Balkinization

In Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the Supreme Court continues a trend of using the technical doctrines of facial challenges to swat away constitutional litigation and drive questions back to the political process. Whether you think that is a good or a bad thing depends on your view of whether the Indiana legislature was essentially limiting access to the ballot to certain classes of voters in order to help the Republican Party stay in power. If you think that the political process will take care of enfranchising these voters, you need not worry too much about the result. If, on the other hand, you think that the political process is being used to build in advantages for one party over another, there is greater reason to be concerned.

As Justice Stevens' plurality opinion points out, all of the Republicans in the Indiana General Assembly supported the bill, while all of the Democrats opposed it. That degree of polarization speaks volumes about the purposes behind the legislation, but the real question is what message you (or the Court) wants to hear. One of the most famous ideas in constitutional law is the idea taken from the Carolene Products...   more »

DownWithTyranny!

In the gay political universe HRC doesn't only stand for the candidate working with John McCain to tear down the Democrat McCain will face in November. It also stands for something far more loathsome and treacherous than Hillary, the Human Rights Campaign. HRC is an Inside the Beltway kiss ass advocacy group for gay people. I was very proud in 1997 when they gave me a Leadership Equality Award for my work at fostering equality in the workplace at Warner Brothers. I even wrote them into my will.

But what opened my eyes to what HRC has become was their endorsement of Holy Joe Lieberman over Ned Lamont. After I learned more about them I smashed my award and removed them from my will. HRC is one of those Inside the Beltway organizations that has long ago lost sight of its original mandate. Instead of fighting for gay equality, they fight to win DC status games and to enhance the future career prospects of the staff. When it comes to electoral politics, you can almost always expect the worst from HRC.

This past February their in house magazine prominently featured Republican rubber ...   more »

DownWithTyranny!

I haven't read a biography of Karl Rove and I don't know when he made his particular pact with Satan. I do know he started working for the Utah Republican Party when he was still in college and that that was followed by stints working for Bob Bennett and then for Ralph Smith's unsuccessful re-election bid in Illinois. Like Cheney and the majority of the Bush Regime higher ups, he gamed and manipulated the system to avoid fighting in the Vietnam War. His first documented criminal activity involving political campaigns was in 1970 when he used false ID to sneak into the campaign office of Alan Dixon (D-IL) and steal campaign letterhead so he could forge and distribute fake flyers in order to disrupt a Dixon rally. After he was exposed, Rove excused this earliest known example of his criminal behavior in politics as "a youthful prank at the age of 19 and I regret it." Perhaps if he had been punished then he wouldn't have gone on to commit the serious crimes he has since.

After Rove dropped out of college he went to work for the Nixon campaign under future federal prisoner Donald Segretti, ...   more »

DownWithTyranny!

I went to a lovely party this weekend. And there were so many smart people there. Two who I was talking with-- both health care experts-- were absolutely positive than no matter who was elected president, there was absolutely no chance that there would be any transformational change in the way the people of this country receive health care. Gee, I thought that was part of the reason we were electing Democrats in a big way this year. But what do I know?

Today's NY Times has a story in the Business Section that probably belongs on page one. It explains why some things get done and why some things don't. It's only trying to talk about the mortgage industry. But the health care industry is much, much worse. Stephen Labaton, who has decided-- or was assigned-- to tackle the issues begins by mentioning that the mortgage industry is fighting back-- intensively-- against threats of regulation. Societies regulate industry when industry's greed gets out of control and threatens the well being of society. Despite Republicans, meat packing plants had to be regulated because... well, people were dying. The "free market" wasn't quite righting the wrongs fast enough. How many ...   more »

DownWithTyranny!

I love it that people have been digging some of the posts here at DWT. One steady digger, Harry, has gotten very pushy lately though. He's always asking when the next post is going up and demanding more, more, more. After I posted on McCain's blatant hypocrisy on fiscal matters, Harry demanded a companion piece on McCain's even more dangerous stance on foreign affairs.

Ken and I have been posting about the dangers of McCain's warmongering and his truculent schoolboy bully attitude towards other countries. After 8 years of Bush and Cheney, it's the last thing America needs! When Bush was running for President in 2000 he laid out a "humble foreign policy" to the voters. Please take a look at him explaining it then:



After he started attacking countries, breaking treaties and making outrageous demands on (small) sovereign nations, he explained that 9/11 changed everything. Yet, reading Against The Tide by Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee paints a very, very different picture. Exactly one day after the Supreme Court made Bush president, Cheney came striding over to the Senate for a meeting with the Republican moderate caucus. Keep in mind that half a dozen far right GOP ...   more »

DownWithTyranny!

I would bet that the McCains don't pay their servants less than the minimum wage. Of course there's no way to know that because McCain keeps all his expenses hidden by not releasing Cindy's tax returns-- and that is, after all, where all the money is in the McCain household. Her father's beer distributorship bought them their 8 houses, their airplane, cars and extravagant lifestyle. But even if McCain is fair to his domestic servants-- and I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt-- he has always voted his class in the Senate. McCain's record on standing up for the working families of this country is crystal clear; he hasn't. Not ever. Not even a little. He may be a good tipper in restaurants and whore houses but when it comes to giving working families a break, McCain has been a nightmare. You want to know why American jobs get shipped overseas and why American workers who lose their jobs are left in the lurch? Just examine McCain's voting record, a voting record that has tossed the poor, native Americans, veterans, our country's children, and the unemployed...   more »