SmartRemarks

Just a quick observation prompted by events in recent weeks. These events are unrelated, yet they form a pattern. Together, they put Washington on the hot seat and shine a spotlight on its (questionable) ability to act in the public interest.

Specifically, if…

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Tags: Congress, Constitution, energy, government, immigration, media, Senate, Wall Street

Either way, it’s definitely disturbing, and (a term I don’t often use) un-American.

What is? The fact that the Obama White House has ordered the CIA to assassinate an American citizen, wherever and whenever he may be found. A man who’s been charged with no crime, much less convicted of one.

The ostensible reason? “Terrorism,” of course.

That this is absolutely unconscionable and inexcusable should go without saying. But apparently it doesn’t, since people I know to be smart, thoughtful liberals have been making excuses for it. So let’s talk about it for a bit.

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Tags: al-Awlaki, assassination, CIA, Constitution, due process, Glenn Greenwald, Obama, terrorism

Yesterday’s inbox contained a political e-mail message forwarded by my girlfriend’s parents. They’re not especially political people; their sensibilities (to the extent they’ll even discuss them) tend toward a somewhat mushy moderate conservatism, the kind of folks who instinctively vote Republican, even though the party’s center of gravity has moved far away from them. Indeed, they even said as much in the forwarded message—”you’re much more interested in politics than either of us”—yet they invited a response, practically asking for an informed rebuttal even as they implicitly treated the viral message as credible and worthy of attention.

Which, once I read it, was really hard to believe.

This is the message they forwarded, word for word:
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Tags: Congress, conservatism, Constitution, e-mail, government, health care, insurance, Medicare, Michael Connelly, Supreme Court

What have we learned this week, boys and girls? We’ve learned that every time we think we know the worst about Dick Cheney, every time we think we understand the fetid depths of the clandestine government that sick fuck and his neocon cabal were running out of the Bush White House, every time we fool ourselves into thinking some sense of closure might actually be in sight… another rock gets turned over to reveal something new and even more disgusting underneath.

Attorney General Eric Holder was already considering appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the details and extent of the torture regime set up by the previous administration. (Or “brutal interrogation practices,” as Newsweek put it… but let’s not mince words; torture is clearly defined in law and precedent, and the mainstream press wouldn’t hesitate to call it what it is were any government but ours involved.)

But even while that story was still developing, before any decision had been made, the news broke about a CIA “program” that had existed since 2001, kept entirely secret from Congress (and even from new agency director Leon Panetta) at the direction of Dick Cheney… and then that this mysterious program apparently involved covert assassination squads.

And the closer you look at the details, the more repulsive and arcanely interconnected it all gets.

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Tags: Congress, Constitution, death squads, Dick Cheney, DOJ, Eric Holder, international, John Yoo, torture

On June 12, even as the election in Iran was happening and sweeping everything else out of the news cycle (a subject on which much digital ink has been spilled, to which I have nothing to add except that it’s nice to see a population care enough about democracy to take to the streets over it; that Obama has been responding to the situation with admirable discretion; and that the conservatives criticizing him are idiots who understand nothing about public diplomacy and would probably still attack him if he released a statement celebrating motherhood and apple pie)… the Obama administration did something unfortunate that produced an incensed reaction from observers in the civil liberties and GLBT communities.

Namely, the Department of Justice submitted a legal motion [pdf] putting this administration on the record defending the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, and arguing to dismiss Smelt v. United States, the first same-sex-marriage related case to reach the federal courts.

This isn’t about the merits of equal marriage per se (which Obama has long been on the record as opposing, unfortunately). It’s a challenge to the validity of DOMA, under which the federal government (and other states) are not obliged to recognize same-sex marriages that are legally constituted in states that allow them (as is the case with these plaintiffs)—never mind that pesky “full faith and credit” clause, among other Constitutional provisions. It is, in short, a law that formally enshrines discrimination.

It was a bad law when Bill Clinton signed it, and it’s a worse one today now that the situation it contemplates is not merely hypothetical. And it’s a law that candidate Obama loudly opposed.

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Tags: Constitution, DOJ, DOMA, equal marriage, GLBT rights, Obama

When people look back years from now, they may well mark spring of 2009 as the point when America really changed its attitude toward same-sex marriage. Call it “gay marriage,” call it what you will—I prefer the simple descriptive term “equal marriage”—it seems clear that we’ve passed a tipping point.

At the start of this year, equal marriage laws were on the books in only one state:  trailblazer Massachusetts. Since then the list has grown to include Connecticut (following through on a court order from last year), Iowa (also in response to the state’s high court), then Vermont and Maine and (as of this week) New Hampshire, in each case enacted not by court order but voluntarily by the state legislatures. Meanwhile there are bills working their way through the legislatures of New York and Pennsylvania. On the next tier down, three states (New Jersey, Washington, and Oregon) recognize same-sex civil unions, and Washington, D.C. has recently joined Nevada and California in recognizing slightly more nebulous “domestic partnerships.”

There are still setbacks—notably California’s regrettable Proposition 8, which passed last November and was upheld (on very narrow grounds) by the California Supreme Court—but compared to just five years ago, when the issue seemed like a sure-thing hot-button winner for right-wingers across the country in the 2004 election cycle, the change has been remarkable to behold.

It stuns me to realize, given that I used to work for a GLBT-rights organization, that I haven’t written about this topic before. Then again, perhaps that’s because in the circles I move in, it’s just not a controversial issue. Everyone understands that equal marriage is quite simply the right thing to do, and that those who oppose it are either trogolodytes or politicians trying to appeal to troglodytes. (And yes, this issue is another one of Obama’s shortcomings.) There is, quite simply, no remotely plausible argument against it. 

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Tags: Constitution, equal marriage, GLBT rights, polling, relationships

Where did we leave off? 

I was writing about the difficulty of finding something meaningful to say in the wake of all the full-time, professional political bloggers out there. Too often I feel like I’m just offering a synthesis of what others have said, rather than any new insight.

Perhaps I’m holding myself to an arbitrarily high standard. Posting seems easier on political discussion forums, where I can just spout off some quick impressions of the issue of the day without necessarily worrying about providing proper background and context for everything, and where the ebb and flow of responses from other posters guides the structure and flow of the discussion, rather than having to organize it entirely on my own. Nonetheless, I ramble on… 

Thus:  I was also writing about the political environment in which the Obama administration operates, and the political pressures that have led the president to make some decisions that are very disappointing in the eyes of civil libertarians, and indeed of concerned citizens in general. Which, in the wake of events this past week relating to the disposition of prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere, leads us to the perplexing questions:

Why has Barack Obama backtracked so quickly from so many of the progressive policy expectations of his supporters?

and, moreover,

WHY does the mass media keep treating Dick Cheney as a credible public figure?

One of these questions may seem deeply relevant, the other facile… but the answers are connected at a deep level.

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Tags: blogging, climate, Congress, conservatism, Constitution, Dick Cheney, energy, Guantanamo, health care, international, journalism, libertarianism, media, Obama, Reid, Republicans, torture

If anyone wonders how (A) a nation can move step-by-step down the path toward fascism, or (B) why the mainstream press in this country is held in such increasingly dismal regard, this week’s cover story in Newsweek provides a searing case study.

Co-authors Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas—both award-winning, Ivy League-educated journalists who move in the highest circles of academia, media, and politics; IOW, the very definition of establishment credibility—have decided that one of the key issues facing the incoming Obama administration, when confronting the boundaries of presidential power, is (as the cover blurb puts it), “What Would Dick [Cheney] Do?”

And Editor-in-Chief Jon Meacham—he who recently resuscitated the meme that “America is a center-right country”—heartily endorses this angle, writing inside the magazine that the cover feature addresses how “the urgent question now is whether President Obama will hew to [the anti-Cheney] dogma or whether, confronted with the realities of office, he will begin to see virtue in the antiterror apparatus Cheney helped Bush create.”

This, in the aftermath of an election that decisively and unequivocally repudiated the disastrous policies of Bush and Cheney—even Bush himself used the word “repudiated” in his semi-self-aware press conference today!—is what our establishment media wants us thinking about.

Where does one begin?

Well, with getting one’s gorge to subside. But after that…

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Tags: Constitution, Dick Cheney, fascism, FISA, George W. Bush, journalism, media, Obama, Rachel Maddow

Once in a while it’s nice to get away from the computer for a couple of days. That’s what my lady love and I did this past weekend, predominantly so as to enjoy the final weekend of the Chicago Humanities Festival.

One of the things I enjoy most about big city life is the cultural amenities, and the CHF is a distinctive one. For two weeks every autumn, the CHF (a nonprofit organization) invites scores of prominent writers, scholars, thinkers and doers to town to offer public lectures and discussions. The highlight last week was David McCullough, as I wrote at the time.

This Saturday, among other things, we heard a group of urban planning experts discuss the prospects for high-speed rail in the U.S. (considerably better than they were a few years ago, given the now-obviously-dire future of fossil fuels), and enjoyed listening to Judge Frank Easterbrook, Harvard Law Prof. Laurence Tribe (a former instructor of Barack Obama), and U of Chicago Law Prof. Geoffrey Stone (a former colleague of Obama) discuss the current state of Constitutional Interpretation.

On Sunday, we heard physicist Ronald Mallett discuss the possibility of time travel; saw a panel of scientists including (via hologram!) Ray Kurzweil discuss the past, present, and future of human evolution, including the accelerating sophistication and likely effects of information technology; and saw Naomi Klein discuss her recent book, Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, in the context of the current economic crisis and the potential for change under Obama.

History, law, science, politics, economics, and more… all wrapped up in a friendly format with Q&As and book signings, all at $5 a head per session. The large and diverse audiences that the event draws every year are heartening evidence that our society has not yet totally surrendered to anti-intellectualism. Taken all together, it’s a tonic, a reminder of the vast world of ideas out there in which we all swim, a reprieve from the day-to-day world and its mundane concerns. And it’s a good reminder that there’s more to life than just what you can find on the internet. What I saw this weekend will certainly influence my future reading and thinking, as it always does… and this time it’ll influence what I write on this blog, as well.

Tags: Constitution, Humanities Festival, Kurzweil