Category Archives: Politics

Scott Brown’s Model Justices: A Venn Diagram

Humor, Law, Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In Monday night’s Massachusetts Senatorial debate, Scott Brown noted that his favorite Supreme Court justices are Scalia, Kennedy, Sotomayor and Roberts, which is a little bit like saying that your favorite foods are spam, foie gras, twinkies and vegan butter. While Brown might have been able to pick two out of the above four without raising too many eyebrows, the more names he added to that list, the more it looked like he was randomly grasping at any Justices he could remember. (Especially with Sotomayor and Scalia; for God’s sake, doesn’t Brown know that they are both YANKEES fans??) But what if, despite Elizabeth Warren’s guffaws and obvious glee–which even a facepalm could not hide–Brown actually knows more about The Nine than we’re giving him credit for? The First Casualty has come up with a Venn Diagram to see if we could make any possible sense out of Brown’s answer (click to enlarge):

 

Bottom line: Brown’s answer would have been way more credible had he stuck with any combination of Scalia // Kennedy // Roberts. As it is, barring some further explanation that we’ve all missed, his four-way answer makes little sense unless he highly prioritizes Catholicism in a Justice. Either that, or he’s a huge fan of the United States v. Jones majority opinion from last term (where the Court held that the Government’s attaching of a GPS device to a car constitutes a search requiring a warrant), which all four model justices joined.

Victoria Kwan holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School in New York and has just completed a clerkship with a judge in Anchorage, Alaska. She tweets as @nerdmeetsboy and will continue to post periodically here on legal issues. Rumor has it she and Jay Pinho are dating.

A sign of just how far the American right has drifted

Media, Politics, , , , , ,

David Brooks, the eminent New York Times columnist and leading conservative intellectual, dreams up a hypothetical Mitt Romney debate monologue:

The second wicked problem the next president will face is sluggish growth. I assume you know that everything President Obama and I have been saying on this subject has been total garbage. Presidents and governors don’t “create jobs.” We don’t have the ability to “grow the economy.” There’s no magic lever.

Instead, an administration makes a thousand small decisions, each of which subtly adds to or detracts from a positive growth environment. The Obama administration, which is either hostile to or aloof from business, has made a thousand tax, regulatory and spending decisions that are biased away from growth and biased toward other priorities. American competitiveness has fallen in each of the past four years, according to the World Economic Forum. Medical device makers, for example, are being chased overseas. The economy in 2012 is worse than the economy in 2011. That’s inexcusable.

If you’re wondering why that second-to-last sentence sounds wrong, it’s because it is. I suppose this was just Brooks’ attempt to channel Romney’s campaign, which will not be “dictated by fact-checkers.” Forgive me for thinking the Times still was.

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The Massachusetts U.S. Senate race heats up

Politics, , , , ,

Tonight incumbent Republican Scott Brown debated Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren once again, and the exchanges were a bit more hostile this time. (David Gregory, as the moderator, was spotty at best.)

What I continue to find interesting about this race is how different the tenor — and how much lower the production values — are in comparison to the national presidential race. Tonight, for example, both candidates really whiffed in key situations: Scott Brown named Antonin Scalia as his model Supreme Court justice (a huge no-no in overwhelmingly Democratic Massachusetts), Elizabeth Warren clearly knew nothing about the Red Sox when asked (she should be at least marginally prepared for the obvious questions at this point; and no one should underestimate the importance of the hometown team in shaping Mass. elections), and then — perhaps most inexplicably — Brown missed on the same question when he had a clear chance to showcase his blue-collar, sports-aware Mass. roots (cue images of his pickup truck here).

On a side note, I ran across this video of Scott Brown greeting his supporters after the first debate several weeks ago, which aptly demonstrates his aisle-crossing, nice-guy appeal:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FHx0i8f9M]

I’m still rooting for Warren, but it’s usually hard not to like this guy at least a little bit. Except for when he does this:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAIMc_U1F8M]
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So that’s why the GOP is so insistent that voter fraud exists

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It seems they have firsthand experience:

The number of Florida counties reporting suspicious voter registration forms connected to Strategic Allied Consulting, the firm hired by the state Republican Party to sign up new voters, has grown to 10, officials said, as local election supervisors continue to search their forms for questionable signatures, addresses or other identifiers.

After reports of suspicious formssurfaced in Florida, the company — owned by Nathan Sproul, who has been involved in voter registration efforts since at least the 2004 presidential election — was fired last week by the state Republican Party and theRepublican National Committee. The party had hired it to conduct drives in Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina and Virginia.

In Colorado, a young woman employed by Strategic Allied was shown on a video outside a store in Colorado Springs recently telling a potential voter that she wanted to register only Republicans and that she worked for the county clerk’s office. The woman was fired, said Ryan Call, chairman of the Colorado Republican Party.

The Florida Division of Elections has forwarded the reports of possible fraud to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for investigation. Prosecutors in some affected counties are also investigating. It is unclear how many forms have been forwarded, in all: in Palm Beach County, the election supervisor found 106 suspicious forms, but the number in several other counties is far lower.

Bay County has found eight suspicious forms with the Republican Party registration code connected to Strategic Allied. In Pasco County, three have been found.

The state Republican Party, which paid the company $1.3 million to register voters here, said it would file an elections fraud complaint against Strategic Allied, which is based in Tempe, Ariz.

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Why (not) to vote for Obama

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As the election approaches, I’ve found myself waffling among various choices:

  • voting to re-elect President Obama
  • voting “none of the above”
  • voting “Foreign Policy: Ron Paul; Economic Policy: Paul Krugman; Social Policy: Barney Frank”
  • (lastly, voting for Tom Brady)

You’ll notice “vote for Romney” is not present anywhere on that list. Strange as this may sound, during the Republican primaries, I honestly believed the whole “Romney is out of touch with the average voter” meme was simply on-point messaging from a well-oiled Democratic PR machine. But it turned out that the spin was a lot closer to the truth than I’d initially imagined (either that or the Democratic PR team is even better than I’d thought). I wouldn’t have voted for him anyway, as I think Obama’s a far better choice. But my “unfavorable” (to borrow polling terminology) impression of him has greatly increased in recent months.

That said, I hardly think Obama has come out smelling like roses. The Atlantic recently published an essay by Conor Friedersdorf (currently the most popular article on its site) titled “Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama.” In it, Friedersdorf identifies three key disappointments in the Obama administration: drone strikes in Pakistan, extrajudicial assassinations of American citizens, and a conflict in Libya that was not approved by Congress:

In different ways, each of these transgressions run contrary to candidate Obama’s 2008 campaign. (To cite just one more example among many, Obama has done more than any modern executive to wage war on whistleblowers. In fact, under Obama, Bush-era lawbreakers, including literal torturers, have been subject to fewer and less draconian attempts at punishment them than some of the people who conscientiously came forward to report on their misdeeds.) Obama ran in the proud American tradition of reformers taking office when wartime excesses threatened to permanently change the nature of the country. But instead of ending those excesses, protecting civil liberties, rolling back executive power, and reasserting core American values, Obama acted contrary to his mandate. The particulars of his actions are disqualifying in themselves. But taken together, they put us on a course where policies Democrats once viewed as radical post-9/11 excesses are made permanent parts of American life.

There is a candidate on the ballot in at least 47 states, and probably in all 50, who regularly speaks out against that post-9/11 trend, and all the individual policies that compose it. His name is Gary Johnson, and he won’t win. I am supporting him because he ought to. Liberals and progressives care so little about having critiques of the aforementioned policies aired that vanishingly few will even urge that he be included in the upcoming presidential debates. If I vote, it will be for Johnson. What about the assertion that Romney will be even worse than Obama has been on these issues? It is quite possible, though not nearly as inevitable as Democrats seem to think. It isn’t as though they accurately predicted the abysmal behavior of Obama during his first term, after all. And how do you get worse than having set a precedent for the extrajudicial assassination of American citizens? By actually carrying out such a killing? Obama did that too. Would Romney? I honestly don’t know. I can imagine he’d kill more Americans without trial and in secret, or that he wouldn’t kill any. I can imagine that he’d kill more innocent Pakistani kids or fewer. His rhetoric suggests he would be worse. I agree with that. Then again, Romney revels in bellicosity; Obama soothes with rhetoric and kills people in secret.

To hell with them both.

I not only sympathize with Friedersdorf’s thesis. I am nearly convinced by it. In fact, maybe I already am. (I’m still not sure how I’ll vote, although I’m fairly certain it won’t be for Tom Brady.) But I recently fell upon an equally arresting argument for the opposite position, and from the unlikeliest of sources: comedian and Daily Show correspondent John Hodgman (perhaps best known for playing the clunky PC in those then-ubiquitous “I’m a Mac” commercials).

On a web site called 90 Days, 90 Reasons, which describes its mission as compelling “a wide range of cultural figures to explain why they’re voting for Obama in 2012, in the hopes that this might re-inspire the grassroots army that got Obama elected in the first place,” Hodgman does so in hilarious yet eloquent fashion:

Like many, I first heard of Barack Obama when he spoke at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Though I lived at that time on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I was listening to him on the radio at our summer house in the five college area of Western Massachusetts. I say this to set the scene, and also to re-assert my credentials as an elite, affluent, northeastern liberal, and thus, at that time, a non-American. In case you had forgotten.

Listening to Obama, I realized I agreed with him on most issues, but mostly I was electrified by the premise of the speech, which was essentially that we are all part of the same country, but which I took to mean “people in blue states are actual humans as well.” There weren’t many people saying this in 2004. Not even many Democrats. And while I was instantly thralled by this on a purely selfish level, I also liked that the sentiment flowed in reverse as well. I have disagreements with, but no need to demonize, conservative America, as indeed many of them are my family, even right here in supposedly liberal Massachusetts. We are all one, he said in 2004, and I was so excited. This guy is going to lose so BEAUTIFULLY, I thought.

But it didn’t happen that way. I can place the moment I knew I was wrong. In July of 2008, I was driving past the empty hole where the new World Trade Center had STILL not been built, and I heard on the radio (I LOVE PUBLIC RADIO, REMEMBER) that Obama had reversed his position on the update of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and would agree with a compromise that would grant telecom companies immunity from prosecution for cooperating with warrantless wiretaps. I had to look all that up, because I honestly forgot what the specific issue was at the time. All I remember was that knife twist in my gut of deep disappointment. I learned then that Obama was going to disappoint; that his ideals were tempered by a kind of rough pragmatism; and that he would be willing to personally alienate ME. ME OF ALL PEOPLE. The one person who knew best about how to run a presidential campaign and ranked Obama’s performance as a candidate solely upon his adherence to a few very specific positions that I cared most about. HOW COULD HE WIN THIS ELECTION WITHOUT ME? And then I realized: Oh. How can he win the election WITH an asshole like me?

Now that I’ve looked it up, I still disagree with his decision on the FISA update. But what I remember is this: not only would I have to get used to that knife twist of disappointment, I would have to learn to enjoy it. Because that’s the moment that I realized that Obama actually intended to win…

And of course, the cost of losing is very high. As a supporter of health care reform, same sex marriage, women’s rights, tax fairness, a domestic policy responsive to the realities of the present day as opposed to toxic nostalgia, and an international policy that punishes our enemies more than it rewards our private contractors, I may not always agree with the speed or execution of Obama’s policies. But I know that a loss this year would not be seen as a noble failure. It would be seen as a repudiation of these values for a long time to come. Losses transform ideals into irrelevant fantasy, and idealists into weepy self-pitiers, like old-school Red Sox fans and Tea Partiers and people who really believe some day that Firefly might come back.

There’s more, of course, and it’s definitely worth reading the whole thing. As for me, I remain undecided but, like the U.S. as a whole, leaning Obama.

When will the National Popular movement see some…movement?

Politics, , ,

I’m surprised there haven’t been more articles like this one:

Here’s how the plan would work. Individual states pass legislation to join an interstate compact, under which member states will award all their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. When states representing 270 electoral votes — the number needed to become president — have signed on, the plan goes into effect. Thus it’s in the power of state Legislatures and governors to catalyze the move.

So far, the bill has been introduced in 47 states. It has been passed into law in Illinois (21 electoral votes) New Jersey (15), Maryland (10 ), and, just last week, Hawaii (4), and is under active consideration in any number of others. In Massachusetts, the bill has a majority in both the House and the Senate, says Pam Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause of Massachusetts.

If the plan goes into effect, it would change the nature of campaigns in a big way. Right now, it doesn’t matter if a candidate wins a state by 10 votes or 10,000; once you have a majority, every additional vote is essentially wasted. Thus there’s little point of campaigning in states that lean strongly for either party.

Earlier this month, the New Yorker‘s Hendrik Hertzberg continued his championing of the movement and noted a prominent new convert:

Al Gore, whose margin of popular victory in 2000 was four times bigger than John F. Kennedy’s in 1960 and only a little smaller than Richard Nixon’s in 1968, has never made a secret of his disagreement with the infamous Supreme Court decision that put his outvoted opponent in the White House. But Gore has been silent, as far as I know, about the over-all electoral system that makes it possible for the Presidency, alone among American elected offices, to be denied to the candidate who comes in first and awarded to the one who comes in second. Until now.

Last Thursday, while leading a panel discussion on Current—the cable network he founded, runs, and, during the conventions, anchors—Gore casually endorsed the National Popular Vote initiative, this blog’s favorite cause…

I’m pretty sure that Gore’s long hesitancy about backing the N.P.V. was due less to a reluctance to seem self-pitying (remember “Sore Loserman”?) than to a desire to keep the plan from becoming a purely partisan political football.

Not all broken clocks are right even twice a day

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Benjamin Netanyahu:

During an address to the Britain’s House of Commons, Netanyahu said that Russia is still passing ballistic missile technology to Iran and that the Iranians are only a year away from acquiring long-range nuclear missile capability.

“If the supply of Russian technology is not stopped, then within a year Iran would become self-sufficient and would be able to create those missiles on its own,” Netanyahu said.

Oh, and…this was in November 1997. Then, the next year (Jay Bushinsky and Liat Collins, “PM: It may be too late to stop Iran, Iraq nuclear plans,” Jerusalem Post, June 9, 1998; no link):

Prime Minster Binyamin Netanyahu yesterday repeated that Israel is doing everything to thwart Iran’s attempts to arm itself with nonconventional ballistic and nuclear weapons.

Netanyahu reportedly told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that the international community had largely ingnored the issue until Israel had begun raising it. He said although there had been a change, it was not sufficient and it is possible that Israel will not be able to prevent Iran and Iraq from acquiring nuclear capability. He said the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan had created a lack of balance in the international system.

You see, if there’s one thing the global community can count on, it’s that Iran will always be on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon.

Mitt Romney needs to fire his advisers

Politics, , , ,

The man is now flailing. His campaign’s policy incoherence has been an issue ever since the beginning, but this is getting ridiculous:

Mitt Romney on Wednesday cited his record in shepherding through the Massachusetts health care law as a sign of his empathy for all people, talking far more openly than usual about a controversial plan that has caused him so much strife with conservative Republicans.

“Don’t forget — I got everybody in my state insured,” Romney told NBC late Wednesday afternoon. “One hundred percent of the kids in our state had health insurance. I don’t think there’s anything that shows more empathy and care about the people of this country than that kind of record.”

Romney made the comments just before going on stage in Toledo, for a rally in which Romney used President Obama’s health care law as a chief example of what’s wrong with the current administration. The dichotomy of his statements further illustrated the tightrope Romney has had to walk in pledging to repeal President Obama’s federal law, while simultaneously trying to take credit for the state-level plan he signed into law in Massachusetts.

“I will repeal Obamacare and replace it with real health care reform,” Romney said during the rally. “Obamacare is really Exhibit No. 1 of the president’s political philosophy, and that is that government knows better than people how to run your lives.”

“I don’t believe in a bigger and bigger government,’’ he added. “I believe in free people pursuing their dreams. I believe in freedom.”