I Must Admit....

I must admit to being pretty depressed with the state of the world right now. On top of the ongoing grievances of Iraq and Afghanistan, Darfur, Somalia, the near total collapse of the Greek economy, the total collapse of the Icelandic economy, that Icelandic volcano that's still causing some travel problems for Europe, watching the Parliamentary Elections in Britain get uglier, and I'm sure a thousand other things I could mention we have three issues just in the US that make me so frustrated.

So, if you were a bit too happy today here's your bit of sad.

First and oldest bit, the FBI is now probing Massey Energy to see if there was possible bribery involved in the flagrant violation of safety rules in the Upper Big Branch Mine that claimed the lives of 29 miners in West Virginia a few weeks ago. Since then there has been a much smaller problem with a collapse in a mine in Utah I believe where a handful of miners were also injured or killed. Both of these mines are non-union mines. American corporations have done such a good job over the last thirty years or so convincing the public that unions are bad news. It's starting to come back to haunt us.

In slightly fresher news, the Goldman Sachs case has gone a step up from unethical and wrong to possibly illegal. Now not only is the SEC charging Goldman with fraud in a civil suit, but the case has now been handed over to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation. It looks like this is gonna get even uglier than it already was. You thought the language on CSPAN was bad the other day? Let's get ready to rumble.

And in developing news the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico is now the size of Deleware. To make matters worse, the containment measures don't seem to be working, and we are now finding out that the slick is growing at five times the rate we thought it was. Whether that is something we didn't know, or was being kept from us is up for debate. As an aside to this story, the Administration is pretty much turning a blind eye. President Obama announced today that he would hold off on authorizing any more off shore drilling, but none was immediately in the works anyway. It's looking like the plan is to come up with some hand-waving in the form on "new safety regulations" before they go ahead and give projects the green light again. How hard is it to understand that the gains to be made from domestic drilling in the Gulf of Mexico (and ANWAR) are too little to make up for these sorts of disasters? It is time for Americans to do everything we can to end our abusive relationship with fossil fuels for the sake of our health, the health of our environment, and our national security. If nothing else, think if it as a war we can win without ever having to fire a shot. The best kind.

Edit: The slick is now, according to the Rachel Maddow Show, bigger than the state of West Virginia.

Florida Senate Take Two

I want to do an update on the Florida Senate race as it looks like things will be shaking up a bit in a few hours. What has been talked about as a possibility up until now looks like it's going to come to pass, namely, as the St. Petersburg Times is reporting, Charlie Christ should be announcing his run as an independent in the race for the open Florida Senate seat. He's been trailing Marco Rubio in the GOP Primary polling for quite some time and doesn't seem to be fond of the idea of losing out before the general election. Historically the game plan for federal elections in Florida has been to run to your base through the primary and then scramble back to the middle to get as many moderates as possible by the general. This is mainly because Florida is a wild state from the conservative panhandle and northern area along the Alabama and Georgia state lines down to the cosmopolitan city of Miami with its large block of hispanic voters and more liberal heads.

A three way race shakes this dynamic up considerably. With three candidates you only need a plurality under Florida election law to win. As best I know there are no runoffs or tie-brakers. This can be a huge advantage for Christ but also for Rubio and Kendrick Meek the likely Democratic challenger. In this instance there will be much more running to the base for Rubio and Meek because both sides can at least hypothetically get their candidates 34% of the vote where 51% was impossible. What this also does though is give Christ wide latitude to sweep up an odd man out coalition of moderate Republicans, true Independents, and Democrats disaffected by things that the Obama Administration has or hasn't done that they disapprove of. His main issues are going to be fundraising and creating a viable infrastructure to run on without the help of the GOP.

I think this is going to turn out to be an infinitely interesting race between now and November. I think it could tell us just how many moderate Republicans are out there, being drowned out by the Tea Party right now. And it could also give us a shot at a Democratic Senator from Florida.

New Post: Arizona's "Papers Please" Law

So this has been bandied about the internet for several days now and coverage has ranged from blogs to the mainstream media like Olbermann and Maddow. People have dissected this bill, sorry law, in every way they know how. Even the President has weighed in. But I feel compelled both by the gross nature of this unconstitutional bid to enshrine racial profiling into our country and my sheer boredom as I wait for my semester to end to say something myself.

This whole thing is so out of left....wait. Scratch that. This is right where our country has been headed. This is the logical conclusion to things that we've been dealing with and not objecting loudly to for several years if not decades by now. Like this or this. In a country where a sitting senator can say that he "supports racial and ethnic profiling" even when such things have proven to be both wrong and ineffective we shouldn't be a surprise. In a country where, 15 years ago, a horrible terrorist attack was carried out in that Oklahoma senator's home state by a white man who was a citizen of this country and yet we continue to view terrorists and immigrants as  something foreign or other or different, we shouldn't be surprised.

This sort of bad mouthing of immigrants, and this sort of government endorsed hatred towards immigrants has a long and well documented history from the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 to the No Irish Need Apply situation on the East Coast especially following the Potato Famine all the way up to the present day. The only thing that has changed is who we've decided is not as good as us. Now it's this Papers Please law and guys like Tom Tancredo (who thought he could be President!) standing up and saying we should make English the national language and require literacy tests before voting. Really? Literacy tests? I don't know how much you remember about domestic US history from...ohh...about 1875 until the 1960s. America has a history of using such tests and ideas to limit who gets to vote. They were applied in no uniform manner (only to people we wanted to discriminate against) and asked questions that most US citizens, white or otherwise don't know the answers to.

Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement has PDFs of one such literacy test in Alabama from the early 1960s. It asks questions like, "If a person charged with treason denies his guilt, how many persons must testify against him before he can be convicted?" Know the answer? I didn't either.

The point to be made here is that this kind of bunk has been an ugly part of our history for longer than we should care to remember. And it will continue to be a part of our history until we stand up and say that it's not okay. Remember, you can tell if someone's an illegal just by looking at their shoes!

More on Senate Races

I read this today on Firedoglake and it got me thinking. Reid was/is looking at a very very difficult race for his own seat in Nevada. That's a big deal, even in a year that is as anti-incumbent as this one. But all of this is still up in the air. Will the Tea Party candidate run, my gut says yes. What we're essentially looking at here is the Tea Party serving as the Ralph Nader of the Nevada senate race. Only this time the Dems may come out on top.

I have very mixed feelings about this. I don't think I've said so before, but I don't like Harry Reid much. I think he's an ineffective party leader and he doesn't have enough spine to get the things done that need to be taken care of. But if I compare that to putting a Republican in that seat, I have to say I'm torn. On the one hand, if Reid loses, we get a new (hopefully more effective) party leader. Names like Dick Durbin have been thrown around. But, this scenario also means one less seat in the Senate for Democrats to be able to do the things we need them to do. I don't care what kind of reform you're pulling for most be it healthcare, the banking system, or something else; your best bet is to have as many Democrats in Congress as possible.

And One More Thing...

I just got wind of this set of polling data from ABC News/Washington Post and Quinnipiac. Taking the two polls together it suggests that somewhere between 52 and 61 percent of the American Public supports trying terror suspects like the Underpants Bomber Umar Faruk Abdulmutallab in military tribunals instead of civilians courts. In this case the ABC News poll was of "adults" by phone; a very amorphous group, and the Quinnipiac poll was of registered voters. I won't pretend to be a polling expert. If you're looking for that then head over to 538.com to get all you ever wanted to know and more about evaluating polls.

In any case, I feel that even if these numbers were 30-40% instead of the 50-60% that they are, they would be too high. The Bush Administration tried terror suspects in criminal courts including Zacharias Moussaoui and Richard Reid, the Shoe Bomber. Especially in the Reid case, which almost exactly parallels the attempted underpants attack, it has been shown that criminal prosecutions of these sort are usually successful (especially with an airplane load of witnesses). In fact, I think the biggest issue with this sort of trial is finding an unbiased jury. That, I think is also the biggest problem in the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial. Where are you going to find 12 unbiased people within 100 miles of NYC? Or anywhere in the United States for that matter?

In any case, the arguements that have been made against civilian trials stem from the position that most of the "enemy combatants" that we're dealing with are not American citizens and so have no Miranda rights and so forth. I would argue that while this may be technically true, the rights afforded Americans under the Constitution and annunciated in the Declaration of Independence are there because they were viewed by the founders as basic human rights.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

It is our duty as Americans to be better than those we oppose. Trying these men in civilian courts upholds the impartiality of our justice system as many on both sides of the aisle have noted. It also shows that we truly value that which is written into our basic founding documents. I don't see that we have any other choice unless we wish to return to the Bush era of being viewed as hypocrites by most of the free world.

Nominations get Nom'd!

Today I want to take a second to talk about a back burner issue that most people don't think too much about. It's one that, never the less, can affect policy and real people's lives and can cause a lot of consternation in the Senate. If you guessed Nominations (judicial and otherwise) you guessed right!

Really the only time Senate nomination hearings get any kind of real press coverage is when we're in the market for a new Supreme Court Justice. And rightfully so. If we're only going to pay attention to this important part of the Senate's job occasionally, that is certainly the occasion to pay attention. But I'm going to make the arguement that these sorts of nomination hearings are much more important than that.

Currently, the GOP caucus in the Senate is holding up a number of nomination hearings. The most recent to make any kind of news is that of Craig Baker for a position on the National Labor Relations Board. His nomination failed with 52 yea votes. Take a minute and look at that. The Senate has 100 members. So if Mr. Baker got 52, why did his nomination fail you ask? Because of the ever present Filibuster. In the world of the Senate right now, the GOP is threatening filibuster on every issue. Every nomination, piece of legislation, and every other bit of Senate business. Even that which they themselves propose. It's a tactic to make the Democrats look like they're weak and can't get anything done. Other recent examples are Erroll Southers and the Shelby snafu from the New York Times and Talking Points Memo respectively. Alabama Senator Richard Shelby blocked every nominee waiting for Senate hearings. He's effectively holding up the funcitoning of government all by himself. In fact, the only thing more effective at that right now is the Mid-Atlantic Snowpocalypse. This is the problem.

I am realizing now that this is more of a filibuster post than a nominee post, but forgive me for positing that the two issues are hopelessly tangled up.

There are several options for solving our filibuster problem and getting the country back to doing business. Honestly, I'd rather get rid of it. This allows the checks and balances of the system to work best. In that sort of system any percieved overreach by one party will be checked, eventually by the other when they come back into power. The good stuff will remain however. Things like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security which the GOP was against initially (and still are) will stay because they recognize the political popularity of these programs. As it currently stands it takes 60 votes in the Senate to pass a cloture motion. This is down from from the 67 originally mandated after 1975. I would argue that it needs to come down further if it should remain at all. Perhaps 55 or 53 votes would be better. But then again, at that point we're rapidly approaching cloture invocation at a simple majority of 50 which makes the provision essentially dead anyway.

I am sure I'll wax about this more later. It's an ongoing issue that will generate it's own news one way or the other. Likewise, I see it as an important question our Democracy is facing right now. I promise more coverage.

Senate Races

It's taking a lot to get used to forming my own ideas to put on this blog. Give me a while to get into gear. In any case, I want to take a moment to talk about the Florida Senate race today. Or more specifically, the Republican primary between Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio. This is an issue that has been brewing for a while, and in some contexts can be seen as representative of the larger issue in the Republican Party right now. A lot of talking heads have been saying that this race is a metaphor for the larger divide between the mainstream Republican Party and the Tea Party movement. While I would contend that the "mainstream" of the GOP is not that far to the left of the Tea Partiers anymore, how they view themselves within the party is really the important part here. Anyway, this article is what got me thinking about this issue this morning.

First off, the simple fact that there are outside influences like Mike Pence all the way from Indiana dipping their fingers into this race already is a statement on how big this is going to get. Believe me, this is Daschle/Thune territory that we're working toward. And it's just a GOP primary. Secondly, this race says loads about our political climate. By all accounts Charlie Crist is an excellent governor in both the big and little "G" senses. He's well liked in Florida. To see him slipping so majorly this early to someone like Marco Rubio says a lot about how the country, and really more specifically the GOP is going these days. That said, a moment ago I said, "this early". It is still early. The primary isn't until August 24th. Any manner of things could happen to turn Crist's chances around beginning with a fizzle in the popularity of the Tea Party. Stuff like this, especially Tancredo's comments could very well do that. Rachel Maddow's excellent coverage is here. Likewise, as strange as it sounds, President Obama could be Crist's biggest ally right now. If the momentum the President has been building since his Question Time with Congressional Republicans continues into the summer, the Tea Party could look very bad and a moderate seem the more reasonable choice to Florida GOP voters.