Virginia's homophobic attorney general is a birther

From WingNutDaily (not linking, no way):

A newly unearthed recording reveals a state attorney general explaining how the president's eligibility could be tested in the courts by a lawyer defending a client against an accusation brought under legislation signed by Obama.

The recording of Virginia Attorney General Kenneth T. Cuccinelli puts him on a growing list of elected leaders, members of Congress and state officials who have addressed concerns over Obama's eligibility to occupy the White House.

Cuccinelli released a statement this week that the recording, apparently made either while he was campaigning for the office or shortly after he was elected, was a "hypothetical" answer to a "hypothetical" question.

Read the rest of this post...

Lead gay legal group sues senior openly-gay Obama official for anti-gay discrimination

Someone seems very intent on ticking off the gays as a crucial congressional election approaches. Read the rest of this post...

Democrats discover the benefits of taking a stand on health reform

Read it. Spot on.

If health-care reform finally staggers across the finish line, it will be because President Obama and congressional Democrats recognized -- at long last -- the truth that has been staring them in the face for more than a year: They'll be better off politically if they just try their best to do the right thing.

No matter what the Democrats attempt or how they go about it, Republicans are going to complain, obstruct and attack. That's the inescapable lesson from this whole exercise, and it's hard to fathom why it took so long to sink in. The Democrats looked ridiculous, sitting around the campfire and singing "Kumbaya" while the opposition was out in the forest whittling spears and arrows.

As if to prove my point, some Republicans are already talking about trying to repeal the reform bill even though it hasn't been passed. This hardly seems in the spirit of bipartisanship -- which the GOP, with cynical but skillful rhetoric, has elevated into some kind of saintly virtue.

You have to admire the GOP's chutzpah. George W. Bush governed like a steamroller as he enacted his radical initiatives -- massive tax cuts, a huge shift in the balance between privacy and security, an unprecedented "big government" takeover of education policy, an expensive and unfunded Medicare prescription drug program.

But the moment the Republicans were out of power, they discovered a moral imperative for the majority party to do everything in a bipartisan fashion.

Read the rest of this post...

I'd be curious how Glenn Beck and the Teabaggers feel about the violent overthrow of our government

I watch stuff like this and can't help feeling that people like Glenn Beck made the Soviet Union great. Read the rest of this post...

Reid promises public option vote later in the year

Free standing, with no help from the White House. Doesn't sound like a terribly enticing offer. Read the rest of this post...

Oregon lawsuit claims Boy Scouts sex abuse coverup

Maybe they should incorporate as a religion. Read the rest of this post...

Virginia warns wife of Justice Clarence Thomas her group is violating law

And they seemed like such nice folk. Read the rest of this post...

Greenspan accepts some responsibility for housing bubble, but again claims ignorance

Thanks for taking the time to speak out again about how clueless the Fed was. Tell me again why we want the Federal Reserve to take the lead on consumer protection? If they were are ignorant to the problem as Greenspan says yet again, there's no reason to have any faith in that organization. None at all.

In his most detailed examination of the causes of the financial crisis, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, acknowledges that the Fed failed to grasp the magnitude of the housing bubble but argued that its policy of low interest rates from 2002 to 2005 did not cause the bubble.

In a 48-page paper that he is to present on Friday at the Brookings Institution, Mr. Greenspan, who stepped down as Fed chairman in January 2006, expressed some remorse, but stood by his conviction that little can be done to identify a bubble before it bursts, much less pop it.

“We had been lulled into a sense of complacency by the only modestly negative economic aftermaths of the stock market crash of 1987 and the dot-com boom,” Mr. Greenspan wrote. “Given history, we believed that any declines in home prices would be gradual. Destabilizing debt problems were not perceived to arise under those conditions.”

Greenspan goes on to talk about how much risk society should accept, but again, where the hell was he? People looked to him to raise issues like that, and he chose to be a media darling and soak up stories about how he was the greatest Fed chairman ever. We now know he was among the worst. He failed the country, yet he still thinks he was brilliant and had nothing to do with the failure. Read the rest of this post...

Dems scared into action on health care reform

Yes, but.

Democratic lawmakers, from the leadership on down, are facing what many describe as an unprecedented amount of political pressure as the party scrambles to pass health care reform.

In recent days, the message has been conveyed throughout the caucus that the failure to pass legislation into law would be a cataclysmic misstep. It goes beyond the certainty that activists in the base would be demoralized, that the president would be weakened or that Congress would seem entirely ineffectual (if not so already). The damage to the party would be so far-reaching, lawmakers have been told, that even the big-time donors who have long supported Democratic causes would be less inclined to contribute.

"The party is on a precipice," said one longtime Democratic donor who asked to speak on the condition of anonymity. "If they pass this [bill], people will be jubilant. If they don't, there are going to be a lot of us who consider just staying home in 2010."

I think this misjudges a bit where "the base" stands. Some people don't want the bill to pass at all. Others are reluctantly for passage, but passage is hardly going to inspire them to get out and vote (and donate) to the party. Remember, this is not the bill the base wanted. It's the most conservative compromise of a compromise that epitomizes everything currently wrong with the party (cave first, ask questions later).

I agree that not passing the bill would make Democrats look even weaker than they already seem (and are). But passing it, after the abysmal mess both the White House and Congress made of this effort, is hardly going to inspire confidence for the future. "The base" - which apparently is the majority of the country at this point - has issues with the Democratic party because the partry doesn't fight for what it says it believes in. That problem won't be solved by voting for a bill that doesn't do much of what the party and the President repeatedly promised, but never really fought for. Read the rest of this post...

VIDEO: Mini-documentary of the Teabagger protests earlier this week in DC. Hysterical as always.

Our good buddies at New Left Media have done another great video. This time, they went to the Teabagger protests in Washington earlier this week. As usual, Chase and Erick knock it out of the ballpark by simply asking the protesters the simplest of questions. These guys are college undergrads. They're ditching classes to make these videos. No one is funding them. Someone needs to step up and hand these boys a large check. You can start by making a donation via PayPal here. (NB: Their camera alone costs them a bundle to rent every time they do this - and no, you can't use a Flip cam and get this good of video, and then editing.)

Read the rest of this post...

John Ensign is still the Republican Senator from Nevada

Amazingly, John Ensign is still in the Senate. But, the leading political columnist in Nevada, Jon Ralston, says it's time for him to go:

But the nagging, all-too-serious question is this: Is Ensign so self-absorbed and delusional that he is willing to bring down folks of varying innocence with him — either people loyal to him now having to hire attorneys to defend themselves because of the senator’s scandal or those whose tangential roles in his life have them under federal scrutiny.

Politicians are notoriously solipsistic, but Ensign’s behavior since his confess-and-run news conference June 16 has set a new nadir. It’s one thing to be exposed as a spectacular hypocrite, a moral crusader with feet of clay, and yet try to hang onto your Club of 100 membership as if it were more important than anything. But it’s quite different to become the focus of criminal and ethics probes and continue to clutch onto the senatorial ring despite the carnage — real, quantifiable human carnage — you are leaving in your wake.

I don't think Ensign is going anywhere. He thinks he can ride this out, just like David Vitter did. And, his GOP colleagues will never turn on him. They only turned on Larry Craig because of the gay angle.

I'm not complaining that Ensign is still in the Senate. If the GOPers want to keep him there, so be it. We'll just point out every day that Ensign symbolizes the corruption and hypocrisy of Mitch McConnell's caucus. Read the rest of this post...

Report: SEC and Fed received warnings about Lehman

Was anyone interested in the truth? Doesn't sound like it. Regulators sounded as complicit as the auditors so I hope there's something wrong with this report.

The findings raise questions over what federal regulators knew about Lehman’s accounting and when they knew it. In the account given by the Merrill officials, the SEC, the lead regulator, and the New York Federal Reserve were given warnings about Lehman’s balance sheet calculations as far back as March 2008.

Former and current Fed officials say even in the competitive world of Wall Street, it is un­usual for rival bankers to relay such concerns to the Fed.

The former Merrill officials said they contacted the regulators after Lehman released an estimate of its liquidity position in the first quarter of 2008.

And a reminder, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was President of the New York Federal Reserve when all of this unfolded. Read the rest of this post...

Friday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

This morning, the President is in Northern Virginia to make one last big push for his health insurance reform legislation. It's looking like the House will vote on Sunday afternoon (just when the immigration reform rally is getting underway on the National Mall.) The vote will be close, but it's looking more likely that the Democrats will scrounge up the necessary 216 votes. The Senate should vote next week on the reconciliation package. But, the House won't need another vote. The Senate bill will be deemed passed in the House vote on Sunday.

It's almost amusing to watch Republicans complain about the process after Mitch McConnell did everything he could to thwart the usual process in the Senate. And, his caucus went along with him -- including the faux moderates Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. But, both of them have been on federally tax-payer funded health care for most of their lives.

Lt. Dan Choi and Capt. Jim Pietrangelo should be released from jail today. They were arrested yesterday after handcuffing themselves to the fence in front of the White House to protest Obama's inaction on repealing DADT. The President plays a key role in that legislation, but despite a vow to do it in the State of the Union, the White House isn't moving. It was the first time I've seen civil disobedience up close. And, it was intense. To think it's come to this with the Obama administration. But, it has. This week, Barney Frank made it abundantly clear that the White House really needed to speak out on its desire to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell this year. That was Monday. No word from the White House, which says everything. There is no plan, despite the promises. It seems that everyone in DC knows that, but not everyone will admit it.


There was also civil disobedience in Speaker Pelosi's offices in DC and SF yesterday to demand movement on ENDA. Pam Spaulding has photos from those protests. Looks like we're not playing nice anymore.


Let's get started... Read the rest of this post...

Bluefin tuna ban collapses at UN

The EU became wobbly and Canada teamed up with Japan to knock this back. (Canada also managed to block a ban on trading polar bear fur because it would create problems for business. What the?) The arguments against the bluefin ban are ridiculous because the industry is already shattered. They're arguing that it will damage a business that hardly has any life left because they've overfished and overfished leaving a fraction of the bluefin tuna left to hunt. Commercial fishing fleets never know when to stop fishing so it tends not to happen until nothing is left. At least in the past we could expect more common sense policies from Canada but those days seem to be gone as well.

The trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna will continue unchecked after the rejection yesterday of a proposed fishing ban that had been described by conservationists as the only way to save the critically endangered species from extinction.

Japan and Canada along with scores of developing nations succeeded yesterday in preventing any restrictions being imposed on the harvest of the fish, which is highly prized in sushi restaurants, on the grounds that a ban would devastate the world's fishing economies. Delegates at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) in Doha voted by a margin of 68 to 20 against a proposal to immediately outlaw the sale of bluefin. A weaker measure supported by the EU, which would have introduced a ban in 2011, was also rejected by 72 votes to 43.

The decision puts one of the world's most majestic fish in imminent danger of extinction. Stocks of bluefin, the largest and fastest of all tuna species, have declined to roughly 15 per cent of historic levels. Migrating shoals of the fish, which grow to up to three metres in length and have been likened to underwater Ferraris, are plundered each year as they pass through the Straits of Gibraltar to spawn in the Mediterranean.

Read the rest of this post...

France proposes shared submarine force with UK

Wow. It's eventually going to happen but can you imagine? Centuries of competing against each other and now this. From a cost perspective, the current model has to be painfully expensive for everyone in Europe. The Guardian:

France has offered to create a joint UK-French nuclear deterrent by sharing submarine patrols, the Guardian has learned.

Officials from both countries have discussed how a deterrence-sharing scheme might work but Britain has so far opposed the idea on the grounds that such pooling of sovereignty would be politically unacceptable.

Britain and France each maintain "continuous at-sea deterrence", which involves running at least one nuclear-armed submarine submerged and undetected at any given time. It is a hugely expensive undertaking, and its usefulness in a post-cold war world has long been questioned by disarmament campaigners.

Read the rest of this post...