Month: May 2009

Rhetoric and Reality

by dday

Glennzilla did a nice job of summarizing this general dynamic today, but I wanted to make one specific point.

In his speech today, the President suggested that existing structures could deal with investigations and even proseuctions of those who violated law during the Bush Administration’s torture regime. He means Congressional inquiries rather than an independent commission, and Justice Department prosecutions rather than through an indepedent or special counsel.

I know that these debates lead directly to a call for a fuller accounting, perhaps through an Independent Commission.

I have opposed the creation of such a Commission because I believe that our existing democratic institutions are strong enough to deliver accountability. The Congress can review abuses of our values, and there are ongoing inquiries by the Congress into matters like enhanced interrogation techniques. The Department of Justice and our courts can work through and punish any violations of our laws.

A fine collection of words. But in his meeting with civil liberties and human rights groups yesterday, Obama suggested that he – not the Attorney General – would not allow such prosecutions to take place.

On at least one issue, though, Obama seems to have made up his mind. Isikoff reports that Obama announced his opposition to torture prosecutions–an unsurprising admission, perhaps, but one that must have disappointed many in attendance. Previously he had said that the question of investigation and prosecuting Bush administration officials was one for Holder to answer. But with Holder sitting right beside him, there’s no doubt he’s feeling pressure to, as they say, look forward, not backward.

So in public, the President gave a pretty speech about upholding the rule of law, but inside the White House, he vows not to uphold it, to do precisely the opposite of what he claims to believe makes us “who we are as a people.” In fact, it does violence to the rule of law for the President to even decide who does and does not get prosecuted, as that is nowhere near within his jurisdiction. And as each new revelation about criminal activity committed at the highest levels comes out, the hollowness of Obama’s rhetoric becomes more and more clear:

One source with knowledge of Zubaydah’s interrogations agreed to describe the legal guidance process, on the condition of anonymity.

The source says nearly every day, (a contractor named James) Mitchell would sit at his computer and write a top-secret cable to the CIA’s counterterrorism center. Each day, Mitchell would request permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques on Zubaydah. The source says the CIA would then forward the request to the White House, where White House counsel Alberto Gonzales would sign off on the technique. That would provide the administration’s legal blessing for Mitchell to increase the pressure on Zubaydah in the next interrogation.

A new document is consistent with the source’s account.

The CIA sent the ACLU a spreadsheet late Tuesday as part of a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. The log shows the number of top-secret cables that went from Zubaydah’s black site prison to CIA headquarters each day. Through the spring and summer of 2002, the log shows, someone sent headquarters several cables a day.

“At the very least, it’s clear that CIA headquarters was choreographing what was going on at the black site,” says Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU lawyer who sued to get the document. “But there’s still this question about the relationship between CIA headquarters and the White House and the Justice Department and the question of which senior officials were driving this process.”

This happened BEFORE the Office of Legal Counsel authorized torture through the Bybee/Yoo memos, and at a time when Gonzales was not in the Justice Department or involved in the workings of the CIA or any other federal agency. He was the President’s lawyer and speaking, presumably, for the President. Directly from the White House. Directing and approving torture without legal opinions. I agree with the groups seeking disbarment of the lawyers involved with twisting the law to justify the Bush torture program, and apparently, the first lawyer involved in doing this was Alberto Gonzales.

But the President of the United States would rather issue a blanket directive that actions like this – the lawyer to the President sitting down and cabling approval of torture tactics against a prisoner on a daily basis – should face no accountability whatsoever. Making the rhetorical flourish in the National Archives today very difficult to take seriously.

UPDATE: David Waldman was at the meeting, and he says on the point of investigations and prosecutions, Isikoff’s reporting is wrong. Duly noted.

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Fighting For Principles

by digby

It seems as if the administration is getting buffeted from all sides these days and I’m sure the president wonders if he has any friends at all sometimes. But the fact is that politics works as much through pressure and working the levers of power as it does with friends and allies working together. “Trust” is not a particularly useful word and neither is “cynicism.” You have to keep up the pressure for change or it will not happen.

It’s been a rough year for the LGBT community with Proposition 8 in California, while at the same time there have been some great victories in the Northeast. Just this week, it was reported that the Obama administration has not yet ordered the promised Pentagon review of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. The battle for full civil rights is raging all around the country and with every step forward there seems to be a step back.

In order to wage that fight more effectively, some people have come together and decided that the time is now to lay down a set of principles. And they are asking you to sign on:

On May 15-17, 2009 in Dallas, Texas twenty-four thinkers, activists, and donors gathered to discuss the immediate need for full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual transgender people in the United States. Collectively we prepared The Dallas Principles.

To join the growing chorus of Americans speaking in unison that now is the time to provide full civil rights to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender citizens, CLICK HERE.

The following eight guiding principles underlie our call to action.
In order to achieve full civil rights now, we avow:
1.Full civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals must be enacted now. Delay and excuses are no longer acceptable.
2.We will not leave any part of our community behind.
3.Separate is never equal.
4.Religious beliefs are not a basis upon which to affirm or deny civil rights.
5.The establishment and guardianship of full civil rights is a non-partisan issue.
6.Individual involvement and grassroots action are paramount to success and must be encouraged.
7.Success is measured by the civil rights we all achieve, not by words, access or money raised.
8.Those who seek our support are expected to commit to these principles.

To join the growing chorus of Americans speaking in unison that now is the time to provide full civil rights to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender citizens, CLICK HERE.

Keep the pressure on. This is an issue that affects every single person in this country, no matter what your sexual orientation or attitudes about marriage and the military. The simple fact is that until all Americans are are treated equally, none of us are.

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High Thresholds

by digby

They really are trying to kill me. Here’s Spencer Ackerman:

Let’s unpack a claim about the Guantanamo detainees, as summarized by Marc Ambinder:

It had been the hope of administration legal advisers that a majority of the 240 [Guantanamo detainees] — perhaps a large majority — would be tried in federal courts. Then they discovered that the evidentiary thresholds for doing so were too high given the quality of information the Bush government had collected about the detainees, and they subsequently concluded that Article III trials wouldn’t be as swift as an option that they wanted to reserve for only a couple dozen high-value detainees: the military commissions.

To say that the “evidentiary thresholds” for trying the detainees in civilian court is “too high” is another way of saying there isn’t sufficient evidence on the face of it for the constant invocation that the detainees are terrorists. If it can be proven that a detainee has given material support to terrorists or contributed to an illegal act, he ought to be convicted. If it can’t, then a detainee ought to be freed. What would happen in that case? Someone who isn’t a terrorist would be free. The detainees, according to the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision last year, have the right to habeas corpus, full stop. There’s no putting that bit of juridical toothpaste back in the tube. As a result, they have to be provided with some sort of trial. Everything else is denying reality. The military commissions represent a method of getting convictions rather than a method of getting justice. Just saying someone is a terrorist over and over again doesn’t make it the case.

There is no excuse for not knowing that the “evidentiary threshold” might be a little bit too high. We’ve known for years that they didn’t have real evidence against many of these guys and what they later obtained in the form of “confessions” had been obtained through torture. Common sense says that they wouldn’t have felt the need to create this extra-legal system if they could have convicted them in normal civilian or military courts.
And, I’m sorry, but I just don’t believe this anyway. The problem here is political, not procedural, and the administration and the Democrats just don’t want to expend any political capital because they don’t care enough about this to risk giving the Republicans something to hang onto.
The easiest thing to do at this point would be to give these prisoners military courts martials and if the Republicans object, they should immediately develop a full blown case of the vapors, screeching at the top of their lungs that the GOP has no respect for the military and is devaluing our troops. If these courts are good enough for our boys, they ought to be good enough for a bunch of terrorist suspects. But that won’t happen. It would be inappropriate, as Ben Nelson said today.
Update: Well, at least there’s this:

Under heavy criticism for a series of decisions on national security that resembled, for some, those of the Bush years, President Barack Obama hosted a lengthy meeting on Wednesday with the leaders of several key human rights and civil liberties groups. Addressed were the topics that promise to be front and center during the President’s major foreign policy speech scheduled for Thursday. According to an attendee, Obama expressed frustration with Congress’ decision to remove funding for the closure of the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. The president declared that his hands were tied in some ways regarding the use of reformed military tribunals, though he pledged to try as many detainees as possible in Article III federal courts. […]
There was much to probe. According to Massimino, Obama had “two baskets of issues he wanted to talk about: one was Guantanamo and all of the things pertaining to closing it. And the other was transparency.” On Gitmo, Massimino said, the President “emphasized that he was in this for the long game. He said he realized that you can’t change people’s misperceptions overnight, that they have had eight long years of a steady dose of fear and a lack of leadership and that is not something that you wave a magic wand and make it go away.”

If it weren’t for the fact that every single voter voted for a man who said they would close Guantanamo in the last election, I might buy this. And the “long game” is actually long enough already for those who’ve been held for years without being able to confront their accusers and with no idea if they would ever be free.

While acknowledging that she did not have verbatim quotes from the president, Massimino nevertheless relayed some of the remarks he made on other key foreign policy topics. On the administration’s decision to reverse course and oppose the release of photos depicting abuse of terrorist suspects, she said that Obama brought it up without being prompted. “He raised it,” she said. “We didn’t have to ask.”

On his decision to maintain and improve the use of military tribunals to try terrorist suspects, Obama, she said, “seemed to imply that some of the circumstances of capture of some of the people of Guantanomo would lend themselves to trial in a military commission.” He reiterated, she added, that “despite the announcement of military commissions on Friday, his strong preference was that we use Article III courts…” […]
Asked whether the president had pacified some of the concerns she brought to the White House on Wednesday, Massimino said that she was pleased with the opportunity for engagement. Beyond that, she still registered concerns. “I think that many of us were disappointed by the announcement about the military commissions and wondered what the reasoning was behind that. And to be honest, I am still wondering having been in this meeting today. I don’t think that this fits the overall framework that the president had articulated about using our values to reinforce a counter terrorism strategy against al Qaeda.”

And expanding the state secrets argument and withholding FOIA documents (or issuing signing statements which claim executive privilege over bailout oversight) doesn’t fit into the transparency framework either.
It’s a good thing that Obama wants to keep an open dialog with the human rights community but it’s become quite clear to me that Democrats as a whole — and I believe with his 65% approval rated permission — have concluded once again that in order to appear to be tough on national security they need to capitulate to the Republicans by punching the hippies — the only people who seem to give a damn about the constitution, civil liberties and human rights. It’s pavlovian.

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Crazy Conservatives Part Deux

by digby

Ed Kilgore fills us in on the result of that ground breaking meeting today:

In a step that will be interpreted as a triumph for what passes as Republican “moderation” these days, the Republican National Committee passed a resolution (at a special session called for this purpose) today that accuses the President and the Democratic Party of “pushing our country towards socialism,” but does not specifically demand that Democrats begin calling themselves the “Democrat Socialist Party,” which was how it was originally worded.

Since all the “whereas” clauses in the resolution seem to have been left intact, it doesn’t appear that Republicans have changed their minds about calling Democrats “socialists.” They’ve just abandoned the sophomoric idea of demanding a party name change, complete with cropping “Democratic” to “Democrat,” an odd if ancient GOP ritual.

Feel that Big GOP Tent expand.

Man, if it isn’t Gitmo terrorists coming to our malls and bake sales to kill us where we stand, it’s the Democrat Socialist Nazis who are destroying the very fabric of America. Best gather our guns, jump into our Escalades and take to the hills. (For the week-end anyway.)

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The Rare Reverse Kabuki

by dday

I don’t know who fed the media this point, or maybe they just couldn’t ignore the wealth of hypocrisy surrounding the right-wing hissy fit over Nancy Pelosi, but they have started to inexplicably push back. It started last week when Marcy Wheeler noted that Pete Hoekstra, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, accused the CIA of providing insufficient briefings and even lying to Congress, regarding a separate investigation. In the interim, a host of elements of the CIA’s story started to fall apart – their briefing record document included people who weren’t in the meetings, people who lacked the security clearance to attend, and even stated Porter Goss was briefed in 2005 when he was the Director of the CIA at the time. The invaluable ThinkProgress dug up a copy of the letter Hoekstra sent to the CIA, and added this:

Similarly, in 2007, Hoekstra described a closed-door briefing by representatives from the intelligence community (including CIA) on the National Intelligence Estimate of Iran’s nuclear capability, saying that the members “didn’t find [the briefers] forthcoming.” More recently, in November 2008, Hoekstra concluded that the CIA “may have been lying or concealing part of the truth” in testimony to Congress regarding a 2001 incident in which the CIA mistakenly killed an American citizen in Peru. “We cannot have an intelligence community that covers up what it does and then lies to Congress,” Hoekstra said of the incident.

Maybe this was simply the easiest way for journalists to understand the emptiness of the hissy fit – Hoekstra said “lied,” too – but for some reason they’re off and running with this today. Wolf Blitzer confronted John Boehner with this and he had to concede the point. Newt Gingrich tried to play this off when called on it by Diane Sawyer, of all people, but it didn’t work ut too well for him.

(not that anyone should give a crap what Newt Gingrich thinks.)

And here comes none other than Arlen Specter, calling ’em how he sees ’em with respect to the CIA:

Sen. Arlen Specter took the opportunity Wednesday to defend House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has come under fire in recent weeks over a controversy surrounding when she was told of the use of enhanced interrogation techniques being used by the CIA.

“The CIA has a very bad record when it comes to — I was about to say ‘candid’; that’s too mild — to honesty,” Specter, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a lunch address to the American Law Institute. He cited misleading information about the agency’s involvement in mining harbors in Nicaragua and the Iran-Contra affair.

I have no idea why the worm turned today, but this controversy is basically over. The CIA’s theory is full of holes, and the Pelosi spat has turned into he said/she said, with the media willing to explore Republican hypocrisy on the issue.

Of course, defusing this time bomb has an added benefit – it ends any rising calls for investigations, perhaps starting with what Pelosi knew but encompassing the entire breadth of the torture regime from top to bottom. The Village certainly wants no part of that. So they had to play rough with Republicans for a couple days. It’s almost a Kabuki dance in reverse – the media pretends to delve deep and fact-check precisely to pre-empt anyone else getting to actually delve deep and fact-check.

Pretty sharp. Meanwhile the whole “we tortured detainees to justify the war in Iraq” storyline has faded off into the distance as well. Maybe Jonathan Landay will drop yet another McClatchy bombshell soon.

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Symbolism

by digby

Here’s the state of the Guantanamo debate from both the Democrats, the Republicans and the villagers on Hardball this afternoon It’s not reassuring:

Saxby Chambliss: We know that the ones that are left in Guantanamo are the meanest, nastiest killers in the world. They getup every day thinking of ways that they can kill and harm Americans. And those are the individuals that we just can’t afford to have transferred to this country and certainly we can’t afford to put them into a position to be released into US society.

Matthews: Do you think our maximum security prisons are not adequate to hold them? We’ve got some, you know, a lot of killers in our prisons. We’ve got murderers, people who murdered again and again in our prisons, really horrible people in those prisons in our country. Senator, Chambliss, you’re saying they’re not good enough to hold these terorists, not tough enough to hold them?

Chambliss: No, what I’m saying is that once you put ’em on Americal soil, then all of a sudden they become eligible for a lot of rights that American criminal have and these are combatant detainees. These are not ordinary bank robbers or the nasty folks who they might be asociated with at these prisons.

These are folks that either have killed or tried to kill Americans. And we ned to make sure that they don’t have the rights given to those criminals that are on American soil, such as the right of habeas corpus, and a certain number of them will probably be successful in a habeas corpus action and could be released in America. And we don’t need to give the Americans the exposure of that nature.

Matthews: is this really a case of NIMBY?

Ben Nelson: It’s certainly not in my case. I think it’s inappropriate to bring those prisoners .. er combatants to America to house them to incarcerate them. It’s just inappropriate. It’s a matter of politics, it’s a matter of policy, and even if you idn’t run the risk of habeas corpus and some of the other rights that they might be able to assert on American soil, it’s inappropriate. This is not the place for them. We need to work with other countries to make sure that they don’t release them. That they keep them incarcerated. After all, they’re their residents, they’re their citizens and after all, they have an obligation here as well. It’s not all on our shoulders in my opinion.

Matthews: The French sent Napoleon to St Helena. Is there another place besides Gitmo? I understand Senator Chambliss, the symbolism. Obviously the candidate Barack Obama didn’t like the symbolism of Gitmo, but are we gonna have to face the fact that these guys are terrorists, they’re going to have to be somewhere, it might as well be Gitmo.

Chambliss: Well, I understand what he’s talking about from a symbolism standpoint and I’m not one who thinks we ought to keep Gitmo open for ever and ever and ever. But you’ve got to have a plan in place before you make a major decision such as closing Gitmo. It may take us three, four, five, ten years. I don’t know what it will take us before we can d eal with each of these prisoners individually. That’s what we’re looking for. We’re looking for a way to keep those prisoners housed and keep them off of American soil until some definitive plan is in place

Chris then noted the Robert Mueller said the terrorists could run the jihad from prison and Chambliss agreed that our prisons could easily become hotbed of terrorist activities because they are a breeding ground for recidivism. They are super smart, clever people who are experts at getting their message out.

Chris then asked Ben Nelson why we are so “dainty” about this and why don’t just execute these dangerous criminals since they are evil and will always be evil. Nelson said we should send them back to their countries under the understanding they will never be released or at least will be rehabilitated as the Saudi Arabians do even though it doesn’t really work.

Never once, during the entire incoherent, intellectual compost pile of a discussion did anyone mention the fact that a bunch of these “terrorists” are not guilty of anything. But I guess that’s not important. If some grunt picked them up seven years ago somewhere in the world then they are guilty of being in the wrong place at the right time, ‘n that’s good enough for us.

I just have to laugh at the sight of Republicans defending our good clean All American killers against some SuperVillain Afghan farmer who “killed Americans or tried to kill Americans.” I’m sure the American killers will happily vote Republican with that kind of endorsement (if they are ever let loose and Americans are “exposed” to them. )

This isn’t even a debate. It’s a pageant. A sick, stupid pageant

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Those Crazy Conservatives

by digby

… are at it again:

Yesterday Michael Steele said:

We are going to take this president on with class. We are going to take this president on with dignity. This will be a very sharp and marked contrast to the shabby and classless way that the Democrats and the far left spoke of President Bush.

Today:

Nearly 2,600 people voted in our ConservativeHQ.com Web site poll conducted from May 12th through May 19th. Ninety-one percent of self-identified conservatives said Obama was either a “socialist,” “Marxist,” “communist,” or “fascist,” proving Obama is no garden variety liberal.

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Break Out

by digby

The press seems to be taking this action to deny funding for the closing of Guantanamo at face value as a sign of congress flexing its muscle at the white house. That’s ridiculous. It seems obvious that they are giving cover to the administration, which simply doesn’t know how to handle this Gitmo hissy fit and want’s to kick the issue down the road. (I’m not sure why they think it will be any easier later, but perhaps they know they are going to punt and just want to keep the coalition from splintering before they get anything substantial done on health care.) Harry Reid’s confused comments from yesterday only underscore for me that he was following some script that he hadn’t fully memorized. The Democrats are not “breaking with” the president.

Obviously, this argument that we can’t allow suspected terrorists to come into our communities and kill us all in our beds is beyond stupid (unless you actually believes these prisoners have supernatural powers as the racist rightwing pantwetters seemed to believe.) America has no shortage of dangerous killers and psychopaths locked up in its prisons and we seem to be able to handle them just fine.

I recently heard one of the Republican strategists argue that we couldn’t allow these prisoners to be housed in America because it would provoke terrorists to try to break them out (kind of a Butch and Sundance thing, I guess.) But, if Americans can’t break their own gang members out of maximum security prisons, it’s hard to imagine that some roving jihadis could do any better.

Prisons are what we do. We have more people locked up that any other nation on earth. It’s one of our biggest industries. We may be bad at everything else, but locking people up we are really,really good at. The idea that we can’t keep a few broken, foreign, torture victims in jail is patently absurd. If you don’t believe that the government is capable of protecting a prison from attack by foreign terrorists, anyone who lives near a nuclear power plant should be completely petrified. Talk about a target.

Look, this is just one more example of the politics of national security trumping actual national security. Logic says that Guantanamo could be closed today and these prisoners could be brought tomorrow to military brigs around the country if not maximum security prisons we have by the dozens. The rest of the world would see Obama fulfilling his clear and unambiguous promise to close it (a promise he shared with his Republican rival, btw) and would gain tremendous credibility around the world for doing so. But the Republicans have the Democrats running scared on national security again and that’s the end of that.

Let’s not pretend there’s really a “debate” going on here. The Democrats are more scared of Republicans than they are of terrorists or anything else and that’s what’s driving this.

Update: dday has more on this.

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This Year, We Have Activists

by dday

The biggest difference between 1993 and 2009 when it comes to health care is the coordinated message machine – on the left this time – pushing for reform. Under Clinton, the White House horded the policy and nobody could go out and sell it, or at least rebut the attacks from industry. This time, the Health Care for America Now structure allows activists a place both to attack back at industry and keep them occupied, while arguing for a consistent set of principles that must be part of any reform. Today, HCAN did something great, calling on the Justice Department to look at monopolies in the insurance market.

Activists backing President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul are asking the Justice Department to open a wide-ranging investigation of what they say is monopoly-like power in the hands of major insurers […]

“A lack of antitrust enforcement has enabled insurers to acquire dominant positions in almost every metropolitan market,” said the letter to the Justice Department, signed by Richard Kirsch, the group’s director. “The failure to attack anticompetitive practices has enhanced the dominant positions of these insurers. This must be reversed.” […]

In a report earlier this year, the American Medical Association found that insurance markets in most major metropolitan areas were dominated by two companies, and in many cases only one. In all, 94 percent of the metropolitan areas met the government’s definition of “highly concentrated” markets for health insurance.

Separately, a recent report by the congressional Government Accountability Office found that in most states, a single insurer dominates the market for small business health insurance, even though many companies offer coverage. The GAO found that the median, or midpoint, statewide market share of the largest insurer was about 47 percent, although the median number of licensed carriers was 27.

This is all the more important, considering that the health insurance industry’s “compromise” solution for reform is to EXPAND THEIR MONOPOLY by mandating that everyone in America buy health insurance from them, without the opportunity for a public plan alternative. With nobody to compete with and essentially a forced market, insurers would have every incentive to consolidate further, the very action which has driven up health care premium costs over the years, as an HCAN report later today will show. While insurers aren’t the only cause of rising health care costs – pharmaceuticals, medical device operators, hospitals, there’s plenty of blame to go around – this model of activism can be scaled to pressure both the industry and the political class.

Health care reform will rise or fall this year based on the success of these activist efforts, toward both the special interests and the politicians. Doesn’t mean it’ll succeed, but it gives it a fighting chance. Frank Luntz (who won’t say who paid him for the health care memo) isn’t the only game in town anymore.

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The California Nightmare

by dday

Many of you know that I do double-duty over at Calitics, the California progressive political website. We had quite a couple of weeks here leading up to another election (our 13th in 7 years), which the voters defeated resoundingly. The Yes side outspent the No side 7:1 and still got crushed. Let me back up a bit and describe the problem.

There is no functional government in California. We might as well be Somalia. Because of the 2/3 requirement needed to pass a budget or raise taxes, because of the cap on property taxes at 1978 rates which make income tax revenue 53% of the overall general fund, because of the various past ballot measures and Constitutional amendments which mandate a healthy part of the budget into certain spending operations, because local governments are funded in the most absurd way possible, because of the utter lack of a political media to explain this jumble to people, we don’t have a government that works. Democrats hold a 63% majority in both houses of the legislature, and yet they cannot invoke the popular will because of hard-right Republican holdouts (we don’t grow any other kind out here).

Now, this would be true if John Birch or Noam Chomsky were Governor, because it’s a failure of process and not policy. But let’s offer a particular bit of scorn for the current Governor, who, despite what you hear in the national media, has been the biggest failure of any California executive in decades. He entered government because he labeled his predecessor Gray Davis a failure and said he had to be recalled. Six years later we have a bigger budget deficit and largely the same dysfunctional structure. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he would “blow up the boxes” in Sacramento, and the boxes remain untouched. He said he would be the “Collectinator” in DC, and yet California gives much more in income taxes to the Feds than they receive in services. Schwarzenegger has virtually no substantive accomplishments; he showed up in DC yesterday for that fuel economy announcement, which is based on California’s tailpipe emissions law, passed in 2002, when he was still making movies.

The man has absolutely no ability to persuade members of his own party, who actually give him lower approval ratings than Democrats. And his latest reinvention will be as a hard-right spending cutter. He’s in Washington today trying to get waivers to cut Medi-Cal and in-home supportive services and still qualify for stimulus money. In other words, he’s reacting to a terrible recession in the state by cutting more government spending and throwing 5,000 state employees out of work. This is more neo-Hooverist than any Mark Sanford or Rick Perry plan.

And yet the local media and the Village treat this guy like the movie star he is, with glossy magazine covers and puff-piece profiles. Imagine George Bush circa 2007 STILL being treated like the guy on the aircraft carrier in his codpiece suit and you get what I mean.

The Democratic leadership doesn’t exactly help matters by capitulating at the first opportunity, and refusing for 30 years to detail the root of the problem – a structural revenue deficit and an ungovernable system. They backed this special election nonsense, and like national Democrats, they view polls as immutable realities cast in stone, rather than a starting point for advocacy and persuasion.

It’s beyond clear what has to be done now. We need to repeal the 2/3 requirement and restore democracy in the state of California. As George Lakoff says, this is the lesson of the election, the voters demanding a functional government that doesn’t have to return to them every couple months to sort out their budget problems. It’s time for a majority vote.

And the new Democratic Party leader, John Burton (who was in Congress I think back in 1874), says he agrees. But I’ve always had the sneaking suspicion that the Democrats like it this way – they may not be able to fix the budget from year to year, but at least they have something else to blame instead of themselves. The 2/3 rule works for BOTH parties – Republicans can hijack the process, Democrats can point at Republicans.

Enough. A growing movement at the grassroots wants to live in a democracy again, not a failed state. Expect initiatives on the 2010 ballot as wide-ranging as a simple repeal of the 2/3 rule, to a Constitutional convention (no state needs one more) to completely rewrite this absurd collection of contradictions. And you can see this as a test case for whether a progressive movement can really deliver the change they seek. If not, I don’t see how the country recovers with this massive sick patient on its West Coast.

(Oh, and we’ll know in a couple hours if the state Supreme Court decision on Prop. 8, the gay marriage law, is coming down tomorrow. Never a dull moment…)

…So no Prop. 8 announcement this week. Also, here is a very good video from a California Assemblywoman that explains the myths and falsehoods of the state budget process pretty darn well.

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