Just Who Are The Undecided?

After twenty-two months of campaigning, something like that, according to Michelle Obama last night on The Daily Show, one would think that we know enough about the candidates to cast a vote.

For anyone left undecided, take a look at John Oliver's segment on The Daily Show, and then make up your mind, already. You aren't going to get famous waiting for a CNN or Fox reporter to find you.

Are you waiting for the final shoe to drop?

Read and pay attention. Intellect, calm, and the ability to surround himself with the best and the brightest. You will know who to vote for: Barack Obama.

More About the Supreme Court

This week opened the October Term of the US Supreme Court. With ten of the thirteen federal appellate circuit courts dominated by conservatives now, the result of the Bush administration, the Supreme Court doesn't have as much work when lower courts were more progressive. However, we can't under-estimate the power and influence of the Supreme Court.

And the president gets to make those nominations. With an aging liberal wing on the court, the next president could move the court all the way to the right, or maintain the tenuous and changing 5-4 majority. Click here to learn how the nomination process works.

Recent Supreme Court terms have heard fewer cases, under 100 a year.

Consumer protection and corporate responsibility are the dominant themes on the Court's agenda this term.

In one pharmaceutical case and another tobacco case, the Court will hear arguments on whether drug and tobacco companies are immunized from liability under state tort law for damages arising from the use of their products. The theory is that once a drug is approved by the FDA and once the cigarette warning is approved by the FTC, consumers have no remedy under product liability law for their damages. The legal term is preemption, where federal law trumps any state recourse. Of course, we already know that the FDA uses pharmaceutical company research as the basis for its drug approvals, research that is often slanted and doctored. And regarding cigarettes, especially "light" cigarettes, that the tobacco companies notoriously suppressed damaging information. What makes these cases unique is that the Bush administration is supporting the corporate positions, arguing that consumers should have no recourse once the federal agencies have acted.

The embarrassingly bad policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in the military might also be up for review if the Court accepts the appeal. The policy, which began in 1994, has resulted in 12,500 dismissals from the military of gay and lesbian servicepersons. The policy is inconsistently enforced, which makes it even more dangerous. 800 servicemembers in critical positions have been dismissed: pilots, intelligence analysts, medics and linguists. According to some estimates, there are currently 65,000 active gay and lesbians members of the military, and over 1 million veterans.

Twenty-two allied countries permit gay servicemembers to openly serve, including Israel.

According to a 2007 CNN poll, 79% of Americans support the right of gays and lesbians to serve in the military.

Click here for a fact sheet from the Servicemembers Legal Defense Fund.

Here is a link to the Alliance for Justice preview of the Supreme Court. This organization is a good source of information about the independence, what remains of it, of the judiciary. It does excellent investigations into the qualifications of judicial nominees, too.

Let's Talk About the Supreme Court

One of the reasons why I am so nervous about this election is that last term, despite an absence of evidence showing widespread fraud or any at all, the US Supreme Court upheld the strictest state laws in Indiana that require state-issued ID as a condition for voting. In all, 24 states have passed laws that require identification at the polls, allegedly to prevent voter fraud.

Ordinarily, that would be fine, to pass laws that maintain the integrity of the electoral process. But that is not what has been happening. Instead, as a revolt against easy registration that followed laws like "motor voter," where people can register to vote at motor vehicles and social services offices, many Republican-controlled legislatures, afraid of new Democratic voters, passed these draconian laws to suppress, not encourage voting.

This afternoon David Iglesias, one of the fired US Attorneys, whose dismissal is now the focus of a special prosecutor investigation ordered by Attorney General Michael Mukasey, was interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air. He has a new book "In Justice: Inside the Scandal that Rocked the Bush Administration." Read a bit about him on NPR.

During Iglesias' interview today, he admitted that since 1965, the focus of the US attorneys and Justice Department had been on protecting voters of color, poor people, and new voters from discrimination that prevented them from voting. A little history here. In the 1960 election between John F.Kennedy and Richard Nixon, for the first time, African American voters in the South voted Democratic instead of Republican. Of course, there was voter suppression: poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation. But the Republican Party was the party of Abraham Lincoln and those African Americans who could vote, did usually vote Republican.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been arrested for driving with an expired license and sentenced to hard labor. Both Nixon and Kennedy were approached for assistance with putting pressure on the Georgia governor to release King. It was Bobby Kennedy who made the phone call to get Dr. King out of prison. His role in the release was publicized throughout the South on blue mimeographed sheets of paper distributed in African American churches. For the first time, significant numbers of African Americans voted Democratic for Kennedy. After he became president, Lyndon Johnson understood the potential power of the African American vote and used his influence within the Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That law is probably the most powerful and effective use of federal enforcement power ever.

However, under the Bush administration, the energies of federal law enforcement as well as state efforts have been to suppress and intimidate voters, especially those voters who traditionally vote Democatic. Karl Rove is allegedly responsible for the cynical strategy of turning voter laws upside down.

According to Alliance for Justice, "in five years, the Bush administration filed just seven lawsuits under the main anti-discrimination provision of the Voting Rights Act. Fourteen were filed in the last two years of Clinton’s presidency alone."

This is why appointments to the US Supreme Court and lower federal courts are so important. The conservative members of the Supreme Court accepted without question this voter suppression strategy, despite the fact that there has been no evidence of any systematic fraud. The 6-3 majority did not question the intent of the legislature's move to insist on government-issued ID when coming to the polls. Now old people, people too poor to have driver's licences, and young voters without the ability to drive can be prevented from voting. Most of the nine fired Attorney Generals were fired because they refused to succumb to political pressure to prosecute voter fraud cases where there was none.

It's not just abortion. It's the tone of America that is at stake in this upcoming election.

Update: This morning's New York Times features an article on the illegal moves, apparently not politically motivated but with dire political consequences, performed by some swing states to remove eligible voters from the roles.

It's the Economy, Stupid: The Second Presidential Debate

We are watching the debate from Nashville, and among us, yes, there isn't a McCain supporter. Our one holdout from the first debate has switched and now is voting for Obama. So we are listening skeptically, voicing our doubts without inhibition. Certainly this debate is not the surreal entertainment of the Biden-Palin debate of last week.

At least this one is serious, seriously looking at how the economic failures have affected individual men and women and families.

Just a very catty observation: we are watching on HDTV, and I never noticed how bad Tom Brokaw's bottom teeth are!

I like Obama's calm. I am feeling so anxious that I need someone to speak to me with deliberation, not pandering, but calm. He seems so sensible. I just lost thousands of dollars in a carefully planned 401K that was divided 50-50 between stocks and bonds. I am not gambler. Despite my conservative investment, my retirement has been put off by years. I need someone who speaks to me as an intelligent person who is part of the solution. McCain condescends to me, he wants to decide, not us.

Challenges are opportunities. Isn't that what we have learned as we have aged? That whenever we are confronted, we have this moment when we can open our eyes and open our possibilities. Obama speaks to that level of thinking. I like that.

23 votes against alternative fuels by McCain. This is a failure of leadership. America has 3% of the world's oil reserves. We can't drill our way out of the problem. We can't use more fossil fuels to get a hold on global warming. We had a chance to be the leaders for going green, and delusion and denial under Bush prevented that from happening. And now Palin speaks about regulation as if it isn't what moves the economy forward.

We can be leaders in developing alternative technology and then exporting it to China and other nations so that we don't smoke over the planet.

Health care is tied to Social Security. We won't bankrupt the country if we have affordable health care.

Ronald Raygun is no hero in this household!

McCain is no maverick. Be sure to read the Rolling Stones article that tells a story about John McCain that will make you shiver.

Is health care a commodity? This is a good question. I was just at the doctor after a cardiac incident. He checked my pulse, heart beat, and did an EKG. Then he told me that my insurance was so bad that he had to wait for another incident before he could order the next round of tests.

I'm a woman nearing sixty. The most likely cause of death for a woman my age is heart disease.

What is the purpose of health insurance?

We need government to impose regulations, because without regulation, we are reduced to our worst: greed, indifference, and bias.

I wish Obama would mention that by having no state regulation over health insurance, companies could easily stop paying for reproductive health, including birth control and abortion. That is what the conservatives want the Supreme Court to do, to make reproductive health protections a state issue, not a federal one. Once it is solely state controlled, we could lose everything. Our daughters could lose control over their bodies. Margaret Atwood wrote of such in The Handmaiden's Tale.

Obama hits McCain on foreign policy!!! Iraq has put an enormous strain on our troops and we owe them gratitude. But what a failed policy!

What about the Iraqi $79 billion surplus? I've never heard McCain answer that charge.

Use of U.S. combat forces: can either fathom a humanitarian use of US force where there are no national security issues at stake.

Moral issues might be at stake. Holocaust, Rwanda: looking back should we have acted? Standing by idly diminishes the US. We need to work in concert with our allies, not alone, we can't sustain unilateral action.

McCain shouldn't be calling us "my friends." It's patronizing. He isn't answering the questions.

What are the limits of America's abilities to make a difference in interventions? Somalia, Lebanon? We have to temper our decisions, is this McCain speaking? I don't think temperament with McCain, do you?

McCain still isn't looking at Obama. He is blinking and smirking a lot. Again, it is an anger management issue, according to Leslie who is an analyst and leadership trainer. It could be misinterpreted as racism or arrogance, at least.

McCain is criticizing Obama about announcing an invasion of Pakistan, yet what did Bush do in invading Iraq? Day by day, hour by hour, warning Iraq before the bombs fell.

Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran!!! Obama is punching back with elegance and grace.

An acceptable dictator in Afghanistan? An acceptable dictator in Iraq? Is this refreshingly honest about American foreign policy, finally?

However, the surge was not the reason for the calm in Iraq, lately, at least according to Bob Woodward. According to Woodward, as he finally admitted on Friday night's Bill Maher's Real Time on HBO, it is a secret strategy of "exploding baskets" that has brought the calm, not any increase in the number of American troops stationed there.

Is McCain saying we should go to war with Russia? Is he mad? At least Obama is speaking about assisting the economic strength of former economic satellites, not just seeing everything in military terms. But I'm not happy about either candidate's response here. Petro dollars increase the influence of Russia.

Notice that the microphones are just for show as a way of diminishing McCain's stiffness and handicaps.

The Israeli question is clearly pandering to Florida. For a laugh, watch Sarah Silverman's thegreatschlep.com. Jews are 2% of the population, but 4% of the vote. It's an important factor in winning Florida, fair and square, and not the way it was won in 2000 or 2004.

Yes, we need to talk directly with our friends, and more importantly, with our enemies.

Last question: What don't you know and how will you learn it?

Obama: Michelle could give a much longer list. The nature of the challenges is immense. We never know what the challenges will be. Are we going to pass on the American dream to the next generation?

McCain: We don't know what challenges we will be facing around the world or at home.

We think Obama did well.

The Supremes

Yesterday was the first day of the October Term of the U.S. Supreme Court. This is a reminder that judicial appointments to the Court, and throughout the federal judiciary, are also on the line in the upcoming presidential election.

The Federalist Society was founded in 1982 to counter the alleged liberal orthodoxy in American law schools.

From The Federalist Society's mission statement: The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be. The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities.

The Federalist Society has two co-chairs: Robert H. Bork, who was not confirmed as a justice on the Supreme Court, and Orrin Hatch. Both are conservative ideologues.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samual Alito, George Bush nominees, have been members of and molded by the tenets of The Federalist Society. Chief Justice John Roberts during his nomination process said he couldn't remember if he had been a member. However, he was. Justice Antonin Scalia recently addressed the Society in Chicago and claimed that a course like poverty law isn't a legitimate subject of study in law school.

It's not just an issue of abortion and the right to access to reproductive health care. The Supreme Court has issued some bizarre decisions these last years, waivering between ideological analysis and pure political pragmatism: Bush v. Gore is the most obvious example. Although the conservative members of the Supreme Court claim to believe in states' rights, when it came to crowning Bush president, it ignored the constitutional role that states play in regulating elections.

Although a narrow majority has regularly condemned the Bush administration for denying all rights to detainees in Guantanamo, the majority has been slight and the bigger issues of the power of the executive have been guided by Federalist Society dogma. Cheney's unusual depiction of the vice president as being a part of the legislative branch and not the executive as a way of removing his papers from public archiving might be sustained by this Supreme Court.

The average age of the current court justice is 68. The oldest member of the Court, Justice Stevens, is 82. The chief Justice is only 53. According to Laurence Tribe, a professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, the Court as an instrument of progressive legal change is no longer.

Think Supreme Court and federal district and appellate court nominations as you get ready to cast your vote.

Some Thoughts on the Bailout and What Really Matters For You and Me

As our life savings and being very close to 60, retirement funds, diminish, adding another few years onto my work life and yours, too, the former head of Lehman Brothers, Richard S. Fuld, Jr., was being grilled by members of the House Oversight and Governmental Reform Committee. Click here for the NY Times story, which is quite incomplete.

Once again, too late.

“Nobody, including me, anticipated how the problems that started in the mortgage markets would spread to our credit markets and banking system and now threaten our entire financial system and our country,” he said. “Like many other financial institutions, Lehman Brothers got caught in this financial tsunami.”

Notice the use of the passive voice. Lehman Brothers as victim, um?

In a report from All Things Considered this evening on NPR, it was reported that Fuld would neither admit that he did anything wrong nor that the government failed to regulate.

It's all show, once again, and all too late.

And if you really want to get mad, take a look at the compensation packages CEO's like Fuld received despite the fact that they ruined their companies, ruined the lives of their employees, and ruined our economy.

While the stock market jumped around as if it was having a heart attack, John McCain was calling Obama "touchy" and Sarah Palin was in Florida claiming that Obama is palling around with terrorists. Not exactly on point. But don't be fooled, this was all distraction from the fact that Henry Paulson, the Treaury Secretary, was appointing one of his Goldman Sachs proteges as the head of the government bailout program. His name is Neel Kashkari, and the office he is going to head is called the Office of Financial Stability. I'm not kidding! We are indeed right in the middle of "newspeak" from George Orwell's 1984.

From the Wall Street Journal: Kashkari’s appointment is another example of how deep those Goldman Sachs ties go. In fact, Paulson himself was recruited by a former Goldman Sachs banker: former White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten. Bolten overcame Paulson’s reluctance to persuade him to take the job as Treasury Secretary at a time when Paulson was so wary of the job that he declined to meet with President Bush because he knew he couldn’t say no to the President himself. According to an article in The International Economy by Fred Barnes in 2006, Paulson also believed that the Bush administration would not be able to accomplish many financial changes in 2007 and 2008. Kashkari’s new job show just how wrong Paulson was back then.

It's clear that McCain doesn't want the election focus to stay on the economy or on banking. He's already admitted to how ignorant he is about economics, despite his service on the Senate Commerce Committee, and he's already shown how in the bankers' pockets he comfortably sits. Remember the Keating Five, the debacle that led to the savings and loan crash, which coincidentally also required a federal government bailout? If you don't, here's a clip from the Obama campaign to educate voters: http://www.keatingeconomics.com/

And although Sarah Palin might make for good comedic material on SNL, don't be distracted: her "hecks," "darns," "hockey moms," and "Joe six-packs" are coded racial messages. When was the last time you met an African American ice hockey player? And when she refers to McCain as a servant, that is also a code message to attract the attention of fundamentalist Christians.

Today is the opening of the October Term for the U.S. Supreme Court. Keep that in mind, too, as the election approaches.

Rolling Stone Magazine's Expose of John McCain

As a group of us gathered around the hotel lobby television to watch the spectacle of Saturday Night Live's parody of the vice presidential debates, we realized that a McCain-Palin win would definitely give America better comedic theater, but aside from that, an Obama defeat would be a disaster for the nation and the planet.

Now Rolling Stone magazine has posted on its website a story, Make Believe Maverick, dated October 16, 2008, by Tom Dickinson, profiling a John McCain who is not fit for the presidency.

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

This is must reading, along with its posting of Matt Taibbi's October 2, 2008 piece Mad-Dog Palin.

American electoral politics has never been polite or constrained. This election season is reaching new lows, however. I'm not sure how to combat the latest lies being spread by the McCain-Palin campaign, but after seeing the damage done by the Swift Boat ads to John Kerry, Obama has to fight back. According to one source, nearly all of McCain's national ads are now negative.

Obama wants to raise the level of discourse. Obama's newest ad is a preemptive strike.

All of this negativity is, of course, a distraction from the real issues: the economy and how it has punched the breath out of most of us; our stature among the community of nations; and whether as a country we will help solve the problems facing this troubled and crowded planet or whether we are the trouble itself.