A Federal Judge in California has ruled that the ban on gays in the military violates the Constitutional rights of gay and lesbian soldiers to due process and to freedom of expression.
District Court Judge Virginia Phillips -- a Clinton appointee -- also wrote that the policy has had a "deleterious effect" on the military and issued an injunction restraining the military from enforcing the policy, though the government may appeal.
The Log Cabin Republicans filed the lawsuit against Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Phillips cited in her ruling the Obama administration's desultory defense.
"[D]efendants called no witnesses, put on no affirmative case, and only entered into evidence the legislative history of the act," she wrote.
Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center speaks to the media as Imam Muhammad Musri of the Islamic Society of Central Florida looks on at left, Thursday, Sept. 9. (AP Photo/Phil Sandlin)
The American Federation of Teachers apparently sees Davis Guggenheim's new documentary — which has been billed as doing for the education "reform" movement what "An Inconvenient Truth" did (for a while at least) for climate change — as a pretty serious threat.
The memo from the union's president yesterday:
To: Members of the Media
From: Randi Weingarten, AFT President
Date: September 8, 2010
Re: Response to "Waiting for Superman"
Is America ready to settle for a good education — for the few? That's the unfortunate takeaway from a soon-to-be released documentary film, "Waiting for 'Superman.'" The film, by Davis Guggenheim, shows how tragically far we are from the great American ideal of providing all children with the excellent education they need and deserve. Yet, despite Guggenheim's unquestionably good intentions, "Waiting for 'Superman'" is inaccurate, inconsistent and incomplete — and misses what could have been a unique opportunity to portray the full and accurate story of our public schools.
"Waiting for 'Superman'" has been screened by private audiences throughout the country and will be released for the general public on Sept. 24. In the event that you write about the film, I wanted to share my thoughts directly with you about it.
One can't help but be moved by the stories of the five children and their families Guggenheim follows as they encounter a lottery system for admission to the schools upon which they are pinning their hopes for a good education. Their stories, in a very real and emotional way, drive home the point that the opportunity for a great public education should come not by chance, but by right.
But the filmmaker's storytelling falters in other key areas. The film casts several outliers in starring roles — for example, "bad" teachers and teachers unions as the villains, and charter schools as heroes ready to save the day. The problem is that these caricatures are more fictional than factual.
I'd missed this when it happened, but Xavier University's student paper reports that the conservative Liberty.com ended its contract with Yates Walker, after he pushed an unsourced sexual rumor about Mike Castle.
Walker told me that he felt comfortable floating the rumor because Castle is "a threat to American sovereignty."
The student paper reports:
Liberty.com later released a press release apologizing the administrators “weren’t able to keep a close eye on all aspects of the content” and noting that they had terminated their contract with Walker.
“We have pulled it down off of YouTube, it is not on the website,” Eric Odom, project director for Liberty.com, said. “We have moved on to the other content that we have and are looking forward from here. It is not the most stellar of situations, but that is where we are now.”
So maybe that's not taboo either. A reader e-mails, regarding my item on an Ohio fundraiser on Sept. 11, that Mike Huckabee is hosting a fundraiser that day for Indiana House candidate Jackie Walorski, according to an e-mail to supporters.
The e-mail, from political director Lindsey Mustard, is directed to people who worked in the candidate's phone bank:
Gov. Mike Huckabee is coming to Bristol, Indiana this Saturday, Sept. 11 to host a reception for Jackie at the home of Phil and Nancy Pletcher. The fundraiser begins at 7:30 p.m. It is $250 per person to attend.
**Anyone that makes 300 phone calls this week, will get one free ticket to attend.
Time.com today carried a brief item suggesting that Organizing for America hasn't lived up to its early promise, a theme that has been much written — and always angrily rejected by the DNC and OfA — since soon after the group's creation.
What happened to Barack Obama's once vaunted political machine? The outfit that put upwards of 8 million volunteers on the street in 2008 — known as Organizing for America — is a ghost of its former self. Its staff has shrunk from 6,000 to 300, and its donors are depressed: Receipts are a fraction of what they were in 2008. Virtually no one in politics believes it will turn many contests this fall. "There's no chance that OFA is going to have the slightest impact on the midterms," says Charlie Cook, who tracks congressional races.
The item prompted an unsolicited — and substantially longer — e-mail to me from DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse, who defended the group at length:
This is a ridiculous bit of reporting that didn't deserve the five graphs it was given. Who in the world would think it is appropriate to compare the scale of effort that takes place in a presidential election year with that of a midterm — it'd be like comparing an ant to elephant and criticizing the ant for not measuring up in size and stature. The fact is, the $50 million vote 2010 plan, which includes thousands of volunteers and hundreds of paid staff in all 50 states, concentrated in key states and districts, is the largest and most robust investment of resources in terms of money, personnel and volunteers for a midterm election in the history of the DNC. If anything, the effort we have undertaken here should be compared to previous midterm efforts of the party and not to a presidential election in which the two candidates raised and spent more than $1 billion.
In addition, the writer offers nothing to back up the assertion that we allowed OFA to languish after the election, which is a flat out misstatement of the facts. Within a matter of days after President Obama was sworn in, OFA was organizing thousands of events in support of the Recovery Act — hardly something that would have occurred if we had not been paying close attention to our supporters. Incidentally, since OFA launched in its present form, we have added 2.6 million people to the e-mail list and 5.1 million people have taken action through OFA — all of this before the midterm elections even have gotten into fool swing (sic). These are figures provided to the writer but which were not used because they did not fit the premise of the story she was writing.
As to the criticism of having OFA staff in VA, AZ and NC — this demonstrates the writer's lack of understanding about what's at stake in the midterms, which includes control of the House and there are numerous key House races in play in these states: as many as four in Virginia, and at least two in each of North Carolina and Arizona.
As to Mr. Cook, since OFA is running or helping to run coordinated campaigns in scores of states — his comment seems to suggest that GOTV in campaigns doesn't matter and the only thing that does is television ads — which would mean he slept thru the 2008 campaign. Besides the fact — when's the last time Charlie Cook attended a phone bank or walked a canvass or became expert on field organizing. Maybe given the whiplash some of his prognostications given people this year he's looking to opine on other things but I would venture to guess he doesn't have a clue as to what our organizing efforts are or what effect they stand to have on the outcome of close races.
The writer of this article had a premise in search of a story — the fact that Time's editors refused to grant the final product more than five graphs tells you all you need to know about the quality of reporting herein.
Establishing the efficacy of the low-profile OfA is hard to do — doors knocked and phone calls placed are impossible to verify, much less to tie to the result of an election. What's long been clear is that the Obama movement hasn't transferred — in this form or any other — to other Democratic campaigns, and that the notion of a transformative online juggernaut never really materialized. Whether that's a technical flaw, a failure of Obama's own leadership or simply the nature of midterm politics is an open question, with Democrats holding different mixes of the possible views.
One thing OfA has unquestionably done: Kept elements of Obama's campaign organization in a useful holding pattern for the reelection effort.
Also, a correction to Woodhouse's post: The item appeared in the magazine, likely explaining its brevity.
Palin's endorsement puts the Delaware primary — in which conservative Christine O'Donnell seemed at risk of fading beneath a barrage of negative press — firmly back on the table.
Josh Gerstein summarizes how a federal court’s decision today to strike down an anti-illegal-immigration ordinance in western Pennsylvania does and doesn’t relate to Arizona’s now-gutted SB1070.
One point to add: The ruling marks another judicial rebuke for anti-illegal-immigration crusader Kris Kobach, who’s also now the Republican nominee for secretary of state in Kansas. Kobach helped craft SB 1070 and viewed it as harmonious with federal law (the judge who granted the injunction against the law didn’t agree) and is listed in today’s decision as arguing on behalf of the Pennsylvania ordinance.
CORRECTION: The original version of this post incorrectly attributed the Pennsylvania decision to a single judge. The opinion was issued by a three-judge panel.
POLITICO reports today about the fading taboo of Sept. 11 politics: Marginal groups are holding dueling mosque rallies in New York that day, while across the country politicians tiptoe back toward having certain, relatively low-key political events that day.
The story doesn't make mention of any candidate fundraisers, but Ohio Senate candidate Lee Fisher is crossing that line as well, with a campaign fundraiser that evening at the home of a Mansfield City councilwoman, Ellen Hairing.
Asked about the timing, a Fisher aide noted that earlier that day, the Democrat is attending a first-responder dedication ceremony in Hilliard, Ohio.
His Republican opponent, Rob Portman, isn't doing any events that day, an aide said.
Fisher is, as far as I know, the only federal candidate in the country holding a fundraiser that day.
Democrats' recent decision to paint the Koch brothers and their company as the fathers of the vast right-wing conspiracy is belied a bit by the breadth of their campaign contributions to Democrats.
A Koch ally sends over a tally of KOCHPAC's publicly disclosed contributions to Democrats this cycle alone, which total $196,000 — a fraction of what the brothers have given to libertarian and artistic causes over the years, but still real money in federal politics.
Their largest gift: $30,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
The PAC, though, gave to a wide range of largely Blue Dog Democrats, some of whom have been sympathetic to the interests of the privately held oil company, but who also voted for, among other things, the health care overhaul the Kochs bitterly oppose.
Blanche Lincoln and her PAC were the top recipients, with at least $10,000 in the 2010 cycle; $10,000 chunks went to Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, Mark Pryor, and health care architect Max Baucus, alogn with Blue Dog Rep. Mike Ross. Other Blue Dogs in the House, like Marion Berry and Chet Edwards, also got big checks. Chuck Schumer received $1,000 of KOCHPAC money this year.
This isn't unusual giving for a big oil company — but it cuts a bit against any simple sense of the Kochs as partisan figures.
Indeed, as I've noted before, they were pouring money into — and in the view of many conservatives down the sinkhole of — libertarian causes for many years; people they long backed are now ascendant, but I'm not sure that makes them the puppet masters.
A document with the full list of Democratic KOCHPAC beneficiaries is after the jump.
Meg Whitman airs the old Bill Clinton attacks, and Weigel recalls:
There's no reason for nonjunkies to remember this, but the Clinton-Brown campaign was, for a low-stakes, mopping-up effort (Clinton was obviously going to be the nominee as soon as Paul Tsongas suspended his campaign), incredibly brutal.
Mike Doyle passes on word of the dismissal of a 1992 lawsuit aimed at forcing the FEC to regulate AIPAC that is still in the courts:
"This never ending legal saga has spanned almost twenty years, multiple administrative complaints and the careers of numerous judges and justices. To say the least, the time to complete the judicial review of these FEC decisions is long overdue. While time will tell what role, if any, this opinion will have played in this interminable legal drama, I certainly trust that I will be the last district judge that has to wrestle with this seemingly inexhaustible Hydra."
Oh, and the exclamation comes when Judge Leon exclaims, "Unfortunately, this appellate odyssey had only just begun!"
Labor leader Edwin Hill, head of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, takes exception to Sarah Palin invoking her past membership in his union:
Now former sister Palin is more than welcome to try to sell the GOP's agenda to our membership — we count Democrats, Republicans and independents among our ranks. But let me offer her a piece of sales advice.
If there is something our members hate — and we've done polling on this — it is overheated rhetoric and knee-jerk partisanship. They value their vote and want to know where candidates stand on the issues that matter the most to them, their families and communities — not just to folks like me in Washington. This year it's all about jobs, jobs, jobs.
If Gov. Palin expects to get union members to support her endorsed candidates — and our locals have been more than willing to endorse GOP candidates if they are better on our issues — we need to see the details. But besides denouncing the Employee Free Choice Act — the bill that would remove many of the existing obstacles to workers exercising their right to join a union — and Obama's rescue of the auto industry, which saved thousands of jobs, there isn't much else in her appeal that tells us what she and her friends would do to help "good blue-collar Americans" if they took power.
Illinois Republican Senate candidate Mark Kirk has launched a new statewide spot that slams rival Alexi Giannoulias for wanting to increase taxes and accuses him of paying none last year. The ad also aims to tie rival Giannoulias to Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, whose approval rating is down in the low twenties.
An off-the-cuff, and relatively unscientific survey of 2,365 Chicagoans from an Illinois pollster finds Rahm Emanuel handily winning a crowded race for mayor. Particularly notable (and questionable): He beats Jesse Jackson Jr. among African-American voters.
