Wow ...

These congressional generic numbers are really starting to look bleak for the Dems. See full numbers here. United States - Business and Economy - United States Congress - Republican - Barack Obama[...]

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Bad mothers Bad children

This is a horrible story out of South Carolina. (No, not Lindsey Graham yapping off about amending the 14th Amendment.) Two infants drown in a car while strapped into their child seats, and a mother leaving the scene of the tragedy to.. ahem, ahem, call the police.

"The two were recovered from the North Edisto River after the car was found near a rural boat landing, Orangeburg County Sheriff Larry Williams said.

County Coroner Samuetta Marshall identified them as 18-month-old Ja'van T. Duley and 2-year-old Devean C. Duley, both of Orangeburg. She would not speculate on a cause of death until autopsies are completed Tuesday.

The boys' mother, whose name was not immediately released, was being held Monday on a charge of leaving the scene of an accident, Williams said.

He said the Highway Patrol was notified about 6:15 a.m. Monday about an accident and a woman who needed help getting her children out of the car.

The children were still strapped in their child seats when divers found them and recovered their bodies about 45 minutes after being called to the scene.

"Early in the investigation, the state patrol felt there was not enough indicators to substantiate that there was an automobile accident," Williams said. "We are looking into all possibilities as to what happened."

The woman, who did not have a cell phone, had walked some distance down the country road by the boat landing and flagged down a passing motorist to call the Highway Patrol..." [Story]
Wow! I guess lightening can strike the same place twice. Didn't something similar happen to another South Carolina woman a few years back? I am reserving judgement until I get more from the po po. But right about now it ain't looking good for Mommy.

And, speaking of Mommy: One of my fellow field hands from Ohio will have to tell me what's so great about the cheeseburgers in Buckeye country.

"A Toledo teen is behind bars for allegedly stabbing his mother over a cheeseburger.

The altercation happened at 425 West Bancroft around 1 a.m. Friday morning.

Aaron Dean, 18, is accused of stabbing his mother over the burger.

Detectives say the teen's mom came home with food for herself. Her son apparently got upset because she didn't bring him a cheeseburger.

Police say he choked her, grabbed a butcher knife, and stabbed her in the right arm before running away.

We talked with Vergie Dean, Aaron's mom, today. She told us she grabbed a cheeseburger from Rally's and headed home.

She says her 6'3" 300-pound son got upset because she didn't bring one for him. "He was like 'Where's my food at?' and I'm like 'I'm not gonna give you anything' so he smacked my sandwich and he pushed me or something and it escalated from there."

Aaron allegedly grabbed and choked her. "He had me in the corner. I took a knife and I stabbed him in his finger. He ran in his room and grabbed a big ole butcher knife. He came back and was like 'You cut me, you cut me.' He was standing right there. He just took the knife and stuck it in my arm. "

Detectives took the butcher knife as evidence.

They say Aaron Dean took off after the stabbing. He was arrested a block from his home, on Prescott Street. "

WTF is wrong with you Negroes? You stab your mama over a cheeseburger? Negro you weigh 300 damn pounds! Looks to me like your mama has given you plenty of cheeseburgers in her day. And why wasn't your ass fixing your own meal? You are 18 years old! Your poor mama was probably too busy to fix you a meal because she was out trying to work to feed your big ass.

But let me stop, apparently the boy suffers from some mental issues, so I am going to leave him alone.

"His mother blames her son's behavior on his mental illness. "He's a paranoid schizophrenic and he ain't been taking his medicine for one because he flips off. He be good sometime, then he get bad."

OK, my bad....but wait...

"Police charged the teen with felonious assault, false information, and drug abuse.

His mother says her son would rather buy drugs than food. "So to keep him from going in the streets to do the bad things, I give him money everyday."

She says she doesn't want him to stay in jail. "It's not a good place for him there. He need to go to a mental hospital somewhere so he can get his head right.."

Yes, and where they can feed his ass. [Story]

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http://field-negro.blogspot.com/2010/08/bad-mothers-bad-children.html

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China expected to pass Japan, and become world's
2nd largest economy this year

Nasty government.

China is expected to surpass Japan this year as the world's second-largest economy, an unprecedented position for a still-developing country and one that has brought strains as well as triumphs.

Second-quarter GDP figures from Japan reported Monday morning show that its economic output, at $1.288 trillion, fell short of the $1.339 trillion China reported for the three months ended in June.

Once final numbers for all of 2010 are compiled, many economists expect China to overtake Japan as the world's second-largest national economy in U.S. dollar terms. The gap between China's $5 trillion economy and the U.S.'s nearly $15 trillion output remains very large, and even at current growth rates?which may not be sustained?it would take China a decade or more to match the No. 1 U.S.

A decade. As if that's a long time for something that significant.

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Let me say again that Elizabeth Warren isn't so
much unconfirmable to the CFPB as she is unnominatable

by Ken

There has been much online chatter, bordering on excitement, among our online brothers and sisters of the Left regarding the New Republic cover story by John Judis, "The Unnecessary Fall: A counter-history of the Obama presidency" (unfortunately available free only to subscribers).

I think these early grafs summarize the basic proposition:

Politicians, such as Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, who found a way of using populism?s appeal during downturns have enjoyed success, while those who have spurned it have suffered accordingly. If, in circumstances like the present one, you don?t develop a populist politics, your adversaries will use populism to define you as an enemy of the people. That?s what Carter discovered during the stagflation of the late ?70s. And that?s what has happened in the last 20 months of the Great Recession to Barack Obama and to the Democratic Party he leads.

Obama took office with widespread popular support, even among Republicans, and some of his first efforts, including the $800 billion stimulus, initially enjoyed strong public favor. But that wide appeal began to dissipate by the late spring of 2009. Disillusion with Obama fueled the November defeat of Democratic gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia. By January 2010, it was a crucial factor in Republican Scott Brown?s astonishing victory over Martha Coakley in Massachusetts.

In the postmortem debate over these defeats, some Democrats have blamed Obama?s dogged pursuit of health care reform while the economy was hemorrhaging jobs. That may have been a factor, but the real damage was done earlier. What doomed Obama politically was the way he dealt with the financial crisis in the first six months of his presidency. In an atmosphere primed for a populist backlash, he allowed the right wing to define the terms.

It's an eminently solid piece, very much worth your attention, but I'm not entirely sure I understand what the fuss is about. Is there anything in it that isn't thrice familiar to, say, the average Down With Tyranny reader who's been paying attention since the dawn of the Obama administration? True, Judis does a nice job of bringing it all together: the public 's well-justified perception that administration economic policy is being made by (and for) Wall Street insiders, which "colored its view of the auto bailout, the stimulus, and health care reform"; the "delayed and muddled response to the BP disaster in the Gulf"; the deaf ear the White House economics team turned to economists of the stature of Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz coupled with the president's "inability to explain to the public why he sought such a large stimulus" and subsequent public abandonment of the jobs issue; the president's own well-documented "strange aversion to confrontational politics," which has led to a "disastrous" attempt "to elevate Obama above the hurly-burly of Washington politics" and enabled the Right to define his "otherness." See anything new there? Anything we haven't all be screaming about for many months now?

In addition to stringing all of this together, the piece certainly has the built-in virtue of appearing in that bastion of right-wing non-liberalism The New Republic, so that it can't be dismissed by smarmy asswipes like White House Press Worm Robert Gibbs as the drug-induced ravings of "the professional left."

For all the excited chatter on the Left, I can't say that I see even yet any indication that anyone inside the administration grasps any of the stuff Judis cites, which dumbfounds me, but then, what's new about that? For how long now have I been dumbfounded?

It's not as hard to understand in the case of someone as fundamentally corrupt as Rahm Emanuel. Wasn't Howie warning as soon as the president-elect tapped the party's leading megacorporate superwhore to be his chief of staff that this was likely to be the death knell for his administration? My own apprehensions were targeted slightly differently: that in the chief of staff's crucial and I get the feeling that Gabbling Gibbsy is just a knuckle-dragging imbecile; but that all of them are so uniformly clueless?

A lot of progressives given to hopelessly wishful thinking keep pointing to even the compromised initiatives of the administration as being "starts" that can be built on. Do they have working brains? Do they really not see that this administration has degraded and discredited every authentically progressive program it has laid its grubby mitts on? In the case of the health care giveaway to the insurance companies, I mean "reform," it will be years before average Americans see any meaningful benefits, years in which their economic footing is becoming at best increasingly shaky and at worst just plain freefall.
Because of the way the "reform" was bludgeoned through, it has almost no friends and mortal enemies, popular and political, all over the political spectrum, enemies who will be lying in wait for its failure, doing everything they can to facilitate its failure. As for the climate and energy "reform" package the administration tried so pathetically to squeeze through,, it contained so much simply monstrous anti-progressive regression that even now nobody I trust on environmental matters will say that it would have done more good than harm.

Immigration reform? This administration hasn't a ghost of a whisper of an idea how it might be accomplished, and contented itself with unconscionable sops to the demagoguing right-wing nativists like that $600 million the administration found somewhere, at a time when it couldn't find a paltry few bucks for teachers, whose only effect -- apart from throwing $600 million down the drain (unless you want to count it as economic-stimulus spending) -- is to legitimize anti-immigrant demagogues' insane delusion that "fortifying" the border in any way whatsoever enhances our security or economic well-being, thereby making any kind of reality-based immigration reform even more impossible.

And of course this monstrous giveaway didn't pick up a single vote for a rational reform program, or redirect the discussion, except in the direction of accepting ever uglier and more dysfunctional xenophobic "thinking" on the subject of immigration. And so on down the policy-initiative line.
Maybe that's what the Obama administration's passivity and first-resort waving of the white flag are all about: They're fraidy-scared that Republicans will say bad things about them.
I suppose a better explanation, and one that my esteemed colleague Ian Welsh keeps coming back to, is that the Obama administration really hasn't compromised anything in terms of its beliefs and goals. Which is certainly a cleaner explanation than falling back on the sheer ineptitude of its nuts 'n' bolts "getting stuff done" apparatus -- though I really do think that these people have no clue as to how serious new initiatives do get done. (For an instructive counter-example, see below.)

I STILL SAY, THE QUESTION ABOUT ELIZABETH WARREN
ISN'T HER CONFIRMABILITY BUT HER NOMINATABILITY

One theme that recurs in much of the leftish response to the Judis piece is the heightened importance of the administration nominating Elizabeth Warren to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). It makes you wonder about these people.

Let me say again, they're dreaming. Yes, Treasury Sec'y "Tiny Tim" Geithner got shamed into denying that he was personally blocking such a nomination, and saying how much respect the administration had for Professor Warren, and that she would definitely be considered for the CFPB job.

Oh, sure, she'll be "considered." I stand by the suggestion I made when I wrote about this last month, that she'll be "considered" more or less thusly:

Dear Professor Warren:

After careful consideration, we've decided we would sooner eat poison than let you anywhere near the CFPB.

Have a nice life.

Yours truly,
A Senior White House Official

Again, if by chance political pressure forces her down their throats, you can be sure the bureau will be frozen out in terms of support and funding. Which is probably what's going to happen anyway, and that's in a Democratic administration. Can you imagine in, say, a Romney administration?

I shared the above opinion with a listserv and got the response, from someone with actual "inside" White House experience, that the funding can't be cut because of language Professor Warren herself got inserted in the enabling legislation. That seems to me hopelessly naive. To imagine that the White House that really wants to freeze an agency out can't find by rough count a jillion ways around a minor legislative impediment like that? Clueless as the Obama people seems to be in most respects with regard to the levers of government, trust me, they'll find all jillion of those ways. Leaving the presumptive consumer financial protectors, if any, whining to nobody who's listening, "But they can't do that! It says so!"

A QUICK NOTE ON "NOMINATABILITY"

The most conspicuous response I got to my previous post, titled "Of course Elizabeth Warren would be confirmable as CFPB head. The real question: Is she nominatable?," was a tweetback to Howie's tweet of the title from someone I formerly had big-time respect for, chiding us for going the way of Sarah Palin into making up words. Which successfully compounded insult with ignorance -- of the English language, and of course what is actually so buffoonish about Princess Sarah's linguistic blundering.

First off, I wonder how many dictionaries the writer consulted in declaring "nominatable" a made-up word. Personally, I would have proceeded very cautiously, because -- just like "confirmable," which by astounding coincidence appeared cheek by jowl with it -- it's a word formed according to an absolutely fundamental and familiar process of English coinage: adding "able" to a verb that indicates a process capable of being accomplished. Yes, a bit of levity was intended, also as a way of calling attention to the concept of nominatability, a word that is surely understandable to any reader of English, and for which there actually is no "official" word.

Poor Princess Sarah, when she was caught "refudiating," had been fed a fact that she was totally unequipped to argue: that writers frequently make up words, not least Shakespeare. Alas for the princess, "refudiate" wasn't any kind of neoloigism, it was simply a blunder by someone with an alarmingly shaky familiarity with the language. I would argue that "nominatable," by contrast, whether or not it conveyed a bit of fun as well as extra meaning to readers, was created in one of the most time-honored modes of word coinage. That is, assuming it truly doesn't exist in any dictionary.

Do you remember all the way back in 2008 when the top-level Obama administration appointments were being announced, and Tom Daschle was going to be both HHS secretary and health care policy coordinator? Until he wasn't going to be? And there was a growing sentiment among some of us that the perfect person for the job, way perfecter than Daschle, would be Howard Dean? After all, he has all that experience both as a medical practitioner and as a pol who has grappled in the real world with health care policy. It's a subject he understands in depth. It seemed so logical, especially considering that the Obama unaccountably hadn't tapped the governor for any other federal job.

It all seemed so logical. Except that the chances of its happening were, on a scale from zero to a zillion, minus infinity, for reasons both personal and political -- which turn out to be pretty much the same thing in this administration. Master Rahm hates Howard Dean, to put it as mildly as I've heard it put. Dean isn't by history or temperament all that "liberal," but he's everything Rahm isn't, and loathes: a decent, socially concerned, conscientious public servant who believes that solutions to our problems must be found which work for the public at large. The Obama circle believes that any changes that are made to the way we govern ourselves must be done without in any way inconveniencing the country's financial and political elite class.

And I'm suggesting that, transposed to the financial world, Elizabeth Warren is Howard Dean redux. The only way the Rahmists would give even the slightest consideration to a Warren CFPB appointment is if it could achieve the opposite result from that fantasized by my deluded colleagues on the Left: if they're satisfied that it's possible to make it absolutely impossible for her to cause any disruption to the megacorporate status quo and in the process, by locking her into the job, silencing her as a potential critical voice of the job done by the first CFPB director.


HAVE WE FORGOTTEN WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE WHEN
A PRESIDENT TRIES TO SELL HIS ECONOMIC PROGRAM?

In his TNR piece Judis offers one example that I think we should all ponder.

Contrast Obama?s attempt to develop a politics to justify his economic program with what Reagan did in 1982. Faced with steadily rising unemployment, which went from 8.6 percent in January to 10.4 percent in November, Reagan and his political staff, which included James Baker, Mike Deaver, and Ed Rollins, forged a strategy early that year calling for voters to ?stay the course? and blaming the current economic troubles on Democratic profligacy. ?We are clearing away the economic wreckage that was dumped in our laps,? Reagan declared.

Democrats accused them of playing ?the blame game,? but the strategy, followed to the letter by the White House for ten months, worked. The Republicans were predicted to lose as many as 50 House seats, but they lost only 26 and broke even in the Senate.

Some commentators have noted Reagan?s popularity was even lower than Obama?s. But, on key economic questions, he did much better than Obama and the Democrats are currently performing?and voters expressed far greater patience with Reagan?s program. According to polls, even as the unemployment rate climbed, a narrow plurality still expressed confidence that Reagan?s program would help the economy. On the eve of the election, with the unemployment rate at a postwar high, a New York Times/CBS News poll found that 60 percent of likely voters thought Reagan?s economic program would eventually help the country. That?s a sign of a successful political operation. If Obama could command those numbers, Democrats could seriously limit their losses in November. But Obama has not been able to develop a narrative that could convince people to trust him and the Democrats.

#

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Straight talk from Krugman on Social Security

Krugman takes on Social Security and the Catfood Commission today:

ocial Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund. The program won’t have to turn to Congress for help or cut benefits until or unless the trust fund is exhausted, which the program’s actuaries don’t expect to happen until 2037 — and there’s a significant chance, according to their estimates, that that day will never come.

Meanwhile, an aging population will eventually (over the course of the next 20 years) cause the cost of paying Social Security benefits to rise from its current 4.8 percent of G.D.P. to about 6 percent of G.D.P. To give you some perspective, that’s a significantly smaller increase than the rise in defense spending since 2001, which Washington certainly didn’t consider a crisis, or even a reason to rethink some of the Bush tax cuts.

So where do claims of crisis come from? To a large extent they rely on bad-faith accounting. In particular, they rely on an exercise in three-card monte in which the surpluses Social Security has been running for a quarter-century don’t count — because hey, the program doesn’t have any independent existence; it’s just part of the general federal budget — while future Social Security deficits are unacceptable — because hey, the program has to stand on its own.

It would be easy to dismiss this bait-and-switch as obvious nonsense, except for one thing: many influential people — including Alan Simpson, co-chairman of the president’s deficit commission — are peddling this nonsense.

The major problem is that in the entire 75 years of its existence, there's been a seriously committed conservative effort to undermine it. At this point, Alan Simpson could actually be convinced of the nonsense and arguing, in his own mind, in good faith. Or he could be a craven liar, which is probably just as likely. It's, as Krugman says, it's an ideological battle for them: "its success undermines their claim that government is always the problem, never the solution."

Thus, arguing from reality with its well-known liberal bias won't work. What will work is bashing politicians over the head with the fact that 85% of Americans oppose cutting Social Security to pay off the deficit. There's a reason the Democrats are running ads on the GOP's efforts to gut Social Security. Dems will need to remember that factoid when the Catfood Commission comes out with its recommendations this fall. Any cuts to Social Security on the Democrats' watch will destroy them politically.

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ugman-on-Social-Security

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Paul Krugman: Attacking Social Security

Frames are beginning to take clear shape for the midterms, and yes, Social Security will be under attack. While Republicans won't necessarily push privatization, they'll try to make points with the usual fear tactics about how the "Social Security Crisis" will bankrupt the country. Paul Krugman has some things to say about that.

The math is wrong and so is their attitude

Social Security?s attackers claim that they?re concerned about the program?s financial future. But their math doesn?t add up, and their hostility isn?t really about dollars and cents. Instead, it?s about ideology and posturing. And underneath it all is ignorance of or indifference to the realities of life for many Americans.

What crisis?

So where do claims of crisis come from? To a large extent they rely on bad-faith accounting. In particular, they rely on an exercise in three-card monte in which the surpluses Social Security has been running for a quarter-century don?t count ? because hey, the program doesn?t have any independent existence; it?s just part of the general federal budget ? while future Social Security deficits are unacceptable ? because hey, the program has to stand on its own.

What's really going on here?

What?s really going on here? Conservatives hate Social Security for ideological reasons: its success undermines their claim that government is always the problem, never the solution. But they receive crucial support from Washington insiders, for whom a declared willingness to cut Social Security has long served as a badge of fiscal seriousness, never mind the arithmetic.

There's much more to Krugman's article, all worthy of attention. Bottom line is easy: Social Security should not be on the table. At all.

Read The Full Article:
http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/paul-krugman-attacking-social-security

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C'mon, you racist retards: I know you can be even
more stupid and hateful than this

Personally, I don't think anybody who seeks favors and answers from an invisible sky wizard should be allowed to build anything, anywhere, ever.  Or drive. Or vote. But until that blessed day comes, all the freakazoids are equally brainless and dangerous, so there's no point in discriminating.

Not that the lack of a point is stopping northern Kentuckians from shitting themselves over a planned house of worship terrorist training center in their very idio-christo midst.

Media Czech:

What happens when vile opportunistic bigots like Sarah Palin, Frank Gaffney, Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity fan the flames of anti-Muslim bigotry and paranoia? It spreads. Fast.

And it's hit Florence, KY:

FLORENCE - The announcement that a mosque is being planned near Mall Road in Florence has drawn a strong reaction from some in the community.

Florence city officials say they have gotten several calls about the proposed worship center and a flier is being distributed in the city's neighborhoods.

There is also a website run by a Boone County resident that posts anti-Islamic messages and encourages people to "Stop the Mosque."

Oh, and here's the lovely site. There, you can learn about how Islam should be abolished in America and how they already occupy the White House.

The site takes comments. Ahem.

Until then, bigots, good luck with embracing the communist takeover of private property in defense of religious tyranny. You're making Newt Gingrich proud.

An anonymous commenter adds:

Florence is located in Boone County, location of the Creationist Museum. I'm embarassed to admit that I'm from the same area, but I never questioned Christians' right to build that ridiculous ode to an anti-science and anti-commonsense agenda.

Just for shits and giggles, how about some real American common sense from the 9-11 families? Who support the proposed not-a-mosque-not-at-Ground-Zero.

As plans to build an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero in New York City become political fodder for the fall elections on a national scale, it's become shorthand to imply that all 9/11 families oppose the erection of the mosque two blocks from the site where terrorists downed the World Trade Center nearly nine years ago.

But in fact, no cohesive position has emerged from the thousands of 9/11 families who have been politically influential on many issues in the past. One group which has opposed war has come out strongly in favor of the mosque project, known as Cordoba House. Others have avoided even addressing the issue.

"There is no simple, singular 9/11 group who really should or could speak for all 9/11 family members," said Donna Marsh O'Connor of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a coalition of more than 250 families which recently endorsed the mosque. Since the endorsement, the membership numbers have grown, she said.

And that silly bitch all over Faux claiming she speaks for the families, who will writhe forever in excruciating torture if we don't kill every raghead in the country right now this minute?

Yeah, she's lying.

The most cursory googling shows that she's been advocating a string of right-wing positions going back over the last decade. Indeed, she's the cofounder with Liz Cheney of Keeping America Safe.

Also very worth noting is that none of the 9/11 Families groups who actually seem to be membership organizations made up of families of the victims seem to have taken positions on the mosque issue at all. I looked at the websites of several such organizations. And they each contain 'about' pages with some information about the organization, its membership and in most cases boards of directors. The website of Burlingame's group, 9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong America, contains no such information. But it's statement of purpose does give some sense of viewpoint: "The war against sharia is a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity."

PZ Myers gets the last word. He quotes Jeffrey Rowland:

There's been a lot of pointless bickering lately about a Mosque being built near where Nine Eleven happened. Exactly what is a "safe distance" to put a Mosque away from a place so that it doesn't have some imaginary effect on it? I'd prefer a ban on ALL religious buildings being built within 1,000 miles of a place where ANY MEMBER of ANY SPECIFIC religious organization did some harm unto society.

This is the advantage of being a non-religious person. We just look at situations like this and scratch our heads, then we move on and try to figure out how to make life less terrible in ways that can actually help.

I like his ban. It would instantly free up a lot of real estate for productive use.

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Prop 8: Ninth Circuit Grants Stay; Marriages On
Hold

The motions panel's order is succinct:

Appellants’ motion for a stay of the district court’s order of August 4, 2010 pending appeal is GRANTED. The court sua sponte orders that this appeal be expedited pursuant to Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 2. The provisions of Ninth Circuit Rule 31-2.2(a) (pertaining to grants of time extensions) shall not apply to this appeal. This appeal shall be calendared during the week of December 6, 2010, at The James R. Browning Courthouse in San Francisco, California.

The previously established briefing schedule is vacated. The opening brief is now due September 17, 2010. The answering brief is due October 18, 2010. The reply brief is due November 1, 2010. In addition to any issues appellants wish to raise on appeal, appellants are directed to include in their opening brief a discussion of why this appeal should not be dismissed for lack of Article III standing. See Arizonans For Official English v. Arizona, 520 U.S. 43, 66 (1997).

[Pleadings regarding the stay are posted here.]

Translation:

• Same-sex marriages remain on hold at least the next few months.
• They're not messing around.  Fed. R. App. P. 2 means normal time limits are suspended; this case is being heard fast, and with no delays.
• And this panel -- which likely isn't the one which will actually hear the appeal -- also is skeptical as to whether the Prop 8 proponents have standing here.

On that last point -- yes, it would be nice if this were all over and Judge Walker's decision couldn't be challenged by appellate courts.  But as a matter of democratic self-governance, I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea that a majority of citizens can pass a state initiative and, depending on what federal judge is drawn, lose the case for its constitutionality but lack the capacity to seek appellate review if the Governor and Attorney General are opposed.  That's not to say that Article III standing has been met here -- maybe California state law needs to be amended to explicitly grant initiative proponents such rights going forward -- but I do get a bit of the oogies about the idea of an unreviewable decision.

Lots of smart people have written about the standing issue; here's a compilation of links.  As Slate's Emily Bazelon writes:

[I]sn't it odd to think that a majority of the voters could pass a law, and then just because the governor and the attorney general don't like it, no one gets to stand up for it on appeal? Especially after they've been allowed to do so at trial? It's an outcome that allows a court challenge to trump voter preferences in a way that just seems undemocratic and out of joint... [T]o deny the Prop 8 proponents standing would be to get to the heart of the case for gay marriage, because it would show that "their interests"—the interests of the gay-marriage opponents—weren't harmed by Walker's decision. "That is, they lose nothing as a result of gay marriage being legal." It sounds great rhetorically. But it's declaring victory before actually winning on the merits. And to win because your opponent wasn't even allowed to fight is not at all like winning after he fought to the death and you creamed him. Or like winning because he saw your far superior strength, and forfeited.

We're right on the merits, and at least some aspects of Judge Walker's opinion will obtain at least five votes from the Supremes.  Don't be afraid.

Finally: yes, the LGBT plaintiffs could now appeal this decision granting the stay to the Supreme Court of the United States, where Justice Kennedy would be initially hearing it. I wouldn't expect it.

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http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/e8bAS8loL24/-Prop-8:-Ninth-Circuit
-Grants-Stay;-Marriages-On-Hold

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WTH Harry Reid Comes Out Against Cordoba House

Ugh. Why is it so difficult to find Democrats not eager to bow to the craven fear-mongering of Republican rivals? TPM:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has now spoken out on the Muslim community center in New York -- saying that while the organizers are free to construct the project, it should be moved somewhere else.

"The First Amendment protects freedom of religion. Senator Reid respects that but thinks that the mosque should be built some place else," said a statement from Reid spokesman Jim Manley. "If the Republicans are being sincere, they would help us pass this long overdue bill to help the first responders whose health and livelihoods have been devastated because of their bravery on 911, rather than continuing to block this much-needed legislation."

Fer cryin' out loud. Reid is running scared because of rival Sharron Angle's taunts that Reid is Obama's waterboy by the lizard brains who want to equate all Muslims with terrorism and 9/11.

"As the Majority Leader, Harry Reid is usually President Obama's mouthpiece in the U.S. Senate, and yet he remains silent on this issue. Reid has a responsibility to stand up and say no to the mosque at Ground Zero or once again side with President Obama---this time against the families of 9/11 victims. America is waiting."

And of course, he caves. Saying that they have a First Amendment right to build it isn't that revolutionary a stance to take. One would hope that the Majority Leader of the Senate has at least a cursory understanding of the Constitution (which is, by the way, more than we can say for Angle). But to say that they should move it is to play into the irrational hatred and bigotry of the lowest common denominator and something for which Reid should be wholly ashamed. Greg Sargent:

Despite Reid's reaffirmation of this right, his response is still weak and indefensible. And it leaves the President hanging after he took a big risk to do the right thing. Obama did not explicitly endorse the decision to build the center. But Obama did say that if the group does proceed with that decision, we must respect that decision, in accordance with American values.

Reid is not willing to say that. Rather, he's saying, in effect, that even if he supports the group's right to build the center, he's not willing to respect the decision to do so. That's unacceptable, and leaves Obama isolated at a very sensitive moment.

What's more, it's unclear why coming out against the plan in the manner Reid did is even good politics for Democrats at this point. Reid basically threw the whole Dem caucus under the bus: With the Senate leader at odds with the president, the media will press every Senate Dem to declare which side they're on.

Dumb, Harry. On every level. Even Republican advisers like Mark McKinnon think that pursuing this is a loser for Republicans. Why do you need to be a loser too?

Want to tell Harry that he needs to smarten up? Contact him here.

UPDATE: Haaretz is claiming that the Cordoba House has decided to move, something Cordoba House representatives are denying.

Read The Full Article:
http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/wth-harry-reid-comes-out-against-cord

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Top Israeli Strategist: Jeff Goldberg Severely
Spun

This is a must read.

The brilliant young writer, Eli Clifton, from Lobelog interviews Yossi Alpher -- an Israeli with decades of intelligence experience in the IDF and the Mossad.

Bottom line: Jeff Goldberg's ATLANTIC piece about the likelihood of an Israeli attack on Iran is so much spin.

Last time (Iraq) it was Goldberg who was doing the spinning. This time he got spun.

The Israelis who spoke to him told him what he wanted to hear and what they wanted him to put out to the particular crowd (that includes me) who pays more attention to the exceedingly parochial former IDF prison warden than his writing merits.

Clifton's interview with Alpher is, in addition to smacking down Goldberg, a strong piece on the whole Iran/Israel nuclear issue. Lesson: you don't read Jeff Goldberg to find out what's happening. You read him to find out what the Israeli right and AIPAC want to happen.

In other words, read him. What his friends want, they usually get. And it affects us all.

Israel Defense Forces - Middle East - Jeff Goldberg - Warfare and Conflict - Israel

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tpmcafe-main/~3/Sb8j9wNSGIs/

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