Log Cabin Republicans—do you need to know any more about Bible Spice’s perspective on gay and lesbian relationships now? McCain doesn’t support FMA, a fact the LCRs has touted early and often, even though it’s misleading because he is merely taking a federalist position—he supports state amendments, and actually would support FMA if it looked like marriage equality was going to be the law of the land in a SCOTUS rulling.
But Governor Palin leaves no doubt about where she stands in this interview with David Brody, CBN News Senior National Correspondent (CBN has video):
Brody: On Constitutional marriage amendment , are, are you for something like that?
Palin: I am, in my own, state, I have voted along with the vast majority of Alaskans who had the opportunity to vote to amend our Constitution defining marriage as between one man and one woman. I wish on a federal level that that’s where we would go because I don’t support gay marriage. I’m not going to be out there judging individuals, sitting in a seat of judgment telling what they can and can’t do, should and should not do, but I certainly can express my own opinion here and take actions that I believe would be best for traditional marriage and that’s casting my votes and speaking up for traditional marriage that, that instrument that it’s the foundation of our society is that strong family and that’s based on that traditional definition of marriage, so I do support that.
Now how about her purported lifelong gay friend that she mentioned in past interviews—does she really believe that if her friend is in a committed same-sex relationship that there should be no legal recognition at all? It’s nice to know she likes tossing her close friends under the bus like that.
I would love to see this friend come forward to comment on how she feels about Sarah Palin as a close confidante. Of course she may be an LCR for all I know.
Jesse covered some of the ACORN ground, but I had to post on this nonsense. John McCain said this in the last presidential debate:
We need to know the full extent of Sen. Obama’s relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.
Wow. That’s a bold statement. Bold, absurd—and a lie. All the hubbub about Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the nation’s largest grassroots community organization—one that has 1.3 million low-income, minority and young voters across the country register to vote has been a rallying cry by conservatives as proof that Democrats are trying to steal the election.
This nonsensical charge by the Right is really a smokescreen to divert attention from shenanigans that really matter—voter suppression—something Republicans know all about, given what happened in Ohio in 2004 and is going on there now, even as we speak.
You can find out The Truth About ACORN here. If you want to see and hear the full manifestation of the evil and hate unleashed by McCain/Palin over ACORN, head over to Right Wing Watch, which has emails and voicemails that are explicit - and RWW had to edit out personal identifying information. Clearly these people didn’t seek anonymity. Here’s one transcript of a voicemail:
“Hi, I was just calling to let you all know that Barack Obama needs to get hung. He’s a fucking nigger, and he’s a piece of shit. You guys are fraudulent, and you need to go to hell. All the niggers on oak trees. They’re gonna get all hung honeys, they’re gonna get assassinated, they’re gonna get killed.”
Wow. How long have I been talking about the the evil that we would see in this election cycle on this blog? This is one of those times when I hate being right, because it does shake one’s faith in humanity.
Did a small fraction of staffers submit fraudulent registration forms? Yes. Does that constitute a conspiracy of some kind? No. Submitting “Mickey Mouse” or dead people on registration forms does not create new voters who will show up at the polls. What part of that does wingnuttia not understand? Oh, never mind. The whole point is to conflate bogus registration forms with voter fraud.
Unfortunately, it seems that the motivating factor behind these attacks is fear of an expanded electorate that more accurately reflects the citizenry of the United States. We find it disappointing that rather than seeking the support of these new voters and listening to their demands for jobs, affordable housing, health care, living wages, and better schools, conservatives and partisan operatives would rather create an atmosphere of fear, intimidation, and chaos. In so doing they feel they can suppress the vote in the current election and pave the way for new initiatives to shrink and narrow the electorate for future ones.
Of course if you confuse and repeat often enough using Rovian tactics, the hope is to sway voters. Quite frankly, with the economy in the sh*tter, I don’t think anyone who is on the fence are going to give a flip about ACORN, particularly when the hyperbole launched by McCain is outlandish—and the fact that he supported the work of ACORN in the past. More below the fold.
Below the fold, I’m posting slightly truncated versions of a recruitment e-mail for the McCain campaign. They’d like law students to serve as voter challengers (presumably with the help of security officers and veterans, although that may just be a Milwaukee thing), and are throwing out the prospect of hordes of fake voter registrations somehow arising from their filing cabinets and data streams and rampaging down to the local precinct location and politely standing in line until the register their second, third and fourth votes for Dangerous Terrorist Barack Obama.
I’m putting this out here, because it needs to be said: ACORN is simply a cover for Republicans doing far worse things. Always has been, always will be. Even looking at the worst things ACORN is accused of, you simply aren’t looking at a substantial threat of anything worse than causing a registrar to sigh in resignation and stick a little Post-It flag to a sheet of paper.
Republicans tend to point to things like ACORN to justify the far sketchier actions that are the bread and butter (and delicious melted cheese) of their voter suppression activities. Republicans rely on “no match” lists, where voters whose information from, say, their driver’s license doesn’t exactly match their voter registration. I know, I know, it’s almost unheard of that people don’t pay to update their valid-for-three-years driver’s licenses every time they move or fill out a form that asks for their middle initial, but still, some such fools exist and prosper.
The vast majority of voter challenges have nothing to do with someone walking in and attempting to vote as Yosemite Sam - they have to do with people who have twelve-letter-long last names with a transposed letter, students who changed dorm rooms from year to year and forgot to reregister and the odd minority or two who thinks it’s okay to vote. It’s not Joe Namath of 123 Jets Way that comes into the voting booth, it’s Stephen K. Washington who’s on the rolls as Stephen L. Washington or Estelle Moore of 5418 E. Overbay Rd. who’s on the rolls at 5418 Overbey Rt. There is no “integrity” being monitored, only the wholehearted defense of pedantic bureaucratic nitpicking over the foolish presumption that voting is a good thing in a democracy.
It should be utterly chilling that a major party in American politics believes that its primary role on Election Day is restricting the franchise to those who have the means and the heritage to have simple names and stable addresses. Instead, it’s just seen as the necessary counterpart to the liberal insistence that democracy is virtuous because it is open to all rather than restricted to few.
Letter’s below. And I’m going to be doing voter protection with Obama’s campaign on November 4th, in no small part because of this.
The link shows that felons are simply still registered from prior, legal, non-fraudulent registration - not that they registered against state law after they were freed or that anyone submitted false registrations on their behalf. The Perfesser has done the voter fraud myth one better: he’s managed to convert a bureaucratic error in which no fraudulent activity has taken place into an act of fraud. Fraud no longer requires the act of one person or group intended to deceive another, it simply requires a record keeper to not keep up with records. Meaning, of course, that you’re committing fraud when your change of address form isn’t processed by the DMV or when a bank mistakenly places a deposit in your account.
How Glenn Reynolds eats without stabbing himself in the eye with a fork, I do not know. My guess is either he uses those nice soft plastic forks with barnyard animals on the end, or his diet is restricted to finger foods and chewable vitamins.
The latest ad from Protectmarriage.com throws the legal right for same-sex couples to marry in Massachusetts as an example of the disaster that awaits the Golden State unless Prop 8 is passed.
Little Girl: “Mom, guess what I learned in school today?” Mother: “What, sweetie?” Mother: “I learned how a prince married a prince and I can marry a princess.” Professor Richard Peterson, Pepperdine University School of Law: “Think it can’t happen? It’s already happened. When Massachusetts legalized gay marriage, schools began teaching second graders that boys can marry boys. The courts ruled that parents had no legal right to object. Voiceover: “Under California law, public schools instruct kids about marriage. Teaching children about gay marriage will happen here unless we pass Proposition 8. Vote Yes on 8.
The reason that there’s been so much focus on abortion this election season (though often in covert terms, such as wingnuts going to great extents to praise Palin mother and daughter for what they perceive as a choice to give into the patriarchy, though it must be understood that pro-choice people can choose teenage motherhood or to have a child with Down’s), because McCain needs the fundies to win, and the fundies are aware that the next President is almost surely going to appoint the justice who will be the swing vote if The Sole Supreme Court Decision Of All Time is challenged. Sadly, people have become numb to warnings that Roe is fixing to go because it’s taking so long to happen. There’s an irony there—-it’s fashionable to say Roe was badly decided, but in fact, one reason that it’s so hard to overturn is that the reasoning in it is sound and popular, and anyone who wants to overturn it will have to find a way to do so without threatening the traditional respect for precedent shared on the court and without alarming the public by telling them upfront that the right to privacy is now kaput. (They’ll learn that after the fact.) So incrementalism has been the key. Instead of getting ban-happy, anti-choice activists nibble at the sides, creating enough confusion that a clever judge can finally overturn Roe once and for all without actually overturning it. John Roberts is that clever sort of asshole, actually. Without much public fanfare, he pulled a stunt that all but overturned Brown v. the Board of Education (at least as the court has always understood it) by citing Brown as precedent. It was not just evil, but with a dash of hateful irony. That’s how right wingers roll these days, and that explains why South Dakota and Colorado aren’t waiting for a definitive 5-4 anti-Roe court to be appointed to start banning abortion. I suspect that they trust that Roberts will get it done for them.
And after reading Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, I’m inclined to see why they’re jumping the gun. I’m not wholly convinced that Roe has majority support on the court. It’s always assumed that Souter, Stevens, Ginsburg, Kennedy, and Breyer are pro-Roe votes, and that Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, and Alito are anti. But I’m skeptical that Kennedy is really a secure vote. His support for Roe was established because he was part of the majority that refused to overturn Roe when challenged to by the ACLU in 1992 during Casey v. Planned Parenthood, but he’s no stalwart defender of women’s rights. For one thing, Casey opened the door to the incrementalist strategy, by practically daring states to come up with as many silly laws as possible to shut down clinics and frustrate patients so that they couldn’t take enough time off of work (or raise enough money) to get abortions, returning us to something close to the pre-Roe state where easily accessed abortion was a privilege of the well-off, while the working poor have to scramble. Kennedy hates abortion, but he signed onto Casey out of a respect for precedence, and I suspect if someone like John Roberts were to give him an argument that upholds a ban while still maintaining official respect for the right to privacy, Kennedy will be on board.
One of the more bizarre (if expected) attacks on the Obamas this year has been the idea that Michelle Obama is some sort of affirmative action drama queen whose entire life has been spent complaining about…well, everything really. Byron York takes this to an absurd new level.
Michelle Obama, you see, didn’t like her big law job after she graduated from Harvard, because it was monotonous and low-level. This is unlike every other person who’s ever gotten a first job right after graduating from a school because…well, probably because she’s a whiny black lady who wants her pink Caddy and government check.
The great thing about the Obamas and their very distinct difference from previous Democratic candidates is that it makes the sad ways in which conservatives seek to other them all the more transparent. A young, smart, ambitious law school graduate who’s dissatisfied with the unproductive and often mind-numbing grind of being a big law associate isn’t some strange concoction of Michelle Obama’s black rage mixed with her affirmative action-driven social promotion to a position she felt was beneath her victim-pimp Nubian brainwashing - it’s what 80% of law school graduates (anecdotally speaking) who take big law jobs go through. It’s a phenomenon, even!
Of course, the last thing I want to do is impute any sort of racial motive to branding someone black a grievance-driven whiner for doing something that thousands of white people do every year. That would be irresponsible and presumptive…just like Byron York’s racist ass.
After Sarah Palin declared the existence a Constitutional right to privacy, conservatives were left with one of two options: do you stick with the consistent (if wrong) judicial philosophy of Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork (among others) that determines a right to privacy as so much manufactured nonsense, or do you completely reverse course on over three decades of conservative talking points to make a reflexively counterproductive defense of Palin’s obviously uninformed comment?
Those excerpts from Couric’s interviews give me more concerns about Biden than Palin. He seems to be under the impression that there’s a “liberty clause” in the Fourteenth Amendment (he has talked about it in Supreme Court confirmation hearings too). He misdescribes what Roe held. He seems to believe that Roe has been good for social peace and that this alleged fact justifies it as constitutional law.
Palin, meanwhile, is asked a somewhat oddly phrased question by Couric, and says, reasonably enough, that the Constitution protects a right to privacy. Now it is certainly and obviously true that the Constitution protects privacy: What else do the Third and Fourth Amendments protect, for example? There is nothing incompatible with either a pro-life point of view or originalism with saying that the Constitution protects privacy.
For example, in the Texas sodomy case, Thomas wrote, “...I ‘can find neither in the Bill of Rights nor any other part of the Constitution a general right of privacy,’...”
JIM LEHRER: What did Justice Scalia say about the right to privacy?
JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Well, Justice Scalia said that this was certainly nowhere in the Constitution, and that this [sodomy] law certainly was constitutional in his view.
Bork’s major point is that Douglas did not derive the right to privacy from some pre-existing right or from natural law, but merely created a new right to privacy with no foundation in the Constitution or Bill of Rights. Bork is correct that the word “privacy” never appears in those documents. Douglas had argued, however, that the right to privacy could be seen to be based on guarantees from the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments. Taken together, the protections afforded by these Amendments showed that a basic zone of privacy was protected for citizens, and that it covered their ability to make personal decisions about their home and family life. In contrast, Bork argues i) that none of the Amendments cited covered the case before the Court, ii) that the Supreme Court never articulated or clarified what the right to privacy was or how far it extended, and he charges iii) that the privacy right merely protected what a majority of justices personally wanted it to cover. In sum, he accuses Douglas and the Court majority of inventing a new right, and thus overstepping their bounds as judges by making new law, not interpreting the law. Bork’s views continue to be defended by others, in politics and in the popular press.
Ponnoru gets bonus irony points for using the rationale behind Griswold v. Connecticut to make a conservative case for…well, anything, really. Why have Republicans been nominating so many anti-conservative justices?
Here it is…what you’ve been waiting for—yet another Sarah Palin self-immolation, via Katie Couric. The video where McCain’s veep nom can’t name any Supreme Court cases.
COURIC: What other Supreme Court decisions [other than Roe v. Wade] do you disagree with?
PALIN: Well, let’s see. There’s—of course—in the great history of America rulings there have been rulings, that’s never going to be absolute consensus by every American. And there are—those issues, again, like Roe v Wade where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So you know—going through the history of America, there would be others but…
COURIC: Can you think of any?
PALIN: Well, I could think of—of any again, that could be best dealt with on a more local level. Maybe I would take issue with. But you know, as mayor, and then as governor and even as a Vice President, if I’m so privileged to serve, wouldn’t be in a position of changing those things but in supporting the law of the land as it reads today.
***
Compare that lunacy to Joe Biden’s response to a similar Couric question:
COURIC: Are there Supreme Court decisions you disagree with?
BIDEN: You know, I’m the guy who wrote the violence against women act and I said that every woman in America, if they are beaten and abused by a man, should be able to take that person to court, and meaning you should be able to go to federal court and sue in federal court the man who abused you if you can prove that abuse. But they said no, that a woman—there is no federal jurisdiction. And I held—they acknowledged I held about 1,000 hours of hearings proving that, that there’s an effect on interstate commerce. Women who are abused and beaten are women who are not able to be in the workforce. And the Supreme Court said, well there is an impact on commerce, but this is federalizing a private crime, and we’re not going to allow that. I think the Supreme Court is wrong about that decision.
I feel bad about the post I wrote earlier today, in that I might have been unduly harsh, though I’m still thinking that everything I said was right. It got me to thinking about a favorite word bandied about, by myself as much as by anyone else, on the anti-oppression blogosphere, which is “privilege”. It’s a useful concept, simple really. Privilege is something you have that other people don’t. Inequality is all about privileges, who has them and who doesn’t.
But my discomfort comes from the fact that there’s a lot of different privileges, and they differ from each other in important ways, and that gets lost when we use the same word to describe them all. I thought about it really hard and decided there’s three categories of privilege that I perceive:
1) Advantages that one person has over another that they don’t deserve and will lose in a just society.
2) Basic human rights that everyone deserves, but only some people have, making those both a right and a privilege.
3) Advantages that can’t be distributed fairly in a practical sense, and can’t be taken from the person who holds them without violating human rights.
Granted, I didn’t spend much time pre-Bush paying attention to the intersection of subpoena activity and our government, but it strikes me as a particularly novel development that Republicans can simply declare any investigation a partisan witchhunt and then say fuck the law.
I wrote about the DOI scandals yesterday—-the graft, the cocaine, the sex that I hoped would make it hook into the public consciousness—-but was not aware of something in the report that certainly ranks above mere screwing around and doing drugs in terms of awful. Lindsay, intrepid digger-up-of-shit that she is, totally found it. There wasn’t just “promiscuity” going on—-there was sexual assault. From the Inspector General’s report, as quoted by Lindsay:
We interviewed yet another [Royalty In Kind program] employee who stated that in approximately 2005, Smith “insisted” that she ride in his car from one business establishment to another, and she agreed.
This employee stated that Smith “took the long way” between the two businesses, and during the drive he asked to go to her nearby home, but she refused. “He wanted to have sex; I said no,” she recalled. Smith then asked if she would have oral sex with him, but she told him she did not want to. She said that Smith “basically forced [her] head into his lap,” and she performed oral sex on him as he drove the car slowly. She said Smith was “real persistent” but not violent, and she did not feel as though she had been sexually assaulted by Smith. She stated that it was difficult for her to have sex with Smith because he supervised her and RIK program, but she “felt like [she] could get fired,” so she did what Smith wanted. She said she was “scared” that if she didn’t do what Smith wanted her to do, it could affect her employment. She said this was the only time she ever had sex with Smith.
So I worked up a post in my head about the way the Bristol Palin story exposes the tension between the real feminist argument for reproductive rights, and the compromise argument, and I had my misgivings because I feared the story is getting overplayed. And Lord Saletan’s nonsense grossed me out. But still, I think it’s interesting, so if you’ll indulge me.
I find it interesting how the McCain/Palin campaign tried to shut down the P.R. disaster that is Bristol Palin’s pregnancy by calling for privacy, which was, just short of their invocation of “choice”, about hiding behind feminist values to assault feminism itself, since they wish you and your family have neither privacy nor choice when it comes to management of your life. But what I find especially interesting is that “privacy” was not actually a feminist value until it had to be in order to get reproductive rights established. Which isn’t to say that I’m against respecting people’s privacy (and really, this is the last mention of the Palin thing in this post*), but that rooting reproductive rights in the value of privacy instead of autonomy and self-determination has actually created some massive problems for us.
Privacy is a double-edged sword. Outside of its use by feminists to get what we want (reproductive rights) without scaring people by arguing for women’s equality, privacy is generally a patriarchal value. It shields rapists and wife-beaters. The sense that women are the private property of men is still more ingrained in our society than the idea that uteruses are the private property of women. To illustrate, here’s an interesting story from Jessica:
I realize that I’m treading on incredibly shaky ground by addressing a legal argument two weeks before I start law school, and risk ruining the entirety of my career by falling flat on my face complaining about a National Review columnist. But hey, I gotta call stupid where I see it.
Andrew McCarthy’s druthers are up about the recent California Supreme Court decision (North Coast Women’s Care v. Benitez) that disallowed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation as it relates to health care. The problem, you see, is that the obvious intent of anti-discrimination laws is to stop people who want to discriminate from discriminating. McCarthy discusses a doctrine called “strict scrutiny” - the simplest explanation of which is that if a law is challenged based on the perception of discrimination, the state must prove that the law furthers a compelling state interest and that it’s the least restrictive alternative for advancing that interest. Ironically enough, its focus is doing no (or the least) amount of harm in order to protect the greater body of rights. McCarthy:
In Monday’s ruling, California’s supreme court purported to follow this test. The state’s so-called “Unruh Civil Rights Act” subjects to civil liability any person who discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation. Seeing nothing overtly hostile to religion in the text, the judges found the Act to be a neutral law of general application. Thus, they reasoned that physicians could not rely on religious convictions to deny in vitro fertilization to a same-sex couple. Case closed.
Not so fast. The Court got it wrong on at least two counts.
No criminal prosecutions are planned for former Justice Department officials accused of allowing politics to influence the hiring of prosecutors, immigration judges and other career government lawyers, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Tuesday.
Okay, so we expected that. The Bush administration has made it clear that they believe that they’re above the law, and probably above the laws of nature as well. But Mukasey decided it wasn’t enough to be a ass-licking, back-scratching, criminal-coddling agent of tyranny. Oh no. He had to be an asshole on top of that.
Log Cabin Republicans—do you need to know any more about Bible Spice’s perspective on gay and lesbian relationships now? McCain doesn’t support FMA, a fact the LCRs has touted early and often, even though it’s misleading because he is merely taking a federalist position—he supports state amendments, and actually would support FMA if it looked like marriage equality was going to be the law of the land in a SCOTUS rulling.
Below the fold, I’m posting slightly truncated versions of a recruitment e-mail for the McCain campaign. They’d like law students to serve as voter challengers (presumably with the help of security officers and veterans, although that may just be a 
I swear to God, whoever taught Glenn Reynolds words beyond “heh” and “indeed” 
The reason that there’s been so much focus on abortion this election season (though often in covert terms, such as wingnuts going to great extents to praise Palin mother and daughter for what they perceive as a choice to give into the patriarchy, though it must be understood that pro-choice people can choose teenage motherhood or to have a child with Down’s), because McCain needs the fundies to win, and the fundies are aware that the next President is almost surely going to appoint the justice who will be the swing vote if 
One of the more bizarre (if expected) attacks on the Obamas this year has been the idea that Michelle Obama is some sort of affirmative action drama queen whose entire life has been spent complaining about…
After Sarah Palin 
I feel bad about 
So I worked up a post in my head about the way the Bristol Palin story exposes the tension between the real feminist argument for reproductive rights, and the compromise argument, and I had my misgivings because I feared the story is getting overplayed. 
I realize that I’m treading on incredibly shaky ground by addressing a legal argument two weeks before I start law school, and risk ruining the entirety of my career by falling flat on my face complaining about a National Review columnist. But hey, I gotta call stupid where I see it.