First Door on the Left

Did anybody else happen to catch tonight’s episode of The Practice on ABC? The main plot, of course, was the ongoing battle between Shore and Eugene, but it was the subplot I found most interesting.

Ellenor defended a lady who struck a police officer after he tried to forcibly remove her to a “free speech zone” during a presidential motorcade because she was carrying a placard critical of Bush’s environmental policies. It was worth the hour to watch the program just to listen to Ellenor’s closing argument. The closing by the prosecutor was equally compelling, though, in my view, quite ridiculous.

I won’t reveal the outcome in case you haven’t yet seen this episode, but if you didn’t catch it you need to find a friend who tivoed (is that a word?) it.

This show, by the way, is quickly supplanting The West Wing as my favorite show on television, though the reruns of The West Wing which you can catch on Bravo are still quite good.

And yet another one jumps ship…

WASHINGTON – Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism coordinator, accuses the Bush administration of failing to recognize the al-Qaida threat before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and then manipulating America into war with Iraq with dangerous consequences.

He accuses Bush of doing “a terrible job on the war against terrorism.”

Clarke, who is expected to testify Tuesday before a federal panel reviewing the attacks, writes in a new book going on sale Monday that Bush and his Cabinet were preoccupied during the early months of his presidency with some of the same Cold War issues that had faced his father’s administration.

“It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier,” Clarke told CBS for an interview Sunday on its “60 Minutes” program.

CBS’ corporate parent, Viacom Inc., owns Simon & Schuster, publisher for Clarke’s book, “Against All Enemies.”

Clarke acknowledges that, “there’s a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too.” He said he wrote to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on Jan. 24, 2001, asking “urgently” for a Cabinet-level meeting “to deal with the impending al-Qaida attack.” Months later, in April, Clarke met with deputy cabinet secretaries, and the conversation turned to Iraq.

“I’m sure I’ll be criticized for lots of things, and I’m sure they’ll launch their dogs on me,” Clarke said. “But frankly I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he’s done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something.”

Buy Mr. Clarke’s book here.

Should there be any further doubt in anybody’s mind regarding the current administration’s stand on civil rights, I give you these paragraphs which appear at the bottom of an article published in The Washington Post today…

The socially conservative and politically influential Family Research Council was given red-carpet treatment at the White House on Thursday. More than 350 major donors and other supporters received a private briefing from Elliott Abrams, the National Security Council staff director for Middle East affairs.

To give the White House session a more intimate feel, Bush aides split the more than 350 attendees of the council’s annual “Washington Briefing” into two groups on successive days.

The Family Research Council is a nonprofit educational foundation and by law must be nonpartisan, but the GOP leanings were clear at last week’s briefing. When James Dobson of Focus on the Family warned during one discussion that gay marriage could lead to a “man marrying his donkey,” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, had the crowd chortling by saying that made him think of “a Republican marrying a Democrat.”

Read that last paragraph again. If that does not make you sick to your stomach, I have serious doubts about your spirituality and your humanity.

Sen. John F. Kerry is setting the stage to raise as much as $100 million for his presidential campaign by seizing control of his party’s fundraising machinery, winning the support of top money people for vanquished rivals, and attracting thousands of new small donors via the Internet, according to officials inside and outside his campaign.

In the two months since the Jan. 19 Iowa caucuses, the Massachusetts Democrat’s campaign has pulled in more than $26 million, including $18 million over the Internet, aides said. Just two weeks ago, the campaign had announced a goal of raising $80 million — and was greeted with initial skepticism among some party fundraisers.

Kerry, who appears to be capitalizing more on animosity toward President Bush than on excitement for his own candidacy, is positioning himself for a big financial lift heading into his party’s summer convention, the officials said.

Although Bush is virtually certain to raise more money than Kerry — and perhaps double — Democrats are no longer concerned that the president will spend the Democratic nominee into the ground even before most voters tune into the race months from now. Some Republicans privately express concern that Bush’s money advantage will not prove invincible, as they had once believed.

Kerry’s fundraising success is crucial to his campaign: He faces a Bush campaign that has already raised more than $150 million and has $104 million in the bank.

“It’s like a funnel coming to a head to support John Kerry,” said Terry Lierman, a Montgomery County Democrat and Kerry fundraiser. “I have no doubt in my mind John Kerry can raise between $80 million and $100 million. In my career I have never seen people join together this fast and furious.”

I think the $100 million dollar estimate is a bit low. At least I hope it is. I think we are going to need a bit more than that to effectively battle the Bush/Rove machine. I still go back to Governor Dean’s statement that there are at least two million people in this country who are willing to give $100 each in order to send George Bush back to Texas (not that we want him here, but better here than where he is now). If you want to help, click here.

The following op-ed column, written by Howard Dean, was published in Cleveland, Ohio’s The Plain Dealer today:

My run for the White House ended last month. But for me, and for my supporters around the country, our work to take this country back has just begun.

As I have long argued, the Democrats cannot beat George W. Bush by meeting his extreme agenda halfway.

To win, Democrats must stand up strong for our principles, not paper over our differences with this president. We must expose the ways in which Bush’s policies benefit the privileged and the far right. We must confidently advance an agenda rooted in hope and real American values opportunity, integrity, community.

I am pleased that in this race candidates, including John Kerry, affirmed that our party must stand sharply against the policies of the Bush administration and stand for real change in Washington.

That is the right way to take on Bush and the most effective way to succeed with voters who might be tempted to support third candidates.

To do our part, we will create out of the Dean for America campaign a new enterprise, Democracy for America, committed to four core principles:

Strong grassroots involvement in democracy. Today, half of Americans don’t even vote. People see what the problems are, but they are cynical about prospects for change. Only through doing will people recognize the power they have to change this country.

Promoting an America where candidates and office holders tell the truth and stand up for what they believe.

Fighting against the influence and agenda of the two pillars of George Bush’s Washington: the far right wing and their radical, divisive policies, and the selfish special interests who for too long have dominated politics.

Fighting for progressive policies, like health care for all, investment in children, equal rights under law and fiscal responsibility.

To help defeat Bush and his agenda in 2004, our new enterprise will focus on key battleground states. We will mobilize our supporters and use the groundbreaking organizing tools we developed during our campaign, planting seeds on the Internet, meeting face to face at the grassroots, bringing new people into the process.

We will use these same tools to support congressional, state and local candidates across America, candidates who stand for our principles.

And we will encourage grassroots members to run for office, and we will offer them tools to achieve this. We want to change conditions so people no longer think that running for office is only for the well-connected.

We will shine a spotlight on the failed policies of the current administration. On George Bush’s watch, America has lost 3 million jobs. The most important state in this election is Ohio, which has lost 275,000 of the best-paying jobs in America.

This administration shuns the labor and environmental standards that would protect more American jobs in the context of globalization. The Bush tax policy, an enormous transfer of money to the richest people and corporations, has turned record surpluses into record deficits, making investment in America a shakier proposition. The administration also opposes fair wage, unemployment and overtime policies that aid our workers in hard times.

Forty-three million Americans are without health insurance. It is now clear to school boards, teachers and members of Congress that No Child Left Behind is not working.

This president has turned his back on the alliances that have helped protect our security for 60 years. He launched a unilateral, pre-emptive Iraqi war whose mission stability in that nation and greater security for Americans remains unaccomplished. In the process, he has misled our citizens about the facts something many Americans will not forgive.

The only promise this president has kept is to make his models for judges Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. His life-tenured appointees are anti-civil rights, anti-choice, anti-consumer and anti-environment.

Despite this record, defeating Bush will not be easy. His strategists are using a $100 million war chest to run from the facts. They seek to fire up their base with divisive approaches to social issues. They want the debate to be conducted on distorted terms that play to Americans’ fears. Their first ad sought to blame the weak economy on others even though Bush has been president for more than three years.

John Kerry and the Democrats will win in November if we harness the innovative campaign techniques learned through our nominating process, and if we highlight our stark differences with this failed president.

The initials — DFA — are those of his high-flying presidential campaign, but Howard Dean’s new advocacy group will recruit like-minded candidates seeking lower-tier offices as well as promote the election of Democratic candidate John Kerry.

Dean, the former Vermont governor who had been the front-runner for the party’s nomination before delegate elections began, is hoping to prove to the political establishment that he retains some of the power he once enjoyed with the legions of followers who helped him raise record amounts of campaign money.

Supporters say the new organization, Democracy For America, will help return political power to the community level.

Dean has been seeking to build excitement among those supporters with a promise to announce Thursday his plans “about the future grass-roots campaign built from the principles of Dean For America,” the former presidential campaign said in a posting to its own Web log. “We will show solidarity in our continued campaign to take back the core of power in American politics from back rooms and special interests to a political ethos based in, and built from, community.”

Rallies are planned in Seattle and San Francisco on Thursday, a month to the day Dean dropped out of the presidential race without winning a contest in spite of spending six months as the Democrat with the most money, endorsements and momentum. A third rally is planned Friday in New York. Dean won a primary, Vermont’s, after he dropped out.

The new organization will play a role in helping Kerry win the presidency in November. Democracy For America also will seek to influence the Democratic Party in much the way that conservatives helped to reshape the Republican Party more than 20 years ago.

In the past week, Dean contacted his supporters via e-mail and asked them to contribute to Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.’s re-election campaign. Jackson was an early and strong supporter of Dean’s presidential bid.

Dean believes he can help to raise money for important congressional races by asking the more than 600,000 people who signed up for his campaign via his Web site to donate. When he was leading in the presidential contest he successfully did that for an Iowa congressman who had not even endorsed him.

Democratic leaders hope that Dean can and will do the same thing to help Kerry raise money. The question is whether he’ll turn over the list of names and e-mail addresses he gathered.

Some of his aides have said they are researching the legalities, including how the list would be viewed by federal elections regulators. It could be considered valuable enough that it would exceed campaign contribution limits. Putting a value on it could be difficult.

George W. Bush will be campaigning this year on terrorism. He will be portraying himself as the candidate most able to deal with terrorism. It is the only thing upon which he can base his campaign since he has pretty much botched everything else. However, as Paul Krugman points out in this New York Times column, Mr. Bush has botched the war on terrorism as well. So he has nothing.

“My most immediate priority,” Spain’s new leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, declared yesterday, “will be to fight terrorism.” But he and the voters who gave his party a stunning upset victory last Sunday don’t believe the war in Iraq is part of that fight. And the Spanish public was also outraged by what it perceived as the Aznar government’s attempt to spin last week’s terrorist attack for political purposes.

The Bush administration, which baffled the world when it used an attack by Islamic fundamentalists to justify the overthrow of a brutal but secular regime, and which has been utterly ruthless in its political exploitation of 9/11, must be very, very afraid.

Polls suggest that a reputation for being tough on terror is just about the only remaining political strength George Bush has. Yet this reputation is based on image, not reality. The truth is that Mr. Bush, while eager to invoke 9/11 on behalf of an unrelated war, has shown consistent reluctance to focus on the terrorists who actually attacked America, or their backers in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

This reluctance dates back to Mr. Bush’s first months in office. Why, after all, has his inner circle tried so hard to prevent a serious investigation of what happened on 9/11? There has been much speculation about whether officials ignored specific intelligence warnings, but what we know for sure is that the administration disregarded urgent pleas by departing Clinton officials to focus on the threat from Al Qaeda.

After 9/11, terrorism could no longer be ignored, and the military conducted a successful campaign against Al Qaeda’s Taliban hosts. But the failure to commit sufficient U.S. forces allowed Osama bin Laden to escape. After that, the administration appeared to lose interest in Al Qaeda; by the summer of 2002, bin Laden’s name had disappeared from Mr. Bush’s speeches. It was all Saddam, all the time.

This wasn’t just a rhetorical switch; crucial resources were pulled off the hunt for Al Qaeda, which had attacked America, to prepare for the overthrow of Saddam, who hadn’t. If you want confirmation that this seriously impeded the fight against terror, just look at reports about the all-out effort to capture Osama that started, finally, just a few days ago. Why didn’t this happen last year, or the year before? According to The New York Times, last year many of the needed forces were tied up in Iraq.

It’s now clear that by shifting his focus to Iraq, Mr. Bush did Al Qaeda a huge favor. The terrorists and their Taliban allies were given time to regroup; the resurgent Taliban once again control almost a third of Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda has regained the ability to carry out large-scale atrocities.

But Mr. Bush’s lapses in the struggle against terrorism extend beyond his decision to give Al Qaeda a breather. His administration has also run interference for Saudi Arabia — the home of most of the 9/11 hijackers, and the main financier of Islamic extremism — and Pakistan, which created the Taliban and has actively engaged in nuclear proliferation.

Click on the headline to read the entire column.

A bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives which would allow Congress to reverse the rulings of the Supreme Court. In short, Congress would enjoy the same veto power over the Supreme Court that it now has over the President. H.R. 3920:

A BILL

To allow Congress to reverse the judgments of the United States Supreme Court.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the `Congressional Accountability for Judicial Activism Act of 2004′.

SEC. 2. CONGRESSIONAL REVERSAL OF SUPREME COURT JUDGMENTS.

The Congress may, if two thirds of each House agree, reverse a judgment of the United States Supreme Court–

(1) if that judgment is handed down after the date of the enactment of this Act; and

(2) to the extent that judgment concerns the constitutionality of an Act of Congress.

Currently, the Supreme Court may rule on the constitutionality of any law enacted by Congress and declare that law invalid of the Court deems that it violates the Constitution. Apparently the authors of this bill do not like that. They want Congress to be able to do whatever it damn well pleases — so long as two-thirds of both Houses agree.

Would it surprise you to learn that this bill was introduced by a Republican congressman, Ron Lewis of Kentucky, and is in direct response to the current battle brewing over same sex marriage? From Mr. Lewis’ website:

WASHINGTON, D.C.— March 9, 2004 – U.S. Representative Ron Lewis (R-KY) today introduced The Congressional Accountability for Judicial Activism Act (H.R. 3920), legislation that would allow Congress, by a 2/3rds vote in each house, to override certain future decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. The bill was drafted in an effort to redress recent cases of activist judicial rulings.

“America’s judicial branch has become increasingly overreaching and disconnected from the values of everyday Americans,” said Lewis. “The recent actions taken by courts in Massachusetts and elsewhere are demonstrative of a single branch of government taking upon itself the singular ability to legislate. These actions usurp the will of the governed by allowing a select few to conclusively rule on issues that are radically reshaping our nation’s traditions.”

Lewis’ proposed legislation, designed to preserve equal dignity among branches of government, would only be applicable to rulings concerning the constitutionality of an Act of Congress following passage. Lewis, a strong supporter of numerous legislative measures aimed to define marriage as an exclusive union between a man and a woman, believes a more comprehensive solution is necessary to address the broader issue of activist courts; a concern he believes has troubling implications beyond just the issue of marriage.

The stage is being set. The Republicans are well aware that the issue of same sex marriage is going to eventually end up in the Supreme Court and they are aware that the Court is going to have to rule in favor of it based on the equal protection clause of the Constitution. They want to be prepared.

Once again I find it amazing that the Republican party labels any court that chooses to uphold the Constitution as “activist.” It is good that they are around to protect us all from these activists, right?

John Kerry locked up the Democratic presidential nomination Saturday, reaching the magic number of delegates needed to become President Bush’s chief rival in the general election, according to an Associated Press tally.

The four-term Massachusetts senator reached the 2,162 delegate mark Saturday afternoon, the AP count found, just as Democrats in Kansas headed to party caucuses.

Kerry subsequently added to his tally with another easy victory in Kansas, winning 72 percent of the vote there and pushing his delegate total to 2,194.

Amassing the required number of delegates was a mere formality after Kerry’s last main Democratic opponent, John Edwards, dropped out of the race following a disastrous showing on March 2, when 10 states held “Super Tuesday” contests.

Senator Kerry is going to need a whole lot of money in order to do battle with the Bushies this spring and summer. Won’t you please give him some? (I would, but quite honestly I do not have any.)

Sunday, March 14th, on NBC’s Meet the Press:

National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice and former Gov. Howard Dean , D-VT, on 9/11 and the Iraq war anniversary.

Should be interesting.

I am sure that Ms. Rice will spout the usual administration lies: that Mr. Bush was a true hero on 9/11 and that the war in Iraq has made us all safer from the threat of terrorism. The truth is that Bush did nothing for this nation on 9/11 and the war in Iraq has deepened, not lessened, the threat of terrorism (as I am sure Dr. Dean will point out).

This one may be worth getting up early on a Sunday morning for, but I doubt anything will be said that hasn’t been said before.

UPDATE: Transcript here. Governor Dean was on during the second half hour. His comments, if you did not see the program, are well worth reading.