In Black Swan, Natalie Portman, a pristine and proper ballerina, must figure out how to go beyond her ability to dance the white swan in "Swan Lake." She must find the passion, a darker side if you will, to convincingly portray the seductress that is the black swan. Of course, as she takes this leap, Portman's character is drawn deeper and deeper into a hallucinatory psychosis, unable to distinguish between reality and delusion.
In the film, Portman must become the Black Swan to play it, there is no middle ground where she can inhabit the character, but not the character's life - which causes her to lose all the self-control and discipline she has gained on stage as well as off. Which would seem to work the same way as conservatism, at least with regard to social policy - as right wingers fear in their fevered and misfiring synapses that we'll all become black swans just like they would (and often still do), without authoritarian rigidity dictating every aspect of our personal lives.
In other words, much like in the film, in the conservative worldview there can also be no middle ground. Either we all become Pat Robertson - you know, before the newfound love of the pot plant - or you know where things are headed. To quote the great Dr. Venkman from Ghostbusters, "human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together...mass hysteria!"
This same dance has played out with policies relating to birth control, divorce, religion in schools and a variety of other issues. But most recently, it reared its Rovian head to spit venom on legislation that would make gay Americans equal to the rest of us under law and started a brawl among conservatives that is worthy of Camille and Kelsey Grammar.
The first of their two most recent Swan Lake moment happened during the vote in the recent lame-duck Congress to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. The Family Research Council, recently rewarded for all their hard work at being bigots with the designation of "hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, pulled some statistics out of a part of their body they're afraid to acknowledge to claim that "homosexual assault" would skyrocket if we let openly gay service members into our armed forces.
These happy - or gay if you will - protectors of our purity worried aloud about the "sleeping" and/or "intoxicated" victims of what would seem to be gay sexual Terminators not simply satisfied with converting foxholes into Liberace revivals, but forcing themselves on anyone and everyone within stone's throw of their tiaras.
"Fierce advocate" claims to the contrary, no truly sentient being would ever mistake President Obama for a staunch defender of gay rights. Not after he campaigned with notorious homophobe Donnie McClurkin in South Carolina. What made DADT repeal possible was two things: (1) Gay advocates realized they were being strung along, and decided to do something potentially embarrasing about it. (2) There was no discernible corporate opposition.
Today President Obama's Federal Communications Commission betrayed the fundamental principle of net neutrality and sold us out to AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.
This is the culmination of a long struggle, and it's important we discuss frankly what led to this point. So this will be a longer e-mail than we traditionally send, with some recommended action items at the end.
Despite what you may have read in the headlines, the rules passed by the FCC today amount to nothing more than a cynical ploy by Democrats to claim a victory on net neutrality while actually caving on real protections for consumers.
Make no mistake, AT&T lobbyists pre-approved this proposal, which means consumers lost and Big Telecom won.
Net neutrality is a principle that says that Internet users, not Internet service providers (ISPs), should be in control. It ensures that Internet service providers can't speed up, slow down, or block Web content based on its source, ownership, or destination.
Yet today the FCC, let by Obama-appointee Julius Genachowski and cheered on by the White House, voted to adopt rules that will enshrine in federal regulations for the first time the ability of AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and other ISPs to discriminate between sources and types of content. And despite the fact that there is only one Internet, the rules also largely exempt cell phones and wireless devices from what meager protections the rules afford.
It's no exaggeration to say that this decision marks the beginning of the end for the Internet as we know it.
Senator Al Franken laid out what's at stake with this ruling, saying:
"The FCC's action today is simply inadequate to protect consumers or preserve the free and open Internet. I am particularly disappointed to learn that the order will not specifically ban paid prioritization, allowing big companies to pay for a fast lane on the Internet and abandoning the foundation of net neutrality. The rule also contains almost no protections for mobile broadband service, remaining silent on the blocking of content, applications, and devices. Wireless technology is the future of the Internet, and for many rural Minnesotans, it's often the only choice for broadband."
....
Now, I must say that it's not Net Netrality activists fault that haven't threatened Obama with course-altering embarrassment, the way that gay activists such as Lt. Dan Choi did. The potential for doing so was just not there in the same way it was for gay activists. So I'm not blaming anyone here. I'm just trying to point out how clearly these two outcomes define the limits of the possible and the impossible with Obama playing the role of political leader.
It should also be noted, of course, that for all of Obama's claims to be thinking in the long term, this habit of always caving on the economic front is virtually guaranteed to destroy the long-term prospective democraphic edge that's been talked about since The Emerging Democratic Majority in 2002. The trends foreseen in that book are not carved in stone, and the more the Dems cave on economic issues, the more social issues are likely to be vulnerable to culture war attacks. And you think the GOP is going to be shy about that?
So we got the good news that legislative repeal of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) policy that kept LBGT folks from openly serving in the military has occurred, as the Senate voted Saturday to first cut off debate on the question (that's the vote that required 60 Senators to pass) and then to pass the actual repeal legislation (which also garnered more than 60 Senate votes, even though it only needed 51).
Most people would assume that once Bill (remember Bill, from "Schoolhouse Rock"?) made it out of Congress and over to the President to for a signature that the process of repeal will be ended-but in fact, there's quite a bit more yet to do, and it's entirely possible that a year or more could go by before the entire process is complete.
Today we'll discuss our way through why it's going to take so long; to illustrate the point we'll consider an actual military order that is quite similar to the sort of work that will be required from the Department of Defense (DOD) before the entire "DADT to open service" transition is complete.
Dr. Kenneth Katz recently published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled "Health Hazards of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell." This week, he penned an op/ed for RH Reality Check about his experiences treating U.S. military at an STD clinic in San Diego. Dr. Katz sees the Pentagon's "Don't Ask Don't Tell" rule for LGB members of the military as a huge roadblock to good medical care. He's pretty confident that his military patients feel safe divulging their sexual histories to a civilian doctor like himself. But when those troops go overseas, they are cared for by military doctors. Technically, doctor-patient communication is exempt from DADT, but many patients don't realize that they can tell their military doctors about gay sex without fear of reprisals (at least in theory). Dr. Katz's patients have told him that they won't go for recommended follow-up STD screening after they ship out because they're afraid to be honest with their doctors. He worries about how many troops are suffering from treatable infections in war zones because they aren't allowed to serve openly.
Food stamp use skyrockets, swordfish sales unaccountably flat
Monica Potts of TAPPED points to the alarming statistic that in the last month alone an additional 500,000 Americans went on food stamps. She notes that the right wing website Daily Calleris alarmed not by the fact that fellow citizens can't afford food, but rather that there's no gruel-only foodstamp program available:
Meanwhile, the conservative news site The Daily Calleris shocked, shocked, to learn that you can use food stamps to buy all manner of food. The government, apparently, doesn't restrict you from purchasing an $18-per-pound swordfish steak from Whole Foods. But that kind of discovery, like almost everything else in the "debate" over food stamp use, is the sort of ridiculous one that comes from a person who's never been hungry.
The Hyde Amendment
In Campus Progress, Jessica Arons and Madina Agénor call for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment for being an assault on the reproductive rights of poor women and women of color. The Supreme Court declared abortion to be a constitutional right in 1973, yet nearly 40 years later, the Hyde Amendment still prohibits nearly all federal funding for abortions. In practice, the women most affected by the Hyde Amendment are those who depend on government health care programs like Medicaid and the Indian Health Service:
Former U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL), the law's sponsor, admitted during debate of his proposal that he was targeting poor women because they were the only ones vulnerable enough for him to reach. "I certainly would like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman," he said. "Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the ... Medicaid bill."
Meanwhile, ultra-conservative Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is calling on Congress to de-fund the reproductive health provider Planned Parenthood, Andy Birkey reports in the Minnesota Independent. In an interview with a conservative news site, Bachmann doubled down on that idea, suggesting that all of health care reform be de-funded because it funds abortions. This is not true. The aforementioned Hyde Amendment guarantees as much. Furthermore, even though health reform never would have funded abortions, President Obama signed an eleventh-hour executive order guaranteeing that health care reform would not fund abortions.
Brooklyn bees gorge on maraschino cherry run-off
Home beekeeping is the hottest new trend for health-conscious locavores. New York City recently changed the law to accommodate beekeepers in the five boroughs. Just because you live in an industrial neighborhood in Brooklyn is no reason to miss out on this sweet action, right? Well, actually, there is a catch. That nice honey at the farmers' market tastes like lavender because that's what those rural bees ate. What do bees in Red Hook, Brooklyn eat? Run-off from a maraschino cherry factory. The overindulgent bees "look like vampires" according to one local keeper and their honey runs bright red. Maraschino honey sounds like a delicious mash-up of high and low culture. Unfortunately, Sarah Goodyear reports in Grist that the end product doesn't taste nearly as good as it looks. Arthur Mondella, the owner of Dell's Maraschino Cherries, wants to do right by the beekeepers. He initially suggested putting out vats of different colored syrup to "help" the bees make rainbow honey. His proposal was not well-received by the crunchy set. Instead, he has agreed to work with the beekeepers to keep the bees out of the vats next year.
I took a couple of weeks off, as Thanksgiving and snow came around (a subject we'll address in a day or so), but we are all again occupied as lots of things we've been talking about either will or won't come to pass, and it seems like all that's happening all at once.
Today we'll take on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT); this because the Pentagon's top leadership just came out and reported that revocation of the policy, following a period of preparation, would be their preferred way to go.
There will be lots of others who will take on the question of what's right and wrong here, and exactly how implementation might occur; my interest is, instead, to focus on one little fact that makes all teh rest of the conversation a lot more relevant.
That is the fact that about 70,000 LBGT troops serve in the military today, DADT notwithstanding, and, that if it wasn't for DADT, almost 45,000 more troops would be serving that aren't today.
And that one little fact leads to today's Great Big Question: exactly how much military would 115,000 troops be, exactly?
The Wall Street Journal reports Democrats are ready to cave on DADT in the lame duck:
Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and John McCain of Arizona, the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, are in talks on stripping the proposed repeal and other controversial provisions from a broader defense bill, leaving the repeal with no legislative vehicle to carry it. With a repeal attached, and amid Republican complaints over the terms of the debate, the defense bill had failed to win the 60 votes needed to overcome a procedural hurdle in the Senate in September.
Look, if Democrats can't repeal a policy more than two thirds of the American people, including a majority of conservatives want gone then they can't expect people to vote for them. Preserving DADT is rank absurdity, even in 1993 the RAND study commissioned by the government showed that combat effectiveness would not be harmed by allowing openly gay servicemembers to serve, and the fact that DADT investigations are sometimes delayed when servicemembers are deployed undermines the notion that openly gay servicemembers harm the war effort.
The plain fact of the matter is that DADT undermines the military by forcing discharges of servicemembers with critical skills and walling off an entire section of the population from recruitment. The only remaining arguments for preserving DADT are premised on archaic cultural attitudes towards homosexuality, and Republicans' insistence on undermining the military by blocking repeal is vanity, a projection of their own superficial prejudices onto the very servicemembers they claim to respect.
This was all perfectly predictable. The Versailles Democrats never do anything that a supermajority of Americans support. Close down bankrupt banks? Pass the public option? End the Afghan War? Let gays and lesbians serve in the military? That's all unthinkable. Instead, Versailles Dems lie and say it's a position of "the professional left." Because, I guess, that's true in the cocktail party circles they run in.
Real Americans don't do Versailles cocktail parties. Real Americans would vote Democratic by 60% margins or more...if only they could get rid of the Versailles Dems.
Versailles Dem #1 is still saying, 'I oppose ending DADT through the courts. I want Congress to do it.' But as of right now, any fool can see that Congress isn't going to do it. Any more than Congress was ready to pass the Civil Rights Act in 1948, when Truman forced the military to integrate.
Fierce advocate? Fierce chihuahua, maybe.
But I shouldn't ought to say that. A real fierce chihuahua might take offense. And then I'd be in real trouble.
Stories begat other stories, or at least they do for me; this two-part conversation came from a comment that was made after I posted a story suggesting that voting matters this time, especially if you don't want environmental disasters like the recent Hungarian "toxic lake" that burst from its containment and polluted the Danube River happening in your neighborhood.
Long story short, we are going to be moving on to ask what, for some, is a more fundamental question: if you're an LBGT voter, and the Democratic Party hasn't, to put it charitably, "been all they could be" when it comes to issues like repealing "don't ask, don't tell" or the Federal Defense of Marriage Act...what should you do?
Now normally I would be the one trying to develop an answer to the question, but instead, we're going to be posing the question to a group of experts, and we'll be letting them give the answers.
And just because you, The Valued Reader, deserve the extra effort, for Part Two we've trying to get you a "Special Bonus Expert" to add some input to the conversation: a Democratic Member of Congress who represents a large LBGT community.
It's not just DADT, of course. It could be said about everything that Barack Obama has promised the Democratic base. But it's just become much clearer about DADT with the recent court decisions. Here's the last 2/3rds or so of Maddow's closing comment from last night, and it very clearly cuts through the customary double-speak of the Obama Administration and its apologists (transcript below):
Here's the thing. The White House line, the line from the administration on this now is that they'd like the Senate to repeal it. Absent that action, the spokesman said, absent that action, absent the Senate voting to repeal it, absent the moon crashing through the atmosphere and turning us all to green cheese--absent that action of the Senate repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the White House says there is an orderly process underway to get rid of the policy. And that orderly process is that the Senate will repeal it?
The White House is assuring everyone that the policy will end. And when you drill down on how they say it will end, they say it will end because the Senate will end it. Even though the Senate has just chosen not to end it and the Senate is poised to get more conservative not less in the imminent elections.
This is incoherence.
Outserve, the underground network of gay service personnel has reported there's a widespread perception in the military in the wake of the ruling that the court ruling against the policy yesterday means the policy is over. Service members, legal defense network has set up a website sldn.org/stillatrisk to warn the members of military to not come out that the policy is still in effect. We were told anyone coming out in the military now is absolute absolutety still at risk of being fired for doing so. It is not over.
The policy is still in effect. and the plan from the White House for ending it is apparently to count on the United States Senate to do the right thing. That's the plan.
An expert on the issue at UC Santa Barbara told the New York Times today, the thing that everybody else is dancing around and unwilling to admit. That unless the President declines to appeal the ruling in Republicans versus the United States, the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy probably will remain law for years. He's right, unless you believe the U.S. Senate is going to do the right thing.
This year with John McCain still there and a slate of Republican Senate candidates that includes an activist against women even serving in the military, who once toured the country promoting the idea that being gay is curable--You know, like as if it's athlete's foot or something-Unless you believe that the United States Senate after this year's elections is going to do the right thing by gay service members-Ha!--then the decision by the Obama Administration whether or not to appeal this ruling is likely a decision between killing this policy, now, and letting it survive probably forever.
This is not the conclusion i expected to reach after today's reporting on this subject and after today's interviews. Everybody says the Justice Department appealing this ruling is an inevitability. It does not have to be. It is not inevitable. If the Administration believes the law is unconstitutional, there is precedent that supports the administration not appealing it and letting the law die. An orderly time frame for the death of a law can be arranged with the court.
I hereby declare that i will never get another callback in Washington ever again for putting it this way to you. but it is the way it is. A plan that has no chance of becoming reality is not a real plan. No matter how much you say it is. you can either end it or you can stop saying you will. Thank you.
The Obama Adminstration is as deeply embedded in doublespeak as the Bush Administration ever was. We are being lied to, pure and simple. And Maddow is calling them out for it.
But Obama can unilaterally - without the intervention of the Party of No! - suspend the operation of this provision under 10 USC 12305 - the stop loss provision. (See this PDF.)
So the opposition of the Party of No is clearly not what is holding him back.
Same for JFK and what eventually became his EO 11063, desegregating new Federally funded housing. He could have issued the EO on Day 1, but wanted to stroke the Southern gatekeepers of the Congress. (Not that that did him much good, of course.)
On Friday, the Obama FBI raided peace activists homes in Minneapolis and Chicago, under the rubric of a "terrorist" investigation. ("FBI raids homes of several Twin Cities war protesters") Under the theory apparently being used, Jimmy Carter could be arrested for supporting terrorism, because he has talked with people in groups accused of terrorist activity, in seeking to draw them into peaceful negotiations.
On Thursday, the Obama DOJ filed a brief appealing a District Court ruling that DADT is unconstitutional. ("DOJ to Judge: Keep Enforcing DADT") One argument it advanced would have limited Brown v. Board of Education to only desegregating the specific plaintiffs who went before the Supreme Court.
If you're starting to get the idea that the Obama Administration's views on civil liberties are to the right of most Republican Administrations of the past, you're not alone. At least one high-ranking former Bush official agrees with you, as Glenn Greenwald noted:
The government's increasing use of the state secrets doctrine to shield its actions from judicial review has been contentious. Some officials have argued that invoking it in the Awlaki matter, about which so much is already public, would risk a backlash. David Rivkin, a lawyer in the White House of President George H. W. Bush, echoed that concern.
"I'm a huge fan of executive power, but if someone came up to you and said the government wants to target you and you can't even talk about it in court to try to stop it, that's too harsh even for me," he said.
Having debated him before, I genuinely didn't think it was possible for any President to concoct an assertion of executive power and secrecy that would be excessive and alarming to David Rivkin, but Barack Obama managed to do that, too. Obama's now asserting a power so radical -- the right to kill American citizens and do so in total secrecy, beyond even the reach of the courts -- that it's "too harsh even for" one of the most far-right War on Terror cheerleading-lawyers in the nation.
Although we know little about the FBI raids on peace activists, we do know that it involves contacts with overseas groups, and we know that in July, in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court had ruled that even free speech activities could be prosecuted as providing "material support" for designated "terrorist organizations", in a case where the purported crime was providing training in human rights advocacy and peacemaking to the Kurdistan Workers' Party in Turkey. At the time, attorney David Cole, who represented the Humanitarian Law Project with the Center For Constitutional Rights, wrote ("What Counts as Abetting Terrorists?"):
Those of you who've followed my work over a period of time know that I'm usually the one suggesting moderation and keeping everyone in the big tent, and, even in this most difficult year, I'm the one telling folks that sometimes you just have to hold your nose and vote for the candidate that sucks less.
And even though the last thing I'd ever want is a Speaker Boehner or a Leader McConnell (or even worse yet, DeMint), the fact remains that there are two Democratic Senators I would actually vote against, even if the candidate that sucks more does win...and those two are Arkansas' Blanche Lincoln and Nebraska's Ben Nelson.
One of those two is up for re-election this year, and thanks to a particularly ridiculous vote by Senator Lincoln, we found ourselves in a bit of an email exchange, which is what we'll be talking about today.
As The Big Hurt notes in Quick Hits the Obama DOJ has taken an "extremely ridiculous" approach in responding to the finding that "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is unconstitutional, once again making a total mockery of Obama's absurd claim to be a "fierce advocate" of gay rights.
Fierce advocate of state power? Sure! Gay rights? Not so much.
The Department of Justice asked a federal judge Thursday to continue enforcing the military's ban on gay and lesbian service members, despite a ruling earlier this month that struck down "don't ask, don't tell" as unconstitutional.
In a 14-page filing, Justice Department attorneys argued that an immediate, permanent injunction against enforcing the law--one supported by Log Cabin Republicans, which successfully challenged DADT in court and has argued for a halt to all discharges of gay service members--would be "untenable." (A PDF of the government's brief is here.)
"Because any injunction in this case must be limited to [Log Cabin Republicans] and the claims it asserts on behalf of its members - and cannot extend to non-parties - plaintiff's requested world-wide injunction of [DADT] fails as a threshold matter," assistant U.S. attorney Paul Freeborne wrote.
DADT repeal advocates and attorneys representing Log Cabin Republicans immediately slammed the Justice Department's filing. Dan Woods, lead attorney for the national gay Republican group, called the arguments "ridiculous" and said his team would file a response as soon as Friday.
"It's our view that the objections fail to recognize the implications of the government's defeat at this trial," Woods told The Advocate. "This case was never limited to only Log Cabin members. And the request for a stay ignores the harm that would be suffered by current and potential service members during a period of the stay."
In a late Thursday statement, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the filing "in no way diminishes the President's firm commitment to achieve a legislative repeal of DADT - indeed, it clearly shows why Congress must act to end this misguided policy."
But Servicemembers United executive director Alex Nicholson said the Obama administration "had a choice to take several different routes [with the injunction], from the moderate and reasonable to the extremely ridiculous. It appears that they decided to go with the latter end of the spectrum."
In fact, if one reads the DOJ brief, one finds clear arguments for state power, which Obama obviously believes in (warrantless wiretapping, assasinations without trial, you name it!). But, as Dan Woods said, there's not even a hint of recognition that the government lost at trial.
As Rachel Maddow pointed out this week, drawing on her interview with VP Biden, the Obama Administration had struck a deal for an orderly phase out of DADT (which Biden said he personally opposed, favoring immediate abolition). But the deal was not honored as vote on the repeal was filibustered. The most direct and straightforward way to abolish DADT, therefore, was simply to let the trial court's decision stand. In fact, it's now a matter of factual record that supports the decision. There is only bigoted opinion in opposition. This is a classic no-brainer.
And the President had no brain. He acts on auto-pilot, based on a script premised on a hallucinatory political reality that has never existed in the real world.
Buchanan II?
In fact, get this: Obama's argument is, essentially, that Brown v. Board of Education should not have resulted in blanket desegregation!
This week, Republicans in the Senate successfully showed their collective contempt for our men and women in uniform and in the process they made our military weaker and our country less safe.
Led by John McCain -- the upper chamber's cranky uncle -- Republicans blocked Democratic efforts to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the ban on gay men and lesbians openly serving in the military.
If McCain's comments after the repeal effort failed are any indication, members of the Grand Old tea Party fail to grasp the finer details of the policy or how it has been implemented. Worse still, they are defiant in their ignorance.
Kevin's made the point before, and repeats it today, that Democrats have to run to the center more than Republicans because more people identify as conservative than liberal and therefore, they have to appeal to fewer "moderates" or people in the center than the Democrats do. Or put another way, since there are so many more people in their base, they have to pander to it to win while the Democrats have to pander to the center in order to get a majority.
The problem with this analysis is that he thinks all this has something to do with how people self-identify, as if the people who identify as "conservative" are all really conservative or the moderates and liberals are truly moderate and liberal. I don't know that that's the case. Sure it's true in some cases, but I don't think people necessarily identify with these ideological labels out of ideology. It's more of a tribal ID or a social designation.
And I think it's fairly clear that a huge propaganda campaign to demonize the word liberal that has lasted nearly 30 years has taken its toll on the willingness of people to wear it. Even I, old time lib that I am, have found myself in large social and business situations in which self-identifying as a liberal is uncomfortable....
Boy howdy! As they say in the trade. The GOP just voted to block discussion of the Defense Authorization Act. If Dems had done this, the only thing you'd hear for the next week would have been, "Why do the Democrats hate the troops?" And yet, not only do the Democrats not even dream of making such a politically potent attack on Republican obstructionists, the Republican senators are acting in defense of a position that even a majority of Republicans oppose. How, exactly does Kevin Drum's reasoning explain that? Simple: It doesn't.
(From Rachel Maddow last night. Maddow followed up with an interview of Mike Almy, whose testimony regarding being discharged outside official policy McCain heard in the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this year, the reality of which he is here denying.)
Angrily repeating himself over and over again, denying reality, and telling others around him that they are wrong, and he alone knows the truth. This is what a mental breakdown looks like. He does not belong in the US Senate. He belongs in a mental hospital. Perhaps there is no discernible difference between the two, given the exaulted status he enjoys:
And to think, this madman actually had a shot to become President of the United States. And to think, this is what Versailles tells us is the model of a sane, responsible Republican!
This really puts that whole thing about not knowing how many houses he owns in context. "Out of touch" does not begin to cover it. The only thing keeping him out of the loony bin is money.
STATE BLOGS
