president. That is where I stand on the major issues of the day. But having the right positions on the issues is only half the battle. The other half is to win broad support for those positions. And winning broad support will require stepping outside our comfort zone. If we want to repeal DOMA, repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and implement fully inclusive laws outlawing hate crimes and discrimination in the workplace, we need to bring the message of LGBT equality to skeptical audiences as well as friendly ones – and that’s what I’ve done throughout my career. I brought this message of inclusiveness to all of America in my keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention. I talked about the need to fight homophobia when I announced my candidacy for President, and I have been talking about LGBT equality to a number of groups during this campaign – from local LGBT activists to rural farmers to parishioners at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Dr. Martin Luther King once preached.

Just as important, I have been listening to what all Americans have to say. I will never compromise on my commitment to equal rights for all LGBT Americans. But neither will I close my ears to the voices of those who still need to be convinced. That is the work we must do to move forward together. It is difficult. It is challenging. And it is necessary.

Americans are yearning for leadership that can empower us to reach for what we know is possible. I believe that we can achieve the goal of full equality for the millions of LGBT people in this country. To do that, we need leadership that can appeal to the best parts of the human spirit. Join with me, and I will provide that leadership. Together, we will achieve real equality for all Americans, gay and straight alike.

Barack Obama

Because people pay attention.  Seen at the corner of 14th Street and Valencia, Mission District:

Nsa

from ThinkProgress:

William F. Buckley died last night.  I've gone back and watched several speeches and debates of his during his heyday in the 60's and 70's (his debates with Noam Chomsky are especially interesting), and while i certainly don't agree with most of what he believed, i appreciated his quick humor and-- most of all-- his civility towards those he disagreed with.  He also was, as far as i am concerned, more grounded and consistent in his conservative philosophy than most so-called conservatives are today. 

Last year, Johann Hari of The New Republic did a piece on the annual "cruise" that The National Review puts on, where you can drop a few thousand to ride around the Caribbean on a large boat with columnists and bloggers from The National Review-- a publication founded by Buckley which serves as the standard bearer of conservative thought in America.

Hari's account of his trip (he wryly referred to it at one point as "the Muslims are Coming cruise") includes this passage that to me perfectly illustrates just how far the conservative movement has strayed from Buckley's vision:

A fracture-line in the lumbering certainty of American conservatism is opening right before my eyes. Following the break, Norman Podhoretz and William Buckley—two of the grand old men of the Grand Old Party—begin to feud. Podhoretz will not stop speaking—“I have lots of ex-friends on the left; it looks as if I’m going to have some ex-friends on the right, too,” he rants—and Buckley says to the chair. Just take the mike, there’s no other way.” He says it with a smile, but with heavy eyes.

Podhoretz and Buckley now inhabit opposite poles of post-September 11 American conservatism, and they stare at totally different Iraqs.  Podhoretz is the Brooklyn-born, street-fighting kid who traveled through a long phase of left-liberalism to a pugilistic belief in America’s power to redeem the world, one bomb at a time.  Today, he is a bristling gray ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq war has been “an amazing success.”  He waves his fist and declaims, “There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria. ….This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false.  It couldn’t have gone better.”  He wants more wars, and fast.  He is “certain” Bush will bomb Iran, and “thank God” for that.

Buckley is an urbane old reactionary, drunk on doubts. He founded National Review in 1955—when conservatism was viewed in polite society as a mental affliction—and he has always been skeptical of appeals to ‘the people,’ preferring the eternal top-down certainties of Catholicism. He united with Podhoretz in mutual hatred of Godless Communism, but, slouching into his eighties, he possesses a worldview that is ill-suited for the fight to bring democracy to the Muslim world. He was a ghostly presence on the cruise at first, appearing only briefly to shake a few hands. But now he has emerged, and his is fighting.

“Aren’t you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?” Buckley snaps at Podhoretz.  He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him that Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired.  “No,” Podhoretz replies. “As I say, they were shipped to Syria.  During Gulf War One, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran.”  He says he is “heartbroken” by this “rise of defeatism on the right.” He adds, apropos of nothing, “There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we are winning.”

The audience cheers Podhoretz.  The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused.  Doesn’t he sound like the liberal media?  Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley “a coward.” His wife nods and says, “Buckley’s an old man,” tapping her head with her finger to suggest dementia.

Ladies and gentlemen: I give you the modern conservative movement.

"There will be no legacy for Mr. Bush.  I don't believe his successor would re-enunciate the words he used in his second inaugural address because they were too ambitious. … So therefore I think his legacy is indecipherable."

"If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we've experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign." Buckley says.

-- William F. Buckley, when asked about the Iraq War and President Bush's foreign policy legacy.

If the nation's top law-enforcement official and top intelligence official admit that President Bush broke the law, why can't we impeach him?
______________________________________________________________

Saturday February 23, 2008 08:46 EST

McConnell/Mukasey: Eavesdropping outside of FISA is "illegal"

(updated below)

The White House yesterday escalated its most brazen, Orwellian campaign of the last eight years -- shrilly accusing House Democrats of jeopardizing the nation's security by allowing the Protect America Act to expire even though it's the President and House Republicans who blocked any extensions of that law. As the Associated Press pointed out at the bottom of its story:

McConnell acknowledged last week that the White House's refusal to extend the wiretapping law was meant to pressure Congress to pass the Senate bill.

Ponder what it says about our press corps that the White House knows it can (a) block all attempts to extend the PAA and then (b) spend the next several weeks blaming Democrats for helping the Terrorists by allowing the PAA to expire. I know I've made that point before, but this one is so brazen, so transparent and audacious, that it just hasn't yet ceased to amaze.

In any event, the two honorable, apolitical, completely trustworthy Bush cabinet members -- DNI Mike McConnell and Attorney General Michael Mukasey -- yesterday released a letter addressed to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes which is basically a written adaptation of the scary 24 video produced this week by the House Republicans, breathlessly claiming that the nation "is now more vulnerable to terrorist attack and other foreign threats" because of the PAA's expiration.

The letter contains the now-standard fear-mongering claims that telecoms will stop cooperating (and even have stopped cooperating already) with government surveillance in the absence of the PAA (an absence caused single-handedly by the President) -- i.e., "we have lost intelligence information this past week," etc. But there was one passage in the letter which seems significant and worth highlighting.

In the letter from Chairman Reyes to which McConnell and Mukasey are responding, Reyes pointed out that under the still-existing FISA law, the Government is free to commence surveillance without a warrant where there is no time to obtain one. In response, McConnell and Mukasey wrote:

[You imply that the emergency authorization process under FISA is an adequate substitute for the legislative authorities that have elapsed. This assertion reflects a basic misunderstanding about FISA's emergency authorization provisions. Specifically, you assert that the National Security Agency (NSA) or Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) "may begin surveillance immediately" in an emergency situation. FISA requires far more, and it would be illegal to proceed as you suggest].

Wow, what a blockbuster revelation. Apparently, as it turns out, in the United States it's "illegal" for the Government to eavesdrop on Americans without first complying with the requirements of FISA. Who would have known? It's a good thing we don't have a Government that would ever do that, or a Congress that would ever tolerate such "illegal" behavior. And it's so moving to hear the Bush administration earnestly explain that they are so hamstrung by FISA's requirements that we are all deeply vulnerable to the Terrorists, but they have no choice but to comply with its burdensome provisions -- because to do otherwise would be "illegal."

According to Bush's Attorney General and DNI, then, this is what is called "illegal" behavior:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 -- Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said.

So, you see, the Bush administration is in a really tough bind here, because they would really like to eavesdrop outside of FISA because they want to protect us all and keep us safe, but they just can't do that, because eavesdropping without complying with FISA's requirements is "illegal," and that's something they would never, ever do.

UPDATE: The claim in the Mukasey/McConnell letter that telecoms aren't cooperating now turns out to be completely untrue since, as The Washington Post reports, "administration officials told lawmakers that the final holdout among the companies had relented and agreed to fully participate in the surveillance program."

But even if telecoms were refusing to cooperate, the reason for their refusal was not because they don't have retroactive immunity, but rather, it's because there is alleged uncertainty over the legality of current surveillance requests, and uncertainty over the ongoing validity of the prospective immunity provided by the PAA, because the PAA expired. If the PAA had been extended, they would be completely protected with prospective immunity for future surveillance cooperation. And, of course, the PAA would not have expired had Congressional Democrats had their way -- they wanted to extend it until they could agree to a new bill. Thus, any alleged refusal on the part of telecoms to cooperate is exclusively the fault of Bush and House Republicans for forcing expiration of the PAA. That's just true as a matter of basic logic.

But leave all of that aside for a moment. Since Mike Mukasey himself just said in this letter that spying outside of FISA is "illegal," and since it's indisputable that the Bush administration did just that for years, doesn't that compel him as Attorney General to commence a criminal investigation into this "illegal" conduct?

UPDATE II: C&L has produced an excellent video response to the House Republicans' 24-copying, "Give-us-what-we-want-or-die" video from earlier this week. And, as I've linked to before, this animated video on telecom amnesty and FISA by Mark Fiore is basically perfect:

UPDATE III: This might be the best GOP FISA quote yet, from Sean Conway, the chief of staff for Colorado Republican U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard (h/t Zappatero):

And the House has just simply said, we're not going to accept this, because we want to have, you know, terrorists be able to sue phone companies if they're listening to our conversations. It's insane.

The most difficult job in America -- it's really impossible -- is satirizing Republican exploitation of Terrorism. No matter how far the satire goes, the actual fear-mongerers always easily surpass it. House Democrats want Terrorists to be able to sue the phone companies. That's what this is about.

Conway also beat his chest and said this:

I don't know about you, but if I'm a Democrat out there, you'd best, better hope that something does not happen in this country while this bill lapses.

Republicans like Conway are so eager for a Terrorist attack to happen that you can almost hear them drooling in anticipation over the political gain they imagine they'll be able to squeeze from it.

-- Glenn Greenwald

When it rains, it pours.

"Republican Rep. Richard Renzi of Arizona was indicted on 35 criminal counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and official extortion stemming from land deals in his state, Justice Department officials said on Friday."

Paul Kiel at TPMMuckraker summarizes the charges:

"The charges boil down to this, basically. Renzi (who's already said he won't seek re-election) is charged with doing everything he can as a congressman to strong-arm others into buying land from his buddy James Sandlin -- Sandlin then allegedly kicked back sizable chunks of cash back to Renzi in a series of complicated financial transactions (thus the money laundering charge). The main details of these charges were reported by the Arizona papers and The Wall Street Journal last year.

In a completely separate matter, the indictment charges Renzi with a conspiracy to "embezzle and misappropriate client premiums [from his insurance company] to fund his congressional campaign.""

Kiel goes on to remind us that the US Attorney who oversaw this investigation was Paul Charlton, one of the Attorneys fired in the US Attorney firing scandal. From the WSJ:

"People briefed on the case said investigators in Arizona asked Washington for clearance -- among other tools -- for a wiretap of Mr. Renzi's telephones, a highly unusual step against a sitting member of Congress, months before Election Day. The wiretap eventually was approved, and was in place by late October, these people said.

On Oct. 26, just days before the election, two political Web sites carried the first public word of the probe. In subsequent news accounts, an unidentified Washington law-enforcement official described the matter as "preliminary." Few details emerged, but the leak disrupted prosecutors' wiretap.

Meanwhile, Mr. Renzi, first elected to Congress in 2002, was fighting to hold on to his seat. In September, President Bush hosted a fund-raiser in Scottsdale on his behalf. About the same time Mr. Charlton was added to a list of prosecutors "we should now consider pushing out," wrote Mr. Gonzales's then-chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, in a Sept. 13, 2006, email to then-White House counsel Harriet Miers."

What an unfortunate series of coincidences. Stranger still, when the investigation was made public, one of Renzi's aides called Charlton to ask about it; Charlton reported that contact to the DoJ, as required, but oddly enough, the DoJ report of that contact was left out of the document dumps the DoJ made in response to various Congressional requests.

By the way, Rick Renzi (R-AZ) is a member of Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) National Leadership Team, as well as a co-chair of his Arizona Leadership Team. 

Damn those conservative ethical restraints!

A very very VERY smart, perceptive, reasonable, objective, and fair old man recently noted how "Conservatives have ethical constraints that liberals don't," because-- among other things-- they "will say anything that supports or justifies their beliefs and ideology regardless of whether or not it's true."

This same old man-- who again, in case you've forgotten, is very smart, perceptive, reasonable, objective, and fair-- went on to perceptively and objectively note:

People on the right can't get away with that. If a conservative makes a dubious charge or commits a breach of ethics, other conservatives will call him on it. As they should. In politics, when a Republican does or says something that reflects badly on the party, and an apology just won't do, he's forced to resign. Not only is that not so with liberals, but Democrats can commit acts of criminality and still retain their seats. And the more liberal, the bigger the criminal act you can get away with, as if "talking while liberal" isn't criminal in itself.

Sounds... reasonable.  And objective! 

So you can imagine my complete surprise when i read the following not 10 minutes ago:

A Republican operative in Alabama says Karl Rove asked her to try to prove the state’s Democratic governor was unfaithful to his wife in an effort to thwart the highly successful politician’s re-election.

Rove’s attempt to smear Don Siegelman was part of a Republican campaign to ruin him that finally succeeded in imprisoning him, says the operative, Jill Simpson.

Simpson speaks to Scott Pelley in her first television interview, to be broadcast on 60 Minutes Sunday, Feb. 24, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Simpson spoke to Pelley because, she says, Siegelman’s seven-year sentence for bribery bothers her. She recalls what Rove, then President Bush’s senior political adviser, asked her to do at a 2001 meeting in this exchange from Sunday’s report.

"Karl Rove asked you to take pictures of Siegelman?" asks Pelley.

"Yes," replies Simpson.

"In a compromising, sexual position with one of his aides," clarifies Pelley.

"Yes, if I could," says Simpson.

Simpson says she found no evidence of infidelity despite months of observation. She tells Pelley that Rove, who had been a top Republican strategist in Alabama, had made requests for information from her before in her capacity as an "opposition researcher" for Republicans running for office.

Rove would not speak to 60 Minutes, but elsewhere has denied being involved in efforts to discredit Siegelman.

Siegelman was convicted of bribery in a case that has drawn criticism from Democrats and Republicans. In fact, 52 former states’ attorneys general from both political parties petitioned Congress to investigate Siegelman’s case, resulting in hearings held last fall.

"I haven’t seen a case with this many red flags on it that pointed towards a real injustice being done," Grant Woods, the former Republican attorney general of Arizona and one of those who petitioned Congress, tells Pelley. "I personally believe that what happened here is that they targeted Don Siegelman because they could not beat him fair and square."

This is the same Karl Rove that leaked the name of a covert CIA operative in an effort to discredit and intimidate a political critic.

I must say-- the "ethical constraints" of the man most singularly responsible for making George W. Bush the President for the last 8 years-- the man who is the Republican Party's number one political operative-- are indeed truly unmatched by those of any liberal.

19 percent.  That's right-- one-nine percent.  That is George W. Bush's approval rating, according to the latest American Research Group poll.  Fully 77% of those polled are unhappy with his performance.  The breakdown by party affiliation:

Among Republicans (29% of adults registered to vote in the survey), 45% approve of the way Bush is handling his job and 50% disapprove. Among Democrats (43% of adults registered to vote in the survey), 1% approve and 99% disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job. Among independents (28% of adults registered to vote in the survey), 17% approve and 75% disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job as president.

Think about these numbers.  They're unprecedented-- never in the history of polling has a sitting President been rated so low.  Not Truman.  Not even Nixon.

Bush is finally number one at something: sucking. 

It really makes me wonder-- just who ARE those 19% of Americans that actually approve of the job that Bush is doing, and what reality are they living in?

UPDATE: I think I found one of them: 

Fringey!

1 comment