Did not get around to this article by George Bush’s Solicitor General Ted Olson yesterday.  See link.  Olson stunned many conservatives last year by agreeing to appear in federal court to argue that California’s Proposition 8 which overturned California’s judicially declared constitutional right should be held unconstitutional.

On a personal note my views on the subject have evolved from the camp of legalize but don’t call it marriage to supporting full legalization.  The primary motive for my shift is that “civil unions” and other non-marriage alternatives may not carry the same protections in some states or across state lines plus a realization that my original position had very little logical support.  Like Olson, I simply do not buy that legalizing gay marriage and encouraging couples to enter into a committed relationship will somehow weaken heterosexual marriage.  No fault divorce and a 50% divorce rate would seem to be the greater threats to the institution of marriage.

Sexual orientation is not a protected category under the 14th amendment and as such does not get special protections.  So long as these bans serve a rational purpose (a lower standard of review than strict scrutiny applied to the protected categories) they are constitutional.  If you subscribe to Scalia’s “Original Meanings” school of interpretation to the constitution (for which I personally do not find much justification in history) then the historical understanding of marriage as a heterosexual institution will win the day. The question is whether on a constitutional basis, the legalization of homosexuality, allowing homosexuals to adopt and create family units and the odd result in California where as Olson notes 18,000 homosexual couples are legally married but cannot remarry will be sufficient to win the day.

As a matter of political strategy, I am not sure this is the wisest course to pursue.  I understand why gay couples feel that they cannot wait any longer, but a court decision that abruptly terminates the political debate (particularly when the side for legalizing gay marriage has lost every public referendum held on the subject) will create resentment and backlash.  It will also add to the populist outrage against “unaccountable” courts that the conservative right has been feeding off since Brown vs. Board of Education and even more so after Roe vs. Wade.

On an institutional level it does have the feel of judicial legislation in the face of public opinion which can be a dangerous road for courts to follow.  As a practical matter, time is on the side of those favoring legalization.  Much of the opposition to the idea comes, not surprisingly, from older Americans.  Also, as the few states that have legalized gay marriage via the legislatures show that legalization is not the harbinger of Armageddon public opposition to the idea will diminish.  But then, it is easy for me to counsel patience on a subject that does not impact me directly.

As this battle winds on, the next step in the war about marriage is beginning.  If the courts can legalize homosexuality, the arguments for criminalizing polygamy which is recognized by many world religions (not to mention was practiced by many of the prophets and kings of the Old Testament and was rationalized by Martin Luther for political reasons in the case of Philip I the Magnanimous, Landgrave of Hesse) is even weaker.  As Jonathan Turley noted in this article a few years ago, the rationale and the language used by the Supreme Court in its 1878 decision supporting the ban would not hold water today.  A new front in the culture wars is about to begin.

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The revelation of Senator Harry Reid’s use of the “n” word while describing Barack Obama’s strengths as a candidate has set off the typical Washington fire storm.  While President Obama has accepted his apology and the Democratic caucus has rallied around Senator Reid the Republicans are crying foul.  They point to the double standard on race that forced them to jettison Trent Lott of Mississippi a few years back (though a lot of the pushing came from the White House in that one).  As others have pointed out,  the situations are not analogous.  Se here, here and here for a detailed explanation on the subject.

But the Republicans are right in that there is a double standard.  It seems unfair but they can look in the mirror for why Republicans (particularly southern Republicans) get so little leeway on race.

As the heirs to the Whigs, the Republican Party was born in its opposition to slavery.  After the civil war the Party of Lincoln could count on the support of the freed slaves.  However, things started to changed under FDR.  The New Deal created a blue collar coalition that included black voters.  By 1956 the Republican share of the black vote was 40% and has been heading down ever since.  However, the addition of Black voters to the Democratic coalition and the resulting push for civil rights fractured the Democratic Party

Southern Democrats who had reestablished control over the region after reconstruction and disenfranchised large portions of the African American population bristled when Northern liberals started preaching civil rights.  The breaking point came during the 1948 Democratic convention when Minneapolis mayor Hubert Humphrey urged the Democratic Party to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”  Outraged Southern Democrats walked out and nominated Strom Thurmond as the presidential nominee of the States’ Rights Party (aka Dixiecrats).  Things got worse for them with the election of John F. Kennedy.  But the unkindest cut of all came when one of their own, former Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson rammed through the Civil Rights Act.  According to legend when Johnson signed the Act into law he remarked, “We have lost the South for a generation.”  He was right because the Republicans were waiting in the wings.

Richard Nixon made some clumsy attempts to court black voters in 1960.  After that Republican presidential tickets actively started courting the Southern white vote.  Barry Goldwater stumped against the Civil Rights Act in 1964, Richard Nixon deployed the Southern Strategy, or Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign kicked off in Philadelphia, Miss., site of the ”Mississippi Burning” murders with the message of “states rights” (though as noted in the link some have disputed whether Reagan’s appeal was targeted at Southern whites).  It worked.  By the 1990s the South had turned Republican.  On the flip side, by then the Republican share of the black vote had dropped to the low teens.  By 1992, the Party of Lincoln was the Party of Pat Buchanan and Jesse Helms.

Next the Republican Party turned its attention to destroying its share of the Hispanic vote.  Pete Wilson eagerly embraced Proposition 187 to secure reelection in the 1994 California gubernatorial election.  He won  the battle but the Republican Party lost the war and the Hispanic vote in California.  The home state of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan with its 54 electoral votes is now solidly Democratic.  Even though George W. Bush tried to win  (and in his own elections won) back the Hispanic vote, the racially tinged rhetoric unleashed by the opponents of immigration reform locked up the Hispanic vote for Barack Obama.  Had John McCain not been on the ticket, the Republicans would have lost Arizona in the 2008 Presidential Elections.

This is the current breakdown of minorities in the Republican Congressional caucus:

• African Americans  - zero
• Hispanics – 3 (three Cuban-Americans from South Florida, and even that once loyal Republican community is trending Democratic)
• Asian Americans – 1 (Joseph Cao elected by fluke last year and who will almost certainly lose next year)

For a party that actively courts the Jewish vote, it has only one Jewish member in Congress (Eric Cantor).   Read the rest of this entry »

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Noticed a link to this animated film by Mark Fiore on Juan Cole’s site.  Cole also links to a report by Drudge noting a claim by Fiore that this video spawned death threats.  The video seems to hit some of the hyperbolic rhetoric (See previous blog) spot on.  Enjoy….

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See previous post regarding the coin here.  The auction where that coin was listed closed last week and the coin with an estimate of $75,000 sold for $140,000 (presumably including auctioneers fees).  A rich price for a truly amazing historical coin.

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From Northern Ireland comes a scandal right out of the pages of the “The Graduate,” right down to the lyrics.

And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson
Jesus loves you more than you will know, wo wo wo
Stand up tall, Mrs. Robinson
God in Heaven smiles on those who pray, hey hey hey
Hey hey hey

Iris Robinson, the 60 year old wife of the First Minister of Northern Ireland and a member of Parliament in her own right evidently engaged in an affair with a 19 year old.  You can read the details on the affair here and I do not intend to dwell on the salacious details.  The scandal threatens to bring down Northern Ireland’s government and has split the Robinson’s church.

I bring this up as an example of a politician from across the pond in the hypocritical moralizing (and more strident) tone of John Ensign, Mark Sanford, Chip Pickering, John Edwards, Henry Hyde, Dan Burton, Newt Gingrich etc.  A politician who cloaks himself or herself with the garb of morality and cannot resist from sermonizing others for their human frailty, but inevitably is revealed to be a fraud.  Robinson who termed herself a born again Christian was notorious for her screeds against homosexuals and Catholics.

Obviously every person is entitled to their religious faith.  However, when politicians grandstand on issues of faith I cannot help but recall the paraphrased (the original quote is in Hamlet Act III, Sc. II) Shakespeare quote “Methinks thou dost protest too loudly.”  As the list of fallen hypocrites grows longer (and global) the cynic in me feels a sense of grim satisfaction.

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On December 32, 2009 a Malaysian court overturned a government ban of usage of the word Allah to denote the Christian god.  Since then hell has broken loose with Churches in the moderate Muslim majority country being firebombed and vandalized.  Accusations have been made that the ruling party whose hold on power is weakening is using the issue to consolidate support among the majority Malay (and Muslim) community.  If so that would be a tragedy.  Before the Saudis found oil and exported their blinkered view of Islam globally, Malaysia (and neighboring Indonesia) were shining examples of how Islam can peacefully coexist with other religions.  Now that is being put at risk by a rather silly dispute on terminology.

Islam acknowledges that God sent prophets to other peoples before the arrival of Muhammad.  This list specifically includes Jesus and Christians are deemed “people of the book” to whom god made a divine revelation and provided a book of prayer.  It naturally follows in Islamic theology that the God of the Christians (setting aside the concept the trinity and the divinity of Jesus which Muslims do not accept and is not at issue here) is the same divine entity.  Indeed under the monotheism inherent in Islam a different interpretation cannot hold.  Yet for some reason Malaysia banned Christians from using the word Allah to denote God in the Malay tongue.  Evidently the alternative words available to be used in native dialects did not measure up to a representation of the divine and Christians asked that the ban be rescinded.  Now fanatics with a limited grasp on their own theology have resorted to violence.

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Sheikh Issa al-Nahyan brother of the Emir of Abu Dhabi and the President of the UAE had been accused of torturing a business associate.  The smoking gun was a video actually showing the Sheikh torturing the Afghan immigrant while two men (one in the garb of security services) watched.  After initially dismissing the charges the international embarrassment forced Abu Dhabi to arrest the sheikh.  But so much for the progress of the rule of law, since the court has now accepted the defense that the poor Sheikh was drugged by the two associates (*cough* scapegoats) and let Sheikh Issa off.  Needless to say the cynic in me has been awakened.

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This emerging battle should be fun to watch.  Rupert Murdoch’s son in law Matthew Freud launched an on the record  broadside against Roger Ailes and Fox News for the “horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.”  See link.  As the article notes, this follows reports (which were denied) over the summer that Murdoch Sr. was himself sometimes embarrassed by the content of Fox News.

Similar questions regarding the journalistic standards of Fox News have been raised by many commentators, the Obama administration and this blog.  See here, here and here.  But the ugly reality is that Mammon is king.  The market wants the tabloid-like opinion driven “news” peddled by Fox which financially is comfortably beating all its other rivals.  Mr. Alies is safe on his perch as the propaganda arm for anti-Democratic Party and anti-Obama political forces for the foreseeable future.  See another opinion on the matter here.

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The New York magazine has a long excerpt from John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s book Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime on the inner workings of John Edwards second attempt to run for president.  See link.

Nobody connected with the campaign comes out looking good.  John Edwards comes off as a narcissistic ego maniac (the ego-monster in the title of the article).  The sainted Elizabeth Edwards comes off as nasty, delusional and unbalanced.  Others have excoriated the staff of the Edwards for not getting it through to the candidate, on how the Rielle Hunter affair would be an albatross that would destroy an Edwards led ticket in the fall.  While the staff presents its side of the story in the article with generous amounts of back biting against the Edwardses, they still do not account for this signal failing.

John Edwards’ political career was truly meteoric.  Within a span of 10 years he blazed to the Vice Presidential nomination and burnt out into well deserved political oblivion.   The emergence of Barack Obama cut off his political positioning as the anti-Hillary candidate.  The Hunter affair was the coup de grace.

On a personal note, I was never a supporter.  Edwards talked a good populist game (which does not endear a candidate to me to begin with) but it was hard not to question the judgment of a candidate who spent a mere 6 years in public office and then apologized for having voted the wrong way (as far as the Democratic base was concerned) on almost every major issue put to vote in his one-term Senate career (bankruptcy reform, the Patriot Act, the Iraq war, assorted free trade agreements, banking reform etc).  Freed of the requirements of running for office in North Carolina he seemed to slither into the populist cloak too easily.

The Democrats lucked out in not having a candidate who would have scuppered a sure thing in the Presidential election.  Assuming he still felt the need to make such an irresponsible Vice Presidential choice, the country also experienced a fortuitous escape from a Vice President Sarah Palin.

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John McCain’s campaign manager comes out swinging on Sarah Palin’s issues with the truth.  This Sunday’s 60 Minutes could be entertaining.  Also read about previously disclosed emails regarding the Alaska Independence Party.  Alaska blog Mudflats has a great read of just how Palin could make stuff up with a straight face.  See link.

For the last 15 years or so the mainstream media has generally been awful in calling out politicians on their bullshit, acting as stenographers reporting stuff verbatim.  Fox News (when they are not making stuff up) is an extreme example of this when it comes to the Republican Party.

With the media not doing their job emboldened politicians up the ante. This was evident the last couple of weeks when Republicans (including Mr. 9/11 himself) started peddling the fiction that no domestic terror attacks occurred George Bush.  At least this time the media did step up.  See link.

Andrew Sullivan has compiled a fairly thorough list of Palin’s odd and often easily disprovable lies since she hit the national stage.  It is hard not to lose respect for John McCain for trying to position a truth averse clueless neophyte a 71 year old cancer survivor’s heartbeat away from the presidency.

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If you are one of the 5 known 1913 Liberty Head nickels in existence (two in museums and three in private collections), the answer is $3,737,500.  That is the price the coin previously owned by Egypt’s former King Farouk and Lakers owner Jerry Buss was sold for at an auction this Thursday.  See link with picture of the Liberty Head.

Buss paid $200,000 for the coin in 1978.  It will be interesting see if the value of the coin continues to appreciate at its approximate 9.58% annualized rate of return the next time it hits the auction block.

Here is an explanation by the Antique Trader Blog as to why collectors value the coin other than the pedigreed ownership of the coin:

“The U.S. Mint struck tens of millions of Liberty Head nickels from 1883 through 1912, but switched designs in 1913 to depict a Native American on the “head’s” side and a bison on the “tail’s” side. However, five nickels with the new date, 1913, but the old design of the symbolic Miss Liberty secretly were made at the Philadelphia Mint and eventually sold to collectors.”

And through such shenanigans at the US Mint is a nickel worth more than five cents minted.

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Tiny Iceland drew unflattering world attention last year when its overheated real estate bubble burst sending the nation perilously close to bankruptcy.  It was back in the news this week for a presidential veto that infuriated the United Kingdom and the Netherlands which is reflected in the pious declarations by the British papers.

The brouhaha started with the collapse of a subsidiary of an Iceland bank Landsbanki called Icesave that offered deposits in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.  The key question is whether the government of Iceland was supposed to back all depositor funds beyond the amounts covered by the Icelandic Depositors’ and Investors’ Guarantee Fund set up under European Economic Area rules.  The legal case on whether Iceland’s tax payers are required to back up the deposit fund is shaky as well and not expressly required by the EU.  Even the Dutch have acknowledged that the deposit fund was not intended to cover a systemic collapse as happened with Iceland’s financial system.  Even in the United States where the FDIC covers only up to $100,000 of deposits, the deposit insurance fund simply does not have the wherewithal to bail out an entire banking system.

Then came the British overreaction that still has Iceland’s citizens seething.  When Iceland agreed to cover domestic depositors, it did not cover foreign deposits (it had not agreed to do so before the crisis in any case).  The British and Dutch stepped in to cover the deposits of their nationals.  Next Gordon Brown’s government misused anti-terrorism statutes to freeze all Iceland assets in the United Kingdom, probably the first time such action has been taken against a NATO ally, sending Iceland’s reeling economy into a tailspin and even bringing down another totally unrelated Iceland bank.  Next the IMF was used to bully Iceland to pay up.  British and Dutch grandstanding on the subject is weakened by the fact that their banks benefited from the same loose passporting rules to establish foreign subsidiaries that Icesave employed.  It is hard to imagine that they would have done what they are asking Iceland to do with respect to foreign accounts in the event of a systemic collapse.

The repayment plan forced down by the IMF is  about 5 billion dollars, chump change for Britain and the Netherlands but 40% of Iceland’s GDP and about $18,000 per citizen.  Iceland’s ability to pay is doubtful as well.  Seething from Gordon Brown’s use of terrorism statutes, the Icelandic public overwhelmingly oppose the plan and deluged the President with requests to veto it.  The President obliged and the veto now sends the plan to a public referendum where it is almost certain to fail.

As a matter of policy, it is not really clear why a government should back all deposit accounts.  It seems an invitation to moral hazard and can cripple an economy in a financial crisis like Iceland’s, particularly when (as noted in the article linked earlier) the legal arguments are shaky.  Gordon Brown’s overreaction made it harder for Iceland to pay back this debt and it is not clear why the United Kingdom should not be penalized for its disgraceful misuse of anti-terrorism statutes and the collateral harm they caused to Iceland’s economy.  Given the small size of the loan by British standards and the financial stress a long term ally was under, Gordon Brown should have resisted the temptation to flex his muscles for domestic opinion and tried to work out a deal.  Instead he made a bad situation worse and now threatens Iceland with financial isolation.

The legal principle employed by the British and the Dutch is a dangerous one too.  Evidently now the taxpayers of the country of formation have to bear the burden of the obligations of a corporation abroad.  Its time for cooler heads to prevail and pull the British and Dutch back from their overreaction and threats to financially ruin a NATO ally.

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“[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”  Article VI of the United States Constitution

The text of the constitution does not help with the realities of Republican Party politics today, as Alabama Republican gubernatorial candidate Bradley Byrne found out.  In a desperate kowtow to the faithful and to stop attacks by his opponents, Mr. Byrne clarified the following “heretical” quote: “”I believe there are parts of the Bible that are meant to be literally true and parts that are not.”

Also submitting to the wrath of the faithful was grocery chain Piggly Wiggly, which felt the backlash from anonymous Internet posters like the following quote in the article linked above: “”Just got a call from a person at my Church letting me know about this.  My family will not be shopping at Ragland Piggly Wiggly stores anymore or anything else they own…. I don’t shop at places that think it is OK to stand next to people who don’t believe the Bible is all true.”

As noted earlier, this is another example of the just how far the theocrats control the conservative movement and the Republican Party.  This does not happen merely in Alabama.  For all the complaints about the assault on Christianity by people like Britt Hume, can you even imagine the furore if a President today emulated John Quincy Adams and took his oath of office on a book of American laws?

The theology is suspect too.  See previous post on the three kings of the nativity here as an example.

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Britt Hume reacted to criticism for his pompous proselytizing on Fox News (see previous blog post here) by playing the victim card and making the tiresome accusation that this is part of the war against Christianity.  Most of this stems from a grouse that the law and the Constitution require equal treatment of Christianity with other faiths (Oh the horror!!!) with little grounding in fact.  Ask Congressman Keith Ellson who was savaged by parts of the right for having the temerity to take his oath of office on the book of his faith – the Quran.

I will outsource the  further exposure of Britt Hume’s ridiculousness to the satirist most often linked on this blog:

From January 4, 2010:

Follow up from From January 5, 2010:

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Jon Stewart starts  off the year strong with a wonderful skewering of the performance of the intelligence agencies and the predictable chest thumping partisan response from Republicans (clip at end of post).

The Republican response has been particularly distressing: from banging the war drums to enter the Yemeni quagmire, repeating calls to bring back torture and attacking the rule of law by trying to push what will be an open and shut case into military tribunals (somehow the court system worked just fine for the shoe bomber Richard Reid).  All of this is a part of a strategy to play the Democrats are weak on terror card with little attention to whether any of this posturing actually works or makes America safer.  The father of the underpants bomber was calling the United States to turn his kid in.  Would this happen if the United States followed Pat Buchanan’s barbaric call to deny medical aid or the calls to torture him for information he probably does not have?  The right still does not understand just how potent a recruiting tool Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib were for Al Qaeda.  And so far nobody has pointed to any useful information the willful law breaking produced that was not being obtained from other legal sources.  It also appears that some of the torture occurred because the prisoners were not giving the answers Dick Cheney and his acolytes wanted to hear.

This blinkered world-view ignores just how much Al Qaeda’s nihilistic philosophy and willingness to shed Muslim blood have cost them support in the Arab world.  Pakistan (while not Arab) is a good example of this.  While Pakistanis remain deeply in denial about the origins of extremism in their country, the vicious attacks on civilians have turned public opinion against these thugs.  An overreaction of the sort counseled by George Bush’s homeland security advisor Frances Fargos Townsend vaguely threatening an invasion of Yemen would be just what Al Qaeda wants.  Have the United States invade yet another Muslim country (in the Arab peninsula no less) that would make it easier for them to claim that the United States is an enemy of Islam.

Then there is the call to engage in racist profiling.  As George Bush’s CIA Director and Homeland Security Secretary note how profiling can be easily sidestepped.  After all the underpants bomber as a Nigerian would not have shown up on typical terrorist profiles.

It is understandable to tighten up security procedures to prevent attacks.  But the ugly reality is that it is impossible to prevent all attacks from a group that probably numbers about a 1,000 people world wide.  If fear of Al Qaeda starts a downward slide to a police state, Al Qaeda will have won.  Using a hammer to swat a fly will leave a gaping hole in the fabric of the idea and values of America.  This long piece from the New York Times is a good read on how the administration struggles to find a balance between the values and the security while avoiding the pointless and probably harmful chest thumping that Dick Cheney would like.

Meanwhile the people calling for draconian police action continue to compare health care reform to tyranny and a Republican Congressional candidate in Minnesota says defeating liberals is a bigger battle than defeating terrorism.  The mind reels.

Enjoy the clip.

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Britt Hume of Fox News insults the faith of about five hundred million people by suggesting that Tiger Wood’s Buddhist faith will not be up to the job of his redemption and he needs to convert to Christianity.  The video of the Fox News anchor turning his media position into a sectarian bully pulpit is below:

The relevant quote from the video above:

“The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith,” Hume said. “He is said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. My message to Tiger would, ‘Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.”

The pomposity of a TV anchor (who ignores the recent rash of C Street conservatives (John Ensign, Chip Pickering and Mark Sanford) whose overt religiosity did not prevent their inclinations to adultery) is one matter.

But this is yet another example of how the right wing cannot resist injecting religion into debate.  Hume is hardly alone on Fox News.  Bill O’Reilly is on record bemoaning attempts to weaken the “White, Christian, male power structure” in this country.  Fox News regularly features Ann Coulter who infamously in the aftermath of 9/11 said we should “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”  Shortly before Christmas the otherwise highly regarded Indiana governor Mitch Daniels went off on an amazingly ignorant screed about the evils of secularism.

This is not new.  But coupled with the attacks on Barack Obama allegedly being a Muslim (not helped by Obama’s politically calculated response to treat the accusation as if it were a slur – previous blog here) they seem to be rising to a crescendo. Read the rest of this entry »

Link to the strip below is here.

Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau January 1, 2010

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