Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and John Cornyn (Texas) have sided with the state of Arizona in its battle with the Department of Justice over a controversial state immigration law.
Graham’s declaration of opposition to the Justice Department law suit comes as a surprise because Graham called the Arizona law unconstitutional in April.
There are, of course, political reasons that make Charlotte a logical choice for national Democrats. President Obama won North Carolina by 14,000 votes in 2008, and a national convention -- with the spotlight and the money that go with it -- could help keep the state competitive, which is looking like a long shot right now. It would be a Democratic showcase in the South, a strong region for the GOP and right next door to marquee Republican and Newsweek cover subject Nikki Haley. Republicans have already chosen Tampa as its 2012 convention site.
Secret civil-rights activist and Eye Doctor Army of One Rand Paul, who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. all the way to whatever business said "No Negros."
The need for that Washington-Silicon Valley mind-meld could not have been any more obvious than this May, when a House subcommittee began exploring ways to rewrite evidence rules that govern e-mails and documents stored in distant databases.
“I think I will acknowledge at the outset how ill-prepared technologically I feel to engage in this discussion,” Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.) told the House Judiciary subcommittee that handles civil liberties. “I feel like a Neanderthal in this area.”
He wasn’t alone. Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) later asked one witness whether he could “look into Rep. Watt’s cloud” — the term that describes the practice of storing data and applications on third-party servers.
“No, no, no, no,” assured Jim Dempsey, the vice president for public policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology. He later found himself diluting his arguments about the Electronic Communications Privacy Act — the point of the hearing — with basic explanations of a practice that undergirds modern e-mail inboxes.
Watt later told POLITICO he planned to bulk up on that debate, as he has with other complex issues like financial regulatory reform. But, he stressed, “even for those who understand the technology, it’s moving too fast for them to keep up and keep the laws abreast.
“This stuff is moving so fast, I don’t even have a Facebook, I don’t Twitter, I had never heard of whatever that term was they were using [at the hearing],” he said, referring to the cloud computing confusion.
But the examples abound elsewhere. Take a 2008 hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee about privacy and online behavior-based advertising. The discussion seemed to fall apart when Sens. Tom Carper (D-Del.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and others seemed not to understand the term “cookies.”
Lawmakers have since learned this one: Cookies allow websites to gear content to a Web user’s behavior. However, while the underlying privacy concerns expressed during that 2008 hearing have resonated across Capitol Hill for years, legislation addressing those gripes has hardly budged, though a new Internet privacy bill spearheaded by Boucher this year does show promise.
It was former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), once the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, who famously described the Internet in 2006 as a “series of tubes.” But four years later, when that same panel considered the merger of Comcast and NBC, Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) admitted to his colleagues he used the Internet at most for an hour each day.
Even more recently, a June hearing on the FCC’s plan to rein in Internet companies became muddled after some House appropriators questioned whether the agency’s Net neutrality plans would allow child pornography to flourish. Not only is child pornography already illegal, it is not even the FCC that polices it — that has long been the chief responsibility of its cousin, the Federal Trade Commission.
Eager to shed their image as the party of old white men, national Republicans are salivating. “The GOP has long struggled with expanding the base of our party,” says Nick Ayers, executive director of the Republican Governors Association (RGA). Haley offers “a big chance for us to bring ethnic minorities into the party.” In Haley, the GOP has found a candidate who not only has consistently espoused conservative dogma—small government, lower taxes, less regulation—but one who appeals to multihued, 21st-century America. When Ayers met her, he immediately grasped her potential. “She had core principles she was unwavering on,” he says. “I thought it would be icing on the cake that she had darker skin and was Indian-American.”So does this herald a new era of diversity in the GOP? Only to an extent, says Scott Huffmon, a political-science professor at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C. “What [Haley’s rise] says about the Republican Party is that they are open to minorities and women,” he says. While that’s significant, it doesn’t mean there’s a corresponding urge to take up what are typically considered minority issues—endemic poverty, for instance, or employment discrimination. If Haley “had entered the race talking about issues that minorities face, she would not have gotten into the next round,” Huffmon argues.
But smokers who view their addiction as of one of the last vestiges of personal independence said their rights are being trampled.
“If I want to smoke, that's my decision and I'll pay the price,” said Debra Henderson of Inman. “It's not the rich who are suffering here, it's the poor — the ones who need to smoke — who are paying. We should try taxing luxury vehicles or something.”
When Senate Republicans decided to turn the first day of Solicitor General Elena Kagan's confirmation hearing into a referendum on her mentor, Justice Thurgood Marshall, they made two big mistakes. The first was tactical: Most Americans just don't know or care that much about Marshall's jurisprudential style. When they think of him, they think of him as a lion of the civil rights movement, a guy you name airports after. While deriding him as a "judicial activist" and "results oriented" may have been an attack on his judicial craftsmanship, to most of us it sounded a lot like an insult to his legacy. But the real mistake the GOP made in tethering Kagan to Marshall was that the comparison emphasized the exact point Senate Democrats were attempting to make all week: that the court has a critical function to play when the other two branches of government let the American people down. Democrats made that point with some success. By invoking Marshall over and over again, Republicans really drove it home.
It was already clear by the second day of the hearings that efforts to slander Marshall (his name came up 35 times on the first day of the hearings alone) had backfired badly. Several senators even hustled to clarify that they never intended to insult the civil rights icon; they just didn't like the way he did business. But when Kagan was given an opportunity to defend Marshall in her testimony, she said something important. "Justice Marshall's whole life was about seeing the courts take seriously claims that were not taken seriously anyplace else," she said. "In his struggle for racial justice, you know, he could go to the statehouses or he could go to Congress or the president, and those claims generally were ignored."
What Kagan was saying here was that Marshall believed that the courts had a critical role to play in bringing about justice because he believed—with good cause in his particular case —that the other branches of government would almost always fail the poor, the disenfranchised, and the powerless. At the same time, Kagan took pains to distinguish herself from her former mentor. Not only did she assert that "if you confirm me to this position, you will get Justice Kagan; you won't get Justice Marshall," but she also explained, time and again, that she believed deeply in deference to the other two branches of government, and to precedent. Unlike her mentor, she believes that the elected branches, for the most part, do a pretty good job.
In one of the most telling exchanges of the hearings, Kagan distinguished her own view of the death penalty from Marshall's by explaining that she had "no moral qualms" with capital punishment and that it was "settled precedent." Period. Questioned by Sen. Richard Durbin about Marshall's approach to capital cases, she clarified: Marshall believed "the death penalty was unconstitutional in all its applications," she said, but he also felt he had "a special role in each death penalty case to make sure that there were no special problems in the imposition of the death penalty." Again, and unlike Marshall, Kagan apparently has more confidence in the capital-punishment system and sees no special role for herself in policing the facts of every last execution.
If Republicans devoted the first part of the hearings to clobbering Thurgood Marshall, Democrats used them to condemn John Roberts. Their argument was that the Roberts court is so completely beholden to corporate America that it routinely bends the rules to allow big money to corrupt elections, big business to abuse employees, and big oil to escape liability for oil spills. This message was somewhat clouded by their deployment of the words judicial activist—language they have railed against for years when used against them—and by their failure to explain what any of this battering away at the Roberts court might have to do with Kagan.
But Republicans inadvertently connected the dots for them by repeatedly reminding Americans that sometimes the court needs to step in when the other branches of government are not looking out for its most vulnerable citizens. By continuing to bring up Marshall's legal legacy, they kept making the point—better than the Democrats could—that not all justices are elite or out of touch. Justices like Marshall could be the only champions left when the system failed the powerless or the poor.
Teams in several major cities--including New York, Miami and Chicago--are courting James with massive salary offers and local sales pitches in the hope that he'll leave the Cleveland Cavaliers, in his beloved home state of Ohio. (He's from Akron, and even has the local 330 area code tattooed on his arm.)
Republican “maverick” Lindsey Graham attended 183 meetings to negotiating a Senate version of the “cap and trade” bill passed by the House. The White House had him over 19 times. But in the end he decided not to go along, after getting much of what he wanted from the Democrats—and, from the grassroots’ perspective, all but ruining the bill. He decided not to go along with any new immigration legislation also.
I say this knowing how deeply it stings gay Americans to let states make invidious choices. In June, my partner, Michael, and I married in the District of Columbia. But every time I commute from my office in Washington to my home in Virginia, my marriage magically dissolves like some matrimonial Cheshire Cat, because Virginia constitutionally bans any recognition of it. What straight couple would tolerate that?
Shortly before we married, we visited a lawyer who explained that it would cost thousands of dollars to draw up documents protecting us in states that, like Virginia, treat us as legal strangers — documents making Michael my heir, giving him access to my hospital room, allowing him to make financial decisions should I be incapacitated. Even so, our pricey paperwork could replicate only a few of the perquisites of marriage, and only imperfectly at that. This is how second-class citizenship feels.
Senior military officers were in widespread agreement that the president had no choice but to fire General McChrystal after he and his staff were quoted in a Rolling Stone article disparaging Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other senior Obama administration officials.
But they said the president’s decision to allow General McChrystal to retire with four stars was an important indicator for future potential employers — perhaps some defense contractors lining the Beltway around Washington — that he was not radioactive, at least as far as the White House was concerned.
Forcing him to retire with three stars “would have sent a signal that he was out of favor,” said John A. Nagl, a retired lieutenant colonel and president of the Center for a New American Security, a nonpartisan military policy institution in Washington.
Under Army regulations, four-star generals must serve three years in that rank before they can keep it in retirement, but the president can waive the rule. General McChrystal was awarded his fourth star only last year, when he was made the top American andNATO commander in Afghanistan. He announced his plans to retire on Monday, five days after being fired.
The White House decision means that General McChrystal, 55, will receive 85 percent of the base pay of a four-star general with 34 years of active service, amounting to an annual pre-tax retirement income of $181,416, according to Pentagon calculations. Had he retired as a three-star, the Pentagon said, General McChrystal would have received an annual pre-tax retirement income of $160,068.
Colleagues said that General McChrystal, who has a grown son, had spent time with family in recent days in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. He has also been in contact by phone and e-mail with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and General Petraeus, who praised him this week not only for his service in Afghanistan but for his “exceptional leadership” in Iraq, where for five years General McChrystal oversaw secret commando operations and aggressively pushed his ranks to kill insurgents.
Colleagues say that they do not know yet what General McChrystal will do in retirement, but that his background suggests a future as a well-paid outside consultant to the Pentagon or a government intelligence agency.
Maybe it’s because here we have a man who admits to committing one of the most egregious displays of unsportsman-like conduct—actually boasts about his hand of God (See the never-dull Peter Singer’s take on cheating), a habitual cocaine user, a drug dealer, a tax evader, a man who shoots at reporters; here we have a man who isn’t embarrassed about keeping the company of murderers and Mafiosi, but is horrified at the thought that someone could think of him as gay.
Ooooh, that grates on my soul.
RALSTON: How would you have voted on that bill to extend unemployment benefits?
ANGLE: I would have voted no, because the truth about it is that they keep extending these unemployment benefits to the point where people are afraid to go out and get a job because the job doesn't pay as much as the unemployment benefit does. And what we really need to do is put people back to work.
