Rays of Light

Congratulations to Jeff "Big Dude" Bridges for his Oscar win for his sensitive portrayal of a modern-day cattle rustler in Rancho Deluxe. Sam Waterson didn't win best supporting actor. And Tom McQuane missed out on screenwriting honors. Oh, go rent it anyway.

The first woman won director for a feature--Kathryn Bigelow and her Hurt Locker won the kudos for best pic.

Icelanders voted 93% to 2% to reject paying the debts of the nation's largest and oldest bank. Fireworks displays accompanied the vote. Maybe if we keep suckering the Chinese and Saudis to underwrite our debt, at the appropriate moment we should declare a Jubilee year where all debts are forgiven and we won't pay off the debt. Nice fantasy but it would be great to see all the exploding heads. The Icelanders reaction is understandable. The British seized all Icelandic assets and businesses in England under their anti-terroist laws.

Could we applaud President Obama for not giving up on Dawn Johnsen after the Republicans held her nomination up for a year? They objected to her becoming Assistant Attorney-General because she opposed torture.

Further below the radar, the Justice Department wanted to beef up legal assistance to the poor during this time of economic devastation. The man chosen to head these efforts is America's leading constitutional scholar, Laurence Tribe. Laurence Tribe has been one of my favorites for years and would be the liberal counterweight to Tony Scalia if nominated to the court. To his credit, he's taking a leave of absence from Harvard to direct this effort.

The Los Angeles Times printed a nice analysis of Silent Clarence Thomas' dissent on Supreme Court decisions about "cruel and unusual punishment". It seems they read remarkably like little Johnny Yoo's torture memos. Yoo was Thomas' legal assistant at the Court.

The whole Republican establishment, Ken Starr and Ted Olson have come down on Liz Cheney for her Al Qaeda 7 ad from Keep America Scared. It seems the Bush Administration hired most of these people after they defended detainees. Here again, the founding fathers came in handy. John Adams defended British soldiers after the Revolution and said it was the most satisfying moment of his public service.

But the Al Qaeda 7 ad was timed perfectly. The OPR report on the Torture lawyers came out the week before. The Democrats in the Senate became vocal about holding hearings on the subject. Then the ad breaks and Senator Grassley demands answers from the Obama Administration. But the investigation into Yoo's missing e-mails continues.

Other former Bush Administration types are now ratting Liz Cheney out for her role in hindering the State Department from creating a broader coalition government in Iraq and her back channel assistance to those in the Pentagon trying to make the case for WMDs in Iraq. She deliberately avoided her own conference on Democracy in Bahrain to slip into Iraq to make sure the visiting State Department official was stymied. And the beat goes on.

The one downbeat note is that the Obama Administration may be making a deal with Republicans to close Gitmo in return for its trying KSM in a military commission. While this is half a loaf, it ignores the very real constitutional problems with military tribunals. I suggest they try him here in Old Town. The last time a 9/11 conspirator was tried here we got TV trucks for two days and the 9/11 families camped out at our church and the whole thing dissipated without an incident.

Americans are beginning to push back against some of the insanity. Our own attorney general Ken Cuccinelli sent directives to the colleges in our state system that they are not to protect the rights of gays because it's not law. Last year the Matthew Shepard Hate Crime law was passed that makes it a federal crime to persecute gays so I don't know what he's talking about. Neither doe the university presidents. The President of Williams and Mary was first off the block by saying the college will protect everyone's rights no matter what the Attorney-General says. But chiming in are the Republicans who blast the Attorney-General for creating a socially divisive issue where none existed.

This is the same Attorney-General who in one of his first acts decided to sue the Environmental Protection Agency for regulating carbon emissions.

But the Republicans know things--they have been in control of the House of Delegates for nearly ten years. These actions by both the Governor and the Attorney-General have galvanized the Democrats, who in recent days have become mobilized after their sleep during the Creigh Deeds campaign to take back the House. It was interesting to see a reaction in such a short time.

For reasons that I will never know, Virginia is a hotbed of climate change deniers. I understand Texas where the oil industry holds sway. But here? A cranky conservative wrote the local Fredericksberg paper that climate science was fraudulent and they let him ramble. Turns out his near neighbor is a science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. It also turns out the man started work on climate change in the late 1960s and wrote the first textbook on how to develop models for studying it. And it further turns out that he collaborated with Carl Sagan in the days before Sagan went mystical on us. He blasted back a point by point refutation of this crank and told the editors not to do this again because they are printing lies to the public.

Creationists are also having problems. Apparently, home schoolers who are not evangelical Christians have become vocal about the biology textbooks sold to homeschoolers that dismiss Darwin and evolution. Much to my delight, it is the kids who are calling out the chapters on evolution as "lies". Virginia Tech professor Duncan Porter was called in to evaluate the textbooks and said he would give them an F. The result is the creation of an organization to defend secular home schoolers from such false information.

All is not well in Beckistan. First the fans of the Founding Fathers have jumped on him for falsely portraying their beliefs. Now "classic Christians", the non-fundamentalists, are going ballistic over his misquoting the Bible and misinterpeting the teachings of Jesus. The flash point was his recent show repeating the garbage that Obama is brainwashing "your children." In it he tries to argue that the Obama Administration is going against Christian teachings on parent-child relationships. Of course, the 'classic Christians" blasted him for this but also pointed out the uncomfortable truth that Jesus said he came "to divide the children from the parents". And other slightly uncomfortable fact that Jesus himself publicly denied his own family, including his mother.

Local feminists in Massachusetts noted that certain front-groups named Feminists for Life played a disproportionate role in Senator Brown's win. These pro-lifers claimed they were linked to the Susan B. Anthony Museum, which has received federal grants and state funds. Apparently, these pro-lifers had hijacked the museum's name and poor Susan B. Anthony, who never made any statements on abortion in his life. After local papers turned down their findings, they went ahead a published it on a blog which began circulated far and wide, forcing the press to finally cover the issue.

Diane Ravitch has jumped ship. Appearing all over NPR and Democracy Now, Diane is pushing her new book The Death and Life of the Great American Public School System, which blasts the Leave No Child Behind policy adopted by George W. Bush. As someone who was involved in developing the policy, Diane's strong opposition now has brought criticism from the right but she is a hard target for them to assail. She worries that the Obama Administration is following the same path with Arne Duncan's educational policy. At the present she's on fire.

Whatever your position on the Iraq War, the Iraqis came out despite a campaign of violence in large numbers to vote in their national elections. Hopefully, the count will be correct and the results will not fuel more sectarian violence. President Obama reiterated that we are still on the timetable to leave.

Elsewhere, more Al Qaeda members were nailed and leaders of the Taliban were captured. This is sure to disappoint Obama's critics.

Sister Sarah Palin spoke in Calgary to adoring crowds of Canadians. She admitted she used to come across the border from Alaska for Canadian Health Care. It should also be noted that her daughter Bristol is receiving free health care from the Alaskan tribal authorities. So much for the argument over government takeover of health care. I wonder if Canada has death panels.

Republican elected officials scrambled like crazy to distance themselves from the RNC's fear campaign to raise money. A very big donor, one of the DeMoss family, wrote Steele that he would no longer contribute to the party. His letter was followed by a slew of others from big donors. On the otherside, the DNC has been making money by publicising the whole deal.

Representative Eric Massa has or has not resigned depending on which statement today he is making. He says Rahm Emmanuel harassed him, while he was in the shower naked, on the health care bill. He said his sexual harassment of his staffer was a reaction to his own cancer. Anyway a no vote on healthcare is about to vanish.

The Democratic scandals involving New York will not affect the party. But other scandals may become fuel for the Republicans. Revisionist historians are wrong about why the Republicans took the House in 1994. It has nothing to do with the healthcare debate, even though Newt is running around town saying it did. It had to do with a rash of scandals that afflicted Democrats. Remember the bright, talented Stephen Solarz having to resign after the post office scandal. These brought the backlash, not health care.

The Crack-Up Continued

A CNN poll has 79% of Americans believing Obama did well on his first overseas trip and that he improved our image abroad. The President holds a 65% approval rating this week. He managed some significant policy achievements at the G20 Summit in London and also laid out his Afghanistan policy before the NATO countries with some hesitancy shown by the European countries. A meeting with his Russian counterpart produced a willingness to negotiate a new arms reduction treaty and his Prague speech laid out a vision to eliminate nuclear weapons. He concluded the trip with an appeal to Turkey, who at least privately has expressed relief that the American Administration has changed. The one negative of the week was the launch by North Korea of a missile that could carry nuclear weapons.

But these events seemed not to have touched parts of our political system. One can argument about the President's tone, the fruitfulness of his meetings and even the rhetoric he used in his major speeches. But that's not what we heard.

Instead, Michell Bachman warned her constituents to be armed and ready for revolt. Yesterday,she warned that President Obama intended to turn the expanded AmeriCore program into re-education camps.

New Gingrich with an eye to the 2012 Republican presidential nomination echoed former Vice President Dick Cheney by saying that President Obama made us less safe as a nation. Newt promised he would have intercepted the North Korea missile. What would have happened if the U.S. missed? Then Newt warned us about electronic pulse weapons being developed. How many threats, Newt, are we supposed to be afraid of at the same time?

Rudy Guiliani, America's Mayor, blasted President Obama for not speaking about Islamic terrorism in his talks abroad. And it was the diplomatic language President Obama used toward the Muslim world that seemed to set the Republicans off. Frank Gaffney speaking on a major television station, not Fox, claimed that the way President Obama spoke to the Muslims was a coded language saying that he, Obama, would introduce Sharia law.

Sharia law got alot of bang for its buck this week. President Obama's nominee for the lawyer to the State Department, the scholarly Dean of Yale Law School Harold Koh, was attacked in the New York Post, Fox News,the National Review, for advocating Sharia Law. Consequently, Republican Senators have placed a hold on his nominee despite Ted Olsen's defense of Koh's integrity and scholarship in the days Koh served in the Reagan Administration.

But Republicans also put a hold on Dawn Johnsen's nominee as chief of the Office of legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. Johnsen has actually held the post before during the Clinton Administration. Her crime was publishing articles depicting her negative opinion of the torture memos by Johnny Yoo.

Both Koh and Johnsen's nominations are held up by the Republicans to coerce the Obama Administration from releasing the second tranche of torture memos as promised. Previews of these memos indicate they are darker than the first, which were alarming enough in that they claimed the President had the power to suspend several articles of the Bill of Rights and to allow the U.S. military to conduct search and seizures in American homes without warrants.

A man convinced that President Obama would seize all Americans' guns, an idea promoted by the NRA, the rightwing websites and some talk show personalities shot and killed four policemen in Pittsburgh. The man had been a blogger on racist and neo-Nazi websites and claimed all the media and financial institutions were run by a zionist conspiracy. Glenn Beck, the Fox television personality most vocally identified with warning the public about the Obama gun seizure policy denied culpabilityfor the man's attacks on the policemen, saying he only provided information on the worst case scenerios, while the man himself was a nut. he went on to say that there would be unrest in the country because people were fed up.

Beck's companion on Fox, Sean Hannity, selectively edited President Obama's speech to Europeans where Obama mentioned America's occasional haughtiness in foreign affairs without showing Obama's criticism of "insidious anti-Americanism". The Newt popped up again to claim that Obama's foreign policy was like Carter's fantasy world.

This type of rhetoric has escalated several fold since the fall rallies of the McCain-Palin campaign. Is this a diversionary tactic so we don't recognize that the Obama budget swam through both the House and the Senate? Is this nuttiness meant for us to forget that the Republican counter-budget released on April 1 was a joke and was perceived as a joke by everyone inside the Beltway? Or are these people purposely trying to stir up hatred of the President in order to provoke an attack on him? It certainly is not the language of dialogue or constructive opposition. It feeds the dark paranoid bottom-feeders in our political culture.

On a more fun note, the "birthers" held a conference here in Washington to probe the "profound" mystery of the President's birth. To protest the state of Hawaii's less than cooperative attitude to the birthers requests for information, the crowd has called for a worldwide boycott of Hawaii as a tourist destination.

But even more fun is the whole Palin family. Todd's sister got nailed for breaking and entering in a house. Levi, Bristol's former fiancee, went on television to talk about having sex with her in Sarah's house and asserting that Sarah had to know. This provoked the now predictable attacks from Governor Sarah that Levi lied. The Queen of the North will soon get even with a book rumored to be searching fro a seven-fgure advance--certainly a reasonable sum in a time of a deep recession. Sarah again provided much needed entertainment by slamming the McCain campaign for not having anyone around with whom she could pray.

And finally as we head toward Easter, some evangelicals are challenging the whole premise of the religious right saying that they would be more persuasive if they simply acted as Christians and stayed out of politics. Amen, Brother.