Tag Archives: Democrats

Another horrible idea

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A website blocked in Bahrain
Image via Wikipedia

Several politicians have announced a new proposed bill called the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). It would create two blacklists of Internet domains: one created by the courts and a second created by government bureaucrats. Domains added to the lists would be blocked by US ISPs.

COICA creates two blacklists of Internet domain names. Courts could add sites to the first list; the Attorney General would have control over the second. Internet service providers and others (everyone from Comcast to PayPal to Google AdSense) would be required to block any domains on the first list. They would also receive immunity (and presumably the good favor of the government) if they block domains on the second list.

The lists are for sites “dedicated to infringing activity,” but that’s defined very broadly — any domain name where counterfeit goods or copyrighted material are “central to the activity of the Internet site” could be blocked.

This is Internet censorship, pure and simple. Welcome to China.

You can sign a petition in opposition to this governmental censorship here.

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Frat house for Jesus

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John Ensign, Man of Integrity

Image by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com via Flickr

In the current issue of The New Yorker, Perter J. Boyer takes a close look at the so-called GOP “frat house” that has been the DC home of a group of evangelical lawmakers, including John Ensign, Tom Coburn and Bart Stupak. The legislators had all pledged to help each other live like Jesus.

How did it turn out? No so well.

One day some weeks earlier, Coburn said, he had learned that John Ensign, who was married, was having an affair with Cynthia Hampton, the wife of one of his aides, Doug Hampton, and there had been an immediate intervention that same day. Meeting in an upstairs room at the C Street house (a room that was occasionally used for marriage counselling), Doug Hampton, accompanied by Coburn and three lay ministers who manage C Street, had confronted Ensign about the affair. The encounter was filled with recrimination and tears, and culminated in Ensign confessing and vowing to repent. Coburn returned to the Senate, but the others remained with Ensign, handing him a pen and paper and dictating a letter to Cynthia Hampton declaring his intention to end the affair.

“Cindy,” the letter began. “This is the most important letter that I’ve ever written. What I did with you was wrong. I was completely self-centered + only thinking of myself.” Ensign wrote that God wished for the two marriages to heal, and for the two lovers to “restore our relationships to Him.” The letter was put in a FedEx envelope, and addressed. The three ministers—Marty Sherman, Tim Coe, and David Coe—drove with Ensign to a FedEx station, and watched as he slipped the letter into the drop-box.

* * *

According to Doug Hampton, Ensign, after mailing the letter and shaking his escorts, had telephoned Cindy Hampton and begged her to disregard the package he had just sent. He soon met her again, in Las Vegas, where they resumed the affair.
The full article also details the little-known organization the operates the house.
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Background on Judge Walker

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From Cato@Liberty:

In fact, Judge Walker was first appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, at the recommendation of Attorney General Edwin Meese III (now the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy and Chairman of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation). Democratic opposition led by Sen. Alan Cranston (D-CA) prevented the nomination from coming to a vote during Reagan’s term. Walker was renominated by President George H. W. Bush in February 1989. Again the Democratic Senate refused to act on the nomination. Finally Bush renominated Walker in August, and the Senate confirmed him in December.

What was the hold-up? Two issues, basically. Like many accomplished men of the time, he was a member of an all-male club, the Olympic Club. Many so-called liberals said that should disqualify him for the federal bench. People for the American Way, for instance, said in a letter to Judiciary Committee chair Joe Biden, “The time has come to send a clear signal that there is no place on the federal bench for an individual who has, for years maintained membership in a discriminatory club and taken no meaningful steps to change the club’s practices.”

The second issue was that as a lawyer in private practice he had represented the U.S. Olympic Committee in a suit that prevented a Bay Area group from calling its athletic competition the Gay Olympics.

Because of those issues, coalitions including such groups as the NAACP, the National Organization for Women, the Human Rights Campaign, the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force worked to block the nomination.

In other words, this “liberal San Francisco judge” was recommended by Ed Meese, appointed by Ronald Reagan, and opposed by Alan Cranston, Nancy Pelosi, Edward Kennedy, and the leading gay activist groups. It’s a good thing for for advocates of marriage equality that those forces were only able to block Walker twice.

Republicans are crazy

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For those who remember, there was a poll commissioned by blog Daily Kos a while ago that showed many in the Republican Party where insane.  Fox News and conservative commentators attacked the poll as purposefully inaccurate.  Well there is a new Harris poll out that shows Republicans are even more insane than I thought (I have cut and pasted below an excerpt from a recent article).

  • 67 percent of Republicans (and 40 percent of Americans overall) believe that Obama is a socialist.
  • 57 percent of Republicans (32 percent overall) believe that Obama is a Muslim
  • 45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was “not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president”
  • 38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is “doing many of the things that Hitler did”
  • Scariest of all, 24 percent of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama “may be the Antichrist.”

Healthcare quote of the day

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When I’m drafting right to life language, I don’t call up the nuns.

– “Democratic” Congressman Bart Stupak, taking on Catholics nuns who have come out in large numbers in favor of healthcare insurance reform.  Who does his listen to?  Why “leading bishops, Focus on the Family, and The National Right to Life Committee,” of course.

More from Maureen Dowd:

We might have to bang Bart’s head into a blackboard a few times before he realizes that in a moral tug-of-war between the sisters and the bishops, you have to go with the gals.

The nuns are giving the Democrats cover. As Bob Casey, an abortion opponent who helped negotiate the abortion language in the Senate bill, observed, quoting Scripture: “They care for ‘the least, the last and the lost.’ And they know health care.”

On Friday, Tim Ryan, an antiabortion Democrat from Ohio, took to the House floor to say he had been influenced by the nuns to vote for the bill.

“You say this is pro-abortion,” he said to Republicans, and yet “you have 59,000 Catholic nuns from across the country endorsing this bill, 600 Catholic hospitals, 1,400 Catholic nursing homes endorsing this bill.”

Harkin: Reconciliation is a go

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I hate to jinx things, but today seems to have been a sort of breakthrough on healthcare insurance reform. Senator Tom Harkin is stating that reconciliation is a go. It actually, finally, mercifully may happen, folks.

Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!

Oh, and when you the GOP whining about the “nuclear option,” review this list of bills that passed using reconciliation:

The 1995 Balanced Budget Act was passed in reconciliation. The final vote was 52 to 47. The 2001 Bush Tax Cut was passed in reconciliation. The final vote was 58 to 33. The 2003 Bush Tax Cut was passed in reconciliation. The final vote was 50 to 50, with Dick Cheney casting the tie-breaking vote. The 2005 Deficit Reduction Act was also passed in reconciliation with a 50 to 50 vote and a Cheney intervention. The 2006 Tax Relief Extensions Act was passed in reconciliation. The final vote was 54 to 44. This is as you’d expect: If bills had overwhelming bipartisan majorities, they wouldn’t need to go through reconciliation.

As it happens, Republicans controlled the Senate during each and every one of these bills.

GOP: wholly-owned subsidiary of insurance companies? (updated)

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The GOP does support the retention of an anti-trust exemption for the healthcare insurance companies. The free market seems very important to the GOP, an article of faith, and government intrusion in the market to protect a free market without collusion is bad. Except when it isn’t.

Update: Matt Taibbi has more.

The insurance antitrust exemption has been an outrage for over fifty years. The original bill formalizing the industry’s exemption from the Sherman Antitrust Act, the McCarran-Ferguson Act, was dreamed up by two Hollywood villains. Nevada Senator Pat McCarran was the inspiration for the “Senator Pat Geary” character in Godfather Part II (”Senator… my final offer is this: nothing” — that guy), while Homer Ferguson was the inspiration for the Lloyd Bridges character in Tucker who whored himself out for the auto makers to get Tucker’s new car struck from the market. These two gigantic assholes teamed up to help the insurance industry avoid the albatross of competitive pricing.

When is a terrorist not a terrorist?

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Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon, points out that if a government asserts that someone is a “terrorist” that does not mean that the accused in fact is a terrorist. The idea that if a claim of “terrorist” is made means anything can be done to the accused (torture, indefinite imprisonment, deportation, etc.) is what helps support the use of torture among a large number of Americans. This despite the fact that torture is both illegal and immoral. It is particularly galling that many on the right (but including a growing number on the left), who claim to be against government interference in the private sector because of alleged governmental incompetance, seem to be quite willing to believe that no claim of “terrorist” can ever be wrong.

The whole point of the Bush-era controversies was that — away from an actual battlefield and where the Constitution applies (on U.S. soil and/or towards American citizens wherever they are) — the Government should have to demonstrate someone’s guilt before it’s assumed (e.g., they should have to show probable cause to a court and obtain warrants before eavesdropping; they should have to offer evidence that a person engaged in Terrorism before locking them in a cage, etc.).  But to someone who equates unproven government accusations with proof, those processes are entirely unnecessary.  Even in the absence of those processes, they already know that these persons are Terrorists.  How do they know that?  Because the Government said so.  Even when it comes to their fellow citizens, that’s all the “proof” that is needed.

This despite repeated proof to the contrary.

Political quote of the day

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This isn’t about betrayal, or a slap in the face, or an insult. It isn’t about strategies to keep seats, or grand theories of justice. Democrats in Congress have the chance to cast a single vote that will make the lives of tens of millions of Americans less wrenching, our demises less brutal. That’s what this is about.

– MD, an anonymous reader of TPM, making explicit the real world effect of a failure by the Democrats in the House to approve the Senate healthcare reform bill and seek improvements later. Where is the courage on the left to vote for real reform even at the cost of each members re-election?