Month: July 2007

    With the growing sentiments in Washington among lawmakers turning away from our continued presence in Iraq building momentum, it appears that the military strategists have been working on exit strategies. It is especially important to consider options as the President continues to play the Armageddon card to use fear tactics to coerce people to continue to support his Iraq policies. Because of my skepticism of this administration, I cannot accept at face value any predictions that they make, no matter how sincere they may appear on the surface.

    So what do our brilliant military minds with the help of millions of tax payer dollars predict the outcome of our withdrawal will be? As usual that depends on who you talk to, some tend to side with the end of the world crowd, but many more tend to believe that while it will be bad, it will not be the apocalyptic scenario being bandied around the Beltway.

That was the conclusion reached in recent “war games” exercises conducted for the U.S. military by retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson. “I honestly don’t think it will be apocalyptic,” said Anderson, who has served in Iraq and now works for a major defense contractor. But “it will be ugly.”

However, just as few envisioned the long Iraq war, now in its fifth year, or the many setbacks along the way, there are no firm conclusions regarding the consequences of a reduction in U.S. troops. A senior administration official closely involved in Iraq policy imagines a vast internecine slaughter as Iraq descends into chaos but cautions that it is impossible to know the outcome. “We’ve got to be very modest about our predictive capabilities,” the official said. NY Times

    The consensus is that Iraq will be divided into the three ethnic groups that now comprise Iraq. We will have the Kurds in the north, the Sunnis in the west, and the Shia in the center and south.  I listen to these predictions with a grain of salt, remember these are the same guys who predicted that we would be welcomed with garland wreaths, that the insurgency was dead, and that the mission was accomplished.

    I have a different take on the outcome of our withdrawal. Now of course for all of us this is conjecture, but for what it’s worth here is my two cents. I think that the government is going to collapse shortly after our departure. This government has shown time and again that it is either incapable or unwilling to protect, govern, or enlist the support of the people. More and more Iraqis believe that this government in particular and politics in general have nothing to do with their day to day survival. An infant government cannot rule without the support of the people. So, the government collapses, then what?

    I believe that after some sectarian violence and infighting, Mr. Moktada al-Sadr, the Shite cleric will emerge as the de facto leader of Iraq. Mr. Sadr has already aligning himself to become the populist leader that the Iraqi people can rally behind. Mr. Sadr has been able to gain traction being on both sides, he appears as an outsider, but uses politics to advance his agenda, he appears as a peaceful man, yet his Sadr Brigade has been carrying out attacks against Sunnis. He already has a reputation for standing up against the Americans and he does not have a clear alliance with Iran.

BAGHDAD, July 18 — After months of lying low, the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr has re-emerged with a shrewd strategy that reaches out to Iraqis on the street while distancing himself from the increasingly unpopular government.

Mr. Sadr and his political allies have largely disengaged from government, contributing to the political paralysis noted in a White House report last week. That outsider status has enhanced Mr. Sadr’s appeal to Iraqis, who consider politics less and less relevant to their daily lives.

Mr. Sadr has been working tirelessly to build support at the grass-roots level, opening storefront offices across Baghdad and southern Iraq that dispense services that are not being provided by the government. In this he seems to be following the model established by Hezbollah, the radical Lebanese Shiite group, as well as Hamas in Gaza, with entwined social and military wings that serve as a parallel government. NY Times

    If I were working on the plan after withdrawal, I would be trying to rehabilitate the relationship with Mr. Sadr. He will be one of the main, if not the main player after our withdrawal. Of course our clowns in Washington will find a way to let another opportunity slip away. Once again they will allow short-sightedness and our relationship to Israel to ruin any chance we could have to continue to exert some level of influence in Iraq. Mark my words when this thing goes bad, it will deteriorate quickly. Once we withdrawal there will be a lot of people jockeying for position. My fear is that due to our inaction or maybe by our design we will end up with another Saddam. Another line in the dictator/strongman series that Washington and the Pentagon love to use for just such an emergency. There are many twists and turns waiting to be played out in this plot, but my money is on Mr. Sadr and short of his assassination I think he will be king. It’s good to be king!

As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand. – Josh Billings

The Disputed Truth

Everyone knows “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Given the fact that this knowledge is universal, what chances do we have for an uncorrupted government? My guess is that the chances are few at best.

Reading the papers this morning on the FBI raid on Alaska Senator Ted Stevens’ House yesterday, searching for information concerning bribery, including a lavish refurnishing of his home, I recalled him as the man who promoted the “bridge to nowhere” (which, according to recent reports, will be built despite protests). As the former Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, he had one of the most powerful positions in Congress (and still has a lot of power even after the Democrats took over the Senate). He oversaw almost 1 trillion bucks in spending, a lot critical to Alaska, if not of real necessity to US taxpayers.

Stevens is an 83 year old man and has been in office 24 years. As such he is an elder statesman. But like so many of our long-term politicians, in both parties, the rise to power often has emphasized greed over wisdom.

It is this natural affinity to the corruption of power that has given us a lobbyist industry to prey on it. As I understand it there are five times the number of lobbyists than there are Congressfolks (indeed, many of them are former Senators and Representatives!), and they form a wall between the elected officials and the electorate.

The system, then, provides the incentive for corruption.

Take earmarks… the way a legislator adds his or her private projects to a bill after debate has ceased, but before it is approved. When Pelosi and Hoyer took over the House, they were clear that they would remove or reduce earmarks. Then they became noticeably silent about the situation, finally trying to justify a new way of controlling them. Yeah. Sure.

Once in power, the tendency toward corruption seems to start dropping roots… almost unnoticed at first, then, when it is too late, perfectly clear.

If the corporate institutions that control the lobbies thought there was a better way to get what they wanted, things would perhaps change. But why would they kill a successful thing? The pharmaceutical lobby alone is a good example… we pay the largest prices in the world for prescription drugs (unless we are under the VA), even if we are on Medicare. Why? Because lobbyists won… and actually wrote the laws (and provided jobs for our legislators like Tauzin who now make six- and seven-figure incomes from the business.)

Every election we hear candidates run on platforms which are against corruption. We retain our hopes. We believe them. And, almost invariably, we get screwed.

If this could change, I know we would all work for it. But it seems unlikely.

Under The LobsterScope

Dave Johnson over at Seeing The Forest (blogging for five years now, if you can believe it,) keeps this question at the top of his site: “Who is our economy FOR, anyway?”

I think it’s well understood by everyone, at least at some level, that when job cuts, decreased quality health care, longer working hours, pollution, gutting worker safety laws, destroying unions and keeping down wages are good for ‘the economy’, it doesn’t refer to our personal economies. Those personal economies require work, health, time with loved ones, rest, water and decent food.

The economy is talked about as if it has a right of personhood, and a person whose advancement according to certain measures is an inherent good. Yet what it really means as generally used in media discourse is the right of a very specific set of people to continue making a lot of money at the expense of everything and everyone else. Then when individuals talk about the economy, what they generally want to know is ‘am I going to have a job/healthcare/food for my family next year,’ and this gets mixed up with the resource hoarding of a very few people.

Since “the economy” is used interchangeably for both these micro and macro issues, pronouncements by environmentalists often run into trouble. For example, it’s reasonable to say that a lot of large scale economic activities have to fundamentally change in order for society to sustain itself. We must stop, for example, emitting so much carbon dioxide, and after we cut emissions drastically, we’re going to have to keep on cutting. That has a lot of serious, possibly terminal, consequences for certain large scale economic activities, which sounds like a world of doom and gloom. Though it doesn’t mean that no one will have a job, or that people won’t get to travel or have enough food; certainly, it doesn’t have to mean those things. Yet as the interests of the few who benefit from our current system have conflated their financial impunity with you getting your paycheck next month, people can be made afraid of the necessary next steps to take in our global crisis.

What people need to realize is this: Destroying the environment destroys economic productivity.

It’s that simple. Most of this, many of you probably know already. Yet discussions keep coming up about the need to balance the economy with the environment, as though there were some non-fictional separation possible between the two. I’m thinking there’s a missing connection somewhere. Read on to see what it took to finally make the Brazilian government wake up to the economic urgency of climate change:

… A number of recent events have led political leaders and ordinary Brazilians to conclude that they are not immune to climate change. First and foremost was a disastrous 2005 drought in the Amazon that killed crops, kindled forest fires, dried up transportation routes, caused disease and wreaked economic havoc.

Brazil sees itself as an emerging agricultural and industrial power, and global warming could have a disastrous impact on those aspirations. Scientists note that Brazil’s southern breadbasket flourishes largely because of rainfall patterns in the Amazon that are likely to be altered if droughts recur or climate change accelerates.

… Brazil also envisions constructing a large network of dams throughout the Amazon over the next several decades to supply electricity to its industrial heartland in São Paulo, 2,000 miles south of here. But those plans depend on water flows in the region’s vast rivers not drying up. …

Less water leads directly to having less power, less food, and poorer ecosystems.

Less predictable weather leads directly to having less food and fiber.

Poorer ecosystems, or less diverse communities of other living things, leads directly to disease and starvation, which means fewer, sicker human beings.

The truth is that our current economic system is destroying the basis of its own productivity, and everyone’s future livelihoods. It’s killing off the climate that supports our food production, the animal species we eat, the living communities that provide the air we breathe and our bulwark against disease. Consider that you can’t speak of having an economy on the moon. Nothing lives there. Yet the natural consequences of unrestrained machine industrialism are to make the earth progressively more and more like the moon. All clean, all bare, all dead. It would be very orderly, tidy, and efficient, but dead things don’t have economies, so who cares?

This is the bill of goods you’ve been sold: That things, mere objects, have inherent value. Things like money, and stock, and rocks and the things we make out of them. That things like ‘economies,’ abstract word games that we just invented in order to think more clearly about our activities, have value of themselves. They do not.

Value isn’t a property of things, it’s a creation of humanity or other resource-consuming critters, and at base, it’s only living things that have value or can assign it.

What is the value of the DNA sequence that converts sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into sugar? Effectively infinite, because without that DNA sequence, we wouldn’t exist. Free oxygen wouldn’t be present in our atmosphere, a gas that another set of DNA sequences can turn into eighteen times the cellular energy it’s possible to produce from phosphorus compounds without oxygen present. Without that 18-fold jump in efficiency, it wouldn’t be possible for multicellular lifeforms to have developed.

But back up, don’t miss this part: The atmosphere we have isn’t just affected by living things, it was originally created and is currently maintained by them. Remember that next time someone tells you that it’s arrogant to think humans can affect the climate.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. But also, what does this prospective decrease in resources really mean for all of us? How do we picture it? Let’s try a story.  

Matt Stoller was very on point the other day when he described what we’re being pushed towards as a state of nuclear feudalism. A state of technical modernism, but widespread poverty and functional slavery; because there would no longer, by any reasonable estimation, be enough to go around for everyone to have a decent life. This month’s Discover had an article in it about the collapse of healthcare in Iraq, but also an interview with scifi author William Gibson, the originator (as many of you may know, but just in case) of dystopian cyberpunk. He said, entirely apropos of this conversation:

… In Neuromancer – although it’s never dated in the book, I always assumed it was happening around 2035 – you glimpse the United States, and it’s not that great a place. There doesn’t seem to be any middle class. There’s nothing between these post-human superrich people and the Street, with a capital S. Nobody’s ever more than one door away from the Street. It’s quite grim and maybe it’s become a kind of cliche, but on the other hand, it’s exactly like Mexico City. It’s really similar to a lot of the Third World. And so I think that the cyberpunk future, if you want to generalize it, is a future in which globalization really does work both ways, and everybody – unless they’re very, very, very rich – winds up getting to be part of the Third World. …

And there, in much fewer words than I’d take to say so, is what will likely happen if we stay on the economically ‘productive’ path we’re on right now. Not quite the moon, but headed that way.

Dirtier air, less clean water, less that’s refreshingly green and productive of oxygen, less to eat, less varieties of things to eat. That’s what we’d face. A wholesale loss of the conditions that support life in all its richness, a marked decrease in the value of everything, because there won’t be as many living things to value it.

So. That’s my take. But then, I thought that the story of how cyanobacteria made life possible by creating the atmosphere was very exciting. I’m kind of funny that way.

I was chatting with Booman just a little while ago and he mentioned that he felt the Booman Tribune was suffering something of a panda deficit. I think I can fix that.

Let the healing begin

[Cross-posted at ProgressiveHistorians, Daily Kos, My Left Wing, Open Left, and Talk Left.]

In Part I of this series, I explained the purpose behind these diaries: to explore the failed mechanism of federal impeachment and suggest ways to fix its flaws.  Yesterday, though, we examined only the instances where impeachment worked: nine cases handled according to protocol, with appropriate outcomes and streamlined processes.  Today, we’ll look at the flip side of the coin: nine cases where impeachment was inappropriately politicized or should never have occurred at all owing to procedural errors or a lack of other removal methods.

As mentioned in the previous installment, my major source for the following is this PBS timeline; other sources include this U.S. Senate article, and this collection of documents from JusticeLearning, though I’ve consulted additional sources (including Wikipedia and JSTOR) and my own memory where necessary.
The Political Impeachments

The following four cases constitute some of the most disgraceful moments in the history of the United States Congress.  In each instance, a federal official was brought to the Senate on trumped-up charges and forced to endure a humiliating trial with little evidence whatsoever before finally being acquitted, often by the narrowest of margins.  The fact that this category includes three of the five highest officials ever to be impeached — two Presidents and a Supreme Court justice — makes its existence all the more alarming:

• Samuel Chase (Supreme Court Justice, 1804): Chase, a distinguished jurist and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was a cantankerous individual and a political opponent of President Thomas Jefferson.  In the first attempt on record to “pack” the Supreme Court, Jefferson presented obviously trumped-up impeachment charges of “making political statements” against Chase to the House of Representatives, who duly impeached the Justice.  In the Senate, Vice President Aaron Burr, who had become a political opponent of Jefferson, conducted the trial with fairness and decorum and enabled Chase to squeak by with a narrow victory.  While the failure of the impeachment against Chase speaks well for the process, what remains troubling is that Chase was impeached at all.
• Andrew Johnson (President, 1868): You don’t have to be a Lost Causer to see this as the most odious of political impeachments.  (Unitary Moonbat has a different take on this — see here.)  Johnson was a politically inept drunkard and white supremacist who was also a staunch supporter of Abraham Lincoln’s lenient Reconstruction policies toward the South.  Unfortunately for Johnson, he also earned the ire of the Radical Republicans who made up the vast majority of Congressmen before the South was readmitted to the Union; these Representatives passed a blatantly unconstitutional law, the Tenure of Office Act, and then impeached Johnson for violating it.  With people all across the North clamoring for Johnson’s head, the Constitution was only saved by the courageous actions of seven Republican Senators, who voted with the President and were subsequently hounded from public life by their irate constituents.  Notable among these were James W. Grimes, who dragged himself into the Senate after suffering a stroke to vote against impeachment, and Edmund G. Ross, who was one of the most radical of Republicans but found the impeachment charges to be criminal and unnecessary.
• Harold Louderback (U.S. District Court Judge, 1933): Louderback was brought up on impeachment charges for allegedly having repaid a Senator who had promoted his candidacy for judge by paying fat receivership fees to the Senator’s brother, an officer of Louderback’s court.  Nevertheless, the House Judiciary Committee voted to censure, not impeach, Louderback for his conduct.  That should have been the end of it, but Fiorello La Guardia, the fiery New York Republican Congressman who had introduced articles of impeachment in the first place, gave such a fiery speech on the House Floor that he induced the general membership to overturn the Committee’s recommendation and vote for impeachment.

  La Guardia was clearly trying to turn the Louderback case into his own personal crusade to gain higher office, and most Senators did not even bother to remain in the chamber during the month-long trial that consumed much of the Senate’s time during the first Hundred Days of the New Deal.  Louderback was acquitted on all counts, and on all but one by less than a majority vote.  After the trial, an outraged Senator Henry Ashurst of Arizona convinced the Senate to finally adopt rules allowing most of the evidence in impeachment trials to be heard by the Judiciary Committee rather than by the full Senate.

• Bill Clinton (President, 1999): The Clinton impeachment is within the political memory of most all who blog today, and for my own generation was a formative event.  Most everyone knows now, as they did then, that the entire impeachment was a trumped-up political ploy; Clinton was essentially impeached, in the memorable words of Barney Frank, for lying about “what did he touch [on Monica Lewinsky] and when did he touch it.” The Senate was unable to muster a simple majority on either count of impeachment, though the almost completely party-line vote was a shocking display of the fallibility of impeachment as an appropriate and properly-functioning tool.

The Procedural Errors

Though they were clearly guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, the following two men would never be impeached at all under current Senate impeachment rules; their appearance in this list is the result of the Senate’s misreading of the Constitutional reach of impeachment:

• William Blount (Senator, 1797): Perhaps the most obviously culpable of the men impeached by Congress, Blount got into trouble when he tried to incite Creek and Cherokee Indians into helping the British Government reconquer Florida, apparently in exchange for a payoff from the British.  This was quite clearly an act of treason, as the official policy of the United States at the time was to obtain Florida at all costs.  Blount was immediately expelled from the Senate when word of this scheme reached Congress in 1797.  However, the House drew up and passed articles of impeachment against Blount.  The Senate considered the matter and concluded that it could not impeach a Senator, only a member of the Executive branch (which is why Blount is the only Congressman ever impeached).

  Improbably, Blount was never formally charged with treason, and even more improbably, he was elected by his constituents to be Speaker of the Tennessee State Senate.  He died right in the middle of this resurrection of his political career, in 1800.  Count this one as a case where the governmental systems surrounding impeachment failed the American people — even though the Senate was quite correct on the constitutional issue, Blount should have been charged with treason, tried before the Supreme Court, and barred from holding political office.

• William Belknap (Secretary of War, 1876): The only Cabinet member ever to be impeached by Congress, Belknap had pretty clearly been receiving a string of lavish kickbacks for years in exchange for a military appointment, shocking even the numbed observers of the scandal-ridden Grant presidency.  He ends up in this category not because his guilt is in doubt — it’s not — but because his trial revolved principally around the question of whether Belknap could be tried even though he had resigned his office before impeachment charges were even voted on by the House.  The Senate voted that he could indeed be tried under these conditions, but the preliminary vote on this issue did not pass the two-thirds majority required for impeachment, foreshadowing the eventual acquittal of Belknap by a similar non-supermajority.  Most of the Senators who voted for acquittal argued they no longer had jurisdiction over Belknap.  Once such a proceeding had been shown to be an exercise in futility, no already-resigned official was ever impeached again.

The Federal Convictions

Why are these guys on this list?  Doesn’t the fact that they were convicted of federal felonies make them obviously worthy of impeachment?  I agree that removal from the bench was required for both of these men, but it should not have taken impeachment to accomplish it — there should be a provision for removing them automatically upon conviction, without wasting the Senate’s time:

• Harry E. Claiborne (U.S. District Court Judge, 1986): Should a federal judge be impeached for falsifying his income tax returns?  If he’s spending two years in federal prison for said act yet refuses to resign his judgeship, absolutely.  In its first impeachment trial since Halsted Ritter’s conviction in 1936 for exactly the same charge, the Senate removed Claiborne from office by a wide margin.  Strangely, current U.S. Senators Orrin Hatch and Jeff Bingaman voted not guilty on all counts, and Carl Levin voted not guilty on three of the four counts.  Hatch is the former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
• Walter L. Nixon (U.S. District Court Judge, 1989): “The other Nixon” had pretty clearly committed perjury before a federal grand jury regarding his possibly illegal intervention into a drug prosecution with which he had personal ties.  Like Harry Claiborne three years earlier, Nixon had already been convicted of the charge by a federal grand jury; the Senate duly ratified that verdict and removed Nixon from the Bench.  Nixon joined with Alcee Hastings in contesting the Senate’s right to hear evidence before a subcommittee instead of the full Senate, but a unanimous Supreme Court declared that it had no right to intervene in the process of congressional impeachment.

The Political Acquittal

Finally, we have perhaps the most disgraceful impeachment ever to have been handled by Congress: a judge who was clearly guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, but who was acquitted by the Senate on partisan grounds:

• Charles Swayne (U.S. District Court Judge, 1903): A twenty-seven-year impeachment drought was broken by the impeachment of Swayne, who was brought up on a variety of charges ranging from unlawful use of judicial contempt against two attorneys who were attempting to have him removed from the bench (the same charge that had been levied against James H. Peck seventy-three years earlier), to stealing confiscated property and cash from the state, to unlawfully residing outside his district; apparently, this last charge carried the stiffest federal sentence at the time.  Swayne did not even attempt to deny all the charges, arguing instead that they did not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors necessary for impeachment.  Despite the clear terming of Swayne’s extradistrict residence as a “high misdemeanor” by the very federal statute that governed it, Senatorial Republicans found Swayne’s line of reasoning persuasive and acquitted him on all counts on party lines, denying pro-impeachment forces even a simple majority on any count of impeachment.  The magnanimous Republicans even paid Swayne’s legal fees after the trial.

  The Swayne case is notable for several reasons.  First, it marked only the second instance in which impeachment proceedings had been introduced into the House by someone other than a Congressman (the earlier case being Luke Lawless’s one-man vendetta against Judge Peck in 1830); in this instance, a joint resolution of the Florida Legislature got the ball rolling.  Second, after the trial took up two and a half months of the Senate’s time, Senators first proposed a new mechanism by which the Judiciary Committee could hear evidence of impeachment instead of the full Senate (the plan was not implemented for another thirty years).  Perhaps most importantly, though, Swayne’s botched impeachment is an excellent example of how the arcane rules of impeachment enabled an obviously grafting and abusive judge to get off scot-free with no punishment or censure at all.

In the final installment of this series, I’ll outline three recommendations for how to fix our broken and battered system of federal impeachment.

I’m headed out to Drinking Liberally for the evening. If you need a pick-me-up, I recommend viewing the video of Teddy Kennedy roaring and raging against Trent Lott’s opposition to health care for children. It made my day.

If you still need more chicken soup for your soul, check out John Nichol’s take on Ted Steven’s seat in Alaska.

Have a good evening and try not to launch any unnecessary land wars in Asia.

This morning I had one of those mornings when I look around and ask myself “What the hell am I doing here?” I was invited to take part in the Maria Leavey Breakfast series, which gets blogger types around the table with various and sundry political types. I wasn’t able to break bread with Grover, but this morning I got some face time with Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. It wasn’t until I stepped off the elevator in the Capitol and started looking for the room number of the meeting that I realized it was the door with “Office of the Speaker” emblazoned above it in gold letters.

That was when I asked myself what the hell I was doing there? Since when do I rate an hour or more of the Speaker’s time? Did somebody make a mistake with the guest list? Did they check my pageviews and traffic stats? Then again, if I now find I’m offered a place at the table, I might as well take a seat. Well, For what it’s worth, I got in, got a seat, and got to ask a question. The audio and transcript aren’t up yet, and I’ll link to it when it’s available, I think my question actually threw Pelosi off for a minute. (Just a minute, though. She quickly got back on message.)

I wasn’t sure I was going to ask a question at all. In settings like this, I tend to do more listening than talking, and need time to go off an analyze things later. But after hearing Nancy’s remarks, I knew I had to ask a question if I got a chance. What kind of a blogger, gay dad, and Rainbow Families board member would I be if I didn’t?

It was when Pelosi was making her remarks that the my question started forming in my mind because, of the three broad topics she introduced to cover a wide range of initiatives, one of them was strengthening families. Under that heading, she talked about education and healthcare as two means of strengthening families. You can probably guess where I was headed. Not for nothing have I spent the last few years blogging about the myriad ways our families get left out of the very concept of families and thus get none of the protections other families are afforded. We’re not even eligible for most off them.

Childcare. Family leave. Health insurance. Even something simple simple as joining a freakin’ gym isn’t so simple when you have to make the case that you qualify as a family, when various and sundry laws say you actually don’t. For example, I just started working as an independent consultant. I’m buying my own health insurance as a result (not cheat, by the way, but I’ll talk about health care later). If I were legally married to my husband, I’d have the option of being carried on his insurance. But right now that’s not possible. That’s just one of many issues where LGBT families get the short end of the stick.

So I raised my hand, and when the microphone came to me, I managed to get something close to this out:

As a working father of a four-year-old, with another on the way [Ed. Note: At this point the Speaker gave me a big smile and said “Congratulations!”], and as a gay dad I’d like to hear more about strengthening families. How do we do it in a way that strengthens all families, and that recognizes the reality of diverse families; families where both parents work, families where parents aren’t married to each other, families where the parents can’t marry each other, single parents, etc.?

I’m not sure if the way I opened my question disarmed her, but I’d swear the Speaker blinked and even stammered for a minute, like she wasn’t expecting that one. (Even though my question came close on the heels of one about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which the speaker favored getting rid of.) But it was only a minute. She quickly righted herself and gave an answer that basically, and I’m paraphrasing here until the transcript is up, that boils down to this: we should already be there, and we can get there by supporting the current agenda. Put another way, we can get to a more progressive place where we will strengthen all families, but not yet.

That’s about what I expected. It’s a pragmatic answer. The way to get there is to strengthen our position in ways that are possible now. Which implies that what we’re asking for isn’t possible now.

Well, I’ve never been accused of being pragmatic. And I didn’t hear anything in the Speaker’s answer that offers a solution for the issues our families are facing now. I didn’t expect to, but I brought up the question because it occurs to me more and more often that the question needs to be brought up more and more often, every time there’s a discussion on an issue that’s relevant to our families. And just about every issue is relevant to our families. From economics to health care, there’s not one that doesn’t touch us and few where we don’t get shafted. Because the things our governments does to strengthen families are the very things denied our families even as we subsidize them.

The problem is that we’re not even considered families when it comes to policy and social programs. We’re labeled as “nonfamilies.”

And if you’re not family, not next of kin, you don’t count for much and you don’t have many rights at a time like this, when you’ve lost a member of your “non-family.” Maybe it’s just a matter of not knowing what to call families who don’t fit the traditional mold. The QueerlyKos round-up also mentioned the brouhaha Condoleeza Rice called when she acknowledged AIDS czar Jeff Dybul’s partner and “mother-in-law” at his swearing in. Technically Dybul’s partner’s mother can’t be his mother in law, because Dybul and his partner can’t have a legally recognized relationship that would make them anything in law but two separate people sharing a roof, etc.

In other words, a “nonfamily.” In the legal sense, at least, though heterosexual “nonfamilies” pretty much always have the option to marry receive the benefits and protections afforded based on marital status. In other words, they’re only missing a piece of paper that they could easily obtain if they so choose. (And it will be argued that “gays can get married, if they just marry a member of the opposite sex”; which essentially means they have to significantly alter the make-up of their families. Something heterosexuals don’t have to do.)

But that brings up the question of what exactly makes a family? Is it legally little more than a marriage certificate? What the article doesn’t mention is what roles the couples labeled “nonfamily” play in one another’s lives. It’s likely they do the same things that married couples do, from supporting one another financially to taking care of each other through illness, even raising children together and caring for one another in old age; all things that could be included in a conservative case for same-sex marriage.

…That leads me to ask to what degree that’s true of the rest of the “nonfamily” households out there. To what degree are we subsidizing “state sanctioned families” with pensions and social security that can’t be inherited, taxes paid because we can’t file jointly if it benefits us, health insurance paid for because we can’t get partner/spousal coverage, etc. with what’s sometimes bitterly referred to as “the gay tax,” because what we can’t pass on to or inherit from our partners simply goes back into the system.

And to the degree that “nonfamily families” are subsidizing “state sanctioned families,” why should we?

Pelosi’s answer had two basic points: (1) that a rising tide of progressive policy victories would raise all boats, including those of us in the “nonfamily units” boat, and (2) that we have to work on convincing more people that our boats should be raised. Can we be sure of that? I mean, at present we have to face the fact that our families’ boats aren’t even in the same body of water. To extend the metaphor, we’re more or less shunted off into a separate lock, where we sit and watch the water level rise and lift other boats, while it basically stays the same where we are.

And the half-measures we’ve gotten thus far are the equivalent of raising the water level in the lock one teaspoon at a time. That’s why it’s hard to cheer civil unions that don’t leave us much better off than we were before. In fact, they just create more battles for us to fight.

Andrew Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern University and author of the book “Same Sex, Different States: When Same-Sex Marriages Cross State Lines,” cited two pressing issues as states wrestle with the evolving definitions of couples: “tangible benefits” and “symbolic approval.”

“If you read the New Jersey statute, it gives couples all the same rights and responsibilities and benefits” as heterosexual couples, Mr. Koppelman said. The objection that gay couples have is that civil unions are “different, and by implication, inferior to heterosexual unions.”

Steven Goldstein, chairman of Garden State Equality, a statewide gay-rights organization, said that to date, 193 of the 1,359 couples who have registered for civil unions in New Jersey have reported to him that their companies are not recognizing their unions, though none have yet filed suit to challenge the law. “Companies are offering a gazillion excuses,” Mr. Goldstein said. “The law says civil union partners should be treated as spouses,” he said. “It doesn’t say they are spouses.”

Some companies, particularly those that are self-insured — like 51 percent of New Jersey businesses — contend that federal law creates obstacles to providing equal benefits. Some cite the federal Defense of Marriage Act, while many others, including United Parcel Service, refer to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974. The act, known as “Erisa,” pre-empts state laws and allows self-insured employers to choose how to define “spouse.”

Tell me again how the answer is a state-by-state patchwork solution. I think that unless and until there’s a federal solution we’re going to continue seeing more of our families working without a net, and inevitably hitting the ground. Hard.

I don’t know what a federal solution looks like. Maybe it looks like looks like a challenge to DOMA. Maybe it looks like chipping away at it one issue at a time. Maybe it looks like establishing some kind of equal legal status at the federal level (since states and private companies often used the lack of federal legislation as an excuse not to do the right thing).

I do know that we have to keep talking about the reality of our families and asking pointed questions. Even if it makes some people — including some pretty nice people who are on our side — nervous.

After all, they’re not — as many of us are — living with the possibility that if the rug should get pulled out from under our families, the support that would be there for any other family won’t be — can’t be — there for ours.

From where I sit. some people could stand to be a little more nervous.

Crossposted from The Republic of T.

For better working links go to www.threeriversonline.com.

I wish I could say that I was watching Sicko as a completely disinterested party. Unfortunately, I’m one of those 50 million Americans that doesn’t have health insurance–

–quick aside: I indirectly work part time for UPMC. I even have an UPMC identification card. But part timers don’t get health care benefits for the smaller company that I work for and apparently UPMC, with only 400 million in profits last time I checked, can’t afford to cover me as well. Quick note to all you folks who spout AMA propaganda about the “long waits” whenever single payer comes up: I would prefer long waits to never seeing a doctor at all–

–True, I’m in good health (I think. Nothing has fallen off, so far….) and I walk a lot but it would be nice to talk to a doctor other than in an emergency room. The main thing I took away from the movie is that other people in other countries live much better than we do, period. They get better health care, better education, and probably better lives. And yes there are other reasons why they want us to hate France as Mike Moore makes clear in this clip. I guess this is why your usual corporate media outlets don’t do more journalism about How People Live abroad. One: They rather you didn’t know and two: you might notice that where people have the six week vacations and unemployment insurance that pays better than our minimum wage they tend to have real opposition/labor parties, as opposed to pretend ones that think NAFTA is going great. I guess, and this could be the theme of all of Mike Moore’s movies: I live in a country that really doesn’t give a fuck about me. Hail America and so forth….

Moore also offers a number of solutions at his website. I’m definitely printing out that Sicko health care card above. Its the only health card I’ll have. There’s also this:

ACTION PAGE
Tell congress to pass HR 676 now.
31101 submissions so far.

Moore also points out that there is a House Bill that would simply expand Medicare to everybody. Sounds good. I’m sure the insurance lobbies and the AMA will take a break on this and let it pass without objection or outcry or multimillion scary ad campaigns. Yes I like to openly amuse myself. Related: there was a big debate recently between Nathan Newman and Ezra Klein about whether the states should take the lead on providing health care or the feds. I found myself on the Nathan Newman side of things here. Let the states take a crack at it. The federal Republican only filibuster will kill all meaningful change in health care policy and other issues of meaning as well.

The first bill the Senate passed this year was the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 (S.1). The House passed their version of the bill later in the year. But Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) used procedural tricks to prevent the Senate from participating in a conference with the House to reconcile the differences in the two versions of the bill. No bill can become law until the House and Senate vote on and pass identical versions. DeMint was single-handedly preventing this from happening.

DeMint’s concern was that tough earmark disclosure rules that were in the Senate bill would be stripped out during the conference reconciliation. The only way to get around DeMint’s obstruction was to hash out the differences between the two bills informally (out of conference) and then have the House and Senate vote again on identical versions. If both bills are identical, there is no need for a reconciliation conference. The House passed their bill this morning by a 411-8 veto-proof margin. The Senate will now move to pass the bill before the August recess.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has vowed to keep his chamber in session over the weekend and into August recess to pass the bill if necessary.

The bill doesn’t do everything I hoped it would. But that’s politics.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) lent the new bill his endorsement, which Democratic leaders hope will tamp down any lingering concerns among members who fought for the strongest possible reforms. Feingold issued two separate statements yesterday, the first unequivocally hailing the legislation’s lobbying provisions.

Of the earmark anxiety, Feingold said: “Congress must not let people who oppose reform change the subject. Right now, the simple question senators must ask themselves is whether we want to change the way Washington does business or not.”

The original Senate vote was 96-2 so a filibuster shouldn’t be a problem…and certainly not a veto.

Last week Congress passed the 9/11 Commission recommendations bill with super-majorities. And they (somewhat disturbingly) passed the minimum wage hike within the Iraq Supplemental funding bill.

Slowly, but surely, the Dems are passing their legislative agenda.

I’m nominating this for the best quote of the Bush era.

“There’s no debate in the world as to whether they have those weapons…We all know that. A trained ape knows that.” – Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, September 13, 2002.

It’s funny because, you know, the president is kind of a trained ape. But there are so many things that have been said that I’m sure someone can find something better. I’m just not sure they can find a quote that packs quite as much ironical truth in with such a big lie.