DADT us dead #14

**** NOW HEAR THIS ****

"THE TIMES, THEY ARE A-CHANGING"

Command Sergeant Major Marvin Hill, a senior aide to General David Petraeus, said in an interview that will be aired on Washington Watch tomorrow that he believes the troops are ready for the change [repeal of DADT]. And he added:

"If there are people who cannot deal with the change, then they're going to have to do what's best for their troops and best for the organization and best for the military service and exit the military service, so that we can move forward -- if that's the way that we have to go."

Just pause and think what a profound change that is. For the very first time, someone in an official capacity is saying that maybe it is not the gay young men and women who would "upset unit cohesion." Rather, it is the homophobes who cause the problem. If they don't like it, they can leave.

Petraeus himself told Congress last March that he believed the time had come to repeal DADT. And about his personal experience of serving with openly gay CIA officers: "after the 10 seconds of awareness wore off, the focus was on the professional attributes of these individuals."

Now this is the kind of leadership that is needed. The incredibly shrinking John McCain has now become almost too small to be seen.

Ralph

The Republican worldview

This from Robert Reich on Huffington Post is succinct, clear -- worth reading it all.

Apart from its extraordinary cost and regressive tilt, the tax deal negotiated between the president and the Republicans has another fatal flaw.

It confirms the Republican worldview.

Americans want to know what happened to the economy and how to fix it. At least Republicans have a story -- the same one they've been flogging for thirty years. The bad economy is big government's fault and the solution is to shrink government.

Here's the real story. For three decades, an increasing share of the benefits of economic growth have gone to the top 1 percent. Thirty years ago, the top got 9 percent of total income. Now they take in almost a quarter. Meanwhile, the earnings of the typical worker have barely budged.

The vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to keep the economy going. (The rich spend a much lower portion of their incomes.) The crisis was averted before now only because middle-class families found ways to keep spending more than they took in -- by women going into paid work, by working longer hours, and finally by using their homes as collateral to borrow. But when the housing bubble burst, the game was up.

The solution is to reorganize the economy so the benefits of growth are more widely shared. Exempt the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes, and apply payroll taxes to incomes over $250,000. Extend Medicare to all. Extend the Earned Income Tax Credit all the way up through families earning $50,000. Make higher education free to families that now can't afford it. Rehire teachers. Repair and rebuild our infrastructure. Create a new WPA to put the unemployed back to work.

Pay for this by raising marginal income taxes on millionaires (under Eisenhower, the highest marginal rate was 91 percent, and the economy flourished). A millionaire marginal tax of 70 percent would eliminate the nation's future budget deficit. In addition, impose a small tax on all financial transactions (even a tiny one -- one half of one percent -- would bring in $200 billion a year, enough to rehire every teacher who's been laid off as well as provide universal preschool for all toddlers). Promote unions for low-wage workers.

But here's the obstacle. As income and wealth have risen to the top, so has political power. Money is being used to bribe politicians and fill the airwaves with misleading ads that block all of this.

The midterm elections offered dramatic evidence. NBC news reported shortly after Election Day, for example, that Crossroads GPS, one of the biggest Republican secret-money organizations, got "a substantial portion" of its loot from a group of extremely wealthy Wall Street hedge fund and private equity managers. Why would they sink so much money into the midterms? Because they've been so strongly opposed to a proposal by congressional Democrats to treat the earnings of hedge fund and private equity managers as ordinary income rather than capital gains (subject to only a 15 percent rate).

In other words, the problem isn't big government. It's power and privilege at the top.

So another part of the solution is to limit the impact of big money on politics. This requires, for example, publicly-financed campaigns, disclosure of all sources of political spending, and resurrection of the fairness doctrine for broadcasters.

It's the same power and privilege that got the Bush tax cuts in the first place, and claimed the lion's share of its benefits. The same power and privilege that got the estate tax phased out.

Get it? By agreeing to another round of massive tax cuts for the wealthy, the president confirms the Republican story. Cutting taxes on the rich while freezing discretionary spending (which he's also agreed to do) affirms that the underlying problem is big government, and the solution is to shrink government and expect the extra wealth at the top to trickle down to everyone else.

Obama's new tax compromise is not only bad economics; it's also disastrous from the standpoint of educating the public about what has happened and what needs to happen in the future. It reinforces the Republican story and makes mincemeat out of the truthful one Democrats should be telling.

Those who wrote our Constitution left us a near-perfect blueprint for a deliberative democracy. We have screwed it up so that it is barely recognizable and barely functional. Is it too late to get out of this mess? Is it even possible, given who has the power now?

Ralph

Olbermann skewers Obama

This is worth watching: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/08/olbermann-tax-cut-obama-special-comment_n_793565.html

It is painful for me to watch, because I have stuck with my belief in and hope for Obama to provide the needed leadership. But that belief and hope are just about gone, and Olbermann's angry articulateness rings so true.

Two memorable lines:

He calls the compromise "a searing and transcendent capitulation."

And this:

"This President negotiates down from a position of strength
better than any politician in our recent history."

Ralph

Obama's bad decision?

I have to say that my thoughts are deeply divided about Obama's compromise deal with the GOP leaders to extend all the Bush tax cuts for 2 years in exchange for a 13 month extension of unemployment benefits, plus some other goodies (like a 2% one-year cut in social security tax and some more tax incentives to encourage job creation).

The deciding factor for me would have to be knowing whether he could have gotten a better deal. Like all my progressive friends, I would like to think that he could by being a bold leader and using his bully pulpit to denounce Republican greed for what it is. But no one knows that for sure.

The other side is that middle class taxes would go up and there would be no jobless benefits -- and then we'd be into January and Republican control of the House and virtual control of the Senate on anything that matters.

Then it would at least be very clear who were the villains. Now, it puts Obama in that role with not just progressive Democrats but, for example, conservative Democrat Mary Landrieu as well, who called it "almost morally corrupt."

What I need Obama to explain is why it is that he always has to be the one to give in to their key issues in order to get something. Why can't he play his cards so that they have to give in once in a while? His defense is to lash out at "hostage-taking Republicans." Steney Hoyer says we had "to pay the ransom."

But if "tax cuts for billionaires" doesn't have any traction with the American people (and we know it does) -- then you're just conceding that Repubs play the game better than we do.

I don't like it. I agree that it seems morally corrupt.

But what would have been the alternative? I just don't know.

Ralph

[This is Richard's cue to come in and tell us for certain that he knows Obama could have gotten a better deal -- or at least someone, if not Obama, could have. And maybe he's right]

Nice folks

Those nice folks who want to protect the "institution of marriage" have taken to being not so nice in their tactics to try to stop the courts from overturning laws that ban same-sex marriage.

The National Organization for Marriage -- now doesn't that sound nice? -- has become vicious, and they're going after the judges who decide these cases. That almost seems un-American -- except I guess they're just exercising their all-American right to free speech.

Here's what they've done:

1. They attacked the sexual orientation of the judge who ruled that California's Proposition 8 was unconstitutional because it denied equal rights to a group of citizens. They wanted to have him declared disqualified and invalidate his judicial judgment based on his perceived (not acknowledged) identity as a gay man. This was not a surreptitious whisper campaign; it was an out and out frontal attack.

2. Although not located in Iowa, NOM organized and funded a campaign to unseat three judges who were part of the unanimous decision that allows same-sex marriage in Iowa. Judges are not elected in Iowa, but at the end of an appointed term, they are up for a "retention vote" -- a sort of vote of confidence/no confidence. Almost unprecedented, these three judges lost the vote for being retained for another term. And the only, only issue that was even mentioned was the vote on the same-sex marriage issue. Sounds Mafia-like in its vindictiveness. And it wasn't even Iowans themselves who organized this; it came from out of state NOM.

3. Now they have organized a campaign trying to disqualify one of the three federal appeals court judges hearing the appeal of the Prop8 issue today -- on the basis that the judge's wife works for an organization that opposes Prop8. If that disqualifies a judge, then Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is in deep trouble.

Where does this lead? Directly away from "an independent judiciary," that's for sure, if judges have to think about losing their jobs because of a specific vote on a specific case. And now that political money can flow unimpeded wherever it will, we're at risk for having a Judiciary that's bought and paid for, just like Congress.

Now who is un-American? NOM is the one with the wrong values.

Ralph

PS: Any organization that has Maggie Gallagher as a spokesperson can't be much good. She is a silly, stupid woman who used to write a column in the AJC. She is an anti-gay fanatic.

To tell the truth . . . #2

The Atlantic magazine's David Samuels' article "The Shameful Attacks on Julian Assange" takes a similar position as did Matthew Dowd:

Julian Assange and Pfc Bradley Manning have done a huge public service by making hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents available on Wikileaks -- and, predictably, no one is grateful. Manning, a former army intelligence analyst in Iraq, faces up to 52 years in prison. He is currently being held in solitary confinement at a military base in Quantico, Virginia, where he is not allowed to see his parents or other outside visitors.

Assange, the organizing brain of Wikileaks, enjoys a higher degree of freedom living as a hunted man in England under the close surveillance of domestic and foreign intelligence agencies -- but probably not for long. Not since President Richard Nixon directed his minions to go after Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan . . . has a working journalist and his source been subjected to the kind of official intimidation and threats that have been directed at Assange and Manning by high-ranking members of the Obama Administration. . . .

But the truly scandalous and shocking response to the Wikileaks documents has been that of other journalists, who make the Obama Administration sound like the ACLU. In a recent article in The New Yorker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Steve Coll . . . labeled Wikileaks' activities - formerly known as journalism - by his newly preferred terms of "vandalism" and "First Amendment-inspired subversion." . . .

Coll's invective is hardly unique, In fact, it was only a pale echo of the language used earlier this year by a columnist at his former employer, The Washington Post. In a column titled "WikiLeaks Must Be Stopped," Mark Thiessen wrote that "WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a criminal enterprise," and urged that the site should be shut down "and its leadership brought to justice." . . . The Times' normally mild-mannered David Brooks asserted in his column this week that "Assange seems to be an old-fashioned anarchist" and worried that Wikileaks will "damage the global conversation." . . .

The true importance of Wikileaks -- and the key to understanding the motivations and behavior of its founder -- lies not in the contents of the latest document dump but in the technology that made it possible, which has already shown itself to be a potent weapon to undermine official lies and defend human rights. . . . The importance of Assange's efforts to human rights workers in the field were recognized last year by Amnesty International, which gave him its Media Award . . . .

Wikileaks is a powerful new way for reporters and human rights advocates to leverage global information technology systems to break the heavy veil of government and corporate secrecy that is slowly suffocating the American press. . . .

In a memorandum entitled "Transparency and Open Government" addressed to the heads of Federal departments and agencies and posted on WhiteHouse.gov, President Obama instructed that "Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing." The Administration would be wise to heed his words -- and to remember how badly the vindictive prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg ended for the Nixon Administration. And American reporters, Pulitzer Prizes and all, should be ashamed for joining in the outraged chorus that defends a burgeoning secret world whose existence is a threat to democracy.

". . . And then they came after me, and there was no one left to defend me."

Ralph

And now for the good news

The board of the International Atomic Energy Agency voted on Friday to set up a global nuclear fuel bank. The Agency is an arm of the United Nations, and its board is made up of representatives of 35 nations.

The purpose is to provide a means of obtaining nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes by smaller nations that might otherwise be tempted to produce their own nuclear material, some of which could then be diverted to make nuclear weapons or possibly fall into terrorists' hands. The bank would provide nuclear fuel in the form of fuel rods, which are much more difficult to reprocess into weapons-grade material.

Sam Nunn's Nuclear Threat Initiative has worked for years to establish the bank and had secured a pledge from Warren Buffett in 2006 to give $50 million, provided that the atomic agency established the bank and that other nations contributed as much as $100 million or the equivalent in nuclear fuel. Contributors thus far include Kuwait, the European Union, Norway, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States.

Now that these conditions have been met, the project can move forward. Nunn hailed the IAEA vote to create the bank as a breakthrough in international cooperation. It will "enable peaceful uses of nuclear energy while reducing the risks of proliferation and catastrophic terrorism."

This is good news without any down side to it. How refreshing !

Ralph