September 5, 2014

Kamal Saleem: Obama Attended DC Mosque On Christmas While Vacationing In Hawaii

While speaking to Rick Wiles on “Trunews” last week, phony ex-terrorist and Religious Right idol Kamal Saleem alleged that President Obama attended a mosque in Washington, D.C. on Christmas Day…while he was vacationing in Hawaii.

“We see him on Christmas, he goes to the mosque, on Christmas Day he’s in a mosque in Washington D.C. taking his shoes off to celebrate that day on Christmas Day in a Washington D.C. mosque,” he said.

-snip- (recording of the interview)

In every year of his presidency — 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 — Obama and his family were in his home state of Hawaii during Christmas. But perhaps Obama actually spent Christmas surreptitiously flying from Hawaii to Washington to secretly attend a mosque and managed to do so without anyone in the media reporting on it ... after all, it’s only a brisk, ten hour flight.​

Maybe Obama was going to a mosque with his ninja-Islamist babysitter that Saleem has warned about, or maybe Saleem was referring to a phony article from the satirical National Report about Obama attending a mosque on July 4th.

- See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/kamal-saleem-obama-attended-dc-mosque-christmas-while-vacationing-hawaii#sthash.Tk8902Wh.dpuf

September 5, 2014

Thankyou, DU'ers

David and I thank each and every one of you for the outpouring of support and expressions of joy you extended to us last week in the thread announcing our wedding. http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025460605

The ceremony was held at Amherst, MA., in the yard of Justice of the Peace Susan Lowenstein, a non-observant Jew that just happens to be a licensed minister thanks to the wonders of the internet. Suzie and her late husband were hippies in Haight-Ashbury (San Francisco) during the 1960's and 70's. Suzie is 87 years old.

The day was beautiful, temps in the high 70's, with a glorious sun filled sky. Three of our four sons attended the ceremony and the youngest was there, thanks to the ability to live-broadcast the ceremony to him in AZ.

The ceremony opened with a reading by our eldest son, Kenny, age 30:

The exchange of vows was next:



We then exchanged rings. Our son Pat, age 28, was the ringbearer for David, while our son Steve, age 26 carried mine. Our rings are inscribed in Hebrew with the words, "I am my Beloved's, and my Beloved is mine" from Solomon's Song of Songs, chapter 2, verse 16

We tried loading pics to DU but haven't been successful so, we invite those interested to see them on my FB page:
https://www.facebook.com/dbabets/media_set?set=a.938524199497202.1073741835.100000188918131&type=1



Dave and I were consciously aware that many lesbians and gay men cannot, at this time, have their relationships legally recognized. To you, we dedicate this video:

September 5, 2014

Ballot, Shmallot ... Roberts Is in Much Bigger Trouble - By Josh Marshall

By JOSH MARSHALL Published SEPTEMBER 4, 2014, 10:30 PM EDT

Democrats are going to fight to keep their former Kansas senate candidate, Chad Taylor, off the ballot (an odd turn of events to put it mildly). This comes after Kris Kobach, Secretary of State, announced that Taylor must stay on ballot. Kobach is intensely political and is likely the most successful and outspoken voter suppression advocate in the country today. Rick Hasen says the law is not dispositive. But life's hard. Kobach's the Secretary State. He gets to make the decision, or at least he gets the first pass at it. A Court will likely have the final say over whether he gets his way.

But here's the thing: I don't think it matters that much.

Obviously both sides can and will fight very hard to get their way. Because elections can come down to a tiny number of votes. And Taylor pulling even a single percent as a phantom candidate could make the difference. But if you look at the poll numbers that drove this decision, again, I don't think this is what this will come down to.

Several recent polls going back to mid-July drove this decision. But two in particular did it. One from mid-August from PPP: Roberts 32%, Taylor 25%, Orman 23% and a late August one from SurveyUSA: Roberts 37%, Taylor 32%, Orman 20%. A Rasmussen poll from a week earlier didn't given Orman as an option. And even in that case Roberts only topped Taylor by 4 points.

more
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/ballot-shmallot-roberts-is-in-much-bigger-trouble

September 5, 2014

The Incoherence of Antonin Scalia - By Richard A. Posner (Yes, THAT Judge Posner)

NOTE: This is a two year old article, published AUGUST 24, 2012, in the New Republic I found it thanks to a link in this article, excerpted here:

--------------------------------------------------

By Richard A. Posner

Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts
By Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner
(Thomson/West, 567 pp., $49.95)

JUDGES LIKE TO SAY that all they do when they interpret a constitutional or statutory provision is apply, to the facts of the particular case, law that has been given to them. They do not make law: that is the job of legislators, and for the authors and ratifiers of constitutions. They are not Apollo; they are his oracle. They are passive interpreters. Their role is semantic.

The passive view of the judicial role is aggressively defended in a new book by Justice Antonin Scalia and the legal lexicographer Bryan Garner. They advocate what is best described as textual originalism, because they want judges to “look for meaning in the governing text, ascribe to that text the meaning that it has borne from its inception, and reject judicial speculation about both the drafters’ extra-textually derived purposes and the desirability of the fair reading’s anticipated consequences.” This austere interpretive method leads to a heavy emphasis on dictionary meanings, in disregard of a wise warning issued by Judge Frank Easterbrook, who though himself a self-declared textualist advises that “the choice among meanings [of words in statutes] must have a footing more solid than a dictionary—which is a museum of words, an historical catalog rather than a means to decode the work of legislatures.”

Scalia and Garner reject (before they later accept) Easterbrook’s warning. Does an ordinance that says that “no person may bring a vehicle into the park” apply to an ambulance that enters the park to save a person’s life? For Scalia and Garner, the answer is yes. After all, an ambulance is a vehicle—any dictionary will tell you that. If the authors of the ordinance wanted to make an exception for ambulances, they should have said so. And perverse results are a small price to pay for the objectivity that textual originalism offers (new dictionaries for new texts, old dictionaries for old ones). But Scalia and Garner later retreat in the ambulance case, and their retreat is consistent with a pattern of equivocation exhibited throughout their book.

One senses a certain defensiveness in Justice Scalia’s advocacy of a textualism so rigid as to make the ambulance driver a lawbreaker. He is one of the most politically conservative Supreme Court justices of the modern era and the intellectual leader of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court. Yet the book claims that his judicial votes are generated by an “objective” interpretive methodology, and that, since it is objective, ideology plays no role. It is true, as Scalia and Garner say, that statutory text is not inherently liberal or inherently conservative; it can be either, depending on who wrote it. Their premise is correct, but their conclusion does not follow: text as such may be politically neutral, but textualism is conservative.

more
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/magazine/books-and-arts/106441/scalia-garner-reading-the-law-textual-originalism

September 5, 2014

The Twilight of Antonin Scalia

The conservative hero's fiery 2012 dissent on same-sex marriage could be his most influential opinion—but not in the way he intended.

GARRETT EPPS

When the Supreme Court reassembles in October, the same nine justices will gather in the robing room, but the Court itself will be different. As one example, consider the position of Justice Antonin Scalia. For a quarter of a century, Scalia has been the conservative wing’s alpha dog. By June of 2014, that seemed to have changed.

Scalia entered the October 2013 term with panache, capturing headlines with his contrived confession to a New York reporter that “I even believe in the Devil.” On the last day of the term, Scalia was not the center of attention; he wasn’t even there. (The Court’s public information staff said that he was “traveling.”) His junior colleague, Samuel Alito, delivered two of the term’s highest profile opinions, in Harris v. Quinn and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby.

There was a new sheriff in town.

Since Scalia’s appointment in 1986, he has succeeded brilliantly in seizing the spotlight, establishing himself as a conservative hero. He told one questioner to “get over it!” when asked about Bush v. Gore, and responded to pro-choice protesters with an indecent Sicilian hand gesture. Confronted politely by a gay student, he snapped, “If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder?”

more
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/the-twilight-of-antonin-scalia/378884/?single_page=true

September 5, 2014

Judge Richard Posner Pokes Scalia In Major Decision For Gay Marriage

By SAHIL KAPUR Published SEPTEMBER 4, 2014, 5:31 PM EDT

Is Justice Antonin Scalia the ironic hero of the gay rights movement?

Somehow, the conservative jurist's arguments in prior opinions have become a regular feature in lower court rulings legalizing gay marriage. The latest example came Thursday in a decision by renowned Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, with whom Scalia has an ongoing feud.

Posner wrote an impassioned opinion for a unanimous three-judge panel to overturn gay marriage bans in Wisconsin and Indiana. He said three past Supreme Court decisions in favor of gay rights — Romer v. Evans, Lawrence v. Texas and United States v. Windsor — didn't necessarily make gay marriage a constitutional right, although he noted that Scalia had suggested otherwise.

"But Justice Scalia, in a dissenting opinion in Lawrence ... joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Thomas, thought not. He wrote that 'principle and logic' would require the Court, given its decision in Lawrence, to hold that there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage," Posner wrote for the Court.

He was referring to Scalia's passionate dissent in a 2003 case which prohibited states from outlawing consensual same-sex sodomy. Scalia declared at the time that the Court had endorsed the "homosexual agenda" and had effectively knocked down the legal argument for prohibiting gay marriage. "Today's opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as formal recognition in marriage is concerned," Scalia wrote. He made a similar prediction in the 2013 ruling that axed the Defense of Marriage Act.

more
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/richard-posner-scalia-gay-marriage

September 5, 2014

Last of the Anti-Gay Marriage Judges

A judge upheld Louisiana's ban on same-sex marriage—but support for freedom to marry is now the norm across America.

When a judge refers to being gay as "lifestyle choices," you know there's going to be a problem.

That’s how U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman, appointed to the bench in 1983 by President Reagan, teed up his ruling on Wednesday upholding Louisiana's denial of the freedom to marry to gay couples.

Fortunately, Judge Feldman's legal opinion is an outlier, the only one out of 26 in federal courts in the last year that didn’t find marriage discrimination unconstitutional.

The very next day, another Reagan appointee, Judge Richard Posner, in a unanimous ruling for the 7th Circuit federal appellate court, struck down comparable marriage bans in Wisconsin and Indiana. In an authoritative, hard-hitting opinion Judge Posner eviscerated the justification Judge Feldman had latched onto, writing, "The only rationale that the states put forth with any conviction—that same-sex couples and their children don’t need marriage because same-sex couples can’t produce children, intended or unintended—is so full of holes that it cannot be taken seriously." Judge Posner’s dismantling of the specious arguments for the denial of the freedom to marry was so pointed, so effective, so direct—so readable!—that I wonder if any other state will dare trot them out again.

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/05/louisiana-s-gay-marriage-ban-is-an-outlier.html

September 5, 2014

The Religious Right's 'Nice Guy' Who Threw His Wife Under the Bus

Patricia Murphy

Bob McDonnell went from GOP family-values godsend to blaming everything on his ‘nut bag’ wife. Yet the Rolex-taking ‘Mr. Honest’ never acknowledged his own bad behavior.

When Bob McDonnell burst onto the national scene in 2009, he was everything the Republican Party needed—a good-looking family man who stopped the Obama juggernaut in its tracks in the swing state of Virginia just 12 months after the party’s McCain humiliation of 2008.

A family-values social conservative (he got his JD from Regent University), McDonnell cleverly wooed Commonwealth voters with his corn-dog “Bob’s for Jobs” campaign slogan and a heavy dose of what appeared to be the TV-perfect brood: five gorgeous kids, including a daughter who served in the military in Iraq, and a devoted, smiling wife who had once been a Washington Redskins cheerleader.

McDonnell’s family was emblazoned on his campaign bus and commercials. At the inaugural ball after he won the governor’s race, the McDonnells slow-danced to “Looks Like We Made It.” McDonnell had even written his master’s thesis on the breakdown of the American family and ways the Republican Party could build it back up. “As the family goes, so goes the nation,” he wrote.

Underlying the entire McDonnell package in 2009 was a known truth about the governor among political operatives who knew him and believed in him—that unlike the divas and the bullies and the egomaniacs who litter both political parties today, Bob McDonnell was just a good guy. Staff called him “Mr. Honest.” Republicans in Washington called him “the Boy Scout.”

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/05/the-religious-right-s-nice-guy-who-threw-his-wife-under-the-bus.html

September 5, 2014

Congress Set to Bow to Obama on ISIS War

Josh Rogin

Congress says it wants to have a role in authorizing Obama’s ongoing war against ISIS. But the White House is using a series of maneuvers to make sure that never happens.

In recent days, leading lawmakers in both parties have been talking tough about forcing the Obama administration to devise and then reveal its strategy to “degrade and destroy” ISIS, as President Obama has promised. There have been public calls for hearings and votes on whether Congress should formally give Obama the authority to do what he’s already doing in Iraq and what he might soon want to do in Syria.

But behind the scenes, there’s no clear plan for Congress to exert its will or even make its wishes known. Lawmakers, staffers, and officials told The Daily Beast that the administration’s refusal to tell anyone its strategy and work with Congress on a bill to authorize military action means the task of passing such a bill is a Sisyphean effort likely to fail. The Hill may not even be able to muster a vote, they say.

“Members will certainly have discussions about the path forward on [ISIS] when they return next week, but how could Congress vote to authorize some action when the president hasn’t even made a compelling case to the American people about what our national objective and strategy should be?” a senior House GOP aide told The Daily Beast.

There’s widespread frustration in both chambers and both parties about President Obama’s admission that “we don’t have a strategy yet” to deal with ISIS in Iraq and Syria. But now the lack of strategy is actually protecting Obama from oversight because Congress can’t authorize or reject what it can’t understand.

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/05/congress-set-to-bow-to-obama-on-isis-war.html

September 5, 2014

Hillary Clinton: US should lead on clean energy

Source: ASSOCIATED PRESS

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday called for the U.S. to become what she called the world’s 21st-century clean energy superpower.

In remarks Thursday at the annual National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas, Clinton credited northern Nevada’s selection for a $5 billion Tesla automobile battery plant to work in recent years for the state to become a leader in solar, wind and geothermal energy projects.

She also cited an expert comparing the importance of the Tesla plant to the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River.

Clinton’s speech to a standing-room crowd of more than 800 marked her return to the Las Vegas Strip hotel where a 36-year-old Phoenix woman was arrested in April after throwing a shoe but missing Clinton on stage.

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Read more: http://www.salon.com/2014/09/05/hillary_clinton_us_should_lead_on_clean_energy/