Congressional Republicans Want More Signing Ceremonies

 Congress, Legislation, Presidency  Comments Off
Mar 092012
 

Steve Benen tells them what they have to do for it:

Of all the things for Republicans to complain about, this has to be one of the more peculiar.

This is, after all, an election year, and I suspect the president would enjoy the good press that comes with getting something done.

But therein lies the point: the prerequisite to formal ceremonies that celebrate a meaningful legislative accomplishment is … a meaningful legislative accomplishment. If Republicans want more events in which lawmakers stand by Obama’s side as he puts his signature on an important bill, perhaps they should complain less, compromise more, and start sending some worthwhile bills to the White House.

It’s not as if Obama is quietly signing major legislation into law in secret.

If GOP leaders want some signing ceremonies that could prove Congress is doing something, they can help pass provisions of the American Jobs Act, the DREAM Act, comprehensive immigration reform, and some meaningful energy policies. If they do, I can practically guarantee the president holds some signing ceremonies, with plenty of pens for everyone.

 Posted by at 12:26 am

Sunahara v. Hawaii Dept. Of Health–DISMISSED

 Birthers, Lawsuits, Right Wing Nutzoids  Comments Off
Mar 082012
 

Fogbow court observer in Honolulu just reporting today’s hearing converted the complaint into a summary judgment motion and the motion was granted, ending the case. Mike Dunford will write up a full report, which will be posted here tomorrow morning.

Update, March 9

Bob, at The Fogbow, explains:

A motion to dismiss assumes the facts pleaded in the complaint are true. In this case, Hawaii argued, even assuming everything in the complaint is true, Sunahara isn’t entitled to relief because the law does not entitle him to what he’s asking for. (Sunahara failed to allege a violation of the law.)

A motion for summary judgment allows the parties to introduce evidence. If no material fact is in dispute, then the judge can make a ruling. (If there is a dispute of a material fact, the motion is denied and there’s a trial.)

I think Hawaii was concerned that if the judge treated the motion to dismiss as a motion for summary judgment, an appellate court would say the judge was wrong (because plaintiff didn’t have adequate notice, etc.), and then they’d have to start all over. Assuming this is true, Sunahara’s attorney either agreed to process, or invited the process, so this can’t be raised on appeal.

Here are the relevant court documents, courtesy of Jack Ryan Scribd:

Complaint
Motion to Dismiss
Opposition
Reply

Court Observer’s Report by Mike Dunford

Judge Nishimura had a number of cases scheduled this morning, and was running slightly behind. The 9:15 hearing wasn’t called until almost 9:30, and it was 9:45 before the Sunahara case was called.

Gerald Kurashima appeared for the plaintiff. Jill Nagamine appeared for the defendant. Rebecca Quinn was not present today. In addition to the attorneys for the parties, there were only a couple of spectators in the courtroom. I was there, John Carroll was there, and the student who accompanied Mr. Carroll to the last hearing in the Wolf v Fuddy case was there. Dean Haskins, Miki Booth, and Duncan Sunahara were all conspicuous in their absence.
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 Posted by at 4:16 pm

Barack Obama Just Makes Them Crazy

 Civil Liberties, Ethics, Media, Right Wing Nutzoids, Video  Comments Off
Mar 082012
 

Larry O’Donnell interviews Keith Boykin, who was one of the organizers of the Harvard protest that shocks and appalls the McCarthyite Baby Breitbarts and Sean Hannity:


Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Here are the Baby Breitbarts and Hannity having the vapors:



Having covered the Birther movement for the past three years, little surprises me about what the RWNJ can come up with to smear President Obama. But this one did. I mean, come on. Barack Obama standing up for minorities and women can come as a surprise to absolutely nobody who is sentient. The Baby Breitbarts and the Hanneties of the world know that the “secret” speech, which was public in 2008, and broadcast by PBS, showed no indecency by Barack Obama. They just hoped to twist it that way. They could have gotten away with it, before Andrew Kaczynski and BuzzFlash punk’d them.

The thing that gets me is this: Barack Obama, having had the universal coming-of-age conflicts and identity-seekings of youth, became the man who did all the right things for American society. Solid education–check. Deep religious faith–check. Stable marriage and family life–check. Professional achievement–check. Respect for others–check. Love of country–check. What the fuck more do they want from him?

But it is just that which makes them crazy.

I am adding in here a snip from a review by Steve Weinberg, In These Times, of Arthur Goldwag’s The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right, to flesh out my point:

Perhaps at least some of the haters are somewhat self-aware. As Goldwag concludes, “Though millions of Americans claim to believe that Obama is a Muslim and a foreigner, and some of them hate him because of the color of his skin, most of them know that the real issue isn’t what Obama is, but what they increasingly fear they’re not.” What they are not is part of the ruling class, despite the privilege they believe being born a white American should bestow.

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 Posted by at 11:45 am

GOP: Gray, Old Party

 Birthers, Demographics, GOP Primaries, Republicans  Comments Off
Mar 082012
 


Why Older Whites Are Dominating the GOP Primaries

After Super Tuesday, exit polls have now been conducted in 14 states from all regions of the country. In all 14 of those states, white voters, and voters over 50, both comprised a significantly larger share of the electorate in this year’s GOP primary than they did in the 2008 general election. In many cases, the gap on each front has been enormous.

These patterns underscore the extent to which the modern GOP coalition revolves around white voters-and increasingly, as the graying baby boom moves right, older white voters.

That coalition powered the Republican Party’s historic gains in 2010. That was an election in which seniors comprised an unusually large share of the overall electorate; the minority share of the vote declined more than usual between a presidential race and the succeeding midterm; and the GOP won the highest share of white voters it has ever captured in a Congressional election, according to polling dating back to 1948. In 2010, Republicans ran especially well with older whites, capturing fully 63 percent of them, exit polls found.

This November, though, the electorate almost certainly will be considerably younger and more tilted toward minorities than it was in 2010. Against that backdrop, the dominance of the GOP primary race by older whites could signal challenges for the party in reaching that broader universe of voters. It also increases the likelihood that the 2012 election will generate a titanic collision between a Democratic coalition that revolves around minorities, younger voters and college-educated whites generally more comfortable with the demographic changes diversifying America; and an older, preponderantly white and heavily working-class Republican coalition heavily reliant on the voters most uneasy with those changes.

So far, according to exit polls posted on CNN.com, whites have cast at least 90 percent of the votes in every Republican primary except Florida (83 percent) and Arizona (89 percent). In every other state except Michigan (92 percent) and Nevada (90 percent) whites have comprised at least 94 percent of the GOP vote this year. That includes Georgia (94), Virginia (94), Ohio (96), Oklahoma (96), Tennessee (97), South Carolina (98), Massachusetts (98), Iowa (99), New Hampshire (99), and Vermont (99).

Ron Brownstein, National Journal

This fits with Ed Kilgore’s noticing the other day, this same demographic is what’s pushing the Republican Party to the crazy house. I myself am a gray, white baby-boomer from the working class and obviously a proud Obama supporter. While I am more conservative than I was as a youngster, who isn’t?, I couldn’t live long enough to understand how so much of my generation went this shameful way.

 Posted by at 10:27 am

Birthers Beclowned, But There Is Much Worse To Arpaio

 Birthers, Civil Liberties, Ethics  Comments Off
Mar 082012
 

Birtherism Is the Least of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Sins

National Review has published an editorial urging everyone to disassociate themselves with Joe Arpaio, the Maricopa County sheriff who is questioning whether President Obama is a real American. “Republicans who have chosen to associate with the birthers have done their party and their country a disservice,” the magazine wrote. “And as Sheriff Arpaio settles comfortably into that political mental ward, the same must be said of those Republicans who choose to associate themselves with him more broadly. Those who cannot distinguish between the birthers’ flim-flam and the critical questions that face our nation in 2012 will not win and do not deserve to.”

They’re absolutely right. Birthers beclown themselves. The conservative movement is well-served by repudiating them. So kudos on a good editorial. But part of me is bothered that Arpaio’s words about a silly conspiracy theory are what has discredited him, given his long history of misdeeds. It’s a reminder that bipartisan political culture elevates relatively meaningless controversy while alarming transgressions against civil liberties and the rule of law are ignored. Now that prominent intellectuals in the conservative movement acknowledge Arpaio’s poor judgment, capacity for shoddy logic, and blinkered moral compass, it’s worth looking back on all that he was able to do before conservatives and right-leaning moderates turned on him.

All of the following have happened since Arpaio was elected in 1992:

Read on at The Atlantic.

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 Posted by at 12:54 am

At Harvard, Obama Dived Into Diversity Fight

 Civil Liberties, Presidency, Video  Comments Off
Mar 072012
 

President Obama, as a law student at Harvard, speaking at a protest in 19910:



It was perhaps Barack Obama’s most intense immersion in the charged campus racial politics of the late 1980s and early 1990s: As President of the Harvard Law Review in the spring of his final year there, 1991, he aligned himself with Professor Derrick Bell’s dramatic protest for diversity on the faculty of Harvard Law School.

Bell was the first black tenured professor at the school, and a pioneer of “critical race theory,” which insisted, controversially, on reading issues of race and power into legal scholarship. His protest that spring was occasioned by Harvard’s denial of tenure to a black woman professor, Regina Austin, at a time when only three of the law school’s professors were black and only five women. He told Harvard he would take a leave of absence — a kind of academic strike — “until a woman of color is offered and accepted a tenured position on this faculty,” and he launched a hunger strike to dramatize his point.

Obama was a major figure on campus, the first black president of the Law Review. Some friends, in a prescient joke, just referred to him as “the first black president.” He had a reputation as a conciliatory figure, not a confrontational one like Bell.

“How Obama would react to Derrick Bell’s protest was a matter of some interest,” New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote in his exploration of Obama and race, The Bridge.

BuzzFeed

In the BuzzFeed comments section, someone who was present:

James Minister O’Keefe · Director at Immigration Law Group LLC
Small error — Obama graduated in 1991. “As President of the Harvard Law Review in the spring of his final year there, 1990″ — which puts this video in the Spring of 1991. As fate would have it, I happened to have been there, standing pretty close to the person holding the camera.

As an anti-birther, you have to always collect these moments of witness, because some Birther liar may claim Barack Obama was in Timbuktu that day.

Adding this video from PBS FRONTLINE: Dreams of Obama in 2008:



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 Posted by at 12:24 pm
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