“…the status of the fetus as human life does not equal that of the mother. …” – Rep. Lisa Brown, Michigan Democrat silenced for saying “vagina.”
WHAT A WEEK it was.
Some legislators – mostly male – will go to great lengths not to hear women’s voices when it comes to legislating our health and catering to extreme special interests. They don’t want to hear us, and when we speak out anyway, they try to shut us down. I’m not about to let them stop me. I wonder if they hear us now? – Rep. Lisa Brown
Pres. Obama began the week with an economic gaffe hangover that ended in a dog of a speech, which was trumped by a historic decision to give DREAMers a path to be part of the American fabric.
Today, the White House wakes up to a composite review of David Marinass’s book by Ben Smith that highlights what the author has researched and uncovered about the myth that is Barack Obama, something I wrote about non-stop during the 2007-2008 cycle. Marinass has the clout and the contacts to go much further today. From Ben Smith:
Maraniss opens with a warning: Among the falsehoods in Dreams is the caveat in the preface that “for the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.”
“The character creations and rearrangements of the book are not merely a matter of style, devices of compression, but are also substantive,” Maraniss responds in his own introduction. The book belongs in the category of “literature and memoir, not history and autobiography,” he writes, and “the themes of the book control character and chronology.”
Conservatives, meanwhile, gathered in Sin City to hail Gov. Scott Walker as their hero.
Following the failure of Democrats and labor unions to oust him two weeks ago, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is being hailed as a conquering hero by conservatives nationwide. The 750 activists who descended on Sheldon Adelson’s Venetian hotel for the right’s answer to Netroots Nation see Walker’s bold and unapologetic brand of conservatism as the way to win in 2012.
Today’s Democrats never seem to quite understand what symbolic wins mean and how deep that meaning goes. They’ve vastly underestimated what letting Scott Walker off the mat means. That’s nothing out of the ordinary, because Pres. Obama let George W. Bush off the mat, but today is trying to resurrect the fight against him as his main line of attack against Mitt Romney.
While conservatives take fresh wins as their new oxygen, Democrats are mining old tales of Bush making them look as if they don’t have a future battle plan.
Legal eagles argue over Pres. Obama’s executive order on DREAMers, with Lawrence Tribe coming up with a very interesting answer.
“Say a Republican were to follow this strategy after regaining the White House in January of 2013 and the Supreme Court upholds the health care bill, and Romney can’t repeal it because the Democrats in the Senate filibuster it, he could basically repeal it through non-enforcement,” said Eastman.
They theoretically could but won’t, said former Obama legal adviser Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School constitutional professor and prominent liberal scholar.
“It’s always possible to conjure hypotheticals that test the outer boundaries of the broad principle that the president is generally obligated to enforce laws duly enacted by Congress but has a paramount duty to obey the Constitution,” Tribe wrote POLITICO in an email. “Obviously, the rule of law and the importance of orderly and stable governance in a system that relies principally on the judicial branch to ‘say what the law is’ precludes promiscuous presidential exercise of the prerogative of non-compliance. Yet it is also surely true that presidents cannot blindly follow congressional directives unless and until a court tells them to stop. What if a Congress were to tell the president to shoot all self-proclaimed Mormons on sight, the way the governor of Missouri once did in the 19th century? Surely no president with a constitutional conscience could comply with such a directive.”
On a completely different note, as someone who used to enjoy riding, I’m pretty sure I’m one of the few around here who finds this story about Ann Romney and the Olympics very cool.
And since this weekend is the 40th anniversary of Watergate, a seminal event that changed the course of American history, which I watched riveted, and also informed everything Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld would do under George W. Bush’s watch, I give you Bill O’Reilly, who’s old enough to know better. He claimed this past week that Pres. Obama’s reaction to national security leaks has “shades of Richard Nixon, who tried to get away with Watergate by having his cronies like John Mitchell investigate it.”
Laughable. Shout out loud, grab your sides, laughable.
In order for a president to exude “shades of Richard Nixon” he would first have to conceive a large scale plan to target and systematically attack his enemies by whatever means necessary, including planning firebombings to get the goods on people he wanted to destroy. An entire underground effort would have to be in place with the intent of sabotaging Americans, including the press, to keep truths from surfacing, paid for by a slush fund meant to allow the president to silence all enemies. All of this done outside the law and systematically put into action in order to buttress a presidency through illegal means never before witnessed in the history of our democratic republic.
There will only be one Richard Milhous Nixon, whose disgrace and ultimate pardon scarred our politics for decades and placed the presidency above the law, something the framers never intended to happen, because their idea of the presidency wasn’t to make him king.
Postscript: On a personal note, here’s to my big brother on Father’s Day. I wrote this last year, but it will always apply.
So L Tribe says that the reason no president should obey a congressional command to shoot all Mormons on sight is that it’s unconstitutional and even expects us good little pupils to accept that as justification for Obama’s dreamy decision?
That’s hilarious.
And insane, too.
Lawyers are terrifying.
We should amend the constitution to keep them out of dangerous places.
Something tells me Mr. Tribe will regret this one.
Personally speaking, if I was running for POTUS, my book about myself would be “literature and memoir” AND “history and autobiography.” You will never really know me and I could care less. But you WILL know me by what I friggin’ do and do well. You will know what I give ya. Suffice it to say you will know that I wasn’t a stone criminal and had mother and father that loved me. By the way, I played high school and college football. The rest, heh heh heh…. WE SHALL SEE!
And ol’ Billy Boy O’Reilly pushes a variation of Godwin’s Law with the Nixon angle. Hardy har har…
Only a blind feminist and Romney supporter would find the Ann Romney story as ‘very cool’. It’s a story about how the Romney’s can afford spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in the boutique ‘sport’ of horse dressage. Shades of John Kerry’s ‘wind surfing’.
This story doesn’t relate at all to middlecass and working class people, let alone all minorities. Just another example of how both Romney’s as shetered a life they have led have little in common and neither of them can relate with ordinary Americans.
” There will only be one Richard M. Nixon. ” Yes; and he will always be a better president than Obama. He accomplished many things for people who did not vote for him. His being a psychopath is another matter.
Well, that statement of yours has to be one of the dumbest ones I’ve heard in a long time. I don’t remember anything good that Nixon accomplished for us people who didn’t vote for him. The man was a racist, crook and liar. He gave us the likes of Agnew, Mitchel and assorted other crooks and liars. To make a statement that he was a better president then Obama is just pure BS.
If I misread you, and you were just making a joke, please accept my apology.
Your an asshole!
Nixon: EPA, ERA, END TO THE DRAFT, TITLE 1X, END TO SEGREGATED CLASSES IN THE SOUTH, OPENING TO CHINA AND REVENUE SHARING, ENDING THE VIETNAM WAR ( YES, IT DID TAKE TO LONG ) Did he do these things out of pure goodness, no, of course not; but he did them anyway. That he was a racist,crook and liar is beside the point and has nothing to do with his accomplishments.
OBAMA: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! HIS SECRETARY OF STATE: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING1
Great post Taylor, and this hits the nail square on the head:
Today’s Democrats never seem to quite understand what symbolic wins mean and how deep that meaning goes. They’ve vastly underestimated what letting Scott Walker off the mat means.
They are hopeless and hapless. They will never get it. How is it possible that an entire political party lacks guile? But they do.
I appreciate Rep. Lisa Brown’s willingness to take a huge risk and articulate where the rubber meets the road in the abortion debate. If the fetus is recognized as human with human rights and those rights come into conflict with the human rights of the mother and the rights of the fetus are held higher, the mother is made a slave in her own body. This is not really about “privacy” it’s about being sovereign over one’s own body.
I totally agree
“I give you Bill O’Reilly, who’s old enough to know better. ”
What, the moronic repugnantklan/teabagger fluffer know better? The pathological liar know better? The HISTORY TEACHER who stated that AMERICANS committed a war crime at Malmady know better?!!!!!!!!
I would laugh if the urge to weep were not so overpowering.
Have no problem with the Romney’s owning horses. Its folks who have the money who don’t own horses who I think are weird.
On the other hand, Ann once joked about how she was keeping the number of horses they owned from her husband because he might get upset. Now that is out of touch.
Austerity has won in Greece, but socialists win in France. I guess in some places like Greece and this country, austerity seems to win. It will haunt anyone that puts austerity first.
Yup.
We have yet to see any concrete results from the change in France. At this point, I’m skeptical that they’ll actually challenge Germany and the ECB.
http://tinyurl.com/7mgymhp I can’t wait to see this!
I wouldn’t assume that austerity has won in Greece. They voted narrowly to keep the euro. If Greek voters are anything like American voters there is a disconnect between what they want and what they might have to do to get it.
Actually, the only parties that unconditionally support leaving the Eurozone are the Communists and Golden Dawn, the fascists. All the other parties favor staying in it under at least some conditions.
That may represent something of a disconnect from reality in Greek politics, a condition not unknown in the U.S. of A. Still, the attitude seems to be that they can get the deal altered sufficiently without abandoning the euro in one way or another. Scroll to the bottom of this article for a summary of the positions.