10 posts tagged “democrats”

This is just one small indication of how elections have consequences, and things really are changing...

LEDBETTER ACT PASSES....Good news on the pay discrimination front:

The Senate approved landmark worker rights legislation on Thursday that will make it easier for those who think they've endured pay discrimination to seek legal help. The vote was 61-36.

....The legislation overrides a May 2007 Supreme Court ruling that [Lilly] Ledbetter, a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company employee in Gadsden, Ala., couldn't sue her employer for pay discrimination because she didn't file suit within 180 days of the alleged discriminatory act.

McClatchy, naturally, doesn't bother to tell its readers the party breakdown of the vote, but it's actually an interesting one: all 56 voting Democrats supported the bill, and five Republicans joined in. Which ones? Arlen Specter plus all four of the women in the GOP caucus. Imagine that.

(From Kevin Drum/Mother Jones)

So here you have the Democrats, not a few days in from inauguration... passing a law which says that women have the right to sue on the basis of discrimination if they are paid less for the same job as a man.  Now, this had actually been the law of the land, until Bush's two Supreme Court Justices took the bench.  When they overturned the reading of the law, Bush refused to sign a new law outlawing pay discrimination. 

Needless to say, the republicans still have not gotten the message.  Most of them in the Senate voted against the bill.  These are the small details that most people don't know.  Details that really would make a difference in the way people vote.  Keep that in mind in four years.

Dude, where's my Prius?

There has been a lot of talk recently about a possible bail-out of the big three Detroit automakers.  There are a lot of reasons for and against helping them out, but I'd have to say, it sure seems like the pro-bailout argument wins.

First, I'm actually glad that the republicans and still-president Bush are blocking a bailout right now.  It seems to me that the CEO's of the big three are really pushing to get a deal now because they think that they'll be able to get an easier time from the republicans.  It sure seems that way.  Though Bush is standing on his lame free-market orthodoxy in public, I think a lot of the reasons why the republicans are against this is based on politics.  They hate unions.  Practically the only powerful union left in the country is the UAW.  If the big three go under, well then, the union is dead.  So these guys would rather watch a million jobs go down the tubes for their political gain, than do something to help.  That, my friends, is the Rove way.  Can you say "Katrina"?  I knew you could.

Now, as far as I'm concerned, I don't mind that the republicans are blocking this right now.  I'd be fairly surprised if GM goes under in the next two months.  By February, we'll have Obama (can it be true???) as the President, and a Democratic congress.  They will actually pass some legislation to help Detroit.  It honestly doesn't make much sense not to.  If Detroit goes under, all those jobs die.  Not only the people who work directly for them, but all of the suppliers of parts.  What little is left of our manufacturing base in this country will die with them.  Sure, Toyota and Honda have US factories... but they are in the South, with no unions, low pay, and little benefits.  They use some US parts, but have a lot more imported parts in their cars.

Just for the record, I do not own an American car.  I'm not crazy.  Let's just say that Detroit made its own bed here.  They have made crappy cars that pale in comparison to the Japanese for about 30 years.  I've had my share of American disappointments - mostly Fords. 

However, I think that with the right leadership, this is a golden opportunity.  I'm sure Obama's team is working on the details right now.  How about predicating any bailout on Detroit getting its house in order?  Forcing them to give up fighting against fuel economy standards?  Forcing them to give up fighting against a national health care plan?  Essentially forcing them to give up their stances that, while in line with their executives' political predilictions, were disasterous for their companies.

Let's face it, one of the big problems that Detroit has faced is that they have huge "legacy costs".  That is, they have to pay tons of money out for the retirement benefits for their retired employees.  They fought against the Clinton health plan.  How much would passage of that 15 years ago have saved them in health insurance costs?  Detroit has also fought tooth and nail against raising fuel economy standards so they could focus on building huge SUV's.  How's that worked out for them?   They made huge profits on those dinosaurs, but what did they do with the money?  This was a huge failure of leadership.  While Toyota plowed a billion dollars into development of the Prius... GM dumped a billion into development of the Hummer brand.  Explain to me why the GM executives still have jobs...

So basically, Obama will have a choice.  Spend billions to prop up the big three, or spend more billions in unemployment benefits, social services, and support for the great lakes states which will implode if Detroit goes under.  It is kind of a no-brainer.  However, with Detroit on the ropes, it will be the prime time to strike a tough bargain.  They get US help, if they give us something in return.  What will Obama ask for?  We'll see in two months!

Obama

Ahhhh, finally a Democrat who will not shirk from fighting with the republicans on national security issues!  Not only that, but in Barack, we have someone who can simply and eloquently state the truth... and with that a devastating and damning argument...

Barack Obama continues hitting back hard today at the false McCain/GOP assaults on him for allegedly seeing terrorism as only a law-enforcement problem...

"I refuse to be lectured on national security by people who are responsible for the most disastrous set of foreign policy decisions in the recent history of the United States. The other side likes to use 9/11 as a political bludgeon. Well, let's talk about 9/11.

"The people who were responsible for murdering 3,000 Americans on 9/11 have not been brought to justice. They are Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and their sponsors -- the Taliban. They were in Afghanistan. And yet George Bush and John McCain decided in 2002 that we should take our eye off of Afghanistan so that we could invade and occupy a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. The case for war in Iraq was so thin that George Bush and John McCain had to hype the threat of Saddam Hussein, and make false promises that we'd be greeted as liberators. They misled the American people, and took us into a misguided war.

"Here are the results of their policy. Osama bin Laden and his top leadership -- the people who murdered 3000 Americans -- have a safe-haven in northwest Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audiotapes to the outside world. That's the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism."

I have not been posting much lately, mainly because I have been very busy... but a lot has been going politically on which has gotten me riled up, I just have not been able to blog about it.  I'm just bursting to be able to discuss the injustice of the Bear Stearns/JP Morgan bailout, but I'll save that for another day.

However, for today, you might want to read this article about how there is essentially no chance for Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic presidential nomination.  I've been reading shadows of this argument for a few weeks now, especially in reading through the lines in various NY Times articles... however nobody has really come right out and made the argument like I've seen it here. 

One big fact has largely been lost in the recent coverage of the Democratic presidential race: Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning.

Her own campaign acknowledges there is no way that she will finish ahead in pledged delegates. That means the only way she wins is if Democratic superdelegates are ready to risk a backlash of historic proportions from the party’s most reliable constituency.

Unless Clinton is able to at least win the primary popular vote — which also would take nothing less than an electoral miracle — and use that achievement to pressure superdelegates, she has only one scenario for victory. An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else.

People who think that scenario is even remotely likely are living on another planet.

But even some of Clinton’s own advisers now concede that she cannot win unless Obama is hit by a political meteor. Something that merely undermines him won't be enough. It would have to be some development that essentially disqualifies him.

Simple number-crunching has shown the long odds against Clinton for some time.

But let’s assume a best-case scenario for Clinton, one where she wins every remaining contest with 60 percent of the vote (an unlikely outcome since she has hit that level in only three states so far — her home state of New York, Rhode Island and Arkansas).

Even then, she would still be behind Obama in delegates.

That means Clinton would need either some of those pledged delegates to switch their support — which technically they can do, though it would be unlikely — or for the white-dominated group of superdelegates to join forces with her to topple Obama.

To foster doubt about Obama, Clinton supporters are using a whisper and pressure campaign to make an 11th-hour argument to party insiders that he would be a weak candidate in November despite his superior standing at the moment.

“All she has left is the electability argument,” a Democratic official said. "It’s all wrapped around: Is there something that makes him ultimately unelectable?”

Her advisers say privately that the nominee will be clear by the end of June. At the same time, they recognize that the nominee probably is clear already.

What has to irk Clintons’ aides is that they felt she might finally have him on the ropes, bruised badly by the Wright fight and wobbly in polls. But the bell rang long ago in the minds of too many voters.

Check out the article...

Colbert

Those of you who watch the Colbert Report, as I do, know that he has "thrown his hat into the ring" of the impending presidential... but only in South Carolina.  Sure, he's mined the whole thing for a ton of jokes, but as well all know, you can't afford not to take Colbert seriously.  As Bush learned, much to his chagrin, Colbert is deadly smart, and will use virtually any opportunity to skewer politicians.

So here we have a real poll, which shows that without doing any campaigning... or even being officially on the ballot, Colbert has some actual support!

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that Colbert is preferred by 13% of voters as an independent candidate challenging Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Rudy Giuliani. The survey was conducted shortly after Colbert’s surprise announcement that he is lusting for the Oval Office.

The result is similar when Fred Thompson is the Republican in the three-way race. With Thompson as the GOP candidate, Colbert earns 12% of the vote.

In a three-way contest, among voters aged 18-29, Colbert does better than the Republican candidate.

Of course all of this is a joke at this point.  However, if you want to read some serious analysis of Colbert's chances in South Carolina, you can read this article by Joshua Green.  He makes a lot of good points, but one thing caught my eye...  If Colbert can win at least one delegate to each of the parties conventions, then he can really have a field day.  I remember his spots on the Daily Show for the '04 election, and he was just amazing.  I can't even imagine how much mischief he could accomplish if he has a delegate to the conventions so they can't keep him out.

So good!

Rove's vision of the voting booth

What would you do with a guy who spent the main part of his career working to disenfranchise legitimate (Democratic) voters?  Well, if you are the Bush administration, you'd put him in charge of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights voting rights section.  While there, he would help transform the section's "historic mission to enforce the nation's civil rights laws without regard to politics, to pursuing an agenda which placed the highest priority on the partisan political goals of the political appointees who supervised the section."  Do you think Alberto Gonzales was alone in wrecking the DOJ, and turning it into a partisan republican machine?  This guy, Hans von Spakovsky (no, I'm not making that name up!), was one of the guys making the Karl Rove nightmare become reality.  As this Slate story explains:

Among his numerous accomplishments at the Voting Section at DoJ, von Spakovsky can take credit for approving the Tom DeLay-sponsored midcensus redistricting in Texas—part of which was later deemed by the Supreme Court to have violated the Voting Rights Act. (To do so, von Spakovsky overrode a 73-page memo written by seven voting-rights experts finding that the DeLay scheme violated the Voting Rights Act by reducing minority voting strength in Texas.) Von Spakovsky similarly pushed for approval of Georgia's restrictive voter-ID law, again over the four-to-one objection of staff lawyers who (in a 51-page memo this time) felt the new law would disenfranchise black voters. State and federal courts later found that statute unconstitutional.

So, given that, what would you do with this guy?  Well, if you were any sane person, you'd prosecute him... but Bush has instead given him the Medal of Freedom nominated him to the Federal Election Commission.  Oh yeah, by the way, he taped a big "Fuck You Democrats!" note on the nomination.  Of course the Democrats control the Senate, and are aware of this joker, so you'd think that they would simply tank his nomination.  Once again, you'd be wrong.  One Democrat on the Senate Rules Committee, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), voted to allow this jackass out of committee.  So now his nomination is going to go to a vote by the full Senate.  Damnit, I'm going to be pretty pissed if this guy gets a six year job on the Federal Election Commission after all he has done to undermine voting rights in this country. 

Footnote:  If you're interested you can read about von Spakovsky's attempts to intimidate Justice Department employees, stifle their appeals, single-handedly disenfranchise thousands of Arizonans and then give false testimony (later modified in written answers) to the committee about it, you can read Dahlia Lithwick's take at Slate and ThinkProgress' rundown of von Spakovsky's past.

A lot of people are frustrated with the fact that although the Democrats have a (slim) majority in Congress, they have been unable to make much headway in winding down the debacle war in Iraq.  I'm frustrated too, but knowing how the Senate works, you can see that in the face of a unified republican opposition, there really isn't much that the Democrats can do.  Normally, you'd think that you need just a majority of votes to get something passed in Congress... but you'd be wrong.  In the Senate, the minority party can Filibuster a law, and thus require it to need 60 votes to pass, rather than 51.  This is a very difficult thing to do when you only have 51 Democratic senators (counting Joe Lieberman - which means you only have 50).  In the past, the Filibuster was only used on extraordinary occasions, when the minority party felt really strongly that a certain bill shouldn't pass.  However, now that the republicans are in the minority, they are using it for virtually every bill.  This is the modern republican party at work.  Kevin Drum has a great post on this which has been widely discussed on the political blogs.

GOP_Filibusters

As you can see, Republicans aren't just obstructing legislation at normal rates. They're obstructing legislation at three times the usual rate. They're absolutely desperate to keep this stuff off the president's desk, where the only choice is to either sign it or else take the blame for a high-profile veto.

As things stand, though, Republicans will largely avoid blame for their tactics. After all, the first story linked above says only that the DC bill "came up short in the Senate" and the second one that the habeas bill "fell short in the Senate." You have to read with a gimlet eye to figure out how the vote actually broke down, and casual readers will come away thinking that the bills failed because of some kind of generic Washington gridlock, not GOP obstructionism.

So, for the record, here are the votes. On the habeas bill, Democrats and Independents voted 50-1 in favor. Republicans voted 42-8 against. On the DC bill, Democrats and Independents voted 49-1 in favor. Republicans voted 41-8 against. Would it really be so hard for reporters to make it clear exactly who's responsible for blocking these bills?

Keep your eyes out for the disingenuous claim from both the republicans and from conservative pundits that the Democrats should put forth some "serious" ideas on Iraq, or should just shut up and support Bush's failed policies.  Kevin Drum succinctly puts this red herring to bed...

Look: A "debate" is fine, but only if there's something to debate. Should we privatize Social Security? Let's debate. Should we debate about how to fix Iraq? We could, but only if there were some plausible solutions to argue about. Unfortunately, there aren't. We don't have enough troops in Iraq to keep order and the troops we do have aren't trained properly anyway. Nobody appears to have any serious desire to change that. Politically, the sectarian split in Iraq is embedded deeply in their history and culture and is mostly beyond our ability to affect, especially after three years of mismanagement. Globally, we have virtually no influence left with either local power brokers like Iran or with our European allies.

Various luminaries in the liberal foreign policy community have been proposing Iraq policies right and left for over three years now. First, that perhaps we should have kept our focus on Afghanistan and stayed out of Iraq altogether. Then, once we were there, liberal thinkers suggested more troops, dialogue with Iran, a multilateral council to accelerate regional investment in Iraq's progress, a variety of counterinsurgency strategies, a variety of partition plans, more serious engagement in Israeli-Palestinian talks (Tony Blair practically begged for this), and on and on. Every single one of these suggestions was ignored.

Would they have made any difference? Who knows. But to blame Democrats now for not being aggressive enough in trying to trisect this angle is like blaming Gerald Ford for losing Vietnam. George Bush fought this war precisely the way he wanted, with precisely the troops he wanted, and with every single penny he asked for. He has kept Don Rumsfeld in charge despite abundant evidence that he doesn't know how to win a war like this. He has mocked liberals and the media at every turn when they suggested we might need a different approach. The result has been a disaster with no evident solution left.

It's one thing to ask for "debate," but it's quite another to ask for a pony that doesn't exist anymore and to blame Democrats when they're unable to produce yet another one after three years of trying. That makes no sense.

Things like this never get in the news because it doesn't fit the meme that Democrats have no political spine... but it isn't true and it is time that it gets reported...

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) today in the Senate:

"In light of the rantings that went on for 30 minutes here, in the chamber, by two colleagues from the other side, I'd like to state for the record that America is not tired of fighting terrorism; America is tired of the wrongheaded and boneheaded leadership of the Republican party that has sent six and a half billion a month to Iraq while the front line was Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. That led this country to attack Saddam Hussein, when we were attacked by Osama bin Laden. Who captured a man who did not attack the country and let loose a man that did.

"Americans are tired of boneheaded Republican leadership that alienates our allies when we need them the most. Americans are most certainly tired of leadership that despite documenting mistake after mistake after mistake, even of their own party admitting mistakes, never admit they do anything wrong. That's the kind of leadership Americans are tired of.

"I'm didn't come to the Senate to have partisan rantings on the floor, but I am most certainly not going to sit here as a Democrat and let the Republican leadership come to the floor and talk about Democrats not making us safe. They're the ones in charge and Osama bin Laden is still at loose."

I'm a pretty politically involved person, and am gearing up for the elections in November.  One of my friends is running for the board of supervisors in San Francisco... and I just found out today that one of my old college friends is running for US Congress in Arizona.  I have not talked to Gabby for at least ten years, but it is nice to see that she is the favored candidate in the Democratic primary tomorrow, and the likely winner of the race in November.  I wish her well - and I'm about to get out my checkbook to donate to her campaign...

There are primaries in nine states and the District of Columbia on Tuesday, but both parties are closely watching the campaign in the Eighth Congressional District here because it is a swing district and one of a handful nationwide that Democrats think they can capture in their bid to reclaim the House. The candidates have spent more than $2.5 million, making it among the most expensive House races in the country.

The front-runner in the Republican primary, according to the most recent poll, is Randy Graf, a former professional golfer and state lawmaker who mounted a strong challenge against Mr. Kolbe in 2004. Mr. Graf, a supporter of the Minuteman Project, a civilian border patrol group, has campaigned on a pledge to ensure that illegal immigrants have no path to citizenship and that the border will be further secured.

But so concerned are national Republicans about Mr. Graf, who once sponsored a bill to let patrons carry guns into bars and restaurants (it did not pass), that they have taken the rare step of spending more than $200,000 on advertising endorsing the more moderate Steve Huffman, also a former state representative.

The move, which other Republican candidates have called unfair, apparently stemmed from a belief that Mr. Graf would lose in a general election to the Democratic front-runner, Gabrielle Giffords, a former state senator.

A recent Arizona Daily Star poll, conducted by Zimmerman and Associates and Marketing Intelligence, showed Ms. Giffords leading her Democratic primary opponents. The poll, released last week, also showed that in a general election matchup, Ms. Giffords would beat Mr. Graf 46 percent to 36 percent, with the rest undecided, and would defeat Mr. Huffman 42 to 39 percent, though with the margin of sampling error it would be a tossup. The poll, which surveyed 800 likely voters from Sept. 1-4, had a margin of sampling error of five percentage points.