This afternoon, I am unconceeding defeat in the 1991 Onondaga County High School chess championships.
Eighteen years ago, I was pressured into conceding by a shadowy coalition of Manlius Pebble Hill chess team members (who hosted the competition), my employer at the time, Wegman's (which was afraid I would turn professional and leave my cashier job), and my teammate Julian Marshall, who went on to "win" the championship. Julian was afraid I would defeat him if I advanced to the final (I mean, I like totally beat Julian about 45% of the time in high school).
Further, I am unconceding defeat in my campaign to make Bel Biv DeVoe's "Do Me" our class song in high school. There is no way that "Everything I do, I do for you" by Bryan Adams represented our class that year.
It now seems quite likely that the Senate has the 60 votes necessary to force cloture on the motion to proceed with the health care bill. The final three votes Senate majority leader Harry Reid needed were Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and Mary Landrieu, but all three now appear to be ready to vote "aye." Here is a rundown of all three:
"This weekend, I will vote for the motion to proceed to bring that debate onto the Senate floor," Nelson says. "The Senate should start trying to fix a health care system that costs too much and delivers too little for Nebraskans."
Nelson indicates that this does not mean he is ready to support cloture to pass the bill, but he is willing to let debate go forward.
Earlier today, Senate #2 Dick Durbin stated that Blanche Lincoln has told Harry Reid she would vote yes. Durbin is now walking back that statement, but really, the gig is up for Lincoln.
Anyway, what was Lincoln going to do--oppose even letting the debate go forward and then ask Democrats to vote for her in 2010? Not bloody likely, especially with a prominent figure in Arkansas still considering a primary challenge. Lincoln is highly likely to be a yes.
Right-wingers are in an uproar over this, but really--I am shocked, shocked to find that there is gambling going on in this casino! A member of Congress holding out on a key vote in order to secure funding for her home state or district!? I bet that has never happened before. This is really breaking new ground on Capitol Hill!
Further, while they don't seem to realize it, the right-wing uproar over Landrieu's deal actually makes it virtually impossible for her to vote against cloture now. Due to right-wing publicity, now everyone knows Landrieu is bringing $100 million home by holding out. As such, what is Landrieu going to do--issue a statement that preventing a floor debate on health care is more important than $100 million for Louisiana? Only 9% of Louisianans think she should block the debate. I bet a lot more than that want the $100 million, especially now that everyone has heard about the $100 million.
So, it looks like Democrats have the 60 needed to move forward on debate. The truth is that Reid probably secured the 60 votes before filing the cloture motion. It is a rare day when the leadership doesn't know the outcome of a vote before scheduling it.
The vote will take place tomorrow night, at 8 p.m. eastern, following an all-day debate. Notably, in exchange for the all-day debate, Senator Coburn has dropped his demand that the entire bill be read out loud, which means there will be less droning on C-SPAN2 during Monday and Tuesday of next week.
This is part two of an interview with Rea Carey, the Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Part one focused on the No On 1 campaign in Maine, the push to repeal Prop 8 in 2010 in California, and the marriage equality movement in general. This part focuses on the state of LGBT rights at the federal level, the Obama administration, and Congress.
Among the highlights:
Rea refusing to accept any half-measure on the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell
Although criticizing the Obama administration in many respects, Rea declining to call on the Obama administration for an apology over numerous slights towards the LGBT community
Rea commenting on the AMERICABlog donor boycott
The one comment I have is that I disagree on the refusal to call on the administration for an apology over what we all agreed were horrendous mistakes, with the rationale of "I don't know that the administration sees those as mistakes" (see the transcript for more). Glenn Beck called the President a racist, and he should apologize, regardless of whether he saw it as a mistake. LGBT advocates should call for the same from the Administration if serious mistakes were made.
Overall, though, NGLTF is taking a pretty strong stance in terms of language regarding the slow pace of LGBT issues in Congress, on Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and with the Democratic Party in general, which is great.
Full transcript below the fold.
Q: Turning to the Administration and Capitol Hill, recently John Aravosis and Joe Sudbay launched a donor boycott of the DNC. Is NGLTF going to endorse the boycott?
The jobs bill is going to happen. The House will likely pass a bill in December, and the Senate will match in January or February after the health care bill is done. Rather than "if" it will happen, the major questions for the jobs bill are how large it will be, what will be in the bill, and how the bill will be funded.
Relating to the latter, I recently had a chance to ask Representative Alan Grayson if there was any legal barrier to using the remaining Wall Street bailout money to fund the bill. He did not believe there was any such legal barrier, and indicated that political barriers would be more significant.
The lack of legal barriers is virtually self-evident. TARP funds have already been used for a variety of non-Wall Street related projects, including the auto bailout and assistance for struggling homeowners. Further, the Obama administration has said it is interested in using some of the funds to pay down the debt, and using others to increase lending to small businesses. Clearly, there is a lot of flexibility in how the money can be used.
Being into the whole history thing enough to have written a book on it, I tend to take a long view on the big policy battles we fight today. As I wrote the other day, no piece of legislation ever gets to perfection, and on plenty of them you can have a perfectly legitimate debate even over the most well-intentioned bill over whether it does more harm than good. In addition to the actual policy particulars, lawmakers have to weigh (if they care about political survival) a wide range of other factors, including the political implications both nationally and in their home districts, the symbolism of what they are doing, how the interest groups and donors that matter the most to them are impacted, and how the media nationally and back home are treating the issue. Trying to factor in all these things is intense, and it is understandable that politicians sometimes have trouble making up their minds.
For reasonably progressive-minded advocates and lawmakers on a huge issue like health care, after you factor in all of the above, at the end of the day you also have to ask yourself two very big questions. The first is whether the passage of this legislation sets the stage on other issues for better or worse things to come. The second is whether the legislation, even with all of its flaws and compromises, creates a platform to build on in the future.
I've been writing a lot on what happened in Maine (most recently this piece yesterday in a Los Angeles LGBT magazine), and where our movement should go from here. NGLTF had run much of the field program in Maine, as well as within the No On 8 campaign in California, so I sat down yesterday to do an interview with Rea Carey, the Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, to address some criticisms and her thoughts on the marriage equality movement. We were joined by Dan Hawes, Director of Organizing and Training, who heads up NGLTF's national field operations and ran the field program in Cumberland County, the most populous in the state.
This is part one related to the No On 1 campaign in Maine and the marriage equality movement in general. I'll be posting the second part, related to LGBT rights at the federal level and the performance of the Obama administration.
Among the highlights:
Among the highlights:
Dan commenting that the campaign "could have had a more direct message", "more lengthy conversations at the door with voters", and done more persuasion rather than "just trying to GOTV our supporters"
Rea commenting on marriage equality at the ballot box "we simply don't have enough people to win at the ballot box yet"
Rea and Dan declining to say whether re-run campaigns in California and Maine could have won, or definitively whether marriage equality is winnable in the short-term
Dan defending against criticisms made with respect to the field program in Maine, and praising various aspects of the campaign
Rea and Dan arguing that provided there is a plan and the time is right, despite the movement's recent losses and overall record at the ballot box, donors will "step up" to contribute the tens of millions necessary to win a Prop 8 repeal effort in California
Full transcript below the fold.
Q: What did you both think of the No On 1 campaign, the result, and where we go from here?
Dan: I think generally it was a well-run campaign with a disappointing result, where we were unable to build a solid majority who supported marriage equality. Our various polling within the campaign and outside the campaign showed we never started with 50% or more of Mainers who were on our side, but I felt like we could probably look piece-by-piece at the campaign, and there's always things we could do differently. But I felt like folks gave their best effort generally to work to win across the board.
Q: What could be done differently?
Dan: It's clear that we haven't yet built a majority of support for marriage, which is part of the problem- we go into these campaigns trying to build a majority rather than defend a majority at the ballot box which is very different. We need to figure out what message will be effective at moving voters to stand with us on marriage quality, which is a venture across the board on all these campaigns, which stands true in Maine as well.
Rea: I would just add to that, one of the things that's so striking having been in California and Maine and having many years under our belts with these things is this challenge in creating a majority vs. defending it. I was so struck, I went canvassing [Election Day] morning, and spoke with a number of voters including some Yes voters, and a gentleman who told me he had voted Yes, he was very nice, very kind about it, but he had voted Yes, and explained why and it was interesting because he said you know I have gay friends, he was a father of three, I have gay friends who were married in Massachusetts and I just feel I want them to have the protections, but I'm not there yet on voting for marriage.
I think there are unfortunately what we've seen in a number of states with trying different messaging and different tactics- and I agree with Dan that every campaign has some different and something that can be learned from and improved upon- we simply don't have enough people to win at the ballot box yet. I absolutely think we're going to get there. I think if you look at the trajectory over the last twenty years, even in a state like California where we used to be behind by twenty points, now we're behind by about four, the trajectory is moving in the right direction, we're just not there yet.
Q: You both have said that we don't have the number of votes, we're short, which is certainly an important point with regard to the electorate. My question originally, though, was what could be done differently? Or was it a flawless campaign, was it near-flawless?
The term "idiocracy" means a nation run by idiots - and the term idiot is defined as "an utterly foolish or senseless person" and/or a "person of the lowest order in a former classification of mental retardation, having a mental age of less than three years old." There are many reasons to conclude that America has become a full-fledged Idiocracy - bad decisions after bad decisions after bad decisions really have suggested that the last decade has seen the ascension of utterly foolish, senseless people of the lowest order in a former classification of mental retardation.
And yet, as I show in my newspaper column out today, if there was still any shred of doubt that we had avoided becoming an Idiocracy, it was only fully snuffed out in the last week by David Broder and Jackson Diehl - two of the alleged "deans" of the Washington media intelligentsia.
Here is Broder attacking President Obama for taking the time to carefully consider whether to send an additional 40,000 American troops into an increasingly Vietnam-like Afghanistan quagmire:
The more President Obama examines our options in Afghanistan, the less he likes the choices he sees...The urgent necessity is to make a decision -- whether or not it is right.
Let's set aside the nauseating spectacle of two crotchety old men, comfortably protected in their plush Washington offices demanding a president send 40,000 troops potentially to their deaths without regard for whether that's the right decision. Let's just put that grotesque immorality in the corner, and pretend it's not important - and let's go to the deeper message of aggressive pro-idiocy.
Broder and Diehl are paid think carefully about issues and then offer their opinions on those issues. That's not part of what they're supposed to do - it's what they do. It's the way they make a living, it's what they're supposed to derive their credibility from - indeed, it's their entire raison d'etre.
And yet, these supposed leading lights of the intelligentsia, these professional thinkers, are overtly preaching anti-intelligence. They are quite clearly insisting that the proper course of action for a president is to avoid applying intelligence and avoid thinking at all. And both of them aren't even being subtle about it.
Read my column here for my take on exactly what all this means - and why it is so deeply disturbing.
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