Booker answers the referendum argument

Newark Mayor Corey Booker offered a rejoinder to Gov. Chris Christie's call for a public referendum on marriage equality that should put an end to the argument once and for all.

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Marriage equality advances, governor makes cynical offer

The last vestige of a politician who knows he is on the wrong side of a civil rights issue is to ask for a referendum.


Gov. Chris Christie did just that today, as the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced legislation that would legalize same-sex marriage in the state. On the surface, this would seem like a significant concession on his part -- polls have shown support in recent years.

But that is not the point. Same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue. Allowing the state to retain an outmoded and religiously based definition of marriage treats gay and lesbian couples as second-class citizens. Pretending to address this issue by offering a public vote on whether gays and lesbians should be treated as equals under the law is cynical and cowardly.

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A mile wide and an inch deep: The #SOTU offers nothing new

I want to buy into the program being outlined tonight by President Barack Obama, at least a good chunk of it (not the gas drilling or the veiled allusion to merit pay for teachers), but I am troubled by the nagging reality of the calendar.

Obama was sworn in as president three years ago. He entered office with one of the largest Congressional and Senate majorities in recent memory. Yet, he was unable to parlay this basic reality into anything more than an industry-friendly health plan and a fiscal stimulus that was too small by at least half.

Apologists will blame the Republicans, will point to their obstructionism. Fair, perhaps, but only to a point. Obama failed to understand that he owned the bully pulpit and an early approval rating that gave him a boat load of political capital. Rather than get into the trenches and fight for an aggressive implementation of a Rooseveltian agenda, he bowed to the false god of compromise and bipartisanship.

In doing so, he allowed the political moment to pass. The economy continued to sputter (at best) and the right wing regained its confidence, with a grassroots Tea Party movement empowered by lobbying money supplying the ground troops. The recession no longer was about Wall Street and deregulation, but about over-regulation and high taxes.

Republicans won back the House and gained seats in the Senate, leaving a president whose viewed compromise as more important than any ideology, which is another way of saying that principles are fungible.

The Obama presidency looked in trouble until the reality of the Republican primary contestants (a collection of liars, cheaters, lunatics and morons) set in. Obama likely will win another term, but I hold no hope that he will do anything but fiddle around the edges of the status quo. He is not a transformational figure, but another in a long line of corporate-friendly Democrats who will win the support of liberals and progressives because the alternative is worse.

That explains the speech we are watching tonight, one in which he has cobbled together an agenda from a menu of offerings designed to appeal to as much of the political class as he can. It is an agenda that is a mile wide and an inch deep and will do nothing to alter the basic structural problems we face.

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Imperial presidency lives on

It's easy to blame George W. Bush for the damage that his administration did to the Constitution.

But we need to be clear that the assault on the separation of powers has been a bipartisan affair, reaching back at least to the Kennedy administration. And nothing done by the Obama administration has halted this dangerous slide.

Peter Singer, in a piece in The New York Times today, the current outlines of the problem, which has left Congress without the power it was given by the Founders to limit the president's war-making ability.

Our new technology -- in particular, unmanned drones -- "removes the last political barriers to war."

The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don’t have to send someone’s son or daughter into harm’s way. But when politicians can avoid the political consequences of the condolence letter — and the impact that military casualties have on voters and on the news media — they no longer treat the previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way.

We can freight with seeming impunity, allowing those off us on the home front to pretend that nothing of any consequence is happening.

We must now accept that technologies that remove humans from the battlefield, from unmanned systems like the Predator to cyberweapons like the Stuxnet computer worm, are becoming the new normal in war.

And like it or not, the new standard we’ve established for them is that presidents need to seek approval only for operations that send people into harm’s way — not for those that involve waging war by other means.

WITHOUT any actual political debate, we have set an enormous precedent, blurring the civilian and military roles in war and circumventing the Constitution’s mandate for authorizing it. Freeing the executive branch to act as it chooses may be appealing to some now, but many future scenarios will be less clear-cut. And each political party will very likely have a different view, depending on who is in the White House.

Unmanned operations are not “costless,” as they are too often described in the news media and government deliberations. Even worthy actions can sometimes have unintended consequences. Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber, was drawn into terrorism by the very Predator strikes in Pakistan meant to stop terrorism.

Similarly, C.I.A. drone strikes outside of declared war zones are setting a troubling precedent that we might not want to see followed by the close to 50 other nations that now possess the same unmanned technology — including China, Russia, Pakistan and Iran.

A deep deliberation on war was something the framers of the Constitution sought to build into our system. Yet on Tuesday, when President Obama talks about his wartime accomplishments during the State of the Union address, Congress will have to admit that its role has been reduced to the same part it plays during the president’s big speech. These days, when it comes to authorizing war, Congress generally sits there silently, except for the occasional clapping. And we do the same at home.

Last year, I met with senior Pentagon officials to discuss the many tough issues emerging from our growing use of robots in war. One of them asked, “So, who then is thinking about all this stuff?”

America’s founding fathers may not have been able to imagine robotic drones, but they did provide an answer. The Constitution did not leave war, no matter how it is waged, to the executive branch alone.

In a democracy, it is an issue for all of us.

Not that anyone, aside from Ron Paul, is talking about this on the campaign trail.

Bruce Springsteen is a bit angry. And it's good for his music.

The new single -- "We Take Care of Our Own" -- soars and seethes, and in the process washes away the taste of his last, and weakest, record, "Working on a Dream."

Slate discussed the record earlier this weak. David Haglund quoted "someone close to Bruce Springsteen" calling Wrecking Ball “the angriest album he’s ever made.” Haglund then quotes from the single's second verse:

   From Chicago to New Orleans
   From the muscle to the bone
   From the shotgun shack to the Superdome
   We yelled “help” but the cavalry stayed home
   There ain’t no-one hearing the bugle blown

Haglund's response:

I’d say that’s fairly angry. The chorus—“Wherever this flag’s flown / We take care of our own”—sounds rousingly optimistic, but may be intended, at least in part, ironically; that would be a familiar approach for Springsteen.

The Katrina reference, meanwhile, recalls another comment from that Springsteen acquaintance quoted above: The Boss apparently “wrote and recorded the majority of the album before the Occupy movements started, so he’s not just setting headlines to music.”

The B-side for this single (on vinyl, at least) is “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” a 1990s-era Springsteen tune. Since Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine apparently features on Wrecking Ball, I’m guessing it’s the version of that song he memorably contributed to. Hope so.

I hope so too. Wrecking Ball is his first release in the post-Big Man-era, a loss that could have stripped the passion from the music. The Boss bought into the optimism of Barack Obama's election win, allowing it to soften his music and cut short the momentum of the truly great Magic album.

If the alum is like the single, we can expect a set of muscular, political tunes and a return to relevance for the Steinbeck of rock and roll.

The Romney-bot bites the dust

It was just a week ago that Mitt Romney had a double-digit in the South Carolina polls. The presumed front-runner, who had been declared the winner of the first two contest (Iowa and New Hampshire), was about to run the table and lock up the nomination early.

But with tonight's second-place finish in South Carolina -- by an embarrassing 14 points -- Romney could be looking at a long fight that he may not be able to win.

If nothing else, the fact that just over half of South Carolina voters said in exit polls that they made up their minds at the last minute shows just how fluid and restive the Republican electorate remains — a troubling sign for Mr. Romney that Mr. Gingrich is now poised to capitalize upon.

And after being so confident just 10 days ago — before its declared victory in Iowa was rescinded and Mr. Gingrich began his rise — the Romney campaign is now not only fighting the perception that Mr. Romney cannot consolidate broad support among conservative voters, but also at least one troubling fact of history: No Republican has gone on to win the party’s nomination without winning South Carolina since before 1980.

And even if he manages to snare the nomination, he will limp into this general election a wounded candidate knowing that he will likely face more attacks on his past -- his days at Bain, his excessive wealth, his constantly shifting positions -- that are also likely to be much more aggressive.

Ultimately, the primary fight offers a clear demonstration of the massive cracks in the Republican coalition and the party's purging of moderates.

Military pisses on itself

You'd think the apparent desecration of Taliban corpses by United States Marines in Afghanistan would be indefensible, that the notion that someone would piss on a dead body would be so foreign to all of our consciences that this would not be an issue.

You would be wrong. This is a post to Facebook that I just came across:

am so sick of this shit with the Marines who urinated on their enemy. Hey stupid go visit a VA hospital sometime and look at the condition of some of our retuning soldiers. Did it ever occur to you that we might not be such a target if other people feared us? GO USA!!!!!!

To sum things up: Pissing on a corpse shows how powerful we are and apparently has military utility. Bizarre.

I'll leave it to Cara Palmer, on Neon Tommy, -- who calls the footage "utterly deplorable" -- to explain things to my Facebook friend:

The thoughtless action and comments of the Marines depicted in the video is not only disrespectful, but it is also inhumane. The devaluation of another human being, dead or alive, in such a manner, even and especially in wartime, reflects badly on the character of those committing the act. Certain standards of behavior must be met, standards these particular Marines were far from meeting.

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The web reacts to NJ marriage-equality bill

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Anti-capitalist corporate Republicans, or something like that

Ted Rall's piece today on Common Dreams is a brilliant dissection of our economic moment and the disjointed uses to which the Republican anybody-but-Romney brigade is attempting to use it, along with a rejoinder to a Democratic Party that has refused to really challenge the corporate order.

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Political disintegration, Ron Paul and the 1 percent

The right is fractured, unwilling or unable to reconcile its many disparate and untamable parts. The left, mostly marginalized in a media landscape controlled by the 1 percent, is in the same boat.

Just as it did during the Clinton years, it has fractured upon the shoals of a centrist Democratic presidency enthrall to the money men of Wall Street.

Here is what we are looking at:

• The Democratic president, Barack Obama, has played nice with Wall Street -- see Glenn Greenwald's column today -- when it should have taken the financial industry out behind the woodshed.
• A Republican frontrunner, Mitt Romney, who picks his position based on the position of the sun and is even closer to Wall Street than Obama.
• The anybody-but-romney contingent of the GOP -- Gingrich, Santorum, Perry -- that plays the populism card but has no critique of American capitalism, nor has any interest in pushing one.
• And Ron Paul. Paul is the only candidate of either party who opposes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and has from the beginning. He offers a critique of crony capitalism and has been as powerful an opponent of the Bush/Obama assaults on civil liberties.

Paul, as I wrote earlier, is no progressive. His history on race and comments on the Johnson civil rights legislation, hardline position on border security, antiabortion views and his opposition to unions, regulations and the social safety net cannot be overlooked.

In a year, however, when there are no Democrats on the ballot other than the centrist president and in a media culture that freezes out third-party challengers, Paul is being used as a stand-in for the missing critique of the system -- a needed and legitimate critique. And his presence -- and the lack of any kind of similar personality on the Democratic side -- has raised the cracks in the left-liberal contingent.

Paul's presence keeps elements of the left critique on the table, but he is an awful salesman for what so desperately needs to be sold. A Paul presidency would not achieve progressive goals -- far from it -- but it likely would prevent us from traveling a path we have too often traveled.

What the Paul phenomenon shows -- as Obama-mania did in 2008 -- is the desperate hunger on the left for someone to talk about the break down of the American system. And what it proves is that a single candidate offers little. What is needed is a movement, one focused on the corruption of our government and the corporate order, the dangers of the imperial project and the environmental cataclysm we face.

This need will remain in place 11 months from now, no matter who wins the election, regardless of who ends up winning the White House.

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Romney's weak sweeps

The mainstream media is portraying tonight's Romney win in New Hampshire as a big one and saying he swept the first two contests. Technically both are true. He won by double digits and won in Iowa.

But let's be real here. Romney won Iowa by 8 votes over a guy -- Santorum -- who was polling in the low single digits just a couple of months ago and appears not to have cracked 40 percent in a state that was a foregone conclusion (he lives there and was governor next door, has huge name recognition and a massive organization).

Rather than showing his strength, the results demonstrate that Romney still has not won over his party and is likely vulnerable to a unified effort by the anyone-but-Romney group. Ron Paul, who is a special case, is at around 24 percent, but John Huntsman, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum totaled 37 percent together -- almost exactly the same figure Romney collected.

If Romney was going to be a real presidential contender, wouldn't have had distinguished himself better from the pack than he has? Especially when his opponents have been Mo, Larry and Curly Joe.

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Tin ears of the Romney-bot

George H.W. Bush (i.e, 41) professed amazement at supermarket scanners during a trip to a food store to attempt to show how much of a regular guy he was. The fallout badly damaged what little credibility he had left, proving to an electorate weary of recession that he was tone deaf on economic matters. End result: Bill Clinton wins the presidency.

Examples of presidential candidates failing to understand the tenor of the times are legion -- Nixon on the beach in dress pants, Dukakis in the tank, Kerry windsurfing, McCain suspending his campaign -- and they almost always end badly for the candidate.

Enter Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor already had credibility problems due to his every evolving positions on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, and he has on more than one occasion proven that he has a tin ear worthy of the first President Bush (offering to make a $10,000 wager as though that were normal behavior, chanting "Who Let the Dogs Out" at a Martin Luther King Day parade in Florida).

And yet, he somehow found a way to top himself Monday:

Republican front-runner Mitt Romney stumbled down the homestretch of the New Hampshire primary on Monday, declaring, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me” as his rivals intensified already fierce criticism.

Romney has attempted to defend himself, saying the full context of the comment would show that he did not mean he likes to fire people but that he likes having the ability to jettison service workers who do a bad job. And while everyone of us takes this ability for granted -- fire the plumber if he can't fix the leak -- it's not like we enjoy doing it. It was a foolish comment, a tone deaf one that underscores that Romney is the scion of a very wealthy family and has little in common with the average voter -- and everything in common with the 1 percent at the top of the economic heap.

Romney is the elite the Tea Party and Occupy movements have warned you about, and it is going to be difficult for him to portray himself as anything else.

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A progressive push in the Legislature

New Jersey Democrats are flexing their more progressive muscles. The party is making two important progressive goals their top priorities -- an increased minimum wage and marriage equality.

Sheila Oliver, the Assembly speaker, announced today that bumping the minimum wage to $8.50 from $7.25 an hour would be a top priority of the Assembly legislative session that starts tomorrow. She called it an "economic stimulus that doesn’t come in the form of more debt or increased spending" and "is a recognition that thousands of households in New Jersey are struggling to subsist on minimum wage jobs that do not allow them to support their families."



The speaker's announcement, which was endorsed by the liberal think tank, New Jersey Policy Perspective, came on the same day that state Democrats held a press conference to announce that they would introduce marriage-equality legislation when it convenes a new session tomorrow.

And yet, the Democrats are closing out a session in which they allowed business concerns to trump environmental ones -- passing a bill delaying implementation of new sewer restrictions -- and  approving privatization of school construction and management.

So, how exactly progressive is the New Jersey Legislature? More progressive than it has been during the first two years of the Christie administration -- and just in time for a presidential election year.

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Ron Paul is not a progressive

Ron Paul was right on both wars, on the bailout of the banks and continues to be right about the need for transparency at the fed. He is right about gay marriage and he is right on most civil liberties issues and the drug war.

Ron Paul, in a photo on his web site: www.ronpaul2012.com

But Ron Paul is not a progressive. Ron Paul is not anti-corporate. He believes that empowering business is the best way to accomplish all good things and that government has no role to play in ensuring a level playing field. It was Paul's dismissal of a government role in health care that elicited the shout of "let him die" during the Republican debates.

He is hardcore on immigration, opposing "amnesty" and "birthright citizenship"; seeks the end to the welfare state; and wants to approve offshore oil drilling.

Forget the ugly racism of his newsletters -- which do reflect either his own past racism or a remarkable willingness to allow racists to speak in his name -- his opposition to crony capitalism (which the otherwise sane Robert Scheer lauds) is more about freeing capital than addressing the widening chasm of inequality or aiding those in need.

Pat Buchanan's opposition to free trade comes to mind here, because it was an issue on which the rabid social conservative was able to make common cause with the left. The same thing is happening here. Paul is a libertarian conservative who happens to be right on a couple of issues and not a legitimate standard-bearer for progressives.

It would be better for the left to sit out the 2012 election than vote for Paul.

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The emptiness of presidential politics

From Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone, a post that Glenn Greenwald described as "one of the most succinct and accurate summaries of the 2012 presidential election and the state of American politics generally that has been written in awhile." Call it the quote of the day, Iowa edition:

It takes an awful lot to rob the presidential race of this elemental appeal. But this year’s race has lost that buzz. In fact, this 2012 race may be the most meaningless national election campaign we’ve ever had. If the presidential race normally captivates the public as a dramatic and angry ideological battle pitting one impassioned half of society against the other, this year’s race feels like something else entirely.

In the wake of the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, and a dozen or more episodes of real rebellion on the streets, in the legislatures of cities and towns, and in state and federal courthouses, this presidential race now feels like a banal bureaucratic sideshow to the real event – the real event being a looming confrontation between huge masses of disaffected citizens on both sides of the aisle, and a corrupt and increasingly ideologically bankrupt political establishment, represented in large part by the two parties dominating this race.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/iowa-the-meaningless-sideshow-begins-20120103#ixzz1iSEHuHDU

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