Daily Archives: March 13, 2010

International Women’s Day at the White House

The White House commemorated International Women’s Day earlier this week with a reception at the White House that included accomplished women of varying professions meeting accomplished young women from area high schools. The WH put up vide of this event — this is about 40 mins long, but the first 7 or so are the Intro by Michele Obama followed by President Obama (about 13 mins or so) talking about the importance of women as fully vested players in American civic and economic life. This first part, where Michele Obama speaks before her husband does is delightful:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr-SefjSFDk[/youtube]

Weekend Open Thread

Welcome to a rain-soaked, windy open thread. I don’t know about you but I think I’m actually living in a marsh. Are you ready for an open thread?

Texas decided to cut Thomas Jefferson out of its history standards. He so inconvenient after all, with his insistence that there is a separation between church and state.

The Texas Board of Education has been meeting this week to revise its social studies curriculum. During the past three days, “the board’s far-right faction wielded their power to shape lessons on the civil rights movement, the U.S. free enterprise system and hundreds of other topics”:

– To avoid exposing students to “transvestites, transsexuals and who knows what else,” the Board struck the curriculum’s reference to “sex and gender as social constructs.”

– The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum, “replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin.”

– The Board refused to require that “students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others.”

– The Board struck the word “democratic” from the description of the U.S. government, instead terming it a “constitutional republic.”

All week we’ve been discussing incrementalism and progressive legislation. Steve Benen picks this up and discusses some important legislation and how they have changed:

On all of the major progressive breakthroughs from recent generations, it’s not even a close call.

When Medicaid passed, for example, it did very little for low-income adults, which is now seen as the point of the program. There were no doubt progressive advocates who, at the time of its passage, feared that it wasn’t ambitious enough, and that if they didn’t get improvements in the bill up front, they wouldn’t happen. With the benefit of hindsight, we know those fears were incorrect.

When Medicare passed, it all but ignored people with disabilities, didn’t cover prescription drugs, and made no allowances for home health services. It was, at best, a limited program at its inception. There may have been liberal Dems who thought that if they didn’t get improvements in the bill up front, they wouldn’t happen. With the benefit of hindsight, we know those fears were incorrect.

When Social Security passed, the benefits were negligible, and the program excluded agricultural workers, domestic workers, the self-employed, railroad employees, government employees, clergy, and those who worked for non-profits. The original Social Security bill offered no benefits for dependents or survivors, and included no cost-of-living increases. There were plenty of liberals at the time who thought Dems had watered down the plan to the point where its value had all but disappeared, and that if they didn’t get improvements in the bill up front, they wouldn’t happen. With the benefit of hindsight, we know those fears were incorrect.

Even the Civil Rights Act, in order to secure passage, needed to drop its voting rights provision. It wasn’t there up front, but it happened soon after.

Mr. President, One More Thing Before You Go

Well, it looks like we finally might be getting down to it. After all this time, there might soon be an actual health care reform bill for the President to sign. According to Karen Tumulty at Swampland, the House is looking to schedule a vote on the Senate’s health care bill for next Friday or Saturday. The main hold-up at the moment is the CBO score on the reconciliation package. Assuming that comes back in the next few days, and with favorable numbers, the vote can be scheduled.

The original most recent deadline of St. atrick’s Day (in honor of O’Bama’s heritage?) was set primarily because the President was scheduled to fly to Indonesia and Australia on Wednesday. Due to the historic and imminent nature of the House vote, Obama has decided to delay his departure to the land of the vegemite sandwich until Sunday.

How exactly the House will pass the legislation is still up in the air. They may just simply vote on the Senate bill, send the reconciliation package to the Senate, and trust that the upper house will promptly pass it. But, since the two houses don’t much trust each other and sound like two teenagers hanging up the phone (“You pass it first….No, you pass it first…No, you pass it first…OK, we’ll pass it together — one, two, three….”) there are a couple little maneuvers the House could try. Either way, it looks like maybe next Saturday we’ll all be glued to C-SPAN to watch the vote. We will all be glued to C-SPAN, right?

Equating Morality with the Checkbook

Delaware Politics and Sussex County Angel have posts up (it is actually the same post by blogger Angel Clark) arguing for the morality of the death penalty in Delaware. But Angel Clark does not argue morality. She argues the fiscal aspect of the death penalty.

Despite its controversy, the death penalty is still legal in Delaware. [..] Since 1991 there have been 14 legal executions in Delaware including the last hanging in the state (1996). The youngest of these was 27 at the time of death and each committed at least one murder. One particularly gruesome case was Brian Steckel. Steckel was executed in 2005 (the most recent legal execution in Delaware) on three counts of first degree murder. He raped and killed Sandra Lee Long and then set her on fire. After this he wrote letters to her mother gloating about his deeds. It cost approximately $66 a day to incarcerate this creature (I will not call him a man). That’s $24,090 a year. Despite the “immorality” people claim are associated with legal executions, I consider it to be more immoral to the mother of Sandra Lee Long to force her to pay to keep Steckel alive.

Um, what? One would expect a post on the morality of the use of the death penalty, whether here in Delaware, or elsewhere throughout the country, that we at least talk about the morality of death penalty itself. Is it right for society to kill, when it is quite clear in both the new and the old Testament that killing is a sin and immoral. Is it right for society to stoop to the level of the barbaric criminal and act in the same fashion (and Angel does talk about this, saying lethal injection is clearly not as barbaric as bludgeoning someone to death, and that is true, but both have the same end result, which is the real issue).

I am agnostic when it comes to the death penalty. I think killing is wrong, whether the state or a criminal does it. But there are just some crimes for which no other punishment is appropriate. For example, serial killers and terrorists quilty of mass murder, like Osama bin Laden. But what I don’t think about is the cost of incarcerating the criminal, whether they are awaiting their punishment on death row or spending their life in prison. To base a decision to kill someone on financial considerations is what is immoral. Indeed, Angel overpays her hand here by saying the mother of the victim is being forced to pay to keep the killer of her daughter alive. Um, no she is not. Not out of her own pocket anyway. It is not like the State of Delaware has presented an invoice to the mother demanding payment. And if we start arguing that people should not have their tax dollars go to pay for things that they disagree with, well we will have a problem on our hands, because many people have a problem with paying for war, and still others have a problem with their money funding faith based organizations, and I could go on and on.

Markell Strips Down

Governor Markell will be joining the other insane swimmers this afternoon in Rehoboth, as they all take part in the Polar Bear Plunge. I believe the Polar Bear Plunge was postponed from February due to one of the many blizzards we received this winter, so the Governor is being wise in doing it now rather than when the air temperature would have been below freezing. Sure, the water temp will still be cold and heart stopping, but at least the air temp is 50.

I guess this is a tradition now, as I frighteningly recall Governor Minner taking the plunge as well.

Mr. Reagan, We’re Ready for Our Close-Up

With Fox Noise snapping up Republican leaders to the soft chairs of punditry, will there be anyone left to run against Obama in 2012? Mike Huckabee recently said that his is quite content on being on television.

“It’s kind of given me a new perspective of the power of the media more so than the power of good policy. Running for president did not necessarily cause people to say ‘Oh, I know who you are.’ But being on Fox News has. It’s really embarrassing when you’re running for president of the United States and nobody seems to have any clue.”

Another 2012 Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin is continuing on the celebrity train with an appearance on Jay Leno and even working on creating a TV series, while Newt Gringrich — who is awaiting God to tell him what to do — has created an industry of . . . well . . . being Newt Gingrich. Criticizing from the Roger Ailes lap is easy, but real governing is hard. As we’ve seen time after time, Republicans distaste of government makes them totally ineffectual at governing.  Though the spotlight might bring a glitter and adulation to these GOP celebrities, it can also wilt any real or imagined political power they may have.

Warren Redlich Speaks

Warren Redlich, who owns the campaign domain for the Christine O’Donnell’s 2008 Senate campaign website gives us the scoop on his interactions with the O’Donnell team.

Comment by Warren Redlich on 13 March 2010 at 8:04 am:
Hi – I’m Warren Redlich. There isn’t much of a connection. Here’s the short story:

One of my hobbies is acquiring expiring domain names and “recycling” the websites. One of my favorite types to acquire are old campaign websites.

I typically restore as much of the old site as possible and call them “legacy campaign websites.” It’s a little bit of my own contribution to history, and a little bit of self-promotion – I put links from the sites to other sites that I own.

In some cases I also value the potential political speech in case that candidate runs for something again (if I don’t like them I can criticize them effectively). Usually those are for candidates in my area – philsteck.com and traceybrooks.com are good examples.

So I did this with the christineodonnell08.com domain name, winning a GoDaddy auction in February of 2009. At a certain point she or her campaign team noticed.

They’ve contacted me a few times over the past 13 months. They were not polite. On more than one occasion they have threatened to sue me. Since I’m a lawyer and I actually know what I’m doing, the threats were not scary.

I should note that no one else noticed this because, well, the site then looked mostly as it did before. And I had offered to post a prominent link to her new campaign site. That offer was ignored.

Then something changed.

They filed a copyright notice with GoDaddy. This shut down the site. I give credit to GoDaddy, because they make it easy to respond to the copyright issue and they restored the site very quickly.

Since I am no longer able to preserve the history of the campaign – it would violate their copyright – I put up new content. The current site is the result.

So what does this mean?
A. Her campaign team is not very smart. They let the domain name lapse which is a somewhat common mistake, but the best campaign teams know better. I know this because I hunt them and some of the most desirable old sites keep getting renewed.

B. They are also arrogant, and unwise. If you’re going to threaten to sue a lawyer, you better know what you’re doing.

C. They don’t think ahead. What did they think was going to happen when they filed the copyright notice?

D. All of these point to something else. They never tried to understand me. It never occurred to them that I believe what I’m doing has value. They never considered my investment in the site (mostly time but also money). They never tried to work with me – something I was willing to do.

So what does that say about their candidate?

Warren

What I think it says – amateur hour. But we already knew that, didn’t we.

Thanks Warren for sharing your story.

I Have The World’s Smallest Violin

My violin weeps for Bart Stupak. He went from the U.S.’s most important Congressman to irrelevant. He went to a publication that has only the Democratic party’s best interest in mind, the National Review Online to have a pity party complain:

Sitting in an airport, on his way home to Michigan, Rep. Bart Stupak, a pro-life Democrat, is chagrined. “They’re ignoring me,” he says, in a phone interview with National Review Online. “That’s their strategy now. The House Democratic leaders think they have the votes to pass the Senate’s health-care bill without us. At this point, there is no doubt that they’ve been able to peel off one or two of my twelve. And even if they don’t have the votes, it’s been made clear to us that they won’t insert our language on the abortion issue.”

According to Stupak, that group of twelve pro-life House Democrats — the “Stupak dozen” — has privately agreed for months to vote ‘no’ on the Senate’s health-care bill if federal funding for abortion is included in the final legislative language. Now, in the debate’s final hours, Stupak says the other eleven are coming under “enormous” political pressure from both the White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.). “I am a definite ‘no’ vote,” he says. “I didn’t cave. The others are having both of their arms twisted, and we’re all getting pounded by our traditional Democratic supporters, like unions.”

Stupak was not going to get what he wanted – which was to outlaw abortion. He should be happy, the Hyde Amendment is now going to be further codified into law and poor women are going to have trouble obtaining abortions. Stupak overplayed his hand by his continuing lies about the bill – lies so blatant that even mainstream news organizations like ABC ran pieces about how he’s lying.

Stupak should be a lesson for other Democrats – being a blockade to the Democrat’s top legislative priority does not end well for you. Now there’s lots of questions about Stupak’s connections to the Family and his residence at the Cheat Street House. He’s even attracted a primary opponent who is having great success with fundraising, Connie Saltonstall.