Month: July 2013

Fiscal killers

by digby

For anyone who thinks that Military Industrial Complex profits are going to suffer in all this budget cutting should think again. Get a load of this boondoggle:

Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) was joined by Congressman John Garamendi (D-CA) and Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO) in introducing an amendment to the Fiscal Year 2014 Defense Appropriations Bill, H.R. 2397, to eliminate the $70.2 million added by the Appropriations Committee for an East Coast missile defense system.

“Military leaders have repeatedly said that they don’t need this unproven and unnecessary weapons system. This weapons program doesn’t match any threat to New York that will occur in the near future and wastes millions of taxpayer dollars,” said Congressman Nadler. “Congress must understand that in order to keep New Yorkers – and all Americans – safe, we need to fund a military that is equipped to deal with the security challenges of the 21st century. Members of Congress should stop forcing their pet programs into the defense bill – especially when the Pentagon says that it is unnecessary.”

“This boondoggle lavishes millions of taxpayer dollars on a project that the Department of Defense and outside experts have said is not needed and will not work. Instead, we should invest this money in effective 21st Century national security programs, in proven investments for job creation such as infrastructure, or in responsibly reducing the deficit,” said Congressman Garamendi, a Member of the House Armed Services Committee.

Hey, it’s always possible that the UK could turn on us and fire our own ICBMs at New York, but it’s unlikely.

This is a perfect demonstration of why the entire budget battle is nothing more than an excuse to slash necessary programs for average people. There’s always money for military boondoggles whether it’s “missile defense” or border security or another already obsolete piece of expensive hardware. Like this one:

The F-35 was conceived as the Pentagon’s silver bullet in the sky — a state-of-the art aircraft with advances that would easily overcome the defenses of most foes. The radar-evading jets would dodge sophisticated antiaircraft missiles and give pilots a better picture of enemy threats while enabling allies, who want the planes, too, to fight more closely with American forces.

But the ambitious aircraft instead illustrates how the Pentagon can let huge and complex programs veer out of control. The program has run into other technical problems and nearly doubled in cost as Lockheed and the military’s own bureaucracy failed to deliver on the most basic promise of a three-in-one jet that would save taxpayers money and be delivered speedily.

Behind the scenes, the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin had also engaged in a conflict of their own over the costs, though both sides now say that the relationship has improved and that the program is making progress. The number of test flights had picked up, and the Marines said before the grounding this week that they were about to shift from simply testing the planes to starting to fly them operationally…

The Pentagon estimates that it could spend as much as $396 billion to buy 2,456 of the jets by the late 2030s. But the program, the most expensive in military history, has been plagued by cost overruns and delays, and it could easily become a target for budget cutters.

There’s always enough money for this stuff isn’t there? Meanwhile they’ll tell you that you must be prepared to “sacrifice” your meager retirement income for the greater good.

A major problem with our system is that the only type of government job creation that’s allowed is weapons building. And those who do that business are given a blank check signed by the taxpayers. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that this creates a huge incentive to use such products so that there is a need to make more of them.

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QOTD: Jeff Garlin

by digby

I would have thought this was common sense, but apparently not …

If You Want To Be A Politician, You Can’t Show Your Weiner’

“This means that the government’s authority to collect information on law-abiding American citizens is essentially limitless”

by digby

Senator Ron Wyden is not an Obama hating emo-prog. He is a US Senator with Top Secret clearance and he knows all the details of these NSA surveillance programs and understands the implications of them in a free society. It would be advisable for those who think that this story can be discounted because you think Edward Snowden is a traitor or Glenn Greenwald is a twitter asshole to read Wyden’s entire speech today to Center for American Progress.

Here are some excerpts:

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) on Tuesday urged the United States to revamp its surveillance laws and practices, warning that the country will “live to regret it” if it fails to do so.

“If we do not seize this unique moment in our constitutional history to reform our surveillance laws and practices, we will all live to regret it,” Wyden said during a keynote address on the National Security Agency’s data collection programs hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

“The combination of increasingly advanced technology with a breakdown in the checks and balances that limit government action could lead us to a surveillance state that cannot be reversed,” he added.

Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned that people’s smartphones can be used as a tracking device to monitor their whereabouts and activities. He argued that privacy protections need to be put in place so the government cannot engage in mobile phone tracking in the future.

“The piece of technology we consider vital to the conduct of our everyday personal and professional life … happens to be a combination phone bug, listening device, location tracker and hidden camera,” he said.

“Without adequate protections built into the law there’s no way that Americans can ever be sure that the government isn’t going to interpret its authorities more and more broadly, year after year, until the idea of a tele-screen monitoring your every move turns from dystopia to reality,” Wyden added.

The Oregon Democrat said the government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act beyond the intent of the law to operate controversial surveillance programs. He criticized senior intelligence officials for making “misleading statements” to the public and Congress about the surveillance programs.

Wyden was unsparing in his criticism of the government’s interpretation of surveillance laws and derided the oversight power of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The government has essentially kept people in the dark about their broad interpretations of the law, he said. Wyden tells constituents there are two Patriot Acts: One they read online at home and “the secret interpretation of the law that the government is actually relying upon.”

“If Americans are not able to learn how their government is interpreting and executing the law then we have effectively eliminated the most important bulwark of our democracy,” he said.

The National Security Agency has come under scrutiny for using the Patriot Act to collect the telephone records — including the numbers that consumers call and the duration of those calls — of U.S. citizens. The phone metadata collection program came to light after former government contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified documents about them to The Guardian and The Washington Post.

But Wyden claims “there is nothing in the Patriot Act that limits this sweeping bulk collection to phone records.” He said the government could use its authority under the law to collect and store sensitive information such as medical records or credit card purchases, or “develop a database of gun owners or readers of books and magazines deemed subversive.”

“This means that the government’s authority to collect information on law-abiding American citizens is essentially limitless,” he said.

I have not been able to understand why so many otherwise responsible liberals and progressives have so blithely dismissed these revelations when we have Senators like Wyden, Udall and Merkley running around with their hair on fire about it. This didn’t start with Edward Snowden — these people have been trying to sound the alarm for years and nobody listened. That’s what happens when these programs are classified, the people in the know are appalled and cannot say anything about it.

Wyden’s speech lays out all the reasons why these programs are wrong and intimates strongly that we still don’t know the full scope of what they are doing. Has he committed treason too?

When the Patriot Act was last reauthorized, I stood on the floor of the United States Senate and said “I want to deliver a warning this afternoon.When the American people find out how their government has interpreted the Patriot Act, they are going to be stunned and they are going to be angry.” From my position on the Senate Intelligence Committee, I had seen government activities conducted under the umbrella of the Patriot Act that I knew would astonish most Americans.

I joined the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2001, just before 9/11. Like most senators I voted for the original Patriot Act, in part, because I was reassured that it had an expiration date that would force Congress to come back and consider these authorities more carefully when the immediate crisis had passed.

As time went on, from my view on the Intelligence Committee there were developments that seemed farther and farther removed from the ideals of our Founding Fathers. This started not long after 9/11, with a Pentagon program called Total Information Awareness,which was essentially an effort to develop an ultra-large-scale domestic data-mining system. Troubled by this effort, and its not exactly modest logo of an all-seeing eye on the universe, I worked with a number of senators to shut it down.

Unfortunately, this was hardly the last domestic surveillance overreach. In fact, the NSA’s infamous warrantless wiretapping program was already up and running at that point, though I, and most members of the Intelligence Committee didn’t learn about it until a few years later. This was part of a pattern of withholding information from Congress that persisted throughout the Bush administration – I joined the Intelligence Committee in 2001, but I learned about the warrantless wiretapping program when you read about it in the New York Times in late 2005.

The Bush administration spent most of 2006 attempting to defend the warrantless wiretapping program. Once again, when the truth came out, it produced a surge of public pressure and the Bush administration announced that they would submit to oversight from Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, also known as the FISA Court.
Unfortunately, because the FISA Court’s rulings are secret, most Americans had no idea that the Court was prepared to issue incredibly broad rulings, permitting the massive surveillance that finally made headlines last month.

It’s now a matter of public record that the bulk phone records program has been operating since at least 2007. It’s not a coincidence that a handful of senators have been working since then to find ways to alert the public about what has been going on. Months and years went into trying to find ways to raise public awareness about secret surveillance authorities within the confines of classification rules.I and several of my colleagues have made it our mission to end the use of secret law.

When Oregonians hear the words secret law, they have come up to me and asked, “Ron, how can the law be secret? When you guys pass laws that’s a public deal. I’m going to look them up online.” In response, I tell Oregonians that there are effectively two Patriot Acts — the first is the one that they can read on their laptop in Medford or Portland, analyze and understand. Then there’s the real Patriot Act — the secret interpretation of the law that the government is actually relying upon.

The secret rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court have interpreted the Patriot Act, as well as section 702 of the FISA statute, in some surprising ways,and these rulings are kept entirely secret from the public. These rulings can be astoundingly broad. The one that authorizes the bulk collection of phone records is as broad as any I have ever seen.

This reliance of government agencies on a secret body of law has real consequences. Most Americans don’t expect to know the details about ongoing sensitive military and intelligence activities, but as voters they absolutely have a need and a right to know what their government thinks it is permitted to do, so that they can ratify or reject decisions that elected officials make on their behalf.

To put it another way, Americans recognize that intelligence agencies will sometimes need to conduct secret operations, but they don’t think those agencies should be relying on secret law. Now, some argue that keeping the meaning of surveillance laws secret is necessary, because it makes it easier to gather intelligence on terrorist groups and other foreign powers. If you follow this logic, when Congress passed the original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act back in the 1970s, they could have found a way to make the whole thing secret, so that Soviet agents wouldn’t know what the FBI’s surveillance authorities were.

But that’s not the way you do it in America.It is a fundamental principle of American democracy that laws should not be public only when it is convenient for government officials to make them public. They should be public all the time, open to review by adversarial courts, and subject to change by an accountable legislature guided by an informed public. If Americans are not able to learn how their government is interpreting and executing the law then we have effectively eliminated the most important bulwark of our democracy.

That’s why, even at the height of the Cold War, when the argument for absolute secrecy was at its zenith, Congress chose to make US surveillance laws public.Without public laws, and public court rulings interpreting those laws, it is impossible to have informed public debate. And when the American people are in the dark, they can’t make fully informed decisions about who should represent them, or protest policies that they disagree with. These are fundamentals. It’s Civics 101. And secret law violates those basic principles. It has no place in America.

Indeed. Read on and see how these secret laws have enabled a series of programs that enable idea of a government “tele-screen monitoring your every move turns from dystopia to reality.” Truly, this is not about whether Edward Snowden is someone you’d want to have a beer with. Ron Wyden is not a narcissistic freak. He’s pretty low key, actually. And he’s basically saying that Snowden’s revelations are real and they are a threat. Isn’t it important that we know that?

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The world is a more wonderful place than we know. Let’s not screw it up.

by David Atkins

If you’ve been on social media much lately you’ve probably seen this story–but just in case you haven’t, you should know that it appears that dolphins have names and use them to call out to one another:

For decades, scientists have been fascinated by dolphins’ so-called signature whistles: distinctive vocal patterns learned early and used throughout life. The purpose of these whistles is a matter of debate, but new research shows that dolphins respond selectively to recorded versions of their personal signatures, much as a person might react to someone calling their name.

Combined with earlier findings, the results “present the first case of naming in mammals, providing a clear parallel between dolphin and human communication,” said biologist Stephanie King of Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, an author of the new study…

Janik and King recorded their signature whistles, then broadcast computer-synthesized versions through a hydrophone. They also played back recordings of unfamiliar signature whistles. The dolphins ignored signatures belonging to other individuals in their groups, as well as unfamiliar whistles.

To their own signatures, however, they usually whistled back, suggesting that dolphins may use the signatures to address one another.

The new findings are “clearly a landmark,” said biologist Shane Gero of Dalhousie University, whose own research suggests that sperm whales have names. “I think this study puts to bed the argument of whether signature whistles are truly signatures.”

Gero is especially interested in the different ways that dolphins responded to hearing their signature called. Sometimes they simply repeated their signature — a bit, perhaps, like hearing your name called and shouting back, “Yes, I’m here!” Some dolphins, however, followed their signatures with a long string of other whistles.

“It opens the door to syntax, to how and when it’s ‘appropriate’ to address one another,” said Gero, who wonders if the different response types might be related to social roles or status. Referring to each other by name suggests that dolphins may recall past experiences with other individual dolphins, Gero said.

Every day it seems that we hairless monkeys learn more ways in which we’re a little less special than we thought, and the world and universe around us more amazing than we thought.

Some of our fellow hairless monkeys are scared by that, and want to reinforce their dominance and sense of specialness in the world. Those monkeys are bad monkeys who should be shunned and ostracized from monkey leadership. The ones who find the world’s wonders amazing and our lack of specialness to reinforce our connection with the world and species around us–those are the good monkeys.

It’s important to have good monkeys leading the group. And it’s really important that we call out the bad monkeys for the scared, angry little creatures they are, without compromising our values with them any more than absolutely necessary.

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“Burn them, burn them both!”

by digby

I saw this yesterday and honestly thought she was joking. Apparently not:

#Kate can do no wrong! Now the royals can stop pretending they were fine with a girl 1st! http://t.co/0thIsxgPwy
— Tina Brown (@TheTinaBeast) July 22, 2013

“As soon as William really kind of emerged into the public eye, you had this wholesome prince and his choice of Kate Middleton turns out to be absolutely impeccable. I mean, once again, she does the perfect thing,” Brown said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I mean, although there’s the constitutional change that we can now have a girl as the first born to be the monarch, nonetheless, she does the traditional thing, and she gives us a prince. She gives a king. I mean, let’s face it, the Queen will be thrilled. She and the Duke of Edinburgh, much as they would have said they would have been fine with a girl first born, they really did want a boy and they got one.”

I’m sure he’ll have more to say about it tonight, but for right now the only response to that is from John Oliver:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

She’s really running for president, guys

by digby

This piece at the Prospect about Liz Cheney and a battle within the GOP on foreign policy is very interesting. But I’m not sure I agree entirely with its conclusion:

While Cheney represents an increasingly unpopular vision of foreign policy, it’s unlikely that the Syrian civil war and the Iranian nuclear program will register much in Wyoming’s election. “Conservative voters have shifted on foreign policy, but the GOP foreign policy establishment hasn’t budged an inch,” Logan says. “They’re pawing the ground for war with Syria and Iran. Given that elections—in particular, the Wyoming GOP Senate primary—aren’t decided on foreign policy grounds, Cheney’s could win the seat in spite of, rather than because of her foreign policy views.”

Yes, I think she could win in spite of her foreign policy views. But have conservative voters shifted on foreign policy? I don’t see any evidence for that claim. Yes, Rand Paul has some followers and foreign policy has receded as the top concern for everyone over the past few years. But that doesn’t mean conservatives aren’t as “America, Fuck Yeah!” as they’ve ever been. The idea that the GOP base is becoming isolationist just doesn’t match the facts or the history of these folks. The only reason they are less bloodthirsty right now is because the Democratic president they hate is doing everything they want a president to do. This means they cannot cheer it, even though they would like to.

Yes, Obama is again talking about Gitmo and he doesn’t support torture. He is certainly less of an imperialist warmonger than Dick Cheney, but that’s not saying much. The truth here is that both parties are imperialist to some degree with a few weak naysayers on the fringes of their coalitions, traditional peaceniks on the left and Rand Paul libertarians on the right.

And while it’s true that Cheney’s foreign policy vision may not be particularly important in a Wyoming race, it’s extremely important to her as a presidential (probably anti-Hillary) candidate. (Or perhaps a Vice-presidential candidate — Daddy’s proven that it can be the most powerful office in the land.) The point is that she’s not running for the Senate, not really. This is her first step in running for national office. And when that happens I predict her foreign policy views, not Rand Paul’s, will be a selling point among the Republicans. The Democratic Party will try valiantly to party like it’s 2006 and pretend that she’s beyond the pale but they will be hit in the face with kill lists, drone strikes and NSA surveillance, which the Dem standard bearer will undoubtedly be defending as a sign that he or she is as hardcore as any Republican. Should be a lot of fun.

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We’re number ONE! (In prison population)

by digby

It has been so touching to see so many Real Americans express their deep concern about what they like to call “black on black” crime in recent days. Their compassion for their African American brothers and sisters is truly moving.

Today we have a very prominent Real American, one who is being talked up as a possible presidential choice to head the Department of Homeland Security, weighing in with a heart-rending display of true caring.

Since 2002, the New York Police Department has taken tens of thousands of weapons off the street through proactive policing strategies. The effect this has had on the murder rate is staggering. In the 11 years before Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, there were 13,212 murders in New York City. During the 11 years of his administration, there have been 5,849. That’s 7,383 lives saved—and if history is a guide, they are largely the lives of young men of color.

So far this year, murders are down 29% from the 50-year low achieved in 2012, and we’ve seen the fewest shootings in two decades.

To critics, none of this seems to much matter. Sidestepping the fact that these policies work, they continue to allege that massive numbers of minorities are stopped and questioned by police for no reason other than their race.

Never mind that in each of the city’s 76 police precincts, the race of those stopped highly correlates to descriptions provided by victims or witnesses to crimes. Or that in a city of 8.5 million people, protected by 19,600 officers on patrol (out of a total uniformed staff of 35,000), the average number of stops we conduct is less than one per officer per week.

Racial profiling is a disingenuous charge at best and an incendiary one at worst, particularly in the wake of the tragic death of Trayvon Martin. The effect is to obscure the rock-solid legal and constitutional foundation underpinning the police department’s tactics and the painstaking analysis that determines how we employ them…As a city, we have to face the reality that New York’s minority communities experience a disproportionate share of violent crime. To ignore that fact, as our critics would have us do, would be a form of discrimination in itself.

He fails to note that crime has gone down as much or even more in other cities which do not employ such tactics. How odd.

I just don’t know what to say anymore about this. So I’ll just put up these graphs and let my fellow Americans decide for themselves if something might be a bit awry in our criminal justice system when it comes to racial and ethnic minorities:

Take a good hard look at that last one. And see it in the context of the charts and graphs above it and our historical “issues” with race. And ask yourself what is motivating certain people to see those numbers and declare that we still aren’t putting enough African Americans and latinos in jail.

Links:
http://www.sentencingproject.org/template/page.cfm?id=122
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/07/27/some-trends-in-imprisonment/
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/08/02/blackwhite-disparities-in-prison-sentences/

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Vote Suppression magnum opus


by digby

I’m sure these throwbacks think they’re just suppressing the white vote, but this is so bad I’m afraid they’re going to be suppressing their own vote as well.  But as usual, I think they probably don’t care. These folks are happy to “sacrifice” anything if it means that African Americans and other racial minorities are denied:

The highly-conservative North Carolina legislature just released a new voter suppression bill that would enact not just voter ID, but a host of other new initiatives designed to make it more difficult to vote. A significant roadblock to the legislation was removed last month when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, making it easier for states with a history of racial discrimination like North Carolina to enact new voter suppression laws. 

The Senate will consider substituted language for HB 589 on Tuesday afternoon. Among the dozens of changes, these are the most onerous for North Carolina voters:

• Implementing a strict voter ID requirement that bars citizens who don’t have a proper photo ID from casting a ballot.

• Eliminating same-day voter registration, which allowed residents to register at the polls.

• Cutting early voting by a full week.

• Increasing the influence of money in elections by raising the maximum campaign contribution to $5,000 and increasing the limit every two years.

• Making it easier for voter suppression groups like True The Vote to challenge any voter who they think may be ineligible by requiring that challengers simply be registered in the same county, rather than precinct, of those they challenge.

• Vastly increasing the number of “poll observers” and increasing what they’re permitted to do. In 2012, ThinkProgress caught the Romney campaign training such poll observers using highly misleading information.

• Only permitting citizens to vote in their specific precinct, rather than casting a ballot in any nearby ward or election district. This can lead to widespread confusion, particularly in urban areas where many precincts can often be housed in the same building.

• Barring young adults from pre-registering as 16- and 17-year-olds, which is permitted by current law, and repealing a state directive that high schools conduct voter registration drives in order to boost turnout among young voters.

• Prohibiting paid voter registration drives, which tend to register poor and minority citizens.

• Dismantling three state public financing programs, including the landmark program that funded judicial elections.

• Weakening disclosure requirements for outside spending groups.

• Preventing counties from extending polling hours in the event of long lines or other extraordinary circumstances and making it more difficult for them to accommodate elderly or disabled voters with satellite polling sites at nursing homes, for instance.

Each of these changes, on their own, would be a significant step away from increasing voting rights. Taken together, this is the voter suppression magnum opus.

As Scalia famously said in Bush vs Gore: there is no constitutional right to vote. And he and his comrades on the court obviously also obviously believe that there’s no reason every citizen should vote. I will be looking forward to their explanation as to how weakening disclosure requirements and raising the contribution limits will prevent “voter fraud.”

In case you were wondering, 40 of North Carolina’s 100 counties were under the jurisdiction of Section of 5 of the Voting Rights Act.  It’s so lucky that the Supreme Court recognized that nobody is trying to suppress the vote anymore so there’s no need for any of that.

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The California Democratic Party voices displeasure on marijuana raids, Wall Street & NSA spying

by David Atkins

The California Democratic Party just finished up our Executive Board meeting this weekend at Costa Mesa. There are a little over 200 members of the Executive Board, myself among them.

Among a variety of disagreements surrounding changing party rules concerning endorsements (which are important for progressives, but more on this in a later post) there were also a number of resolutions of note. Resolutions are non-binding, of course, but they do give a sense of the stance of the Democratic Party and its activists, which in turn affect the stances legislators who wish to seek the endorsement of those same local activists (which is why the rules governing who gets an endorsement vote are important.) There are many districts in California where a Democrat will certainly win the general election, so the important battle is within the party. So long as progressive activists within the party are able to sway endorsement votes–and so long as progressives remain active in the Democratic Party–then the values expressed by party resolutions gradually influence the stances of elected officials in the state legislature and in Congress.

I’m proud to say that the California Democratic Party is a pretty progressive group (more so today than even just a few years in the past, due to active engagement from activists), and we passed a number of excellent resolutions, some of which voice significant displeasure with Administration activity or lack thereof.

Among many more standard liberal causes were more eye-opening the resolutions passed were Resolution 13-04.38 calling for prosecution of Wall Street executives:

PROSECUTE AND HOLD ACCOUNTABLE FINANCIAL EXECUTIVES

WHEREAS, it has been almost five years since the financial crisis crippled the American economy and,

WHEREAS, unacceptably high numbers of Americans have suffered job losses, foreclosure, homelessness, and loss of dignity due to the crisis and,

WHEREAS, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission showed why the system failed, that there was verifiable evidence of trillions of dollars of fraud and gross negligence, that crimes were committed by mortgage originators, underwriters, banks, and there have been no financial executive brought, to prosecution for the above actions,

BE IT RESOLVED, that the California Democratic Party stands in solidarity with Senator Elizabeth Warren and others in their effort to encourage regulators, the Justice Department, SEC, and other responsible
parties to prosecute and hold accountable those who not only created the crisis but have been merciless in their treatment of those who suffer as a result of their actions while still ignoring good
corporate governance policies.

That resolution passed unanimously on the consent calendar, as did a separate resolution calling for a Wall Street transaction tax.

Then there is Resolution Resolution 13-04.40 to overturn Citizens United, deny personhood to corporations and affirm that money is not speech, whose first “resolved” clause reads:

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that the California Democratic Party calls upon the Congress to send to the states for ratification a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United vs. FEC corporate constitutional rights, clarifying that corporations are not persons and constitutional rights are for natural persons only, ending the doctrine that money is speech and leveling the playing field through limits on the ability of corporations and other wealthy interests to influence the outcome of elections through political campaign contributions and expenditures.

In a direct rebuke to President Obama over marijuana raids, Resolution 13-04.48 states:

MARIJUANA LEGALIZATION RESOLUTION FOR PRESIDENT OBAMA
WHEREAS, 18 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws legalizing t he use of cannabis when
recommended by a physician, and Colorado and Washington in 2012 passed laws legalizing the recreational use of cannabis, and over 825,000 Americans are caught up in the criminal justice system every year for marijuana law violations, and

WHEREAS, the United States spends over $20 billion a year enforcing marijuana prohibition laws, and thousands of people are murdered every year involving the smuggling of illegal drugs into the United
States and marijuana accounts for over half of these illegal drugs, and polls show overwhelming support for the medicinal use of cannabis and majority support for legalization of marijuana, and

WHEREAS, marijuana prohibition laws are racially enforced with a far larger percentage of African Americans and Hispanics convicted and imprisoned for marijuana prohibition offenses than their white counterparts even though marijuana use in their communities is no more than in white communities, and Whereas college students lose their college grants and scholarships if found to be using marijuana,

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that the California Democratic Party requests: President Obama to allow
the newly enacted marijuana legalization laws in Colorado and Washington to go into effect with no federal interference, and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the California Democratic Party asks President Obama to end the
Department of Justice interference and raids by federal agencies in states with medical marijuana laws,
and a comprehensive study be immediately undertaken to produce recommendations for reform of our nation’s marijuana prohibition laws.

That resolution was joined by another that opposed local efforts to restrict access to dispensaries.

Perhaps most important to regular readers of this blog was resolution 13-07.12 against the overreach of NSA spying:

WHEREAS, the Bill of Rights is the principal document defining who we are as a people and the Fourth Amendment, protects our citizens from government intrusion into their affairs by banning unreasonable searches and seizures; and

WHEREAS the government’s heretofore secret (but massive) collection of our phone and email without any reasonable cause to believe any crime has been committed has now been made public; and

WHEREAS the Patriot Act, authorized under President George W. Bush and continued under the Obama Administration began and continued these offenses against the Bill of Rights;

BE IT RESOLVED that the California Democratic Party denounces such actions in no uncertain terms, and
calls upon the Congress and this Administration to immediately halt such practices before they move us even further towards a totalitarian state.

That last resolution, it should be noted, was authored by California Democratic Party Chairman John Burton himself. It was accompanied by a resolution that any data collected by NSA programs be deleted within six months unless a judge deems it necessary for national security.

It’s going to take some time for all of this to filter through to Congress. Our government is not as progressive as Democrats in Congress; Democrats in Congress are not as progressive as those in California; and Democrats in California are often not as progressive as our party activists. Still, the momentum is finally heading back in the right direction. It’s hard for the casual reader of the daily news to see that, but activists in the party organization can see it. We’re light years ahead of where we were just a few years ago, to say nothing of over a decade ago. That itself is a step back, of course, from where we were about 40 years ago–but we didn’t have as staunch a conservative opposition then as we do now. They’ve been winning for the last long while–but the counterpunch is coming, and hard.

As when conservatives were taking over the Republican Party in their early Buckley days, the results won’t always be too visible to those not close to it. But they’re coming nonetheless, so long as progressives stay engaged in the fight. And even if it takes too long to overtake Congress, at the very least blue states like California will be on the leading edge of sane policy, showing the right path by example and dragging the rest of the country where it needs to go.

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George Bush’s Legacy 

by tristero

Maybe it’s arguable whether life was more or less violent under Saddam Hussein. What is indisputable is that once George W. Bush ordered troops to invade, every single violent death in Iraq will be blamed on the United States, no matter our actual culpability.

My grandchildren will still be living with the consequences of Bush’s colossal foreign policy disaster, a disaster that was completely predictable and avoidable.