Laughing Our Way Out of Confusion about Health Care

Donny Shaw at OpenCongress makes an excellent point about how the Daily Show with Jon Stewart often features segments with more probing discussion about issues than actual programs that purport to be news outlets.

Armed with the first 500 pages of the House health care bill (H.R. 3200) Betsy McCaughey, the first person to equate end-of-life planning with government-mandated euthanasia, went on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night to defend her position.

The show sort of underscores the anomaly of the health care debate in our country right now. This is comedy show where two people are having a fairly high-level discussion about actual legislative text, and the substance is compelling enough that it makes for good entertainment. There is a real desire to know what’s in the bill. Health care, obviously, is an especially important issue. But, also, I think the people that follow what happens in Congress are figuring out that there is a lot of misinformation standing in the way of having a smart debate of the bill, and they are trying to get the facts for themselves, which is fantastic.

I suppose its fantastic that the Daily Show decided to do such a segment, but its also an alarming indicator of how the disinformation out there is so pervasive that even after two months of ‘debate’ we are still remain confused about the substance of the proposal. And the fact that a comedian, even one as clever as Stewart, could provide a better 101 on the issue than many other programs should be considered an indictment of the failure of the television news media to inform and educate the public about a critical issue that could change the country for generations to come.

You can watch the segment here.

On Excerpts of The Battle for America 2008

I have never been much of consumer of campaign books. I tend to think they more or less rehash everything that has already been dissected in contemporaneous reporting even if they do offer juicy tidbits about campaign infighting, portraits of a frustrated candidate, and a loads of humorous anecdotes. Couldn’t I get much of that on YouTube spoofs anytime I want? Aside from a peculiar variety of political junkies, I often wonder to myself who actually purchases such books.

But after reading the an excerpt of “The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election” by Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson in the Washington Post today, I think I’m beginning to understand the appeal of that genre of books. Of course, the 2008 presidential contest from primary to the end of the general election is an unusual serious of events featuring an unlikely stew of characters giving life to grand themes. Somehow the white guy from the South, former Senator John Edwards, became the underdog and a white woman from a northern blue state and black guy with a Muslim name became the main competitors on the Democratic side. And even in that struggle contained hues of David versus Goliath storyline that the media found easy to sell to a eager public.

Meanwhile, the Republican corp had a number of cartoon characters from the adamantly anti-immigrant then-Congressman Tom Tancredo to the jolly aw shucks evangelism of former Arkansas Mike Huckabee. A more disciplined Senator John McCain had to emerge from the ashes before taking the lead. And that only happened after his big win in New Hampshire.

The media’s appetite for sideshow personalities like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Joe the Plumber, and Bill Ayers made the long campaign easy fodder for water cooler talk for those who wanted a little gossip go with wonky debates on the minutiae of preconditions, the importance of a employer mandates in a health care plan, and the intricacies of the delegate and Superdelegate count.

Historians will have fun with that moment in American politics for generations to decades to come – maybe even longer than that.

But everything revolved around the eventual victor Barack Obama. Compared to his competitors, his campaign was heralded a marvel of near pitch perfect management with few dips in morale matching the posture of its intrepid leader. And the public, particularly his supporters, were very impressed with his cool demeanor, keen intellect and soaring rhetoric.

Balz and Johnson, however, seized on the moments in which those notions did not hold up.

Aides worried that Obama’s low morale might infect others in the campaign and spoke to him about it. They tried to buck him up, but at points in the spring and early summer of 2007, he was deeply frustrated — with his own performance and with that of much of his campaign. On July 15, he met with his senior staff at the home of Valerie Jarrett, a close friend and confidante to both Obama and his wife, Michelle. One adviser recalled it as the moment Obama began to take a more direct role in the operations of his campaign. He was blunt in his critique, and the exchanges among some of his advisers became testy. Beyond fundraising and the operation overseeing the Internet and new media, the campaign was not performing well, Obama said. The message still wasn’t where it should be. The political operation wasn’t up to speed. The campaign lacked crispness and good execution. He believed it was becoming too insular and wanted new people added to the inner circle. He told his team members they were all doing B work. If they continued on that course, they would come in a respectable second.

“Second is not good enough,” he said.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the excerpt so far, however, was then-chief campaign strategist and now White House senior adviser David Axelrod’s candid and prescient assessment of the big O’s potential weaknesses in a 2006 memo.

“It goes to your willingness and ability to put up with something you have never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism. At the risk of triggering the very reaction that concerns me, I don’t know if you are Muhammad Ali or Floyd Patterson when it comes to taking a punch. You care far too much what is written and said about you. You don’t relish combat when it becomes personal and nasty. When the largely irrelevant Alan Keyes attacked you, you flinched,” he said of Obama’s 2004 Senate opponent.

Many in the blogosphere and beyond often wondered if Obama was in fact the happy warrior beneath all that cool even if he could seduced legions of voters with great speechifying. The sheer force of the machinery of the campaign helped quell, thought not silence, many of those lingering doubts. And Obama knew it telling Balz and Haynes:

As he reviewed the campaign from his transition headquarters in mid-December, Obama offered a frank assessment of his two main competitors: Clinton and John McCain. “I was sure that my toughest race was Hillary,” he said. “Hillary was just a terrific candidate, and she really found her voice in the last part of the campaign. After Texas and Ohio she just became less cautious and was out there and was working hard and I think connecting with voters really well. She was just a terrific candidate. And [the Clinton campaign] operation was not as good as ours and not as tight as ours, but they were still plenty tough. Their rapid response, how they messaged in the media was really good. So we just always thought they were our most formidable challenge. That isn’t to say that we underestimated John McCain; it’s just that we didn’t think that their campaign operation was as good.

I cannot help but note the irony here that the campaign that was often dubbed as personality driven and almost free of doubt was in fact the very same tightly organized campaign that achieved success in no small part due to a healthy fear of losing. Its not news, but still a tidbit worth chewing. And maybe with enough of these kinds of insights it might even form a book worth reading.

Conservatives on the Brown Decision

This is just ridiculous. In an ongoing series decrying U.S. Supreme Court decisions they do not like, Bench Memos, a conservative law blog run by the National Review, cited the Brown v. Board of Ed decision, which found that racial segreation violated “equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment,” as an instance of liberal judical activism.

And they did so on the 55th Anniversary of the court’s decision. 

1954—In Brown v. Board of Education, a unanimous Supreme Court abandons available originalist justifications for its ruling that state-segregated schools violate the Equal Protection Clause—justifications that would have been far weightier, and commanded far more public respect, than its own makeshift reliance on contemporaneous psychological research of dubious relevance. Contrary to conventional understanding, the Court declines to revisit its notorious 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson and instead limits itself to the question whether the separate-but-equal rule of Plessy “should be held inapplicable to public education.”

For some reason I don’t people were scrambling to use “originalist justifications” to end segregation in the 50s. 

Interestingly enough, while Brown is rightly credited with dealing a huge blow to Jim Crow segregation few appreciate how it change the Senate’s posture toward the judiciary and Supreme Court nominees in particular. In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Yale law professor Stephen Carter sums up the after effects this way: 

Before that 1954 case, it was virtually unheard of for a nominee to appear in person before the Senate. Only two had been called, each because of special circumstances surrounding the nomination. But there was always a sense that demanding testimony was somehow unseemly. The bar frowned on the practice, and the senators avoided it. Abraham Lincoln, questioned about his nomination of Salmon P. Chase as chief justice, responded, “We cannot ask a man what he will do, and if we should, and he should answer us, we should despise him for it.”

Brown changed everything. Infuriated by the Supreme Court’s temerity in striking down public school segregation, the Southern Democrats who in those days still largely ran the Senate began to require that all potential justices give testimony before the Judiciary Committee. When the nominees appeared, the Dixiecrat Senators grilled them on Brown. The first was John Marshall Harlan in 1955, who declined invitations to discuss either specific cases or judicial philosophy as “a matter of propriety.” One by one, later nominees followed his example.

Some of them suffered for it. Justice William Brennan was roughed up at his hearing by Senator Joseph McCarthy, not even a member of the committee, who was permitted to make a special appearance to torment Brennan about his views on Communism. In the 1960s, Thurgood Marshall was grilled on minutiae about the history of the Constitution, part of an effort by opponents to demonstrate that the man who had by that time won 29 out of 32 cases before the Supreme Court was intellectually not up to the job.

 

A Skeptical Court Hears Voting Rights Act Case

Yesterday, a skeptical U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the constitutionality of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that requires certain states and localities with a history of voting discrimination submit changes in voting procedures, or gain “pre-clearance,” by the federal government for approval.

The case involves a municipal utility district in Texas that wants to sidestep needing to comply with the provision because it claims the kind of discrimination that it once deterred no longer exists. Board member elections in the utility district require pre-clearance since the entire state of Texas falls under the jurisdiction of Section 5.

The case is called Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder.

Adam Liptak’s summary in the NYT of yesterday’s oral argument was spot on, especially his description of Justice Kennedy’s hostile line of questioning. And if his questioning is any indication, which in this case I think it is, Kennedy will likely write the majority or controlling opinion as he did in the Section 2 case earlier this year and erode much of Section 5, while of course noting that racial discrimination “is not ancient history.”

Perhaps, the real question here is how badly the Court will gut Section 5 and if it will introduce or demand that Congress create a more precise and less far reaching standard in determining which states and jurisdictions should be covered and why, even if in 2006 it reauthorized the Voting Rights Act only after it held 19 hearings and reviewed thousands of pages of testimony and documents.

Plus, a very curious exchange between Justice Scalia and Debo Aegbile from LDF during yesterday’s oral arguments.

Scalia actually suggested that simply because the VRA was cleared both chambers of Congress by wide margins, even if both houses and the Oval Office were controlled by Republicans at the time, we should be skeptical of its validity. In other words, we should be skeptical of the law, which has been reauthorized repeatedly by Congress, because it got too much support. Huh?

If we applied that same line of thinking to other laws enacted by Congress such as the American Disabilities Amendments Act that passed this fall and signed by a Republican president, then I suppose we should consider them invalid too. Or maybe we should consider the unanimous opinions like in Brown v. Board of Ed invalid because they also had too much support.

What happened to judicial modesty and due deference to legislative bodies that conservatives love to spout?

Here’s the exchange:

JUSTICE SCALIA: Mr. Adegbile, what was — I read it in the briefs, and I forget what it was. What was the vote on this 2006 extension — 98 to nothing in the Senate, and what was it in the House? Was -

MR. ADEGBILE: It was — it was 33 to 390, I believe.

JUSTICE SCALIA: 33 to 390. You know, the — the Israeli Supreme Court, the Sanhedrin, used to have a rule that if the death penalty was pronounced unanimously, it was invalid, because there must be something wrong there. Do you ever expect — do you ever seriously expect Congress to vote against a reextension of the Voting Rights Act? Do you really think that any incumbent would — would vote to do that?

MR. ADEGBILE: Well -

JUSTICE SCALIA: Twenty-five years from now? Fifty years from now? When?

MR. ADEGBILE: Justice Scalia, I think some members of Congress did of course vote against the Act.

JUSTICE SCALIA: Thirty-three members of the House and nobody in the Senate.

MR. ADEGBILE: Thirty-three members of the House, indeed. But I think the — the reason that they voted for it is what’s more important. Congress did not assume that section 5 was necessary. It took a very careful examination to see how it was operating, and the determination was that in the absence of section 5, because of the repetitive violations, because of 620 objections — there was evidence that approximately 60 percent of those show some evidence of intentional discrimination.

If you take away the prophylaxis, the discrimination will return in a way that we don’t need to revisit. The history has been that voting discrimination manifests itself through repetitive efforts and…..

Besides Texas, eight other states are covered by the provision, including Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Most of Virginia and parts of California, Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina and South Dakota are also covered.

Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to eliminate discriminatory voting practices by state and local governments. The law has been renewed and amended several times since it was passed, most recently with a 25-year renewal in 2006 where it cleared the Senate by a 98-0 and the House 390-33.

Member States Reach Agreement on Anti-Racism Document

The anti-racism Durban Review Conference on 21 April adopted its final outcome document. It has its flaws particularly some questionable free speech paragraphs and its vulnerable to the charge that it did not need to include language regarding foreign occupation, though there is no mention of Israel by name. There are also a lot of NGO groups that are understandably frustrated at how language about the transatlantic slave trade was watered down in the final out come document.

But considering what the previous drafts looked like this final outcome document is a dramatic improvement. What’s more, the NYT has correctly framed this as a victory for the UN process and a loss for Ahmedinejad and those who wanted to use the Israeli-Palestinian question to either overshadow all other global racial discrimination issues or not participate in the conference at all.

The adoption of the resolution by the committee that coordinates the conference ended months of negotiation that removed contentious clauses referring to Israel and Palestine and trying to make defamation of religion an offense against human rights.

The conference will formally adopt the document here on Friday, but it is no longer open to debate or amendment, diplomats said.

Announcing the adoption of the resolution to warm applause from delegates, the conference president, Amos Wako, who is from Kenya said: “What we have decided shows the outcome when you remain engaged in the process. It shows that boycotts do not assist.”

“This is very good news indeed,” said Navi Pillay, the United Nations human rights commissioner, who hosted the conference. “It’s the culmination of months of deliberation.”

[snip]

Announcing the adoption of the resolution to warm applause from delegates, the conference president, Amos Wako, who is from Kenya said: “What we have decided shows the outcome when you remain engaged in the process. It shows that boycotts do not assist.”

I fully expect a lot of critics to focus on the language regarding foreign occupation and free expression. But in the meantime I think the administration has got to be reconsidering participating in the follow process, given how this turned out.

Plus, the outcome document is very progressive on a whole range of issues from calling for a aggressively punishing hate crimes to urging governments to embrace equal opportunity programs from establishing national human rights bodies to affirming the right to organize to calling for the humane treatment of migrant workers in addition to calling for the ratification of other U.N. social justice treaties.

Homeland Security Sees Uptick in Hate Group Recuritment

A Department of Homeland Security report on the rise of right wing hate groups and extremism was leaked this week. The DHS report is called “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.”

Unsurprisingly, the report found that the spike in undocumented immigration, the current economic downtown, and the election of the first African American president have spurred their efforts in winning new recruits.

Not exactly news to many of us, but its different when you see this documented by the government.

Of course, much of the controversy surrounding the report has focused on how these groups recruit disgruntled military veterans that find it difficult to readjust to civilian life, but that’s far from the report’s central focus. And anyone who takes time to read it would soon discover that himself.

But even if some civil libertarians and conservatives raising concerns about whether or not the government should be monitoring political beliefs, I think this presents many civil and human rights advocates with an opportunity to to promote greater awareness about the rise of hate crimes and their clear, though often overlooked, relationship to hate speech. That’s not to say we should go out of our way to criminalize intolerant speech, but being vigilante about countering intolerant speech can be critical to reducing hate crimes.

The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crime Prevention Act, which seems like it will be introduced this session of Congress, would provide local authorities with more resources to combat hate crimes and give federal government jurisdiction over processing hate crimes in states where the current law is inadequate.

In my opinion, I think the key findings in the report include:

• Over the past five years, various rightwing extremists, including militias and white supremacists, have adopted the immigration issue as a call to action, and recruiting tool. Debates over appropriate immigration levels and enforcement policy generally fall within the realm of protected political speech under the First Amendment, but in some cases, anti-immigration or strident pro-enforcement fervor has been directed against specific groups and has the potential to turn violent.

• In contrast to the early 90s, the advent of the Internet and other information age technologies s has given domestic extremists greater access to information related to bomb-making, weapons training, and tactics, as well as targeting of individuals, organizations, and facilities, potentially making extremist individuals and groups more dangerous and the consequences of their violence more severe.

• Lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent rightwing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States. Information from law enforcement and nongovernmental organizations indicates lone wolves and small terrorist cells have shown intent—and, in some cases, the capability—to commit violent acts.

• Most statements by rightwing extremists have been rhetorical, expressing concerns about the election of the first African American president, but stopping short of calls for violent action.

• Historically, domestic rightwing extremists have feared, predicted, and anticipated a cataclysmic economic collapse in the United States. Conspiracy theories involving declarations of martial law, impending civil strife or racial conflict, suspension of the U.S. Constitution, and the creation of citizen detention camps often incorporate aspects of a failed economy.

Also, see Department of Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano’s statement on the report here.

Kenn Starr Backs Harold Koh For State Gig

That makes two. Ken Starr and Ted Olson, former Solicitor General under Bush the younger, have both endorsed President Obama’s nominee for State Department Legal Advisor Harold Koh. As some of you may know, Koh has come under attack from the likes of Glenn Beck and Jay Sekulow and their foot soldiers on the far right who have tried to portray Obama’s nominee as a nutty liberal looking to supplant American law with Sharia law and a threat to the “fundamental American principles of representative government.”

The baseless accusations have already been debunked by Dahilia Lithwick and others but now right wingers will now have to shout down their own. In a letter dated yesterday, Dean of Pepperdine Law School Ken Star said, “I am firmly convinced that Harold is extraordinarily well qualified to serve with great distinction in the post of Legal Advisor,” and Ted Olson who said he had “ the greatest respect for Harold Koh,” and added, “He’s a brilliant scholar and a man of great integrity.”

Part of the reason that conservatives have gone after Harold Koh, Dawn Johnsen, and other executive nominees is to set the stage for the larger battle over a Supreme Court nominee which may come as soon as this summer. Conservatives hope to target and tarnish as many people with SCOTUS nom resumes, like Koh, in an effort to eliminate them from contention but also to keep throwing red meat to their base to keep them engaged on issues that even vaguely have culture warrior significance.

Justice Ginsberg on Foreign Law

From Jefferey Toobin at the New Yorker:

It looks like Harold Koh, President Obama’s nominee for legal adviser at the State Department, may turn out to be the first real confirmation fight in the new Administration. The controversy has been mentioned in a handful of newspapers, but there’s plenty of Internet fire on the anti-Koh, and pro-Koh, side.

The heart of the attack on Koh, who is now the dean of Yale Law School, is that he believes in “transnationalism,” which purportedly is the notion that American courts should honor and apply the laws of other nations in our courts.

I wonder if the so-called controversy over Koh’s transnationalism can be explained away by simply saying that if citing international law is good enough for the Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, then it should be good enough for a legal adviser to the U.S. State Department. The Court has cited international law, which is not the same as being bound by it, in cases involving gay rights and the death penalty and the sky did not fall, though it did anger the right.

Adam Liptak reported in the NYT on Saturday that Justice Ruth Ginsberg thinks the debate concerning international is sorta ridiculous.

In her remarks, Justice Ginsburg discussed a decision by the Israeli Supreme Court concerning the use of torture to obtain information from people suspected of terrorism.

“The police think that a suspect they have apprehended knows where and when a bomb is going to go off,” she said, describing the question presented in the case. “Can the police use torture to extract that information? And in an eloquent decision by Aharon Barak, then the chief justice of Israel, the court said: ‘Torture? Never.’ ”

The message of the decision, Justice Ginsburg said, was “that we could hand our enemies no greater victory than to come to look like that enemy in our disregard for human dignity.” Then she asked, “Now why should I not read that opinion and be affected by its tremendous persuasive value?”

My sentiments exactly.

Side note: Toobin, apparently has not been following the battles over President Obama’s other executive nominees fight that closely, since he seems to think that Koh would be the first real confirmation fight.
Dawn Johnsen, Obama’s nominee to head the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, has come under attack from the far right for being a lawyer for NARAL at one point and her unsparing criticism of Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program and use of torture to extract intelligence information from detainees. Republicans are threatening to filibuster her nomination.

Another nominee, Thomas Saenz, was in the pipeline, though never formally announced, to be Obama’s top civil rights enforcer at the Justice Department until the anti-immigrant right sunk his nomination for his work on successfully challenging local ordinances banning day laborers from city streets and of California’s Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot measure that prevented undocumented immigrants from taking advantage of certain social services.

The Confidence Factor

Public confidence is difficult to retain and maybe even harder to build upon, particularly after 8 years of President George W. Bush.

According to the findings of the General Social Survey, people have more confidence in the banking and financial institutions (19 percent) than they do in press (9 percent). I agree that the Enron and other accounting scandals have a lot to do with the public feeling sour about the banking and financial system, but so does the sense, whether warranted or not, that that sector widens inequality than it does energize the economy. This has as much to do with the credit card industry as it does with the growing sense that Wall Street is too opaque.

That said, people also seem to have more confidence in the banking system and major companies (16 percent ) than they do in organized labor (13 percent). I suppose that partially explains why people are so opposed to bailing out Detroit automakers.

They have more confidence in the Supreme Court (32 percent) that they do in the educational system (30 percent), organized religion (20 percent) or Congress or the Executive Branch (11 percent each).

I find that surprising considering the bitter Supreme Court fights over the nominations of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Roberts in 2005 and 2006, respectively. In recent years, the Court also had a number of 5 to 4 rulings on a number of cases on issues where the public is still divided such as gun control, the death penalty, and gay marriage.

At least the scientific community manages to remain in relative good standing with 40 percent.

Only the U.S. military managed to break 50 percent in the survey. Predictably, the patriotic fervor that sprung from 9/11 has not dampened the sense of ambivalence or downright opposition to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the prosecution of the war on terror.  But I am just guessing here.

Interestingly enough, the military and education were the only social institutions displayed below to gain any measure of confidence among the public from 2000 to 2008.

(H/T: FiveThirtyEight.com)

Intolerable Speech

You just cannot make this stuff up. Or if you did people would simply say this would not happen in 2009. But it did. A Utah state senator, who once called a bill he opposed an ugly black baby, called gay activists the biggest threat to the U.S after comparing them to radical terrorists. He remarks led to the Republican leadership there stripping him of his Judiciary Committee Chairmanship.

Here is how Utah State Senator Chris Buttars defended his comments

I was disappointed to learn of the Utah State Senate’s censure on Feb. 20, 2009. However, this action will not discourage me from defending marriage from an increasingly vocal and radical segment of the homosexual community.

In recent years, registering opposition to the homosexual agenda has become almost impossible. Political correctness has replaced open and energetic debate. Those who dare to disagree with the homosexual agenda are labeled “haters,” and “bigots,” and are censured by their peers.

The Utah state affiliate of the ACLU released a rather disappointing and cliched response to the controversy.

While we disagree vehemently with Senator Buttars’ views, we strongly support the Constitution’s free speech protections. Free speech rights are indivisible. Restricting the speech of one group or individual jeopardizes everyone’s rights because the same laws or regulations used to silence unpopular and controversial speech can be used to silence valid discourse.

Free speech in America has been, and always will be critical in the protection and expansion of the rights of civil rights workers, anti-war protesters, lesbian and gay activists and others fighting for justice. The ACLU protects freedom of speech, even that with which many of its supporters disagree.

I am not convinced that Senator Buttars free speech rights are being restricted because he was stripped of his chairmanship. Few people made that argument when then-U.S. Senator Trent Lott was demoted from his position as Senate Majority Leader in 2002 after he lavished praise on Strom Thurmond’s 1948 pro-segregationist campaign and claimed “if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.” Those problems of course being integration and much of the civil rights gains that followed the 1950s.

The comments were rightfully criticized as racist.

So when President Bush and and Lott’s fellow Republican lawmakers moved to replace the Mississippi Senator, they sought to distance themselves from comments that a good many Americans found intolerable.  At the same time, however, its not as if Senator Lott was legally restricted from voicing those same opinions again. The same applies here to Utah state Senator Buttars.

Elected officials, like private citizens, can exercise their Constitutionally-protected rights, but its not as if there should not be consequences to what they say whether its through public disapproval or being politically isolated.

Republican Pushback on Gitmo

Apparently, President Obama’s series of executive orders to shut down Gitmo and the network of secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency within a year has not gone over well with many Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Representative Steven King has made the case that Obama’s plan amounts to granting terrorists a path to U.S. citizenship and a free pass to strike again. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham still wants to preserve the option of detaining of at least some war on terror suspects or enemy combatants indefinitely.

House Republican Leader John Boehner has even gone so far as to suggest that the well documented abuses at Gitmo are somehow exaggerated. Earlier this week, the Ohio Congressman told the Politico, “I don’t know that there is a terrorist treated better anywhere in the world than what has happened at Guantanamo.”

He also went on to say, “We have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build a facility that has more comforts than a lot of Americans get. … I believe they have been treated fairly.”

That of course does not square with a recent bipartisan Senate Armed Services report which concluded:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there. Secretary Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 approval of Mr. Haynes’s recommendation that most of the techniques contained in GTMO’s October 11, 2002 request be authorized, influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques, including military working dogs, forced nudity, and stress positions, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But its important to understand the human dimension of all of this and why this chapter of the Bush administration’s legacy needs to be closed. In the January 15th issue of the New York Review of Books, Georgetown law professor David Cole quotes the U.S. Army log describing the tortuous interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged 20th 9/11 highjacker, at Gitmo. The descriptions of the brutality are nothing short of harrowing.

Detainee began to cry. Visibly shaken. Very emotional. Detainee cried. Disturbed. Detainee began to cry. Detainee butted SGT R in the eye. Detainee bit the IV tube completely in two. Started moaning. Uncomfortable. Moaning. Turned his head from left to right. Began crying hard spontaneously. Crying and praying. Began to cry. Claimed to have been pressured into making a confession. Falling asleep. Very uncomfortable. On the verge of breaking. Angry. Detainee struggled. Detainee asked for prayer. Very agitated. Yelled. Agitated and violent. Detainee spat. Detainee proclaimed his innocence. Whining. Pushed guard. Dizzy. Headache. Near tears. Forgetting things. Angry. Upset. Complained of dizziness. Tired. Agitated. Yelled for Allah. Started making faces. Near crying. Irritated. Annoyed. Detainee attempted to injure two guards. Became very violent and irate. Attempted to liberate himself. Struggled. Made several attempts to stand up. Screamed….

Thankfully, 53 percent of the American public support using a different system for handling detainees than the military commissions process at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Another 58 percent support an complete ban on using torture as a interrogation technique, according to a recent ABC News poll.

Sure, Obama himself admitted that shutting down Gitmo “is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize” and that many of the so-called enemy combatants are still dangerous enough to pose a threat, but we can still try them in our own civil system or in the military courts-martial system for war crimes.

As Obama noted earlier this week, the U.S. will win this fight and “We are going to win it on our own terms.”

Undoing Gitmo

In just days after the nation welcomed him as its newly inaugurated president, Barack Obama swiftly moved to undo some his predecessor’s legacy in shutting down the prison at Guantanamo Bay and the network of secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency.

President Barack Obama began by signing an executive order instructing military prosecutors to seek a 4 month delay of the military commissions process in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the site of a U.S. naval base and prison camp.  The Obama administration will use the 120-day period to “undertake a thorough review of both the pending cases and the military commissions process” to further the “interests of justice.”

A military judge granted the request for the delay on Wednesday.

In choosing to halt the trials of Gitmo detainees, experts believe President Obama wants to either try detainees in federal courts as criminal defendants or in a courts martial or even create a specialized system where the accused are accorded a a greater measure of due process rights and end the use of abusive interrogation practices.

During Bush’s tenure, many prisoners at Gitmo were held indefinitely without charge, tortured by CIA officials, had secret evidence used against them to justify their detention, and in the vast majority of cases could not challenge the legality of the very incarceration.

A key Bush administration official, Judge Susan J. Crawford, recently told the Washington Post she did not refer certain cases at Gitmo for prosecution because she believes the U.S. tortured certain detainees while interrogating them, rendering their confessions inadmissible. Also, a recent bipartisan Congressional report, found that former Secretary of Defense “Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there.”

Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a Bush appointee who currently serves in the same post, urged the outgoing president to shut down the prison this summer because it also diminished U.S. standing in world. “I think that despite the fact that in many respects Guantanamo has become a state-of-the-art prison now, early reports of abuses and so on unquestionably were a black eye for the United States,” Gates said this summer.

On November 13, 2001, President Bush signed a military order to create the military commissions. The commissions were designed to try, treat and detain non-U.S. citizens in an effort to prosecute and interrogate so-called war on terror suspects and enemy-combatants, a class of fighters that are not quite conventional soldiers, but were captured on the battlefield by American troops.

In 2006, a Republican controlled Congress passed the Military Commissions Act. The law gave Bush with the authority that the Supreme Court said he could not usurp with an executive order alone to set up his own court system that escaped scrutiny from other branches of government and suspended a prisoner’s right to contest his own imprisonment.

But Barack Obama is now moving with all deliberate haste to change course.

As the 44th president noted in his inaugural address on Tuesday, the framers of our constitution “understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please.  Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.”

So, in many ways these initial steps signify a break with the old regime and yet an embrace of America’s oldest traditions that happens to “reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

The Durban Review Conference and its Critics

This week Secretary of State designate Hillary Clinton and US Ambassador to the UN designate Dr. Susan Rice will have their confirmation hearings this week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Tuesday and Thursday.

To be sure, their respective views on humanitarian intervention to nuclear non-proliferation, from devising an exit strategy for Iraq and how to appropriately engage Iran or addressing energy security problems and climate change, among other issues will be thoroughly probed and debated.

Another serious issue that has not received national attention thus far, but merits serious consideration,  is whether or not the United States should participate in the next World Conference Against Racism, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance (WCAR), otherwise known as Durban II, scheduled to take place April 20-24, 2009.

The chief aim of the last WCAR conference in 2001 was to provide a global framework that national governments could build upon to enact or improve racial anti-discrimination laws and initiatives.

Yet unlike many other United Nations member states, the U.S. has not been involved in the Durban process since 2001 when then-Secretary of State Colin Powell withdrew the U.S. delegation from the conference in Durban, South Africa. Powell said the U.S. could not support the the conference’s collective statement by governments, the Durban Declaration of Programme of Action (DDPA), because it contained language that singled out Israel for criticism.  A handful of countries within the 57 member Organization of Islamic Conference – Iran, Syria, Egypt, Libya, and Pakistan – led the effort to insert language about foreign occupation and other statements designed to inject the visceral politics of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. Ethnic and racial strife in Darfur, Kashmir, Tibet or elsewhere in the world were conspicuously ignored.

Things were worse in the non-governmental forum where a small yet vocal minority of organizations high-jacked the gathering by not only disseminated anti-Semitic and anti-Israel literature and cartoons, but also drafted a document that neither reflected the true the spirit of the conference nor the views of the majority of the forum’s participants.

In the end, the Israel obsession only served to diminish the legitimacy of the conference and subvert its central mission of combating racism and overshadowed some of its more enduring achievements. Instead many choose to focus on it’s failures.

“I know that you do not combat racism by conferences that produce declarations containing hateful language, some of which is a throwback to the days of ‘Zionism equals racism,” Powell said in frustration on September 4th as he stormed out of the conference before a final draft was of the document produced.

Five days later, the 9/11 attacks occurred and in the remaining years of the Bush presidency U.N.- U.S. relations soured along with American standing in Muslim majority countries.

Wrestling with the Legacy of Durban I

Fearing a repeat of the 2001 conference, Israel and Canada have already said they will boycott Durban II. The respective U.S. out-going and in-coming presidential administrations have remained silent on whether or not the America will participate in April. Most UN member states, however, are not so quick to abandon the process.

Despite the efforts of certain OIC governments seeking to undermine the process in the 2001, the document, which was endorsed by a majority of a 134 countries in the UN General Assembly, managed to have a positive impact on other UN member nations striving to achieve some measure of racial justice. For  example, the DDPA recognized the Dalits, or the 160 million “untouchables” in India as victims of caste based discrimination elsewhere and that they should be treated as  a protected class in international human rights law.

In 2003, the Brazilian government created the Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality to implement affirmative action programs for people of African and indigenous descent in entering universities and in finding government jobs. This was done in response to the DDPA’s recommendation governments used equal opportunity programs be used to deter racial discrimination and promote integration.

The 2001 document also recognized slavery, including the transatlantic slave trade, as a crime against humanity. Nearly seven years later, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelming passed a resolution apologizing for slavery and Jim Crow segregation. Thus, while its difficult to draw a cause and effect relationship here, its clear that some of the recommendations coming out of the Durban process helped set standards or even nudge governments in the right direction on racial justice issues.

But many UN observers also see a revival of the same campaign OIC countries to not only derail the process by making Israel a central focus, but also introducing anti-blasphemy measures to limit free expression. This has as much to do with the neglect of the so-called Middle-East process as it does with the controversy spawned by the Danish cartoons.

This has lead some critics of Durban II to believe the U.S. should boycott the conference. “Durban II, planned for April in Geneva, promises to be an encore of the same old Israel-bashing” argues a Wall Street Journal Editorial. “If the Durban II drafters have their way, any challenge of Islamic teachings, including teachings used to justify violence, would be taboo.”

Of course, the document is called a draft for a reason, and an active effort by the U.S. in negotiating the final text of the Durban II document could change things significantly.

Changing the Face of U.S. and U.N. Relations

Not everyone thinks the U.S. should be content to it on the sidelines. In 2008, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution sponsored (H.R.1361) by Rep. Howard Berman, urging the Secretary of State to “lead a high-level diplomatic effort” in order “to defeat any effort by states to use the forum to promote anti-Semitism or hatred against members of any group or to call into question the legitimacy of any state.”

Other UN observers have been more direct. “Unfortunately, plugging our ears to this kind of dreck neither makes it any less likely to occur, nor deprives it of a forum. The only way to counter speech we don’t like, as the constitutional adage goes, is with more speech” argued John Boonstra at UN Dispatch, a blog that covers UN issues.

Even the America Israel Public Affairs Committee, a staunchly pro-Israel group, urged the United States “to use the preparatory process to halt the further demonization of Israel, ” as opposed to prematurely abandoning the process entirely.

But even if Israel was not central obsession of a few yet influential countries at the U.N., the U.S.  should at least strongly consider participating in the process if it wants to improve its image in the world, which is something Obama aims to do. Choosing to boycott Durban II, the first UN human rights gathering the in-coming Obama administration would have a chance to attend, may after all send the wrong message to the world -  something that the first black president could ill afford to do given the nature of the conference.

The question of race in 21st will only get more complicated with increased immigration from the global south to the global north, and as various countries including the U.S. try to grapple with rapidly changing demographics. Also, Barack Obama needs to demonstrate that he wants to move beyond the excesses of the Bush’s war on terror policies, which has been seen by many as an excuse to target Arabs and Muslims. In other words, the civil strife associated with racism could present diplomatic obstacles and create more instability in the world.

At the same time, however, he should impress on certain countries that terrorism is as real threat to U.S. as it is to countries anywhere else in the world and satirical depictions of religious figures, while offensive, should not be used as an excuse to place limits on freedom of expression, as some OIC countries want to do.

Additionally, Durban II could serve as a stepping stone for an Obama administration looking to reedefine the U.N.-U.S. relations in the post-Bush era. Making sure the conference maintains its central focus on the combating racial discrimination, instead of a proxy battle over Arab-Israeli relations will be a difficult task. But it is still achievable with an energetic and committed team of diplomats. UN Ambassador Dr. Susan Rice is certain capable of leading such an effort on her own and is familiar with the sort of entanglements awaiting her in Geneva.

In a November 2002 speech before a an audience at the University of Delaware, she made the following remarks:

Against this dismal back-drop, we also encounter an international community increasingly skeptical of U.S. intentions and resentful of our power. How did we get here? In large part, we did so by almost reflexively spurning collective instruments – from international treaties such as the ABM treaty, the Bioweapons Convention and the International Criminal Court to multilateral gatherings such as the UN Conference on Racism.

Of course, that was more than six years ago. Dr. Rice may have a different opinion today. But note Dr. Rice’s insistence on the connection between the exercise of American power and blacklash toward retreating from organizations within the U.N. system.

But Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton’s is less likely to support U.S. participation, assuming her statements on the campaign trail are any indication.  “I will never forget how the world’s first conference against racism became a mockery of itself when it descended into anti-Semitism and hatred,” she said in a June 2008 speech at an AIPAC conference.  “The debacle at Durban must never be repeated. We should take very strong action to ensure anti-Semitism is kept off the agenda at Durban II and if those efforts fail, I believe that the United States should boycott that conference.

With Obama’s decision to elevate the U.S. Ambassadorship to the UN to a cabinet level post, Dr. Rice will report directly to the president without the filter of the State Department, though the Secretary of State will likely to be consulted as well. But even in that scenario its difficult to say whose opinion will be given more weight. After all, Dr. Susan Rice is more of the UN expert than Clinton is even if the Secretary of State is regarded as the nation’s top diplomat.

Their statements on Durban II will surely be scrutinized during their respective confirmation hearings, particularly by Senators seeking to pin the in-coming administration down on a definitive ye or nay position on the issue.

Further complicating this issue is Israel’s war in Gaza and the U.S. kneejerk response to support it. Now while Israel’s current bombardment campaign is a separate matter, it will undoubtedly influence what Obama decides.  In his letter, to the outgoing Ambassador to the UN, Obama affirmed his support for Israel in its war in Gaza even as its unpopularity grows exponentially with each passing day and the Palestianian death toll rises.

Hopefully, President-elect Obama will not allow accusations that he is not a “friend” to Israel affect how he determines how to recast U.S.-U.N. relations. Whatever course he decides on this issue should be consistent with his promise to “to renew the trust and faith of our people — and all people — in an America that battles immediate evils, promotes an ultimate good, and leads the world once more” as he said in his Foreign Affairs essay.

That kind of bold leadership requires a break from the past and the political will to create your own opportunities even if they initially present themselves as crises.

Note:  I have changed the title of this post from “The World Conference on Racism and its Critics”  to the “Durban Review Conference and its Critics.” since the former refers to the gathering in that took place in 2001 in Durban, South Africa, and the latter actually refers to the upcoming meeting in April 2009, which is a follow up to the first one.

Reforming the Prison System

Senator Jim Webb will introduce legislation aimed at reforming the prison system during upcoming session of Congress. According to the Washington Post, Webb wants to reform law enforcement’s efforts targeting low-level drug actors instead of more influential players in the drug trade, policies incarcerating ex-convicts for technical parole violations, and laws depriving or curtailing the voting rights of ex-offenders.

The effects of the proliferation of failed criminal justice policies and enforcement strategies have been well documented. Despite having only five percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has a quarter of the world’s prison population. The 2.3 million behind bars are not only disproportionately black and Latino, but also amounts to one percent of the U.S. adult population, according to the Pew Center on the States.

In 2004, Latinos and African Americans  inmates made up 19.4  and 43.4 percent of those population state penitentiaries, respectively. Yet the 2006 U.S. Census Bureau estimates that Latinos and African American only 14.8 and 12.8 percent of the U.S. population.

Approximately, one in 106 white men aged 18 or older are in prison, compared to one in 36 Hispanic men and one in 15 for black men in the same age group. More strikingly, one in 9 black men between 20 and 34 are in prison, according to Pew.

(Source: Hamilton Project)

For some, Webb seems an unlikely figure champion of progressive criminal justice, since his biography has all the makings of a law and order conservative. But the one time Republican and highly decorated Marine captain, Vietnam war veteran and former Reagan Naval Secretary, had what he described as an “eye opening” experience as a journalist reporting on how the Japanese prison were run.

In a speech at the National Press Club, Senator Webb said he was struck by how Japan in the early 1980’s managed to have only 40,000 people in prison in a society with more than 100 million. By contrast, the U.S. incarcerated about 780,000 people in a society of more than 200 million at that time, according to Webb in his speech.

He was also impressed with how the Japanese, unlike the their U.S. counterparts, separated offenders in prison by the type of offense they committed instead of lumping together violent felons with non-violent ones. And he also took notice of the overall focus on the readmission of inmates in the greater society with marketable skills. In other words, the Japanese authorities actually invested in rehabilitating people in their correctional facilities.

As a freshman Senator, Webb joined a growing number of policy experts and lawmakers advocating for alternatives to incarceration. Webb co-sponsored the Second Chance Act in the U.S. Senate, which Illinois Congressman Danny Davis helped conceive, and signed into law by President Bush in April 2008. The measure provides more than $360 million in federal funding to help ex-0ffenders reintegrate into society by providing substance abuse treatment for those who need it, assistance in obtaining identification cards, which is critical to landing a job, job training, and financial incentives for employers willing to hire ex-felons.

The goal of the bill was to reduce the recidivism rate, which has skyrocketed in recent years along with state spending supporting incarceration policies. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Annual criminal-justice expenditures for police, prisons, probation and courts have risen to more than $200 billion from $36 billion in 1982.”

Meanwhile, state correctional spending is gradually edging out other priorities such as higher education, as evidenced by the graph below. States such as Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan and Oregon spend just as much on corrections as they do on higher education.

But in addition to reentry programs lawmakers should reconsider the variety of policies supporting the failed war on drugs too. For starters, Congress should direct its attention to correcting the disparities in sentencing guidelines for crack and power cocaine. Despite the fact that we now know that they pharmacologically induce the same effects, 5 grams of crack – less than two sugar cubes, carries a mandatory minimum of five years in prison. The same penalty applies to those with power cocaine if they are caught with 500 grams. That’s a 100 to 1 disparity. Interestingly enough, about 75 percent of crack cocaine defendants are only low level offenders, not the major king pings and traffickers that are truly profiting from the drug trade.

During the last 25 years or so, drug arrests have tripled, thereby creating a 1100% increase in drug offenders in prisons and jails since 1980. The U.S. went from imprisoning 41,100 in 1980 to nearly half a million on drug charges alone according to the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice reform advocacy group.

The same organization also found that while African Americans constitute 14 percent of regular drug users and yet they are still 37 percent of arrested for a drug offense in state prison.

On the change.gov website, Obama’s agenda includes not only eliminating the crack-cocaine disparity, but also the expansion of drug courts, since they are more effective at reducing recidivism, drug use and other forms of criminal activity.

States and the federal government should also reconsider jailing and imprisoning ex-convicts for mere technical violations of their parole, since they are nonviolent offenses. It needlessly enlarges the prison population and impedes the reintegration of people who deemed threats to public safety simply because he missed an appointment, failed a drug test, or lost a job. Such routine violations indicate a greater need for counseling and other forms of intervention rather than incarceration.

Lastly, felons should be allowed to vote after completing their sentence and parole.  Felon disenfranchisement laws date back to the Jim Crow era and were engineered to suppress minority voting. Today, the ACLU estimates about 5.3 million people are affected by laws barring those with criminal records from voting.

Webb seems to understand the importance of it all when he said, “If you have paid the price that your community, through its government, has decided you should pay for the crime that you have done, then you should be made whole. I don’t think that’s a difficult concept.”

Hopefully, the new administration and new Congress will move forward with these reforms while they have they still have the political momentum on their back rather fear the next campaign attack ad calling them soft on crime because they were smart on policy.

First of Many Disagreements to Come

In picking Reverend Rick Warren deliver the invocation at the inaugural, President-elect Barack Obama earned the ire of the liberal left. It’s a reaction that surely team Obama must have foreseen, but one that may be difficult to quell, at least in the short term.

Joe Solmonese, President of Human Rights Campaign, a pro-gay rights group, called the  invitation “a genuine blow to LGBT Americans.”

At The Nation magazine Sarah Posner writes, “… the choice of Warren is not only a slap in the face to progressive ministers toiling on the front lines of advocacy and service but a bow to the continuing influence of the religious right in American politics.”

Greg Levine of Firedog Lake worries that the President-elect is being too accomodationist to a figure who deserves no olive branch, “… if Barack Obama wants to invite different voices to a discussion, fine, but that is very different from having a known homophobe give a speech at what is likely to be one of the highest profile events in recent US history. That’s not a dialogue—that’s a signal.”

Rev. Warren has been an outspoken and vigorous supporter of banning gay marriage, compared abortion to the Holocaust, thinks evolution is a fiction, and is an ardent foe of anti-stem cell research. To many on the left, he is a culture warrior in the mold of James Dobson or Pat Robertson despite the best-selling author’s support for such causes as global poverty reduction, containing the spread of AIDS and HIV, and combating climate change. All of which are areas where Obama will more than likely want to enlist Warren’s support.

But liberals, many of whom are willing to work with evangelicals on those same issues, do not want any progress of those nobel causes  to come at the expense of the right to marry, sexually reproductive rights, or scientific freedom. While inviting Rev. Warren to deliver the invocation will not automatically usher in the dark ages, it does suggest something that Obama is a little too conciliatory toward the very same people who will try to tear him apart in a few months. Some even worry that its an indication of the very conservative instincts that many fear Obama has thus far managed to conceal.

Other political observers see a stroke of opportunistic genius involved. MSNBC First Read said, “As for the pure politics of this, when you look at the exit polls and see the large numbers of white evangelicals in swing states like North Carolina, Florida and Missouri, as well as emerging battlegrounds like Georgia and Texas, you’ll understand what Obama’s up to. ” As plausible as that may sound to some, I think that’s a tad too cynical.

For his part, Obama said on Thursday at his press conference:

Nevertheless, I had an opportunity to speak, and that dialogue, I think, is a part of what my campaign’s been all about, that we’re never going to agree on every single issue. What we have to do is create an atmosphere where we can disagree without being disagreeable, and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans. So Rick Warren has been invited to speak, Dr. Joseph Lowery — who has deeply contrasting views to Rick Warren about a whole host of issues — is also speaking.

During the course of the entire inaugural festivities, there are going to be a wide range of viewpoints that are presented. And that’s how it should be, because that’s what America’s about. That’s part of the magic of this country, is that we are diverse and noisy and opinionated. And so, you know, that’s the spirit in which, you know, we have put together what I think will be a terrific inauguration. And that’s, hopefully, going to be a spirit that carries over into my administration.

Disagreeing without being disagreeable might not cut it with after the fallout over Prop 8, a measure banning same-sex marriagea, in California. Too many feelings are still raw about that lost, and not enough has been done to mend divisions between communities. Plus, given how there are thousands of activists about to descend on DC on January 20th, we could see spontaneous protests take place just as we saw in around the country in the aftermath of the passage of Prop 8. Thus, creating an undesirable subplot to what would otherwise be a much more grander narrative about the dawn of an era.

Most people who voted for Obama assumed that they would not agree with him on every single issue, but they do hope to be on the same wavelength on certain big issues that have a certain visceral dimension to them. And when that is not the case, the President-elect should expect a barrage of intense and persistent criticism, which I am sure he will be able to handle. He’s a big boy.

So simply attributing criticism as mere difference of opinion, especially when its describe as noisy and such, probably will strike many his supporters as dismissive. As David Corn noted on CQ, “…Warren’s opposition to gay rights is more than a mere policy dispute. It is an act of bigotry. Sure, Warren does not believe he is being discriminatory. But that’s what it is.”

By the same token, liberals have to understand that the culture wars don’t mean as much to Obama as they do to his Democratic predecessors. He thinks those issues frames are designed to keep Democrats in the losing column, electorally speaking. So, he will not hesitate to aggressively court evangelicals on issues where they and liberals share common ground.  Doing so, will probably involve at least some symbolic gestures before effectively prying lose the white knuckled grip Republican’s have had on that segment of the voting population as he fulfills his quest to redraw the political map and maintain widespread support for his agenda.

In the final analysis, however, I am not sure if having Rev. Warren at the inauguration is worth the political headache of angering the liberal base. I realize that the favorability ratings are high and that Obama feels as if he could take at hit now, but I would be reluctant to spend hard won political capital among supporters on something that would pose the most activist and partisan segment of my base against me on the last day of the honeymoon.