This is a place where current and ex-students of my "We the People" program can touch base with each other on important current issues. Publish your comments by clicking on "comments" under a post, then "post a comment". You can register, or just post a comment anonymously. WARNING: I make less of an attempt to be "fair and balanced" in this blog than I do in class. Feel free to take me on though, I don't have all the answers and I love to hear your opinions regardless of your perspective.
An interesting piece in the NY Times this morning about the successes and failures Obama has had in convincing individual members of Congress to support his program. If he expects to win upcoming battles such as the one on health care, does he need to get tougher?
A suburban Philadelphia school district used school-issued laptop webcams to spy on students at home, potentially catching them and their families in compromising situations, a family claims in a federal lawsuit.
The Tea Party, a loosely knit group of people who are fed up with big government, are trying to get more organized in hopes of influencing the 2010 election.
(Some affiliated with the group says their name stands for Taxed Enough Already, while others claim the name is a reference to the civil disobedience of the Boston Tea Party of 1773.)
While members of the group don't agree on everything, they held their first ever convention in Nashville recently with Sarah Palin as the headline speaker.
Take a good look at the picture: Is the look of American democracy in the new decade? I'll refrain from making any snarky jokes here, but you may be able to imagine some of my thoughts.
Some info on this group and the impact they are having on politics:
What has been a Taliban stronghold, the city of Marjah,in the southern province of Helmand, is the target of a joint U.S./Afghan military offensive. While success might mean a major region of the country will be more open to Afghan government services (hopefully winning "hearts and minds" away from the extremists) there are always big risks when the guns and bombs start going off.
Sadly, one such tragedy occurred only three days into this operation as a U.S. missile destroyed a house killing at least 9 civilians.
President Obama has called for a televised, bi-partisan, half-day health care summit. Clearly, Obama is trying to move the momentum back toward passage of health care reform after its chances were diminished by Republican Scott Brown becoming the 41st Republican Senator, and making it possible for Republicans to filibuster any health care bill they don't approve of in the Senate.
My first take is that this is a smart move on the part of the Obama Administration. He came off looking very good in his exchange with House Republicans during an hour-long televised Q & A session a week and a half ago. I think the chances of Obama winning over more public support by engaging with Republicans in an open, televised, give-and-take are very good.
We need health care reform to pass, we can't do nothing. It is costing us too much in money and in the quality of life for too many Americans. If Obama can pull of this summit (how can the Republicans really say no?) he will greatly increase the prospects of passage of health care reform legislation.
The President made his invitation in a pre-Super Bowl interview with Katie Couric of CBS News:
At a National Prayer Breakfast, Obama gave a speech in which he called for a more civil tone in the debates and discussions going on in Washington D.C.
I found this to be an interesting commentary on a less flashy, but very important aspect of a presidential administration: a reliance on scientific driven regulatory policy instead of ideologically driven policy.
...the old-time progressives who fashioned the regulatory state rested their hopes on what could be called “scientific administration.” Louis Brandeis and Herbert Croly--to name two of the foremost turn-of-the-century progressives--believed that the agencies, staffed by experts schooled in social and natural science and employing the scientific method in their decision-making, could rise above partisanship and interest-group pressure....
Many of the last century’s presidents--from Theodore Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton--subscribed to this progressive ideal of regulation based on expertise. But, beginning in the 1980s and culminating in the presidency of George W. Bush, the notion of scientific administration came under attack from Republicans and their allies. They began to subvert the agencies by bringing in business executives, corporate lawyers, and lobbyists--the very opposite of the impartial experts envisioned by Brandeis and Croly.
...Obama’s regulatory appointments could not be more different--no surprise given that he is the son of two social scientists (one of whom attempted to introduce scientific administration to Kenya) and that he once worked in academia himself. Indeed, the flow of expertise into the federal bureaucracy over the past year has been reminiscent of what took place at the start of the New Deal.
Probably you have heard that our nation has a big national debt. Yes, we do. If you click on this link, you will see how much money we owe.
The debt is the total of all the money the governnment owes because of all the years in which our government had a deficit - we spent more than was collected in taxes.
Why do we do this? basically because Americans demand a lot from the government but don't want to pay more taxes. There are only two ways to reduce budget deficits, reduce spending or raise taxes. Neither are popular.
So, now that the economy is having lots of trouble and people are hurting, it makes it especially hard to cut government programs or raise taxes.
SO, let's look at the budget that Barack Obama has proposed to Congress for 2011. Look at the following links, and see what you can learn about our federal budget.
First an NBC news report on Obama's budget announcement:
Will it pass? Congress has to pass the budget each year, and it is a complicated process. Here is an interactive look at the budget process also from the Washington Post.
The New York Times has another way of looking at this in the following interactive graph. It give more info about what each category is all about.
A dramatic loss in a special election in Massachusetts last night has hurt Democrats and will make it more difficult for Obama to get things passed in the Senate. This was liberal icon Ted Kennedy's seat, and hands a 41st vote to the Republicans, enough to sustain filibusters. Was this loss a failure a reflection of people being unhappy with Obama? Analysis from the New York Times: News Analysis - A Year Later, Voters Send a Different Message - NYTimes.com
Obama started out with very high ratings in the opinion polls, but those have dropped below 50% on approval ratings in many polls. A look back at the last year of Obama's year in office from NBC:
For the first time, the issue of same-sex marriage is going before a federal court. At issue is Proposition 8, passed by California voters, which bans same sex marriage in that state. Do states have the authority under the Constitution to ban same sex marriage, or is it a violation of basic rights?
Fellow Democract, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has faced the embarrassing disclosure of remarks he made about Barack Obama during the 2008 political campaign.
Reid, in predicting that Obama could become the first African-American President was quoted in a new book about the campaign as having described Obama as “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Reid Apologizes for Remarks on Obama’s Color and ‘Dialect’
Will Profiling Make a Difference?: "The U.S. has decided that treating people differently depending on where they come from will improve airline security."
Is racial profiling justified in an effort to improve airline security? The debate over individual rights and security continues. What are your thoughts?
The attempted bombing of a jet liner heading to Detroit on Christmas day has renewed the debate over some proposed security measures such as full body scans and passenger (racial/ethnic) profiling. What do you think about these issues?
Leading Chinese Dissident Gets 11-Year Prison Term: "A Chinese court has sentenced Liu Xiaobo, a prominent dissident, to 11 years in jail on subversion charges after he called for sweeping political reforms.
Nowhere in the Constitution of the United States is there a mention of a filibuster. Article I of the Constitution gives each house of Congress the right to make its own rules, and the use of the filibuster has been a tradition in the U.S. Senate for over two centuries. (The House of Representatives used it in our republic's early days, but banned it in the early 19th century.)
When President Bush was in office, Republicans complained that the Democrats were unfairly using the filibuster to keep certain right-wing judges from being brought to the floor for a confirmation vote. The Republican majority at the time threatened to do away with the filibuster, calling it first the "nuclear option" and when that phrase didn't poll well, they called it the "constitutional option."
Now, the majority party is the Democrats, and many on the left are howling about the Republicans abusing the filibuster. Other than it being a unique and quirky element of our Senate, I find the filibuster hard to defend as it has been used in recent decades. It was used rarely and required Senators to remain on the floor speaking throughout the entire filibuster. It was an exhausting, last-ditch effort that Senators would use only in very rare cases. A filibuster would end only when the Senator (or group of Senators) sat down and stopped speaking, thus yielding the floor to another Senator.
The modern filibuster does not require such sacrifice however. Under this system, as I understand it, those in the minority wanting to block legislation can simply declare a "procedural filibuster" which allows them to stop Senate business without having to actually stand and speak. They can hold onto this for as long as they want until a motion to end debate (cloture) passes with 3/5ths of the Senate (60 votes).
What was the original purpose of a filibuster? Does it still make sense to allow filibusters since they are used so often in recent decades? Our democracy wants answers!
Op-Ed Columnist: A Dangerous Dysfunction: "The difficulty of trying to pass health care reform shows how dysfunctional the Senate, and the United States government as a whole, has become."
E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post has gone so far as to say that "everyone must get it through their heads that thanks to the bizarre habits of the Senate, we are no longer a normal democracy.
Colbert King, also of the Washington Post reminds us though that what people think of the filibuster often depends on who is in the majority and who is in the minority. Liberals love hate the filibuster.
I wrote a post a few days ago in defense of Obama - largely because of my reaction to the developments in the Senate, where the "public option" and expanded Medicare proposals had been dropped in order to placate Sen. Joe Lieberman. A few others have made stronger arguments than I, from the same perspective. A sampling:
Paul Krugman, economist and leading progressive columnist: Pass the Bill
How do you feel about the job Barack Obama is doing as our President? He entered office with some of the highest expectations of any President I can remember. However, in a very challenging time of both war and recession, many are beginning to lose faith in his ability as a leader. What do you think? The following is a report from NBC News.
While I have been deeply disappointed in some of the decisions the President has made, I still think he has the potential to become a great president. Unlike most liberals/progressives, I still consider myself a supporter. Perhaps that is because as a student of history, my expectations were not as great as many of my compatriots on the left. We still live in a nation with a very strong conservative movement that is beguiled by the beliefs that through military might and a near blind faith in free markets, we will always be number one in the world.
On the whole, Americans like the idea of change, just as long as that change doesn't ask much sacrifice on their part. Americans are a compassionate people, but are suspicious of big government and succumb to the stereotype that most of the poor in America are lazy or are the victim of their own poor decisions. Deep down, Americans still believe in the Horatio Alger myth, that God is on our side, and foreigners who don't see us as a beneficent power are irrational, warped fanatics.
That is the country Barack Obama is trying to lead. In most cases, I think he has the good sense to lead us down the path that will bring us to a more just and humane world. However, there are tremendously powerful forces against change in this nation.
The forces of militarism and greed that Martin Luther King railed against promoted hatred and intolerance of him. King, however, was a crusader and a martyr for his cause. Barack Obama is a politician whose power is restrained in many ways. Politics is, as has been observed, the art of compromise. In order to get things done in politics one often has to swallow hard and accept what is possible instead of what is ideal.
Looking back on the past year, I think we may come to see his first year in office as a time of naive hopefulness in the process of gentile politics and rational discussion, and that he may have realized too late that at times the gloves have to come off. It is very clear now that his political opponents never had any intention of cooperating with this left-leaning Democrat. He may have wasted valuable months in office trying to court those that were never dealing with him in good faith.
Still, even as disappointed as I am that we are escalating a war I wish we could be done with; as disheartened as I am about the direction health care reform has taken; and as surprised as I am at the lack of a reversal of all of the Bush policies that trampled on civil liberties, I still think he has the intelligence and ability to get us farther down the road of social and political progress.
I am unconvinced that any other serious candidate for President would be doing a better job with the challenges set before this President. I am still glad to have supported and worked for his election, and I will criticize the actions and policies I disagree with. However, I am convinced the America I envision is much closer to becoming a reality with a President Obama than a President Bush, President McCain, President Edwards, President Huckabee, President Romney, or any of the other cast of characters that sought to occupy the Oval Office.
By dropping the public option that liberals cherish, there just might be 60 Senate votes for cloture to end a filibuster on the health care bill. Why Joe Lieberman is driving liberals/progressives nuts:
Is this an effective use of the bully pulpit? Is Obama going to get results by taking on the bankers in a public way? It seems to me that without asking Congress for new legislation, this is the only tactic the President has at this time. It seems that he is having some impact on the big bankers, but is Obama, as portrayed by the media, coming across as "being tough on the fat-cats" or a desperate guy with few options? What do you think?
This doesn't come as a surprise to me - there are a lot of problems we are facing, and people would like to see more in terms of results. Is it fair to expect more? Fair or not it makes things more difficult to get done if you are the President. What is often referred to as "political capital" is simply a reflection of the support the president can point to in challenging Congress to enact his agenda. The lower the poll numbers, the less fearful members of Congress are to take positions and votes against a president.
The controversy over the "Stupack Amendment" which prohibits federal funds from going to abortions in the new health care bill that just passed the House of Representatives continued in Washington D.C. today:
One Democrat that spoke on the House floor against the "Stupack Amendment":
The topic of the press conference was the recently passed Health Care bill which moves on to the House. Speaker Pelosi, knows that her job isn't over, and needs to keep up public support for the bill.
This sad chapter of the United States not living up to it's ideals on the rule of law goes on - even nine months into the Obama administration. Is justice delayed, justice denied?
The Washington State Legislature passed a far reaching gay rights measure last session that provided for benefits for same-sex domestic partnerships (pretty much everything except the word "marriage").
Now let's say you don't think the state should recognize same sex marriages/partnerships/unions.
You sign a petition to put the new law up for a vote by the people of the state in the hope that they will reject it, and nullify the bill passed by the legislature (our State Constitution allows for this).
If those signatures were submitted to the Secretary of State for validation, do you have a right to expect that your name will be kept private? If your name is made public, you could be the object of public criticism. If you sign a petition to the government, do you give up the right to remain an anonymous opponent of gay marriage (or any other issue for that matter)?
That is the question we are in the middle of in our state right now. While we are awaiting a trial to settle this issue, a U.S. Supreme Court Justice stepped in and made a temporary ruling.
Do you want education to get more expensive? Higher tuition, less services from our universities? If you don't, you should get educated about Washington State's I-1033, and make others aware of what is at stake.
George H.W. Bush invited Barack Obama to an event to celebrate and encourage volunteerism in the United States. With all the screaming and yelling we see in politics today, it is nice to see political opponents come together.
Given the fact that laws against inter-racial marriages were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1967 (Loving v. Virginia) I don't see how this judge thinks this ruling is going to stand. I'm pretty sure he will lose his job as a Louisiana judge within a few days since he is being so defiant and obnoxious about it.
The bill not the far-reaching reform that I am still hoping for, but it is still progress. One Republican, Senator Olympia Snowe, did vote for the bill drafted by Committee Chairman Baucus. Of course this was just a committee vote, and the full Senate still has to take up the issue. There are still three health care reform bills in the House of Representatives.
It will be very interesting to see what happens at the conference committee that will have to iron out the differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill.
Nobel Peace Prize stuns Obama, the world President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in a stunning decision designed to build momentum behind his initiatives to reduce nuclear arms, ease tensions with the Muslim world and stress diplomacy and cooperation rather than unilateralism.
The New York Times did a front page story today that uncovered previously unknown details about Michelle Obama's ancestry. Yes, her ancestors were slaves, but she also had some white relatives dating from the 1850's. I found the story of her family tree very interesting.
There are many parts of America where Caucasians are overwhelming majorities, and there aren't too many people of color to be found. An African-American author traveled to some of these places in Idaho, Utah, and Georgia to research them for a book that has just been published. He calls these places Whitopias.
Sometimes I like Thomas Friedman, and sometimes not so much, but it is hard to disagree that these are three tremendous challenges facing our nation & world.
Another year, another controversy over religion and the 1st Amendment. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."
A radio story from NPR, and a print story from the L.A. Times:
This was one of the most unusual oral arguments at the Supreme Court I've read about. At issue is whether a federal law banning animal cruelty is overly broad. You have got to read this.
For the next couple of nights, the CBS Evening News is doing some in-depth reporting on the war in Afghanistan. It is a complicated job, and its going to get messier as more U.S. troops become engaged with Taliban and/or al-Queda fighters. At least 8 more U.S. soldiers were killed over the weekend.
Referendum 71 seeks to undo a new law passed by the WA Legislature in it's last term providing for protection against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. It is shaping up to be a divisive and emotional debate.
The Supreme Court begins its session tomorrow as it does every year on the "First Monday of October". This year, the court will include Sonia Sotomayor, our first Latina Justice.
As usual, the Court will be hearing it's share of controversial cases.
An interesting debate. The following is from the intro to the NY Times article featuring the opinions of eight political commentators.
It seems that whatever President Obama talks about — whether it’s overhauling health care, or regulating Wall Street, or telling schoolchildren to study hard — his opponents have called him a socialist. What does the word mean today, nearly 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall? What role has the label played in American political history?
There is no 'we' in American politics Columnist Thomas L. Friedman has no problem with substantive criticism of President Obama, but criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and is creating a climate that poisons attempts to collectively deal with the nation's pressing problems.
Part of the health care reform bills making their way through Congress right now have stirred a Constitutional debate: Does Congress have the power to require individuals to buy health insurance? A very good analysis of the issue was done by the non-partisan FactCheck.org. What do you think?
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