Ninth Circuit Finally Halts DADT Enforcement

Better late than never as the saying goes. Today, the U. S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the stay that it had imposed to block the world wide injunction that was issued by U.S. District Court Judge Virginia Phillips in Log Cabin Republicans v. United States which blocked enforcement of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Frankly, the stay should never have been issued in my opinion. The immediate result is that the U. S. military must immediately cease enforcement of DADT while the wait continues for the Department of Defense and the White House to deliver the certifications needed to finally repeal DADT. The order lifting the stay can be found here. No doubt the Christo-fascists will have yet another conniption fit and whine about judicial tyranny. Metro Weekly has coverage on this development. Here are highlights:
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In an order issued by a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, U.S. District Court Judge Virginia Phillips's judgment halting the worldwide enforcement of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" as a result of her decision in Log Cabin Republicans v. United States has been put back in effect.
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DADT cannot be enforced, per the order, unless the government gets a stay of the order from either the full Ninth Circuit or the U.S. Supreme Court pending an appeal of today's decision.
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The three-judge panel -- Judges Alex Kozinski, Kim Wardlaw and Richard Paez -- decided to lift the appellate court's earlier stay of Phillips's order pending the appeal of the LCR case because, the judges write, "The circumstances and balance of hardships have changed, and appellants/cross-appellees can no longer satisfy the demanding standard for issuance of a stay."
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Among the circumstances cited by the court are the July 1 filing in Karen Golinski's federal case seeking health insurance benefits for her wife and the related earlier Feb. 23 letter from Attorney General Eric Holder declaring that he and President Barack Obama had decided that heightened scrutiny applies to classifications -- such as DADT.
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The judges also note that "the process of repealing Section 654 [-- the DADT law --] is well underway, and the preponderance of the armed forces are expected to have been trained by mid-summer." Smith echoed this fact, writing to Metro Weekly, "[I]mplementation of the DADT repeal voted by the Congress and signed in to law by the President last December is proceeding smoothly, is well underway, and certification is just weeks away."
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In addition to lifting the stay, the Ninth Circuit set arguments on the appeal of the merits of the LCR case itself -- as opposed to the stay of Phillips's order pending the appeal, which was what the judges altered today -- for the week of Aug. 29. White House and Justice Department spokespersons did not respond to requests for comment.

Will Afghanistan Be Obama's Vietnam?

Time and time again U.S. leaders - especially those in the military - seem to make the same short sighted decisions that squander lives and ultimately end up unable to stem the tide of events in foreign nations most Americans and policy makers do not understand. The senior military commanders can be depended upon to ALWAYS want more troops and seek to escalate engagement. War is after all their game and sitting home on base as opposed to breaking things and killing "the enemy" is the last thing these guys want. One would think that after Vietnam - where the USA went in after a disaster for the French - we'd be wiser, but apparently not in some circles. Having witnessed the disaster for the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the U.S. military command seems hell bent to reprise the disaster. Frank Rich's editorial in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon from a historical perspective and cautions that we should not make the same kinds of mistakes made dating all the way back to Vietnam. The question is, will Obama be able to refuse the antiquated thinking of the military leadership. Here are some column highlights:

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THE most intriguing, and possibly most fateful, news of last week could not be found in the health care horse-trading in Congress, or in the international zoo at the United Nations, or in the Iran slapdown in Pittsburgh. It was an item tucked into a blog at ABCNews.com. George Stephanopoulos reported that the new “must-read book” for President Obama’s war team is “Lessons in Disaster” by Gordon M. Goldstein, a foreign-policy scholar who had collaborated with McGeorge Bundy, the Kennedy-Johnson national security adviser, on writing a Robert McNamara-style mea culpa about his role as an architect of the Vietnam War.

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What’s most relevant to our moment is the war’s and Goldstein’s first chapter, set in 1961. That’s where we see the hawkish young President Kennedy wrestling with Vietnam during his first months in office.

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The remarkable parallels to 2009 became clear last week, when the Obama administration’s internal conflicts about Afghanistan spilled onto the front page. On Monday The Washington Post published Bob Woodward’s account of a confidential assessment by the top United States and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, warning that there could be “mission failure” if more troops aren’t added in the next 12 months. In Wednesday’s Times White House officials implicitly pushed back against the leak of McChrystal’s report by saying that the president is “exploring alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan.” As Goldstein said to me last week, it’s “eerie” how closely even these political maneuvers track those of a half-century ago . . .

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Obama finds himself at that same lonely decision point now. Though he came to the presidency declaring Afghanistan a “war of necessity,” circumstances have since changed. While the Taliban thrives there, Al Qaeda’s ground zero is next-door in nuclear-armed Pakistan. Last month’s blatantly corrupt, and arguably stolen, Afghanistan election ended any pretense that Hamid Karzai is a credible counter to the Taliban or a legitimate partner for America in a counterinsurgency project of enormous risk and cost. Indeed, Karzai, whose brother is a reputed narcotics trafficker, is a double for Ngo Dinh Diem, the corrupt South Vietnamese president whose brother also presided over a vast, government-sanctioned criminal enterprise in the early 1960s.

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Goldstein points out there are other indisputable then-and-now analogies as well. Much as Vietnam could not be secured over the centuries by China, France, Japan or the United States, so Afghanistan has been a notorious graveyard for the ambitions of Alexander the Great, the British and the Soviets. “Some states in world politics are simply not susceptible to intervention by the great powers,” Goldstein told me.

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Even if we routed the Taliban in another decade or two, after countless casualties and billions of dollars, how would that stop Al Qaeda from coalescing in Somalia or some other criminal host state? How would a Taliban-free Afghanistan stop a jihadist trained in Pakistan’s Qaeda camps from mounting a terrorist plot in Denver and Queens?

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Obama’s decision, whichever it is, will demand all the wisdom and political courage he can muster. If he adds combat troops, he’ll be extending a deteriorating eight-year-long war without a majority of his country or his own party behind him. He’ll have to explain why more American lives should be yoked to the Karzai “government.” He’ll have to be honest in estimating the cost. (The Iraq war, which the Bush administration priced at $50 to $60 billion, is at roughly $1 trillion and counting.) He will have to finally ask recession-battered Americans what his predecessor never did: How much — and what — are you willing to sacrifice in blood and treasure for the mission?

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Just as I sensed that the Iraq War would be a disaster, I get the same sense on Afghanistan. If past super powers could not win there, why should Obama believe the promises of less than objective military leaders?

Notre Dame Hypocrisy

I have not said too much about the continuing swirl of protests from the pedophile priest loving set at Notre Dame University that has its panties in a knot over Barack Obama's selection as the commencement speaker this year. These folk who worry only about children before they are born continue to brown nose and ass kiss the members of the Church hierarchy who deliberately covered up sexual abuse of minors and callously reassigned predator priests to new parishes. Equally bad, these folks had no apparent problem with welcoming the Chimperator to the campus even though the Catholic Church in theory opposes the death penalty which Bush authorized more than any other governor. At times I truly wonder how these Catholics got their heads so far up their own backsides that they cannot see the hypocrisy in their double standards. What is shocking about the Chimperator - as is brought out in a New York Review of Books column - is just how little he carried about those he was sending to to be executed. Or maybe it's not shocking coming from the man who took the nation to war in Iraq based on lies and who has responsibility on his hands for the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqi civilians. Here are some column highlights:

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In the twenty-first century, a state governor represents the last vestige of the "divine right of kings," because he has absolute power over life and death—especially when such power is entrusted to politicians motivated more by expediency than by conscience. . . . All governors claim to agonize over death penalty decisions. All claim to scrutinize every possible angle of the cases of condemned persons facing execution under their watch.

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George W. Bush during his six years as governor of Texas presided over 152 executions, more than any other governor in the recent history of the United States. Bush has said: "I take every death penalty case seriously and review each case carefully.... Each case is major because each case is life or death."

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He might have succeeded in bequeathing to history this image of himself as a scrupulously fair-minded governor if the journalist Alan Berlow had not used the Public Information Act to gain access to fifty-seven confidential death penalty memos that Bush's legal counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, whom President Bush has recently nominated to be attorney general of the United States, presented to him, usually on the very day of execution. The reports Gonzales presented could not be more cursory.
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Take, for example, the case of Terry Washington, a mentally retarded man of thirty-three with the communication skills of a seven-year-old. Washington's plea for clemency came before Governor Bush on the morning of May 6, 1997. After a thirty-minute briefing by Gonzales, Bush checked "Deny"—just as he had denied twenty-nine other pleas for clemency in his first twenty-eight months as governor.

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But Washington's plea for clemency raised substantial issues, which called for thoughtful, fair-minded consideration, not the least of which was the fact that Washington's mental handicap had never been presented to the jury that condemned him to death. Gonzales's legal summary, however, omitted any mention of Washington's mental limitations as well as the fact that his trial lawyer had failed to enlist the help of a mental health expert to testify on his client's behalf.

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When Berlow asked Gonzales directly whether Bush ever read the clemency petitions, he replied that he did so "from time to time." Instead, Bush seems to have relied on Gonzales's summaries, and they clearly indicate that Gonzales continuously sided with the prosecutors.

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Berlow writes, "The fact that courts have rejected a defendant's legal claims arguably places an added burden on a governor—as the conscience of the state...—to conduct a scrupulous review." How, then, could Bush's legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales, systematically neglect to provide mitigating evidence or "new facts" that the petitioners' juries had never heard? For the man who said that the nature of the war on terror "renders obsolete [the Geneva conventions'] strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners" and called the conventions "quaint" when issuing guidelines for the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo, this is not surprising.

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There is more, but you get the drift. Bush uncaringly and irresponsibly deprived condemned individuals from having a chance to either prove their innocence or at least mitigating circumstances. Believe me, the more exposure I have to the trial process, the less faith I have in the court system. The outcome of a case is often a crap shoot and is decided more by the prejudices of the judge and/or jury than the true facts of the case.

Obama Halts Pending Bush Regulations

In another move that highlights that the eight year nightmare of the Bush/Cheney regime is over, the Obama administration has halted all pending regulations initiated by the Chimperator's regime. Hopefully, this move will stop the implementation of anti-science, Christianist driven, and deregulatory policies. Many people do not realize the damage that bad regulations can work on the legal process and on citizen rights. Especially, when the bureaucrats placed in charge are political appointees who were selected not for competence but rather ideology, a phenomenon all too prevailent under the Chimperator. Here are some highlights from CNN:

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WASHINGTON (CNN)– President Obama has wasted no time handling the Bush administration's unfinished business. White House officials tell CNN Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel sent a memo Tuesday to all agencies and departments of the federal government. The memo halts further consideration of pending regulations throughout the government until a legal and policy review can be conducted by the Obama administration.

Obama Holds Big Lead Going into Virginia Primary

It will be interesting to see the outcome of Tuesday's primary. I was surprised to see that Obama's margin over Hillary Clinton was the largest here in the Hampton Roads area based on the most recent polls. I am at the office early waiting for the Obama field organizer to come by and print off canvassing materials – we are having another gorgeous day which will be conducive to canvassing - and then later volunteers should be by to use the phones. Purportedly, as of yesterday at mid-day over 7,000 people had already sent an RSVP online for the Obama appearance this evening in Virginia Beach. On a side note, McCain is fortunately holding a huge lead over Christo-fascist Mike Huckabee except in Southwestern Virginia, home of the highest concentration of Kool-Aid drinkers in the state. Here are some highlights from this morning’s Virginian Pilot (http://hamptonroads.com/2008/02/obama-mccain-hold-big-lead-going-virginia-primary-poll-says):

Obama led Clinton, 53 percent to 37 percent, in a telephone survey of 400 likely voters in the Democratic primary. The poll was conducted Thursday and Friday by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc. of Washington. Mason-Dixon also surveyed 400 likely voters in the state's Republican primary. Fifty-five percent favored the Arizonan McCain, 27 percent preferred Huckabee, and 5 percent sided with U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. J. Bradford Coker, managing director of Mason-Dixon, said the outcome is basically "a done deal in Virginia."

Among whites, 49 percent favored Clinton, and 41 percent preferred Obama. Obama's lead in Hampton Roads, where 62 percent of voters polled support him compared to 27 percent for Clinton, is the largest of any region in the state. Clinton, who if elected would become the first female president, has tepid support among women in Virginia according to the poll, with Obama claiming 49 percent to her 41 percent. Both candidates are well-regarded by Virginia Democrats. Seventy percent of those surveyed said they had a favorable impression of Obama, and 60 percent said they had positive feelings about Clinton.

Asked to identify the most important issue, 38 percent of the Democrats polled said the economy and jobs, 22 percent chose health care, 20 percent said the Iraq war, and 10 percent pointed to national security and terrorism.

Huckabee appears to be running even with McCain in Southwest Virginia. McCain seems to have enormous advantages in all other regions of the state, including 59 percent in Hampton Roads to 27 percent for Huckabee.

Is Hillary Clinton Turning into Karl Rove?

Like many Americans I am disgusted with politicians who use lies, misstatements and character assassination to further their own campaigns or larger political agendas. After seven years of Karl Rove's nasty and underhanded tactics, I am dismayed - although not surprised - that increasingly Hillary's campaign is looking more and more as if Karl Rove was hidden behind a curtain somewhere giving directions. Perhaps her ploys is working with some, but for me, I find each instance of deliberate lie or misrepresentation of Obama's record making me more inclined to vote for a Republican (other than Huckabee, of course) should Hillary be the Democrat nominee.

I suspect that I am not the only one voter feeling this way. To clear the record on some points, Richard Wolfe has a good piece in Newsweek that looks at Obama's true record as opposed to how it has been misrepresented by Bill and Hill (http://www.newsweek.com/id/91755/page/1). In addition, I believe that if Hillary undermines Obama through lies, innuendo and dirty tricks, she could find herself losing the black vote in November and possibly giving victory to the hapless GOP. This opinion piece in today's Washington Post is instructive (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/11/AR2008011103281.html?hpid=opinionsbox1). People truly do want - and one of the changes is an end to Rove style politics. Hillary, PLEASE stop the lies and sleaze.

Getting Out the Barack Vote: Did Race Bias Cost Obama A Win in New Hampshire?

No one will ever know for certain if racial bias played a part in the New Hampshire results, although I would picture - perhaps incorrectly - Iowa as a more likely place for racial bias. In any event, Editor & Publisher has an article that looks at this possibility (http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003694676). Unfortunately, some of the analysis does make sense, especially the ability to vote in private as opposed to out in the open in front of others. The Democrats need to be VERY careful - the last thing needed in November is for disaffected black voters sit home to "punish" perceived bigoted white Democrats. I can only hope for the day that Americans will judge people by their merits and abilities rather than their skin color (or sexual orientation). Here are some highlights:

Many theories have been advanced in the media since Hillary Clinton’s stunning upset over Barack Obama. One of them has been much contested: that white voters told pollsters they would vote for Obama but couldn’t quite pull the trigger for the African-American candidate when the time came to cast their ballots. This allegedly counted for more than any sort of “late female surge” for Clinton.Maybe when Bill Clinton referred to the “fairy tale” surrounding Obama he meant the fable that massive numbers of whites would actually vote for Obama when they had plausible alternatives. But this has been the elephant in the room almost totally ignored by the media until now.

Why did it show up (if it did) in New Hampshire and not in Iowa? The Iowa caucuses were quite public, this theory goes, while voters had a curtain to hide behind in New Hampshire. An interesting new detail has now emerged seemingly bolstering that theory: not just advance polls, but some exit surveys apparently show that even coming out of the polls, voters in New Hampshire gave Obama about a 5% bulge -- if they were being honest. Where did all those votes go? Maybe he never really had them to start with.

"I think it's very naive to dismiss the racial factors in this," said Larry Sabato, professor of politics at the University of Virginia. "Anytime you've got white undecided voters pulling the lever choosing between a white and a black candidate, that is when the race issue is most important," Drew Westen of Emory University told Tom Edsall, the former Washington Post reporter now writing for Huffington Post. "Both campaigns' internal polls showed a 10 to 12 point Obama lead; to see that evaporate into a three-point loss, when he didn't have any gaffes, that has a ring to it."

This is not a new phenomenon, of course. It is sometimes called “The Bradley Effect” or the “Wilder Effect” after two well-known black officials whose huge leads in final polls mysteriously disappeared (Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles and Governor Doug Wilder of Virginia). And, of course, if true (and it may not be) it would have enormous ramifications for the rest of the primary race, and the general election if Obama did manage to get the Democratic nod.

Jon Stewart on The Daily Show Wednesday night told pollster James Zogby that the only thing we now know for sure coming out of New Hampshire is "Democrats lie." He wasn't referring to the racial controversy but the issue is now out there.

Clinton Campaign Falsifies Obama Abortion Record

The Huffington Post is reporting (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20080105/clinton-obama-abortion/) that Hillary Clinton has sent out a false mailing to voters in New Hampshire which lies about Barack Obama's past votes on abortion rights. Whether one supports abortion right or not, the number one issue should be that the mailings are factually accurate. Otherwise they are evidence of deliberate lying - something I believe the American voters are sick of seeing. A candidate that resorts to outright lying deserves to be defeated. If Hillary doesn't watch out, she herself and her tactics will become the best argument for picking Obama over her. Claims can be fact checked and in a state like New Hampshire, it would seem intentionally lying could back fire big time. Here are so highlights:

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton criticizes rival Barack Obama's record on abortion rights in a mailing sent to New Hampshire voters _ her first direct attack on the Illinois senator since his victory in Iowa. The mailer says that seven times during his time in the Illinois state Senate, Obama declined to take a position on abortion bills, while Clinton has been a defender of abortion rights.

During his eight years in the legislature, Obama cast a number of votes on abortion and received a 100 percent rating from the Illinois Planned Parenthood Council for his support of abortion rights, family planning services and health insurance coverage for female contraceptives. He voted against requiring medical care for aborted fetuses who survive, a vote that especially riled abortion opponents.

The mailer says "Paid for by Hillary Clinton for President" and has a return address of her office in Manchester. Clinton spokesman Phil Singer said the campaign decided to send the piece because "as Senator Obama has said, `voting records matter.' This is a critical issue for New Hampshire voters and they deserve a straightforward presentation of the facts about both candidates."

Obama spokesman Bill Burton responded, "The Clinton campaign's false negative attacks were rejected by Iowa voters, and we expect that they'll suffer the same fate here in New Hampshire."