Politics, Compassion, and Justice

A letter I sent to my Senators:

If Republicans believe that homosexuality is a choice and that unions of such voluntary orientations be prohibited, can we not tack on an amendment that unions of other voluntary choice groups such as Republicans also be prohibited? It only makes sense. The Bible prohibits the chosen people from intermarrying with idol worshippers. Certainly those who enshrine and idolize certain verses to the exclusion of others qualify.

Thank you for standing up against the Homosexual Marriage Ban Amendment and for “all Men being created equal” “with liberty and justice for all”. I add that Stephen Colbert has proposed banning homosexuals from getting drivers licenses. Al Franken thinks this is a misallocation of resources, we should first ban terrorists from marrying.

Perhaps there is a more effective analogy we can find to make the point of how unamerican it is to discriminate not on the strength of a man’s character, but on his choice for bed partners.
Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold Objecting to the Judiciary Committee’s Handling of the Constitutional Amendment on Marriage:

Constitutional amendments deserve the most careful and deliberate consideration of any matter that comes before the Senate. In addition to hearings and a subcommittee markup, such a measure should be considered by the Judiciary Committee in the light of day, open to the press and the public, with cameras present so that the whole country can see what is done. Open and deliberate debate on such an important matter cannot take place in a setting such as the one chosen by the Chairman of the Committee today.

The Constitution of the United States is an historic guarantee of individual freedom. It has served as a beacon of hope, an example to people around the world who yearn to be free and to live their lives without government interference in their most basic human decisions. I took an oath when I joined this body to support and defend the Constitution. I will continue to fight this mean-spirited, divisive, poorly drafted, and misguided amendment when it comes to the Senate floor.”

The picture shows Palestine’s borders as the 1967 cease fire lines. This is strange since even the UN gave Jews territory in 1947. In addition, Israel never annexed the territories won in 67. Moreover, the Palestine in the picture should include Jordan and transjordan to represent the British mandate, which bears no geographic relation to the Palestinian people or the territory claimed by Hamas. Also, the article is inaccurate. Jews have lived in Jerusalem up until 1948-1967 when they were kicked out. The Jewish state lets Arabs live there. The Palestinians aspire to Judenrein.
Aljazeera.Net - Who is the alien of independence day?:

For Israelis it is known as Independence Day; but for Palestinians and Arabs it is al-Nakba, or The Catastrophe.

Um, so about the Republican “Clinton sucks” meme… It doesn’t seems to be working anymore.
CNN.com - Poll: Clinton outperformed Bush - May 12, 2006:

In a new poll comparing President Bush’s job performance with that of his predecessor, a strong majority of respondents said President Clinton outperformed Bush on a host of issues.

The poll of 1,021 adult Americans was conducted May 5-7 by Opinion Research Corp. for CNN. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Respondents favored Clinton by greater than 2-to-1 margins when asked who did a better job at handling the economy (63 percent Clinton, 26 percent Bush) and solving the problems of ordinary Americans (62 percent Clinton, 25 percent Bush).

On foreign affairs, the margin was 56 percent to 32 percent in Clinton’s favor; on taxes, it was 51 percent to 35 percent for Clinton; and on handling natural disasters, it was 51 percent to 30 percent, also favoring Clinton.

Moreover, 59 percent said Bush has done more to divide the country, while only 27 percent said Clinton had.

When asked which man was more honest as president, poll respondents were more evenly divided, with the numbers — 46 percent Clinton to 41 percent Bush — falling within the poll’s margin of error. The same was true for a question on handling national security: 46 percent said Clinton performed better; 42 percent picked Bush.

President Bush Discusses NSA Surveillance Program

THE PRESIDENT: After September the 11th, I vowed to the American people that our government would do everything within the law to protect them against another terrorist attack. …

[Boston.com] President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Second, the government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval.

[USA Today] The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.
[USA Today] USA TODAY reported in today’s editions that AT&T Corp., Verizon Communications Inc., and BellSouth Corp. telephone companies have turned over records of tens of millions of their customers’ phone calls to the NSA since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The newspaper cited anonymous sources it said had direct knowledge of the arrangement.

Third, the intelligence activities I authorized are lawful and have been briefed to appropriate members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat.

[USA Today] House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said she had previously been briefed by the administration on “some” of the domestic data collection program, but said she still finds it “alarming.”
….
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, asked “why are the telephone companies not protecting their customers? I think they have a social responsibility to people who do business with them to protect our privacy as long there isn’t some suspicion that we’re a terrorist or a criminal or something.”

“I don’t know enough about the details except that I am willing to find out because I’m not sure why it would be necessary to keep and have that kind of information,” said House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told Fox News Channel: “The idea of collecting millions or thousands of phone numbers, how does that fit into following the enemy?”

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said bringing the telephone companies before the Judiciary Committee is an important step.
…
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., argued that the program “is not a warrantless wiretapping of the American people. I don’t think this action is nearly as troublesome as being made out here, because they are not tapping our phones.”

Fourth, the privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities.

[USA Today] In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. “In other words,” Bush explained, “one end of the communication must be outside the United States.”

As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.

Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers’ names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA’s domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.

We’re not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans.

[USA Today] Among the big telecommunications companies, only Qwest has refused to help the NSA, the sources said. According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.
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The caveat, he said, is that “personal identifiers” — such as names, Social Security numbers and street addresses — can’t be included as part of the search. “That requires an additional level of probable cause,” he said.
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Enacted in 1978, FISA lays out procedures that the U.S. government must follow to conduct electronic surveillance and physical searches of people believed to be engaged in espionage or international terrorism against the United States. A special court, which has 11 members, is responsible for adjudicating requests under FISA.
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In the case of the NSA’s international call-tracking program, Bush signed an executive order allowing the NSA to engage in eavesdropping without a warrant. The president and his representatives have since argued that an executive order was sufficient for the agency to proceed. Some civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, disagree.
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Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest’s lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA’s explanation did little to satisfy Qwest’s lawyers. “They told (Qwest) they didn’t want to do that because FISA might not agree with them,” one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest’s suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general’s office. A second person confirmed this version of events

Our efforts are focused on links to al Qaeda and their known affiliates.

The NSA program that he’s ostensibly defending basically collects the record of ever phone call in the country. Hard to image there’s that many Al-Qaeda to focus on.
[NYTimes] In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans’ international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans’ privacy.

So far we’ve been very successful in preventing another attack on our soil.

They have yet to publish a single foiled attempt. I think that is an important factor with respect to the effectiveness of the government in preventing attacks. With what we know, we just have to trust them.

As a general matter, every time sensitive intelligence is leaked, it hurts our ability to defeat this enemy. Our most important job is to protect the American people from another attack, and we will do so within the laws of our country.

[Unclaimed Territory] There is a long history of striking a balance in this country between allowing investigative journalism to flourish through the use of leaks and the need to safeguard secrecy needs. As is true in so many other areas, every presidential administration since the Roosevelt administration has accepted and worked within roughly the same framework. The Bush administration is waging war against so many of these traditions, and its obsessive efforts to eliminate all anti-administration leaks, and thereby eliminate investigative journalism in this country entirely, is one of its most dangerous assaults on the operating rules to which we have collectively agreed.

The administration is an aggressive practitioner of politically self-serving leaks, and is seeking to ensure that all leaks are eliminated other than those which serve its interests and promote its version of events. Just imagine what we would not know about our government over the last five years if there had been no leaks — warrantless eavesdropping, the use of torture and rendition, secret Eastern European gulags, Abu Ghraib, the inconvenient pre-war intelligence which was ignored. And then imagine the even more extreme measures the administration would have felt free to pursue had they known that there was no chance of leaking. That is the world they are trying to create.
[Salon]Over the years, members of Congress have adopted, presidents have signed and courts have adjudicated all sorts of laws that are supposed to apply when the government wants to know about calls coming into and going out from a particular telephone number. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1984 lays down some of the rules for obtaining that kind of information. Congress amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1998 to set forth rules when the government wants the information in the context of foreign intelligence operations. And in 2001, the Bush administration proposed — and Congress approved — changes in the rules in the course of adopting the Patriot Act.

So what do we learn today? The Bush administration — without an act of Congress, without a ruling from the judiciary, without even the usual F-you of a signing statement — has written its own set of rules for gathering telephone records. Forget words like “subpoena” and “warrant” and “probable cause.” Forget fine legislative calibration. Forget all that stuff about amendments and floor debate and compromise in conference committees. None of that matters now. Under the Bush administration’s rules, the NSA gets access to every single phone record it can persuade anybody to give it.

15 sentences, 7 rehashing the past, 2 answering criticism, 4 reassuring us, 2 wagging finger. In sum 2/15 was spent answering the question (misleadingly) and 13/15 justifying it.

More from my favorite site. The Republicans (who for some reasons call themselves conservative, when all they want to conserve is power), they have a great strategy. Cut taxes and destroy the fiscal solvency of the government so that when Democrats eventually come to power, they will have undo the tax cuts, which they will call “raising taxes”. Brilliant in a sinister way. The funny thing is, though, that the benefits of these cuts always go to the very wealthy by a large proportion. Even if 60% of the country gets $20 bills, Their base gets some $82,000!

Think Progress » Fiscal Insanity: Paying for Tax Cuts With More Tax Cuts:

Last year, in a supposed effort to impose some fiscal discipline, Congress limited itself to $70 billion in tax cuts over 10 years in the tax package currently under consideration in Congress. But the bill put together by conservatives includes far more than $70 billion in tax cuts over ten years, mostly for the wealthy, and they figured out an inventive way to get around the limit: more tax cuts.

Here’s how it works. Traditionally, very wealthy people are not eligible for an extremely tax-favorable kind of retirement account called a Roth IRA. As a revenue raising gimmick, Congress decided to remove the income restrictions on Roth IRAs for one year (2010). In the short term, these wealthy people will switch from their current retirement accounts to the Roth IRA, providing a quick influx of $6.9 billion to the treasury during the 10 year window. (The money is taxed when it is transferred.)

But over the long term, this shift will swell the federal debt even more. Once the money is transferred to Roth IRAs, it is never taxed again. Overall, the treasury “would lose $37 billion in revenue from the Roth IRA provision from 2013 to 2049.”

Great article on the myth of the “irrational anger of the left”, h/t dkos

Why the anger? It can be summed up in one run-on sentence: We have lost two towers in New York, a part of the Pentagon, an important American city called New Orleans, our economic solvency, our global reputation, our moral authority, our children’s future, we have lost tens of thousands of American soldiers to death and grievous injury, we must endure the Abramoffs and the Cunninghams and the Libbys and the whores and the bribes and the utter corruption, we must contemplate the staggering depth of the hole we have been hurled down into, and we expect little to no help from the mainstream DC press, whose lazy go-along-to-get-along cocktail-circuit mentality allowed so much of this to happen because they failed comprehensively to do their job.

George W. Bush and his pals used September 11th against the American people, used perhaps the most horrific day in our collective history, deliberately and with intent, to foster a war of choice that has killed untold tens of thousands of human beings and basically bankrupted our country. They lied about the threat posed by Iraq. They destroyed the career of a CIA agent who was tasked to keep an eye on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and did so to exact petty political revenge against a critic. They tortured people, and spied on American civilians.

You cannot fathom anger arising from this?
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You, sir, should not be asking why so many of your email friends are so angry. You should be asking why you yourself are not with them in their rage. I have admired a number of your articles over these last years, and know that you are no fool regarding our situation in Iraq and here at home. It isn’t your grasp of the issues that concerns me, but the absence of outrage. Do you really care about the things you write about, or is all this merely grist for the mill that provides you a paycheck?

Greenwald in a great post:

As Republicans have demonstrated for quite some time, the party which runs away from anger is the party which stands for nothing, inspires nobody, and loses.

Seems like Israel is getting serious on Peace. They’ll make a deadline or act unilaterally again. See yahoo, Al Jazeera, WSJ, SFgate. Jpost
Ynet רמון: ההכנות להתכנסות יימשכו עד 2008 - חדשות:

Ramon: The Convergence will continue until 2008
The Minister of Justice said to ynet that “Anyone who says that on January 1, 2007 we’ll clear out the first settlement is wrong and dissembles. The preparations to Convergence will be long”. In his words, “Until the end of the year we will make a great effort to check the possibilities with the Palestinians.”

Another gem from Ann Coulter. Is she serious?

Crown | Godless:

GODLESS is the most explosive book yet from #1 New York Times bestselling author Ann Coulter. In this completely original and thoroughly controversial work, Coulter writes, “Liberals love to boast that they are not ‘religious,’ which is what one would expect to hear from the state-sanctioned religion. Of course liberalism is a religion. It has its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints, its own total worldview, and its own explanation of the existence of the universe. In other words, liberalism contains all the attributes of what is generally known as ‘religion.’ ”

Let’s start with the idea of a Godless Liberal religion.

1. Godless- Presumably she means this perjoratively, that being Godless is somehow bad. I mean, if by comparison Republicans are Godful (goodthinkful), then how does she explain this culture of corruption. Tom Delay is very religious and yet he was favored big business over the rights of immigrant women to control their bodies in Saipan. Furthermore, to call the Liberal religion Godless is a confabulation.
2. A religion necessitates, by definition, a belief in a supernatural being. Liberalism is a political mindset and therefore is not a religion or church.
3. Although it may be true that Liberalism is Godless, that was perhaps the intent of the Establishment Clause that religion have no part in politics. In any case, even John Kerry is an observant, religious Catholic. And as far as I can tell, he hasn’t had to step down from office due to scandals like all the Republicans that are going down now.
4. Liberals don’t boast that they’re not religious. That’s the equivalent of claiming that Consevatives are corrupt. Sure, a lot Republicans are corrupt and a lot of Liberals see no place for religion in politics, but that doesn’t mean that all Republicans are corrupt or that all Liberals are irreligious
5. How is “Liberalism” a state-sanctioned religion? I mean, are Libertarianism, Conservatism, and Communism also state-sponsored because they have political parties?
6. Not sure what she means that liberals have their own cosmology. Does she mean that Liberals have a different perspective on the facts than Republicans. If so, then I won’t differ.
7. What does she mean that Liberals have their own miracles, supernatural, churches, high priests, and saints? I cannot think of a single Liberal example, except perhaps FDR and Clinton. Republicans actually have a religious wing that dominates their party. They worship Reagen, supply-side tax-cuts, war, and white heterosexual businessmen.

In sum, WTF.
(cross-posted at dkos)

It’s good to know Bush is still looking out for his base, even as it shrinks. He’s a tax-cut and spend President. Amazing a guy can get elected by pandering to the religious authoritarians and paying the money-men. And the Democrats are still afraid of having a strong reform/contract with America message.
Think Progress » Breaking: House, Senate Conservatives Agree on $70 Billion In New Tax Cuts for the Rich:

According to a study by the Tax Policy Center, the tax cuts overwhelmingly benefit the richest Americans:

The top tenth of 1 percent, whose average income is $5.3 million, would save an average of $82,415. Those in the top group would see their tax bill cut 4.8 percent, while Americans at the center of the income distribution — the middle fifth of taxpayers, who will earn an average of $36,000 this year — could expect a 0.4 percent reduction in their tax bill, or about $20.

Those who make less than $75,000 — which includes about 75 percent of all taxpayers — would save, at most, $110 each. Those making more than $1 million would save, on average, almost $42,000.

Despite administration claims to the contrary, Federal Reserve economists have found these investment tax cuts haven’t boosted the stock market, and the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation has found that any economic benefits of the cuts are “eventually likely to be outweighed by the reduction in national savings due to increasing Federal government deficits.”

For full coverage, stay tuned to American Progress’ BudgetBlog.