First Step Towards Sanity

American troops have pulled out of Iraqi cities, turning over the control of them to Iraqi security forces. This is the first step towards a complete US pullout, assuming of course that President Obama keeps his campaign promise to do exactly that.

Iraq will undoubtedly face an upsurge in violence, the security forces will very likely be tested in the next few weeks, and I hope that they're up to the task. If they crumble against their opponents, Obama will be forced to order American troops back in and we'll see this insanity perpetuated at least through the elections of 2012.

Politically, Iraq cannot be allowed to fall or the neo-cons will finally have something to rally around and possibly have a serious chance in 2012. A collapsed Iraq would mean that Obama really was "too inexperienced" to be president. Never mind the fact that it was an illegal war in the first place. Fox News viewers don't know this and Fox news is sadly still far and away the number one "news" station. If Iraqi forces lose control of their cities, Fox will plaster the images day and night, blaming all the carnage and destruction on the withdrawal. It will be like the scenes in Saigon after the US withdrawal in the 70's, which are still blamed on the Democrats even though Nixon was President at the time.

So I hope the Iraqi forces are up to the task, and that Obama is a good chess player. There are political forces both inside and outside the United States who are not only counting on the Iraqi withdrawal to fail, but may actively take part in supporting the opposition forces in Iraq. There is far too much money to be made with a perpetual war. The same people who put together the Project for a New American Century years ago, are still active and have reaped billions from the American goverment during the last six years. They will gladly reinvest a little of that money to destabilize Iraq and force Obama to order American troops back in.

In the meantime, I salute both President Obama and Iraqi President al-Maliki for taking this first important step, and I hope there is a lasting peace and stability in Iraq for years to come.

June 7, 2009

Sometimes Being Patriotic Means Having To Say Your Sorry

This week, at a speech in Cairo, Obama did something unheard of in a politician: He told the TRUTH! He acknowledged that the Palestinian people have suffered and were displaced by the creation of modern Israel. He was also the first president to admit that the US actively helped overthrow the democratic government of Iran during the Cold War (something so few Americans seem to know about). And finally, perhaps the one that has sent so many neo-conservative war mongers into hysterical fits, he stated the obvious fact that the attack on Iraq was a war of choice (and a bad one at that).

Conservative reaction has ranged from Sean Hannity of FOX News selectively editing the video of the speech in order to make it look like Obama was sympathizing with the attackers on 9/11, to Senator Jim Inhofe actually calling the speech "un-American" and that he couldn't tell "which side he's on." Now I expect any show on FOX News to distort the truth by any means possible, they are a political propaganda machine, not a news station. It was pretty shocking though to hear a Senator deliver such an inflammatory criticism of the president, especially when he is out of the country. I have no doubt that his comments were meant to motivate the fanatical base of the Republican party, but I thought I'd take some tome to explain to Senator Inhofe which side Obama and the rest of us patriotic Americans are on.

I'd like to make a distinction first between patriotism and nationalism. Dictionaries differ on their descriptions, but the overall consensus is that while patrotism means loving your country, nationalism means loving your country to a fanatical level. I think of Senator Inhofe as a Nationalist, someone who will staunchly
defend the country, even when it has clearly committed a major crime.
I consider myself a patriot. I love the USA and the ideals that it stands for, but when the government falls short of those ideals I look at the truth of the situation no matter how ugly it gets.

Like most Americans, I grew up with propagandized history classes that always painted America as the "good guys". The horrible things we did to Native Americans as we expanded west were not in my textbooks, nor was any mention of tidbits like the U.S. government backing a revolution against the democraticaly elected Guatemalan government at the behest of the United Fruit Company.

These events are facts, and facts need to be embraced and not ran away from (pay attention please creationsists). If we deny those portions of our history that we don't like, then we are no better than the Holocaust deniers, trying to paint a rosy picture where none exists. Our country has been involved in some atrocious behavior over the years, and only by recognizing that and accepting the uncomfortable truth of it, can we learn and grow beyond it.

Iraq was a war of choice, there is no disputing this. As the historical record begins to unfold it becomes more and more obvious that the Bush administration just wanted to invade Iraq and that there were no connections between Iraq and 9/11, Iraq or Iraq and Al Quaida, except perhaps sharing the same planet. In order to create a fictional connection, the Bush Administration used methods of torture to extract false confessions out of prisoners. These are the facts, and the ramifications of this are what President Obama inherited when he took office.

I applaud Obama for taking on these subjects in such a frank and honest way. It takes a bigger man (and country) to admit when we did something wrong, and his doing so in such a public way has helped restore our credibility with other nations around the world. Obama is a true patriot, and I am proud to have him as our president.

Sim City Recognizes Gay Marriage

(No this is not satire.) The latest version of the Sims video game allows gay couples to get married! Congratulations to Sims maker, Electronic Arts for recognizing that same sex marriage is really just a matter of equal rights for all.

May 27, 2009

The Prop 8 Decision: Legalese vs. Equality

heThe other day I wrote that Prop 8 was a masterstroke of evil and legalese. After reading the CA Supreme Court's decision last night, I suspect that some of the Justices would agree with me. There are several times in the document where the Justices note that they had to put their personal feelings aside and look strictly at the legality of Proposition 8. However, in their sticking to the letter of the law they legalized discrimination, and did so knowingly as is made obvious in the dissenting opinion by Justice Moreno.

There were two sticking points that made Proposition 8 stand. The first is that the California Constitution allows for a simple majority to pass an amendment. In the past this has allowed laws like Proposition 187 to pass, a law which denied public education and social services to illegal immigrant families. Prop 187 was ultimately struck down because the judge ruled that it was 'a “scheme” designed to regulate
immigration, an exclusively federal domain.'

This is where the second point comes in. There are no (as pointed out by Michaelangelo Signorile on his show yesterday) federal laws recognizing or protecting gays as a minority class. If there had been any federal recognition, the Justices could have struck down Proposition 8 on that merit, but without it, six of them felt that their hands were tied.

The dissenting vote by Judge Moreno was an interesting read, and naturally I found myself in agreement with most of his points. I thought he made the real point, the one overlooked by the majority in their opinon when he noted:

We recognized in the Marriage Cases that "draw[ing] a distinction between the name for the official family relationship of opposite-sex couples (marriage) and that for same-sex couples (domestic partnership)" (Marriage Cases, supra, 43 Cal.4th at p. 782) "impinges upon a same-sex couple's fundamental interest in having their family relationship accorded the same respect and dignity enjoyed by an opposite-sex couple." (Id. at p. 784.) Denying same-sex couples the right to call their relationships marriages treats them as " 'second-class citizens.' " (Id. at p. 785.) As we observed in the Marriage Cases, "there exists a substantial risk that a judicial decision upholding the differential treatment of opposite-sex and same-sex couples would be understood as validating a more general proposition that our state by now has repudiated: that it is permissible, under the law, for society to treat gay individuals and same-sex couples differently from, and less favorably than, heterosexual individuals and opposite-sex couples." (43 Cal.4th at p. 855.)

Considering that most of what was written above came from the earlier decision, I'm stumped that the same body of Justices could reach such a radically different conclusion. Justice Moreno makes some excellent points about how the Justices are not beholden to only those minorities identified by the US Constitution:

California’s equal protection doctrine has not been confined to that of federal Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence: "[O]ur state equal protection provisions . . . are possessed of an independent vitality which, in a given case, may demand an analysis different from that which would obtain if only the federal standard were applicable." (Serrano v. Priest (1976) 18 Cal.3d 728, 764.) The equal protection clause of our state Constitution is important as a provision of independent force and effect only when this court extends greater protection under that provision than the high court has extended under the equal protection clause of the federal Constitution.

It appears that there was plenty of precedent for the court to overturn Proposition 8, and I am truly confused as to what motivated the Justices to decide the way that they did. Was it simply political cowardice in the face of right wing media's constant attacks on "activist judges" and a threat by the Christian Right to start a recall vote against the Justices themselves? I'd like to think not, that the Justices would not bow to that sort of political pressure.

I'm trying to convince myself that they were adhering to the letter of the law concerning Constitutional amendments, but in doing so they sacrificed one of their prime duties, which is to prevent a minority class from being mistreated by the majority, or as Justice Moreno said in his dissenting opinion: "The equal protection clause is therefore, by its nature, inherently countermajoritarian. As a logical matter, it cannot depend on the will of the majority for its enforcement, for it is the will of the majority against which the equal protection clause is designed to protect."

So where does that leave us? As I said the other day, the momentum is on the side of the LGBT community. Public opinion has shifted in favor of same sex marriage and will continue to do so as it becomes less scary to the average voter. Voters will overturn Prop 8 in either 2010 or 2012 and this decision will go down as an embarrassing moment in California history.

May 25, 2009

The Prop 8 Decision: Equality Will Win Out in the End

Tomorrow the California Supreme Court will issue its verdict on whether or not Proposition 8 is constitutional. The answer to this seemed obvious on a personal level, but I know that legal definitions can often be more convoluted and confusing, so I spent the last two days reading the California Constitution and the arguments against Proposition 8 to see if I could come to my own conclusions. As I researched, reading many of the current articles about the whole subject, I realized that even if the Court upholds Prop 8, its days are numbered.

After looking over the California Constitution, I realized that Prop 8 was a masterstroke of evil and legalese. There was little or nothing in the existing California constitution to refute it, except for those points which are being decided on by the CA Supreme Court right now: Is Prop 8 invalid because it constitutes a revision rather than an amendment? And, does Prop 8 violate the Separation of Powers doctrine under the Constitution? The first one seemed obvious to me, but we're talking about legal definitions here rather than common sense, but the second question seemed more obtuse and required a lot more research before I was able to understand it.

Does Proposition 8 count as a revision of the Constitution rather than an amendment? Since it takes away a previously existing (albeit for a brief time) right for a group of people, the answer is an obvious "yes." Had same sex marriage never been legalized, there would have been a valid argument for it being and amendment, but stripping away a right that the same Supreme Court had previously ruled as existing, clearly makes it a revision and not an amendment.

The question of whether Proposition 8 violated the Separation of Powers Doctrine under the Constitution seemed a bit murky at first, and looking at the Constitution itself didn't help matters. All it states is that "The powers of state government are legislative, executive, and judicial. Persons charged with the exercise of one power may not exercise either of the others except as permitted by this Constitution." What is not said here is that while the legislative branch's job is to pass the laws, it is the job of the judicial branch to interpret them. Proposition 8 only exists because some California citizens didn't like a particular interpretation of the existing law by the courts, so they passed a law which took the power of interpretation away from the courts. In effect, it was a legal act of spite, and the proper action of the courts would be to strike it down.

The main argument I've heard for the Supreme Court keeping Prop 8 is that they don't want to overturn the will of the voters. This argument was presented strongly by one of the Justices during the the Prop 8 hearings in March and gave many people the impression that Prop 8 would indeed be upheld. If this is the basis of their ruling, it should be noted that the will of the voters is shifting, and now favors overturning Prop 8 by a slight majority. Time is on the side of progressives, and the average person is getting over their fears and realizing that the world won't end because gay people are allowed to marry each other.

So if tomorrow is a setback rather than a day of celebration, I am confident that we'll see Prop 8 overturned and same sex marriage legalized within the next two to four years. I'll even be as bold to predict that we'll see a federal same sex bill in the Senate be 2016. I'm betting that the Supreme Court will do the right thing though and tomorrow will be a day of (re)celebration.

May 24, 2009

Changes to this Blog

Over the next few weeks and months there will be some major changes to this blog. First and foremost will be the expansion of it's format, going beyond parody. I will from time to time be posting my own political musings, under the category of "opinion" (for all my right wing readers who have trouble telling the difference.) I expect to make my first opinionated post by tomorrow, so I figured a heads up was in order.

I will also be promoting some of my politically designed t-shirts and bumper stickers. Whether I do this as a blog entry or just something in the sidebar is yet to be decided, but I thought I would give everyone fair warning.

I also intend on posting far more frequently, hopefully getting at least two or three posts a week here. I enjoy writing for PM, even when my posts have been few and far between. Often I'll have a post in mind, but get so bogged down with my day job and other responsibilities that the moment passes and the story is no longer relevant. That is going to change, I will now set aside a little time each day for writing either here or in one of my other blogs.

If you're a fan of this blog, I hope you'll enjoy the expanded content. If you're one of the Conservatives who feel that you have been scandalized by this blog, don't worry, there's still time to become a progressive before I poke fun at your foibles. What do you think really made Arlen Spector change parties?