Lesbians Die For My Freedom*

*cool, huh.

The DADT circus continues today. Yesterday provided some strange doings. We've come to expect Republicans treating President Obama like a bus boy, but this nasty,thuggish tone now extends to anyone associated with the executive branch. Senator McCain, who clearly seems to have had a bad gay experience in his past,criticized Admiral Mullen for not being in charge of ground troops and therefore how would he know what the fighting men and women really believe? Admiral Mullen patiently explained how many ships he had captained, fleets and service he had commanded. Mullen missed his chance. He should have answered McCain by saying,"He rented his Admiral uniform from the Village People." Today's hearing had all the service heads report on whether they favor repeal and were they confident that procedures were in place to make a smooth transition to its repeal. Naturally, the head of the Marines expressed his personal opinion that it shouldn't be repealed but did allow how he was confident in Gates and others that the process can be managed along a timeline that had been discussed. Basically,Republican Senators Collins and Brown have jumped ship on McCain, making it certain that the votes exist for his repeal.

But the Washington Post ran an article heavy with anonymous sources suggesting that the Pentagon is afraid of the Republicans and believe they'll screw it up and that the issues will bounce back and forth in court cases which create havoc with bureaucratic procedures. The anti-repeal crowd is now saying that the debate on the overall defense appropriations bill would take too long to accomodate the repeal of DADT. The Defense Appropriations bill was already extensively debated before the fall election and has been filibustered twice already by the anti-repeal crowd. The other argument that it shouldn't be repealed now because we are at war got shot down by Susan Collins, who picked up on something Gates said in his testimony, and suggested it was easier to repeal now that we are in conflict. Of course, a cynic might suggest that we haven't been out of conflict for twenty years.

I would not be surprised to see Gates request President Obama repeal it by executive order because it could not happen next Congress with the teabaggers coming in.

I guess it has come to this. An emaciated Larry Eagleburger appeared on Keith Olbermann to plead for the ratification of the New Start Treaty. Unfortunately, Larry, like all five of the Republican Secretaries of State who wrote the op-ed in the Washington Post,didn't press a timeframe because they didn't want to get into politics. Howard Baker, former Chief of Staff for Ronald Reagan, penned an op-ed in favor of the New Start Treaty. My problem with all these guys is that they really have no ideas how far off the beaten path the Republican Party has gone. They do not understand that the GOP base has nothing but contempt for their level of expertise. Possessing expertise and knowledge of foreign affairs is elitist. In the immortal words of incoming teabagger Rand Paul, "I don't do Afghanistan."

(Historical note--Washington is filled with former diplomats who insist on being called ambassador. Once they leave their post, they are not entitled to this. There are four lifetime ambassadors, whose ranks get filled upon death. Larry Eagleburger is one of them. The late Jeane Kirkpatrick was another. Max Kampelman is another.)

The American people are not as crazy as they vote. 82% favor the ratification of the Start Treaty. Also, about 70%--like the military itself--favor gays openly serving in the military.

The Democrats in the House yesterday voted to make all middle class tax cuts permanent. All Repubicans voted against and 20 of the Blue Dog Democrats. John Boehner referred to the vote as "chickenshit". Boehner has invoked the will of the people to be against all tax hikes. Well, not so fast. 53% of Americans agree with the Democrats in preserving the tax cuts for those earning less than $250,000 and not extending tax cuts for the wealthier Americans. Only 26% of Americans believe Boehner we should extend the tax cuts for everyone.

And if we extended none, we would be near a balanced budget in four years.

The Catfood Commission won't be submitting their recommendations to Congress because they failed to get the 14 votes necessary to approve their recommendations. In some ways, this is too bad because the Catfood Commission actually increased the national debt for the next ten years and then eased into the debt savings of their proposals.

Meanwhile, the White House and the GOP are behnd closed doors hammering out a tax package, which will probably extend all tax cuts for 2-3 years,extend unemployment insurance,and avoid the debt ceiling vote until the fall of 2011. As an add-on some say the New Start Treaty will be ratified. The whole process is infuriating Democrats who claim Obama is selling out to the GOP. I think there is a little quid pro quo here in that the Republican leadership wants to avoid the most extreme actions of their teabaggers in the next Congress. The debt ceiling vote is really to protect the Republicans from looking like total clowns. Also,part of the negotiation is the ways to fund the government so as to avoid the 1994 government shutdown that blew up on the GOP.

Things are getting so bizarre it took Pravda to attack Sarah Palin as a traitor to the United States. For some reason, Pravda, which sees the Palin home from its porch, felt her attack on Obama for not preventing Wikileaks went too far. Pravda defended President Obama as a democratically elected President who does not have dictatorial powers to suppress these leaks. I guess this was really an indirect shot at the other born-again Christian Putin,who hunts wolves from helicopters. But the tone of the attack was unusually brutal against a critic of an American President.

Maybe they read Fidel Castro's book on Obama and liked what they read.

Fleeing town, the President snuck into Afghanistan for a surprise visit and was met by joyous troops. He should have worn the flightsuit with the codpiece.His approval rating in the CBS poll is a measly 48%, the highest since April. I guess he needed downtime.

Doug Brooks showed up at AEI the other day to argue that Republicans really could deal with President Obama. Brooks looked frightened of his AEI audience when he explained that Obama really isn't a socialist and that his staff may well be American liberals but they don't want to create a European style social democracy. I found it a llittle disconcerting that Brooks felt compelled to keep talking about the White House as Americans.

The UK papers think Americans are barbaric for cutting off unemployment benefits to 2 million American before Christmas or at any time. This would not happen even in Conservative-run England.

Are white males going to voice solidarity with Julian Assange. The Swedish rape charges look fishier by the minute. I know we've been sensitized to the lurking misogyny in Sweden by "the Girl with the Dragoon Tatoo" but the law Assange is being arrested on is beyond the pale. Assange, who has been linked to two Swedish women, who have written about having sex with him, is being accused of rape because in Sweden having consensual sex without a condom is grounds for a rape charge. Assange has claimed his condom broke midway. I'm glad he shared this with us all.

Joining Assange on the Interpol most wanted list is Richard Bruce Cheney, formerly known as the Vice President. The paragon of transparent government, Nigeria has charged Cheney with corruption for the days he was CEO of Halliburton. The problem for the current administration is that the charge is real and being transmitted by Interpol, whom we are asking to arrest Assange, and the United States has had an extradition treaty with Nigeria for decades. As Lenin asked, "hat is to be done?"

Yesterday's news that the Obama Administration with Republicans bigwigs pressured Spain to drop its investigation on the torture allegations against leading Bush officials is even more troubling for civil libertarians. It seems the Obama Administration forgot that the Spanish judiciary really is independent and that the U.S. Government was threatening the national government with severe consequences if an independent court did its work. While the United States will not keep its commitment to enforce the International Covention against Torture, now it's interferring with another country who is trying to fulfil their obligations. This matter only gets worse and worse.

But I guess that's American Exceptionalism!