39 posts tagged “republicans”

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.

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!

Crucial reporting by Glen Greenwald...

As the police attacks on protesters in Minnesota continue -- see this video of the police swarming a bus transporting members of Earth Justice, seizing the bus and leaving the group members stranded on the side of the highway -- it appears increasingly clear that it is the Federal Government that is directing this intimidation campaign. Minnesota Public Radio reported yesterday that "the searches were led by the Ramsey County Sheriff's office. Deputies coordinated searches with the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments and the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

Today's Star Tribune added that the raids were specifically "aided by informants planted in protest groups." Back in May, Marcy Wheeler presciently noted that the Minneapolis Joint Terrorist Task Force -- an inter-agency group of federal, state and local law enforcement led by the FBI -- was actively recruiting Minneapolis residents to serve as plants, to infiltrate "vegan groups" and other left-wing activist groups and report back to the Task Force about what they were doing. There seems to be little doubt that it was this domestic spying by the Federal Government that led to the excessive and truly despicable home assaults by the police yesterday.

So here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protesters who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do. And as extraordinary as that conduct is, more extraordinary is the fact that they have received virtually no attention from the national media and little outcry from anyone. And it's not difficult to see why. As the recent "overhaul" of the 30-year-old FISA law illustrated -- preceded by the endless expansion of surveillance state powers, justified first by the War on Drugs and then the War on Terror -- we've essentially decided that we want our Government to spy on us without limits. There is literally no police power that the state can exercise that will cause much protest from the political and media class and, therefore, from the citizenry.

Beyond that, there is a widespread sense that the targets of these raids deserve what they get, even if nothing they've done is remotely illegal. We love to proclaim how much we cherish our "freedoms" in the abstract, but we despise those who actually exercise them. The Constitution, right in the very First Amendment, protects free speech and free assembly precisely because those liberties are central to a healthy republic -- but we've decided that anyone who would actually express truly dissident views or do anything other than sit meekly and quietly in their homes are dirty trouble-makers up to no good, and it's therefore probably for the best if our Government keeps them in check, spies on them, even gets a little rough with them.

After all, if you don't want the FBI spying on you, or the Police surrounding and then invading your home with rifles and seizing your computers, there's a very simple solution: don't protest the Government. Just sit quietly in your house and mind your own business. That way, the Government will have no reason to monitor what you say and feel the need to intimidate you by invading your home. Anyone who decides to protest -- especially with something as unruly and disrespectful as an unauthorized street march -- gets what they deserve.

Isn't it that mentality which very clearly is the cause of virtually everyone turning away as these police raids escalate against citizens -- including lawyers, journalists and activists -- who have broken no laws and whose only crime is that they intend vocally to protest what the Government is doing? Add to that the fact that many good establishment liberals are embarrassed by leftist protesters of this sort and wish that they would remain invisible, and there arises a widespread consensus that these Government attacks are perfectly tolerable if not desirable.

During the Olympics just weeks ago, there was endless hand-wringing over the efforts by the Chinese Government to squelch dissent and incarcerate protesters. On August 21, The Washington Post fretted:

Six Americans detained by police this week could be held for 10 days, according to Chinese authorities, who appear to be intensifying their efforts to shut down any public demonstrations during the final days of the Olympic Games. . . .

Chinese Olympic officials announced last month that Beijing would set up zones where people could protest during the Games, as long as they had received permission. None of the 77 applications submitted was approved, however, and several other would-be protesters were stopped from even applying.

On August 2, The Post gravely warned:

Behind the gray walls and barbed wire of the prison here, eight Chinese farmers with a grievance against the government have been consigned to Olympic limbo.

Their indefinite detainment, relatives and neighbors said, is the price they are paying for stirring up trouble as China prepares to host the Beijing Games. Trouble, the Communist Party has made clear, will not be permitted.

Would The Washington Post ever use such dark and accusatory tones to describe what the U.S. Government does? Of course it wouldn't. Yet how is our own Government's behavior in Minnesota any different than what the Chinese did to its protesters during the Olympics (other than the fact that we actually have a Constitution that prohibits such behavior)? And where are all the self-righteous Freedom Crusaders in our nation's establishment organs who were so flamboyantly criticizing the actions of a Government on the other side of the globe as our own Government engages in the same tyrannical, protest-squelching conduct with exactly the same motives?

Just review what happened yesterday and today. Homes of college-aid protesters were raided by rifle-wielding police forces. Journalists were forcibly detained at gun point. Lawyers on the scene to represent the detainees were handcuffed. Computers, laptops, journals, diaries, and political pamphlets were seized from people's homes. And all of this occurred against U.S. citizens, without a single act of violence having taken place, and nothing more serious than traffic blockage even alleged by authorities to have been planned.

A man whose sister was one of those arrested at one of the raided houses in Minneapolis yesterday emailed me a photograph of her and her friend who was also arrested -- Monica Bicking (r.) and Eryn Trimme -- and he wrote this:

They are still in custody. I've been told that the police have 36 hours to charge her, and that 36 hours starts after the labor day holiday, so they only have to charge her sometime Wednesday. It seems unlikely that they'd do anything to expedite her or Eryn's release.

They were then planning to actually board up her house for unspecified "code violations", but apparently her neighbors were very vocal, and the police ended up agreeing not to do anything so long as the front door was fixed by 6pm (the front door they'd busted in).

Heres is the extraordinary blog item I linked to yesterday from Eileen Clancy, one of the founders of I-Witness Video -- a NYC-based video collective which is in St. Paul to document the policing of the protests around this week's Republican National Convention, just as they did at the 2004 GOP Convention in New York. Clancy wrote this as a plea for help, as the Police surrounded her house and (before they had a search warrant) told everyone inside that they'd be arrested if they exited the home:

This is Eileen Clancy . . . The house where I-Witness Video is staying in St. Paul has been surrounded by police. We have locked all the doors. We have been told that if we leave we will be detained. One of our people who was caught outside is being detained in handcuffs in front of the house. The police say that they are waiting to get a search warrant. More than a dozen police are wielding firearms, including one St. Paul officer with a long gun, which someone told me is an M-16.

We are suffering a preemptive video arrest. For those that don't know, I-Witness Video was remarkably successful in exposing police misconduct and outright perjury by police during the 2004 RNC. Out of 1800 arrests, at least 400 were overturned based solely on video evidence which contradicted sworn statements which were fabricated by police officers. It seems that the house arrest we are now under and the possible threat of the seizure of our computers and video cameras is a result of the 2004 success.

We are asking the public to contact the office of St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman at 651-266-8510 to stop this house arrest, this gross intimidation by police officers, and the detention of media activists and reporters.

That sounds like what it was: a cry for help from a hostage. Hours later, the Police finally obtained a search warrant -- for the wrong house, one adjacent to the house where they were being detained -- and nonetheless broke in, pointing guns, forced them to lay on the floor and handcuffed everyone inside (and handcuffed a National Lawyers Guild attorney outside). They searched the house, arrested nobody, and then left. Any rational person planning to protest the GOP Convention would, in light of this Government spying and these police raids, think twice -- at least -- about whether to do so. That is the point of the raids -- to announce to citizens that they best stay in their homes and be good, quiet, meek, compliant people unless they want their homes to be invaded, their property seized, and have rifles pointed at them, too. The fact that this behavior is producing so little outcry only ensures, for obvious reasons, that it will continue in the future. We love our Surveillance State for keeping us safe and maintaining nice, quiet order.

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."

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!

There has been quite a bit of discussion in the blogs about the potential disaster that would befall the country should Giuliani win the republican presidential nomination, and then the presidency.  For the rundown, you can get the gist of it by reading some of the posts at Talking Points Memo.  However, if you don't want the short version, you can read this post by Kevin Drum, and then the linked article...

What would Rudy Giuliani be like as president? IRachel Morris looks for the answer by digging around in the nooks and crannies of his two terms as mayor of New York City. Here's an excerpt:

In 1996, Doug Criscitello, a former federal budget analyst, started work as the first director of the Independent Budget Office. Criscitello expected to put his auditors to work immediately, but then he received a surprising communication from the mayor's office. It was a memorandum informing him that all the IBO's requests for data had to be referred to City Hall — despite plain language in the city charter stating that the IBO could get information directly from municipal agencies. Puzzled, Criscitello contacted Giuliani's lawyers, who reaffirmed the message. "They weren't nasty about it. They were very matter-of-fact," said Criscitello. " 'Here's how we've decided to interpret the charter, and if you disagree there's a legal process you can go through and we can get a judge to rule on this.'" Eventually, the IBO sued the mayor's office for the data, and in 1998 a state judge ruled that City Hall had violated the city charter and ordered it to start cooperating. Meanwhile, Giuliani had bought two years of time.

Criscitello had run into what was becoming a signature feature of Giuliani's governing style. Chafing against the limits of his authority, Giuliani was taking an increasingly instrumentalist view of the law: it was only as good as how well it was enforced, and should be overstepped when doing so served his ends. His administration tussled in court not only with the IBO but also with numerous interest groups, the state comptroller, the public advocate, and the city council. "All of those were effectively cases that said, he's gone beyond the restraints on executive power," said Eric Lane, director of the 1989 charter commission and a law professor at Hofstra University. By 1999, the city council was forced to allocate money specifically for the purpose of suing City Hall, which had 685 lawyers on its payroll and had increased its legal budget by 41 percent since Giuliani took office.

....New York State's comptroller, H. Carl McCall, had a similar experience to Criscitello's when he tried to undertake routine audits of how well the city had provided services in areas ranging from restaurant inspections to policing. First, City Hall refused to provide the information. Then, in 1997, Giuliani booted McCall's auditors out of city agencies. McCall issued seventeen subpoenas in one month alone, all of which the mayor's office ignored. After two years, the state's highest court ordered his administration to turn over the information. By that time, however, Giuliani had already succeeded in the effort that mattered most to him: significantly delaying the comptroller's efforts. Not until 2000, for instance, would McCall be able to produce an audit of crime statistics, and when it finally appeared, the auditors noted that they were still unsure whether they had received all of the relevant material. As a "matter of policy," they wrote, City Hall had decided not to provide the customary document confirming that the data was accurate and complete.

Choosing the best presidential candidate among the 2008 contenders is a tough job. Picking the worst is easy. Rudy Giuliani is the guy you'd get if you put George Bush and Dick Cheney into a wine press and squeezed out their pure combined essence: unbounded arrogance and self-righteousness, a chip on his shoulder the size of a redwood, a studied contempt for anybody's opinion but his own, a vindictive streak a mile wide, and a devotion to secrecy and executive power unmatched in presidential history. He is a disaster waiting to happen.

 

Last night's Family Guy "Star Wars-tacular" was pretty awesome.  I'd have to say it was probably more funny than the Robot Chicken Star Wars spoof from earlier in the summer.  Given that there is some overlap between the two shows, and that both of them have done Start Wars jokes in the past, it is pretty amazing that they can still come up with fresh jokes.

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.

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?

Hah, I just read this article by Matt Tiabbi for Rolling Stone about the republican presidential candidates... it is worth a read.  He pretty much nails the pathetic group, and explains why it seems more and more likely that '08 will be a Democratic blow-out of an election.

Quietly and miserably, like an anxious mother tiptoeing away from an autistic child who has fallen asleep with his helmet on, the Republican Party continues its hopeless search for a viable nominee while backpedaling from its own disaster in Iraq. The candidates, all of them -- I exclude here Congressman Ron Paul, who is an uninvited guest to this ball -- are fourth-rate buffoons, not one of them qualified to hold down the last ten minutes of a weekday open-mike night in a Skokie comedy club. They are divided into two categories: those who try to avoid talking about Iraq by saying nothing at all, and those who try to avoid talking about Iraq by talking loudly about something else.

In the face of the awesome political catastrophe that has befallen the Republican Party in the form of George W. Bush, the response of its new leaders has not been to re-examine their perverted values, their vicious tactics or even their position on Bush's singularly idiotic and supremely characteristic policy mistake, the Iraq War. Instead, the party is closing its eyes and trying, Dorothy-like, to wish its way back to Kansas, back to the good old days of mean-spirited, blame-the-darkies politics of Newt Gingrich, a time when electoral blowouts could be won by offering frightened Americans a chance to pull a lever against gays, atheists and the collective rest of onrushing modern reality.

Last night, in the republican debate, Duncan Hunter argued passionately against closing the prison at Guantanamo, and said the prisoners there in fact have great living conditions. "They have better health care than most Americans," he said.

Wow.