The 62,000 or so folks in that Upper East Side zip code who don’t rent live in domiciles worth, on average, just under a million bucks. And those people in 10128 have donated $1.7 million in the 2010 election cycle to federal candidates, national parties, or PACs. (Sorry, Rush: Your neighbors preferred Democratic entities.)

But the folks in 10128 are cheapskates compared with the real money farther south on Fifth Avenue. The 100,000-plus people who live in 10021 have given $3.3 million. In fact, eight zip codes surrounding Central Park rank in the top 20 zip codes nationally in political giving by individuals for this election cycle, their residents having coughed up $17.4 million. 10021, 10022 and 10024 are the top three individual donor zip codes in the nation.

I was going to tell you this a few months ago. I had intended to point out that zip codes in and around Washington, D.C., where the real money is, ponied up $22.9 million in this election cycle. I’d planned to tell you that individuals in the top 50 zip codes in the nation had so far contributed nearly $74 million to federal candidates or committees.

But these numbers summarizing individual donations direct to candidates or parties have become meaningless. That means I will likely end four years of writing about them.

The totals provided here, courtesy of the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization that aggregates Federal Election Commission records to make them easier to understand, represents donations exceeding $200 by individuals. Federal election law limits individual candidate contributions to $2,400, up to an aggregate total of $45,600 per election cycle. Individuals may also give an aggregated total of $69,900 to national parties and PACs per cycle. Bottom line: An individual may make $115,500 in campaign contributions per election cycle.

Well, that’s chicken feed now, so there’s no reason to write about campaign contributions by individuals any more.

You all know why: The Supreme Corporate Court of the United States struck down provisions of campaign-finance law in its 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, overruling precedents. (So much for stare decisis.) The bottom line: The government may not ban corporations from spending unlimited amounts of money on broadcast political ads prior to primary or general elections. (This is not the first episode of judicial activism by the “pro-corporate wing” of the Roberts Court.) Says The New York Times:

For the first time, though, as a result of the [Citizens United] ruling, corporations will be able to spend unlimited amounts of money on “electioneering communications” (i.e., broadcast advertisements) expressly advocating for a candidate’s election or defeat. While the court upheld the ban on direct contributions from corporations or unions to candidates, it also clears the way, for the first time, for corporations to donate money to nonprofit groups that place advocacy advertisements.

But, because the Supreme Court has not yet struck down the remainder of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, corporations may spend limitless money on ads supporting or opposing candidates while individual contributors continue to face limits on their donations direct to candidates or parties.

That means all those donations by folks in the top 50 zip codes for this election cycle — $74 million and counting — are small change now. Those who used to be big players in the Election Power Grab Sweepstakes are now bit players. Corporations — those newly minted artificial beings with more power than individual human beings — can outspend them.

In fact, perhaps many of those well-to-do folks in the zip codes surrounding Central Park, those able to afford that $115,500 aggregate limit, might be high-ranking executives of corporations. Maybe they’ll just stop donating as individuals and leave it to the corporation to pay the advertising freight charges to influence election outcomes.

The Screw Democracy Game™ — spend large amounts of money on behalf of political parties and candidates with expectations of a beneficial return on that investment — has changed, it seems. We’ll know for sure as the 2010 mid-term elections near. To what extent will corporations pour money into television advertising to support candidates they prefer? Will they overtly or covertly threaten candidates holding positions unfavorable to business and corporations by dumping millions into advertising support for those candidates’ opponents?

Will Congress require full, public disclosure of direct corporate (or union) spending on “electioneering communications” (even though they may be unlimited financially) and include immediate online disclosure? Will Congress mandate a “I’m the CEO, and I approved this message” tag for corporation-funded, televised political ads? Will Congress close the door that allows corporations (and unions) to hide massive financial support of political entities by passing corporate (or union) money anonymously through nonprofit civic leagues and trade associations? Says The Times:

That means that those nonprofit groups, which are not required to disclose their donors, can now use corporate contributions to buy political commercials, and the corporations can potentially operate behind the anonymity of their donations. [emphasis added]

The Court’s ruling means it has become useless for me to continue to root through the records in the FEC’s database of individual donations to candidates, parties or PACs. Similarly, how useful will be such data aggregated by categories provided by the Center for Responsive Politics? True, the center is “a clearinghouse for data and analysis on multiple aspects of money in politics—the independent interest groups called 527s committees, federal lobbying, Washington’s ‘revolving door’, privately sponsored congressional travel and the personal finances of members of Congress, the president and other officials.” It will continue to provide an important public service. Perhaps it will find a way to track this new, unlimited spending on “electioneering communications.”

But in light of five men’s decision to dramatically change the face of election financing, the role I’ve played — finding out what individuals gave how much to whom with what effect — appears pointless.

Political advantage is gained or lost through television advertising. Corporations can now spend unlimited amounts of money on such advertising to influence the outcome of elections with more effect than an individual’s maximum donation of $115,500 direct to candidates or parties can accomplish. More importantly, corporations have the legal means to hide that spending.

But, supporters of the Court’s decision argue, individuals can spend on broadcast political ads without limit, too. They are only constrained on direct donations to candidates or parties.

Yes, if you, as an individual, are sufficiently wealthy, you may spend unlimited money on “electioneering communications” just as corporations now can. But can you, the wealthy individual, match the political ad spending of the wealthy corporation? Or corporations, plural?

This means sorting through aggregations of FEC data on individual campaign contributions has lost interest for me.

Now I need ideas, new techniques, to track all this corporate money that will be spent on “electioneering communications.” Suggestions, dear readers?

In March, the Discovery Channel, teaming again with the BBC, plans to present “Life” — a “breathtaking ten-part blockbuster [that] brings you 130 incredible stories from the frontiers of the natural world … This is evolution in action.”

And again, viewers will be astonished by the remarkable videography done by the best pros in the world under arduous, even dangerous conditions. Viewers will park themselves in their Barcaloungers, appropriate beverage and salsa and chips in hand, and revel in the breadth and depth of the series. But are these series the most accurate portrayals of the state of the natural world? And do they desensitize us to reality?

Yet again, television will fail to remind viewers that the vast pollution and environmental degradation brought on by the needs and wants of those viewers and the industries that satisfy them are threatening to destroy much of what the viewers see.

In fact, viewers are hard-pressed to find videography of pollution anywhere on scheduled series on basic cable. Out of sight, out of mind. Check the lists of programming at National Geographic and the Discovery Channel. At least Nat Geo offers “Six Degrees,” but it’s a what-if, worst-case, disaster scenario special.

Pollution is ugly. It does not make for breathtaking television. Nor is televising the pollution of air, land, and water profitable. Corporate sponsors do not support programming of a topic whose root cause could often be laid at the sponsors’ doorstep.

In 1970, I was hired as an environmental writer, three weeks before the first Earth Day. Six weeks later, after the blush had faded from the environmental rose, the paper “promoted” me to full-time sports writer. But on every five-year anniversary of Earth Day, editors placed Denny back on the green beat for a few weeks. In those days, the green movement prompted newspapers to undertake science and environmental pages — and full pages at that. But such commitment to the cause faded, like my paper’s dedication to the environmental beat, because advertisers don’t like stories that paint consumerism as a root of all environmental evil.

As a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists for two decades, I’ve seen first-hand the decline of dedicated science and environment pages in the nation’s newspapers. Christine Russell, a former science reporter for The Washington Post and the president of the U.S. Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, lamented that those dedicated pages peaked at 95 in 1989 and dropped to 34 in 2005 — and they’re still declining. I’ve watched the number of members of SEJ working in print environmental journalism decline as members lost jobs or beats.

Every editor I ever asked about the fate of his or her paper’s science or environmental page said the same thing: “No advertiser support.” What companies would want to put their ads for airline travel deals or SUVs on a page dedicated to depicting accurately the consequences of both purchases?

We know, of course, that corporatists can’t control all breaking environmental news — especially if good video can be had. Spill oil on a highly visible beach, dump toxins into a river and kill thousands of fish, let a dam holding 2.6 million cubic yards of toxic coal sludge break and inundate hundreds of acres, and by god you’ve got a public relations environmental disaster guaranteed to sit on the front page or lead the nightly news … for how long? Modern news media generally have the same attention span as their corporate owners — short.

Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum wrote “Unpopular Science” for The Nation. In that well-argued piece, they lamented the need for more, not less, critical writing about science and scientific issues, such as the environment:

We live in a time of pathbreaking advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology, of private spaceflight and personalized medicine, amid a climate and energy crisis, in a world made more dangerous by biological and nuclear terror threats and global pandemics. Meanwhile, advances in neuroscience are calling into question who we are, whether our identities and thought processes can be reduced to purely physical phenomena, whether we actually have free will. The media ought to be bursting with this stuff. Yet precisely the opposite is happening: even in places where you’d expect it to hold out the longest, science journalism is declining.

When Ted Turner was the financial muscle behind CNN and TBS, its environmental unit, led by Teya Ryan, Barbara Pyle, and Peter Dykstra, produced ground-breaking coverage. But that legendary green DNA has evaporated from CNN. Two years ago CNN whacked “its entire science, technology, and environment news staff, including Miles O’Brien, its chief technology and environment correspondent, as well as six executive producers.” Here’s the explanation from CNN’s flack:

We want to integrate environmental, science and technology reporting into the general editorial structure rather than have a stand alone unit. Now that the bulk of our environmental coverage is being offered through the Planet in Peril franchise, which is produced by the Anderson Cooper 360 program, there is no need for a separate unit.

Sure. More free-diving with great white sharks by the Silver Fox himself. O’Brien was a first-rate science reporter; Cooper isn’t. CNN has long since lost its moral compass regarding editorial decisions about content.

The New York Times still has its Tuesday “Science Times” page, but it’s an island in an uncovered ocean of environmental issues. So where does the public turn for science and environmental coverage if traditional media are bailing out? NPR’s Ira Flatow suggests that blogs and social media are filling the void. Perhaps, but where are they? Can viewers just point the remote and click and get environmental and science news they need? How is the credibility of online-only environmental and science writing unsupported by traditional media assessed? By whom?

Corporations that pollute without consequence the public goods of air, water, and land are no doubt pleased by the absence of serious, frequent, and thorough environmental and science news coverage. Between the newspaper industry’s self-implosion and the long-term lack of corporate advertising support for news and programming that depicts Nature as Soiled rather than Nature as Discoveryized, pollution will continue unabated.

Throw in deregulation. Throw in underfunding of federal and state staff needed to detect, correct, and regulate air, water, and land pollution. And throw in the Supreme Court of the United States:

Thousands of the nation’s largest water polluters are outside the Clean Water Act’s reach because the Supreme Court has left uncertain which waterways are protected by that law, according to interviews with regulators.

In their Times story, part of a series called “Toxic Waters,” reporters Charles Duhigg and Janet Roberts trace the demise of the definition of “navigable waters” in the Clean Water Act. Supreme Court decisions may lead to exclusion of waters protected by Act from which 117 million Americans obtain drinking water. The pollution threat to water supplies is real — and ought to be far more compelling as a series topic for Nat Geo and the Discovery Channel. According to Duhigg and Roberts:

Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years. [emphasis added]

Try to keep this in mind as you park your fanny on that Barcalounger to watch the first episode of “Life” next month.

Ponder, too, the sources of the water and crops used to make that appropriate beverage and
your salsa and chips. Still taste good?

He could not have imagined that the exorbitant and still-rising cost of electing the members of Congress would argue that not “all men are created equal.” Rather, men, and mostly men, of considerable financial substance worth in sum about $650 million would sit on Capitol Hill. Nor would he have imagined that the most powerful interests in this nation “conceived in Liberty” would be about to spend $3.7 billion to position those (mostly) men in November to immediately forget, polls might suggest, “the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

President Lincoln could not have imagined, at least on a 21st Century scale, how the enterprise of government would become precisely that – a business enterprise riddled with corruption brought on by the enticements of money primarily intended to lubricate the interests of the powerful who wish to remain that way.

President Lincoln could not have foreseen that a former member of Congress, already convicted and imprisoned for seven years for bribery and racketeering, would threaten to run for Congress again as an Independent, saying, “I have been a Democrat all my life, and quite frankly I am disgusted with both parties. I hate to say this. My father is rolling over in his grave, a truck driver.”

President Lincoln, a lawyer by trade, probably would suggest that it takes a crook to root out a drift of swine-minded crooks.

Polls of popularity generally assign Lincoln at or near the top of lists of “greatest presidents.” Despite whatever historical flaws he may have as a politician, military tactician or executive branch leader, his reputation for honesty and truth prevail scores of years later. His vision for the Republic was clear. But time and the misuse of money have eroded that vision, rendering it unrecognizable.

In his address of only 265 words, he directed a divided nation to heal the deep wounds brought on by such a divisive war. He said, “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion …” He sought freedom — and all the obligations and responsibilities that entails — as a defining characteristic of the Republic.

What would he think of a Congress so divided and held in such low regard by the voters who elected its members? How would he regard an industry surrounding Congress whose sole purpose is to prey on political and philosophical schisms on behalf of powerful clients who seek primarily to retain and expand their means of holding power? Would he be saddened by the decision of the Republic’s highest court to allow corporations the same rights as individuals?

As he sits in effigy, fatigued in appearance by artist’s intent, looking east toward the Reflecting Pool, he may be considering revising his remarks offered at Gettysburg:

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain— that this nation, under the god of Maximize Shareholder Income, shall have an enduring vision of Corporate leadership—and that government of the Dollar, by the Dollar, and for the Dollar, shall not perish from the Corporate Boardrooms.

Ever since five members of the Supreme Court declared the Constitution unconstitutional yesterday morning I’ve been in something of a snit. Along the way, I’ve said a variety of things that struck me as insightful, pithy, even witty. Others, however – bitter, lonely misanthropic types simmering in their own humorless bile – seem to be finding me mostly snarky and cynical.

So here are a few samples. You be the judge. Assuming you’re a corporation with enough spare cash that your opinion matters, that is.

• Early on, my S&R colleague Brian Angliss lamented that this is how democracy dies, or something to that effect. My reply: “From where I sit democracy has been dead for some time. This is more like vandals pulling over the headstone.” See? Wasn’t that clever?
• Another colleague says that the proper response is to raise so much hell over the outrage that our elected officials are shamed into taking action. My response: “Yes, well. This all assumes that Congressweasels are capable of feeling shame.” She allowed that they’d feel shame if we lit a big enough fire under them. Me: “I think their shame tolerance is probably directly proportional to the size of their corporate donations.” I’m standing by it, too.
• “Used to be if you wanted to control the government you had to work through a broker. Now you can just buy Senators straight off the rack.”
• “Hey, I’m a huge William Gibson fan. I just don’t think Neuromancer was intended as a how-to book.”
• To another “democracy is dead” rant: “I’m not sure America is really ready for democracy.” I’ll have more on that eventually, I feel sure.
• Brian, in reply, advocated what I’ll charitably term “forceful action.” And then I said: “Oh, I’m all for that. I guess my point is that this case doesn’t change reality, it merely acknowledges it.” Man, was I on a roll today or what?
• “Maybe now they’ll release a Kindle version of 1984 for Dummies.”
• Finally, a guy on one of my lists raised a question I’d been trying to sidestep all day. To wit: Does this mean a corporation can run for president? After all, it’s a violation of their Constitutional rights to prevent it. So I said: “First things first. Before they can run for president you have to give them the vote. I assume that they’d get a number of votes proportional to their EBIDTA.”
• “How many electoral votes does ExxonMobil have?”
• Also, I was earlier conjecturing that there might be money to be made in combining erectile dysfunction drugs with antibiotics. Call it “Cialicillen.” At the time I was goofing on another subject entirely, but the more I think about it, the more I think it may apply here. I’m still working on it.

*Aherm*

What Would Hunter Do?

In any case, I’ve been saying for years that America’s left/right divide is in some ways a myth, a well-constructed, brutally cynical divide-and-conquer strategy by which The Haves hold The Have-Nots at bay and transform themselves into Have-Mores (or, ideally, Have-Goddamned-Everythings). In my eulogy for Hunter Thompson, for instance, I argued that much of his relentless campaigning for social justice emanated from this insight:

Although I never heard him say it in these words, Hunter S. Thompson I think understood the artificial Red/Blue, Conservative/Liberal divide that most Americans seem to have bought into for the cynical construction that it is -“ a rhetorical fluff job that turns Americans with common cause against each other and that serves the power elites in both parties to the detriment of the public they take turns fleecing.

There was a divide, in Thompson’s world – no doubt about that – but it wasn’t Left/Right, it was Top/Bottom. He was a working man born in the borderlands of the rapidly (and sometimes violently) evolving mid-century South, and his reporting reflects an unfailing empathy for those who spent most of their lives scrambling for a foothold on the lower rungs of the political and economic ladder. The rich and powerful were usually cast as evil, soulless swine, and his sense of social and moral justice provided countless column inches to individuals and groups who’d been ignored or silenced by a society that cared way more about money than justice.

In short, Hunter Thompson was a champion of the common people. Yes, his reporting was so crazed at times that you couldn’t be sure if you were reading an eyewitness account or a drug-addled hallucination. But he remained to the end one of the most unswervingly ethical reporters of our generation, a man whose commitment to social justice and the public good trumped everything.

So today looks like a landmark moment for the architects of The Have-Mores’ neo-serfdom project, and it’s the kind of day where I miss HST more than I can adequately articulate. Wait – did I say “I”? We. We miss him more than we know, and if you don’t realize it yet, wait a few months. Because now the ankle-irons are off our corporations, and that includes the media megacorps. If you think truth is being bought and sold like fake boobs in Beverly Hills now, wait until Campaign 2012. Bitches, you ain’t seen dick yet. Give it five years and CBS will be auctioning Evening News coverage off on eBay. You’re going to reflect fondly on the hard-hitting, good-old days when Katie Couric wielded her righteousness like god’s own objective flaming sword of justice.  (As a side note, is “Supreme Court ruling could boost TV ad business” the most hysterically, pointlessly obvious well-fucking-duh headline since “Sun rises in east” or what?)

Yesterday afternoon, Wendy Redal suggested that perhaps this represents a moment when all the Have-Nots, Democrat, Republican and Independent alike, can find a bit of common cause. Maybe, and if so it will be the strangest set of bedfellows since the last time David Vitter had a sleepover and invited Ted Haggard and Dennis Rodman. But I guess you gotta have hope – the way it looks right now there’s nothing left but hope.

As our buddy Lex recently said, money talks and bullshit walks. And anything that ain’t money is bullshit.

Look. It says so, right there in the Constitution.

Overturning key provisions of McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and flouting a century of precedent, the decision opens the floodgates to a torrent of spending by banks, insurance companies, energy companies, automakers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, chemical producers, agribusiness giants and media oligopolies — both domestic and foreign – to sway races by buying candidates. And to trash American democracy in the process.

“Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy — it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people — political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority. The irony in Kennedy’s logic is profound, as the Court has in essence granted the status of personhood — of individual citizenship — to corporations, who are the least likely entities on earth to hold officials accountable to anyone but their own interests.

When Goldman Sachs, for instance, finds itself with a $16 billion (that’s with a “b”) bonus pool for top executives, what is the likelihood they are going to make campaign contributions to any political candidate who supports a tax on such bonuses, despite the government’s bailout for Wall Street?

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), who was in the room for the Court’s announcement, condemned it as “the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case. It leads us all down the road to serfdom.”

Yet it may be that prospect that offers the only remaining hope to unite a nation so fractured by partisanship and anger. In the face of this ruling, average Americans will become disenfranchised laborers, with no access to any ability to affect the political system in their favor. The grassroots donations of $10 here and $25 there that Barack Obama credited with momentum for his victory will be so much chump change in the face of these new playing rules. While labor unions and other groups will also be exempt from previous spending limits, it is the staggering power of corporations to shout down ordinary citizens through an exponential ability to outspend them that poses the gravest threat to our common welfare.

The real divide in this country is not so much left vs. right as haves vs. have-nots. Most Americans want health care reform. We just disagree on the best route to get it. Most Americans are disgusted at Wall Street’s escape from the economic hardship average people face every day, losing their jobs and homes and worrying about feeding their kids. Some think Democrats should be punished for the banks’ bailout; others insist it’s a Republican legacy for which the right must bear blame. Today’s decision, however, cements the already-entrenched power of the ‘haves’ to control public discourse and thereby the political agenda toward their own ends.  But if anything can galvanize the populist base of this country – and that is our true, uniting base – it must be today’s catastrophic court decision, which threatens to undermine our jobs, our health, our safety, our environment, the air we breathe and the water we drink, our access to information, virtually every element of the quality of life and freedoms we jointly value as Americans.

In the wake of this decision, progressives have more in common with teabaggers than either of us ever dreamed possible. We’ll need a lot more strange bedfellows to come together to save our democracy, fractious and scarred as it is. Congressman Grayson has introduced a set of bills to bite back – learn more here.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the 182 nations of the world had a combined GDP of nearly $60.9 trillion (or $60,900 billion) in 2008. But comparing the GDP data to the Fortune 500 data produces the table at right (click for the top 182 nations and corporations each, in order). If Exxon Mobil were a country, it would rank 25^th in the world, right between Norway and Austria. Wal-Mart would rank 27^th, sandwiched between Austria and Taiwan. Chevron would rank 28^th, ConocoPhillips 42^nd, GE 49^th, GM 59^th, Ford 60^th, and AT&T, H-P, and Valero would be ranked 64-66 respectively.

In fact, all of the Fortune 500 would rank above the 40 smallest national economies in the world. And the smallest company on Fortune’s list of the 1000 largest U.S. companies would be larger than the national economies of 28 entire countries. Exxon Mobil’s revenue is greater than the combined GDP of the 78 smallest countries (out of a total of 182) in the world.

And yet the Supreme Court took the unusual step of ordering a hearing during the court’s recess in order to hear legal arguments over whether corporate money could be spent to influence elections and whether the current bans on most such money in politics were constitutional. And indications are that the conservative majority will likely rule to overturn nearly 20 years of precedent and rule that it is constitutional for corporate money to be spent directly to influence local, state, and federal elections.

According to the Constitutional Accountability Center, the four liberal justices were the ones quoting from the U.S. Constitution to support their questions and arguments:

Justice Ginsburg reminded Olson that it is living persons, not corporations, who are “endowed by [their] Creator with unalienable rights.” Justice Sotomayor, too, picked up on this theme, emphasizing how the Supreme Court had rewritten the Constitution to create the fiction that corporations are persons entitled to the same basic rights as human beings. If we are looking to constitutional first principles to topple precedents, she asked, why shouldn’t we also look at the cases that invented corporate constitutional personhood and “imbued a creature of State law with human characteristics”?

Several of the court’s conservatives are supposed to be Originalists, judges who believe that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed at it’s writing (except for amendments, of course) and has not changed since then. Granting state creations the rights guaranteed to flesh and blood people when the Constitution doesn’t mention state creations is hypocrisy of the first order. It’s also an example of the very judicial activism than the Senate Republicans who voted against confirming Justice Sotomayor feared she would bring to the court. Perhaps the most activist judge on the Supreme Court today, defined by being the most willing to overrule Congress, is Antonin Scalia.

At present, corporate profits may not be spent to directly influence elections. This has historically been the case because corporations can live effectively forever and amass financial resources that no individual person could equal, and because legislators and courts have been concerned about corporate influence corrupting the political process. In essence, these are many of the same arguments that federal law uses to ban foreign nationals and governments from donating money to political campaigns. And yet, to the best of my knowledge, there are no foreign governments suing for free speech rights to influence elections.

The problem twofold – corporations are presently considered people, and money is considered speech. Corporations were defined legally as people for the purposes of limiting personal liability in the event of a business failure. But one of the results is that corporations have claimed the rights guaranteed to real people in the Bill of Rights, specifically the First Amendment right to free speech. And because the Supreme Court declared, in Buckley v. Valeo, that spending money equals exercising the right to free speech, corporations are now claiming that their money should be given identical rights to the money of individual citizens.

There are at least two direct solutions to this problem. The first would be to overturn Buckley v. Valeo. This would make money no longer equal to speech and could be an even more significant change in legal precedent than overturning 100 years of campaign limits on corporate donations to candidates. It would also require the conservatives on the court to go against their known personal ideologies.

The second is to redefine corporations so that they are not considered individual people for all situations. This would certainly require federal legislation and would probably require state legislation as well. It would also require that the economic and political powers at the state and federal levels voluntarily relinquish the power that corporate money (via PACs today, possibly via direct contributions in a few months) brings them.

Neither is particularly likely given the composition of the Supreme Court and the major influence of money in politics today.

Eventually, though, if the laws are overturned, enough companies will corrupt enough politicians with direct donations that they’ll overreach, and the public reaction will be swift and unstoppable. And when that happens, Exxon Mobil’s money and Wal-Mart’s money and Chevron’s money will be as untouchable as money from Hugo Chavez of Venezuela or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Both of which have smaller economies than either Exxon Mobil or Wal-Mart.

Politics is at its heart a battle for control of language and symbols. Now that the president has nominated Judge Sotomayor, [insert name of political party or faction here] will seek to [support | undercut] that nominee through [messaging | framing | "truth"]. Ideological control of mainstream, a word signifying ownership of the core values of a majority of Americans, is at stake.

From Scott Reed, manager of the 1996 presidential campaign of Bob Dole:

The G.OP. has to make a stand. This is what the base and social conservatives really care about, and we need to brand her a liberal with some out-of-the-mainstream positions.

From Burt Neuborne, legal director of the New York University Brennan Center for Justice:

I have reviewed Judge Sotomayor’s judicial record, and it is undoubtedly well within the judicial mainstream.

From a list of talking points released in error by the GOP and printed in The Hill:

Republicans look forward to learning more about Judge Sotomayor’s legal views and to determining whether her views reflect the values of mainstream America.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com on Judge Sotomayer’s comments on gender and ethnicity informing judicial rulings:

It’s possible to take that view too far to the point where it becomes troubling, and Sotomayor should (and certainly will) be asked about it, but the comments themselves are entirely mainstream and uncontroversial.

From David Limbaugh at Human Events:

Even though the nation is mostly conservative and “liberal” is still a dirty word, President Obama is moving us leftward at a breakneck pace by disguising his actions through smooth rhetoric and slick salesmanship. Obama is a consummate practitioner of presenting his extreme leftist agenda as moderate and mainstream.

And even from George W. Bush in 2005:

My nominee will be a fair-minded individual who represents the mainstream of American law and American values.

Imagine a political spectrum from as far left as possible to as far right as possible. (Given the press’s framing of what “far left” and “far right” has been for the past quarter century, left vs. right isn’t as distinct as it used to be. But let’s leave that for another post …)

Where is mainstream? Is it where the Democratic Party used to be before Bill Clinton transformed it into Centrist City? Is it where various progressive groups say they now populate the mainstream? Is it where evangelical Christians say the base of the Republican Party is? Is mainstream more at home with social conservatives or fiscal conservatives?

I don’t know. But it will be fun watching them all attempt to remake mainstream within their own ideological images.

But … I doubt it. An obstacle lies squarely in the path of politicians’ ability or willingness to act sensibly and selflessly. That obstacle is money. Or, rather, the pursuit of it to grasp and maintain power, prestige, and wealth.

Despite any number of outrageous conflations of influential wealth and influenced legislation, and despite the protestations of the masses with fewer dollars over the power of the few with many dollars, and despite the laughable “reforms” Congress attempts occasionally, money is not going to leave politics.

Wishing won’t make it so. Neither will endless, whining posts by bloggers like me. Money is part of the DNA of politics and will remain so (thanks, in part, to the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the “Millionaire’s Amendment” in McCain-Feingold).

“We need transparency,” yell the populists, the progressives, and those just plain pissed off. “We need more disclosure,” they shout.

Sure. Why not. Badger Congress into writing legislation uninfluenced by lobbyists that would produce more transparency and more disclosure of all that money. (Hope the Senate gets around to allowing electronic filing of campaign finance reports …)

That, of course, is unlikely, because so much money is involved — and so much power. Full, easy-to-access transparency of every political dollar means easy-to-access identification of those who may be trading donations for access to legislators. Ditto lobbying expenditures.

The Democratic and Republican parties along their hench-committees — the national committees, the congressional campaign committees, and the senate campaign committees — collected more than $3 billion for the 2008 election cycle — and more than $12.8 billion since 2000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That does not count fundraising by individual congressional and presidential candidates, which is likely billions more.

Many of our representatives in Congress began their political careers running for statewide offices back home. Well, in 2008, that was pricey, too. Fundraising for all candidates and committees — governors, state House and Senate seats, other statewide posts — exceeded $1.9 billion, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Since 2000, according to the institute’s data, state political races have accounted for $13.1 billion in fundraising.

That’s about $46 billion in political spending in just eight years (and doesn’t count lobbying expenditures aimed at state legislators and state agencies).

Some months ago, I argued that, because the paltry public funding raised through the IRS check-off represented so little money, Congress should add $10 billion a year to the federal budget to pay for every single election in the United States. The public, I argued, must outbid the monied, corporate influence seekers who fund political campaigns in exchange for access to politicians unavailable to you and me.

Well, I must have taken a Phelps-sized bong hit before I wrote that post. The likelihood that Congress would approve public financing of political campaigns so substantial that office seekers would forego any other campaign contributions is damn small. Non-existent, in fact. The lobbyists whose influence depends on infusing money into politics will not let that happen.

Since 2000, lobbyists have spent $20.3 billion to lobby Congress and federal agencies (most notably, regulatory agencies), according to the center.

Sadly, politics operates in a world inhabited by money raised through lobbyists and other influence seekers and peddlers, bundlers, 527s, inauguration committees, state and national party campaign committees, convention committees and, probably, leftover Nixon bagmen.

It’s difficult, too, to tell the difference between a politician and a lobbyist, because they’re often the same person. Revolving Door, a study of the nexus between governing and lobbying by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, found that “17 of 24 former Bush Cabinet members have taken positions with at least 119 companies, including 65 firms that lobby the government and 40 that lobby the agencies they headed.”

It’s not just former executive branch members selling access for profit. Since 2005, 195 members of Congress have fled Capitol Hill for K Street to become lobbyists — and cash in on their access to their former congressional colleagues. And don’t forget the senior congressional staff members that flit back and forth from K Street to Capitol Hill.

Since the early ’90s found former House Speaker Tom DeLay gaming the system to secure and hold GOP power, politics has become a multi-billion-dollar industry. There’s so much money to be made by so many entities, from the broadcasters who sell air time for ads, to political consultants who poll the populace and design the ads, to the companies that provide computers and phones, and even caterers. In the business of politics, there’s plenty of money to go around.

Writes Robert G. Kaiser, associate editor of The Washington Post, Feb. 2:

Washington is broken: Lobbyists and special interests have turned our government into a game that only they can afford to play. They write the checks, and the citizenry gets stuck with the bill. Politics is no longer a mission; it’s a business.

All of this is damn disgusting. Plenty of folks are fed up with the role of money in politics. So consider these two points:

1. Money will remain in politics and in fact increase.
2. People are fed up with the behavior of those pouring money into politics and profiting.

At what point will Fact 2 erode the impact of Fact 1? Not soon, argues Mr. Kaiser in discussing President Obama’s pledge to curb lobbyists’ influence in D.C.:

But slowing the revolving door will not be nearly enough to dismantle the Washington culture of money, lobbying and self-dealing that has metastasized over four decades. This culture has created multimillionaires and provided a grand style of life to thousands. It has helped moneyed interests protect their status and privileges, undermined government regulation of business and turned our elected officials into chronic money-chasers. Real reform will require more than presidential fiat.

But consider the failure of former Sen. Tom Daschle’s failed nomination for an Obama Cabinet post because the solon-turned-sinecure was too dumb or too selfish to pay about $140,000 in income taxes on a car service provided by an influential friend. Because of Sen. Daschle’s moronic — or arrogant — mistake, the public learned that his carefully crafted common-man image was merely an artifice.

Consider, too, the similarly errant, stupid tax behaviors of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who failed to pay $34,000 he owed until offered a cabinet job. And the idiocy of Nancy Killefer, “chosen to be the White House chief performance officer, who once had a $900 lien placed on her house for failing to pay unemployment taxes on household help.”

Has the outrageous, callous behaviors revealed of politicians and political wanna-bees cracked the public’s tolerance for business-as-usual Washington, D.C., politics?

Perhaps. But I’ll bet you $46 billion over the next eight years it hasn’t.

James Dobson and the Christian Right activists at Focus on the Family seem to have forgotten that scriptural promise.  Then again, there is a great deal of the Bible they seem to have forgotten, or chosen to blatantly ignore.  Their real “focus” is on scare tactics to frighten conservative evangelicals away from any flirtation with voting for Barack Obama, who may as well be the devil incarnate masquerading beneath a veneer of seductive charisma.

The latest instrument in this campaign of emotional intimidation is a “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” [download PDF at website] produced by Focus on the Family Action, the PAC arm of Dobson’s organization.  The document is so over the top that it’s garnered the usual media buzz, which is the goal of the group’s media strategy, according to Focus senior vice president Tom Minnery.  Unfortunately, the press finds such extremism more riveting than the message of a Christian political organization like Matthew 25 that supports Obama and candidates who are likely to promote the moral values expressed in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and which takes as its scriptural mandate Jesus’ words in Matthew 25:40, “I tell you the truth, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

Whoever crafted the 15-page letter clearly had a creative heyday while indulging paranoia at an unprecedented level.  The letter, which is as likely to amuse as to appall most Christians who are more moderate and rational than Dobson’s devotees, outlines a world so transformed in just four years that it has become unrecognizable.  Consider these 15 (and the letter contains more) “natural” outcomes if Obama is elected, most of which are fomented after a 6-3 liberal majority takes over the U.S. Supreme Court:

• Boy Scouts disband after refusing to allow homosexual scoutmasters to sleep in the same tent as young boys

• First-graders get “compulsory training in varieties of gender identity,” and parents can no longer opt out of school-based sex ed for their kids

• Churches are declared “public accommodations” and forced to offer marriage ceremonies for homosexual couples

• Military must offer “sensitivity training” for troops forced to accept enlisted homosexuals

• The Supreme Court declares that “proselytizing speech” does not have the same protection as other speech, and Christian ministries are banned from college campuses

• Nurses who do not wish to participate in abortions will lose their jobs, and doctors who deliver babies at hospitals must perform abortions or lose their licenses

• The FCC nullifies all restrictions on obscene speech or visual portrayals on TV, and it’s now a 24-hour non-stop diet of explicit porn

• States are allowed to ban guns, and illegal gun-owners face stiff fines or prison terms

• Home-schoolers are forced to use state-approved curricula, and rather than do so, many emigrate to New Zealand or Australia where they may teach without restrictions

• The U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq prompts a take-over by Al Qaeda, which in turn has carried out terrorist attacks on four U.S. cities

• Russia reclaims most of the old Soviet bloc, including the Baltic states, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Bulgaria while UN & NATO fail to take action

• Latin America topples toward communism as the U.S.’s pro-Chavez policies give Venezuela more weight

• A single-payer national health care system has banned hospital admissions for anyone over 80

• Periodic blackouts are the norm after a moratorium is instituted on new oil drilling, nuclear plants and CO2-emitting coal power plants

• Business owners and entrepreneurs have moved overseas in droves to avoid higher taxes, with a huge loss of U.S. jobs

Wow, that’s one efficient administration.  Even when G.W. Bush had both houses of Congress, a majority of Supreme Court appointees, and two-thirds of federal judgeships in his court, the American political and cultural landscape held relatively steady.  That’s not to say that another four years of Republican control wouldn’t instigate a significant shift farther right – or that change won’t happen under Obama — but a scenario like the one Focus paints in this letter is as ridiculous as it is underhanded in its efforts to exploit the worries of religious conservatives who are beholden to fear rather than faith.

And to push the insult further, it turns out that some Christians themselves will be to blame.  As the letter’s author, “A Christian in 2012,” states in an effort to explain how all this happened, “In 2008 many evangelicals thought that Senator Obama was an opportunity for a ‘change,’ and they voted for him. They simply did not realize Obama’s far-left agenda would take away many of our freedoms as a nation, perhaps permanently…[allowing] the law, in the hands of a liberal Congress and Supreme Court, to become a great instrument of oppression.”

As a result of these naïve voters’ ignorance, the country has become a pawn in the takeover by “the agenda of the ACLU, the agenda of liberal activist judges in their dissenting opinions, the agenda of the homosexual activists, the agenda of the environmental activists, the agenda of the National Education Association, the agenda of the global warming activists, the agenda of the abortion rights activists, the agenda of the gun control activists, the agenda of the euthanasia supporters, the agenda of the one-world government pacifists, [and] the agenda of far-left groups in Canada and Europe.”  Heaven help us.  That’s a lot of agendas.

Capitalizing on fear has been a mainstay in the religious right’s persuasion tactics, just as absolutist governments have perpetuated through history.  Fear has always been the most powerful weapon tyrants have utilized to engineer consent to power, or to mobilize people into attacking other nations, races, ethnic groups or cultures. It is always fear that precedes fascism.  And it is ironic that in trumpeting the threats to freedom posed by this litany of “leftist” agendas, Focus on the Family and its ilk would seek to replace existing freedoms with a form of government that leans dangerously toward theocracy.

But the greater irony is that the “gospel” of Jesus translates to “good news,” not “be afraid.”  The Book of Matthew tells the story of the good news Jesus brings to the poor, the grieving, the hungry, the persecuted, the meek, the merciful, the pure of heart, and the peacemakers.  It is these, the scriptures say, who will be blessed, comforted, satisfied, and who shall see God.

Not once does the Jesus of the New Testament express concern over homosexuality as the greatest threat to the Kingdom of God.  Rather – as is made clear in the more than 2,000 verses in the Bible critiquing the love of money – it is being consumed with materialism and one’s own well-being at the ignorance and expense of others.

In Matthew 25:42-45, Jesus says, “For I was hungry, and you gave me no meat.  I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink.  I was a stranger, and you took me not in; naked, and you clothed me not; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit me.  Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when did we see you hungry, thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto you?  He answered them, saying, I tell you the truth: inasmuch as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.”

Imagine a letter from 2012 in which genuine Christian values – an agenda for “the least of these” – were to prevail.  Now that would be a transformed world.  In the meantime, Dobson and his supporters would do well to heed the words of David in the Psalms: “The Lord is my Shepherd, whom shall I fear?”  Indeed, the most frequently expressed command in the Bible is “be not afraid “ or “do not fear.”  Focus on the Family’s political agenda is thus neither Christian, nor right.

The second company, Philip Morris, is suing using a totally different legal logic. They say it’s an unconstitutional abridgment of their First Amendment right to free speech.

In 2003, the Supreme Court dismissed Nike, Inc., et al, Petitioners v. Marc Kasky (with dissents on the dismissal by Justice Breyer and Justice Kennedy). According to the dismissal concurrence (linked above), the case essentially involved a private California citizen (Marc Kasky) suing Nike for unfair and deceptive practices under California’s Unfair Competition Law, specifically that “Nike made a number of ‘false statements and/or material omissions of fact’ concerning the working conditions under which Nike products are manufactured.” Nike’s response was that Kasky’s suit was unconstitutional since Nike had a First Amendment right (ostensibly guaranteed by its status as a juristic person) to say anything it wanted in its “commercial speech” (ie advertising). The Supreme Court initially granted, and then subsequently dismissed without deciding the constitutional questions, a hearing on this issue.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle article, Philip Morris is claiming that “‘…the purpose and effect of the ordinance is to suppress communications directed to adult smokers, in violation of our constitutional rights’, said Joe Murillo, a lawyer representing Philip Morris USA.” Understandably, the director of the city’s Department of Public Health, Mitch Katz, is not impressed:

“Do you remember any part of the Bill of Rights being about pharmacies selling tobacco?” he asked. “Philip Morris has fought every attempt by public health officials to save lives by curbing smoking … It’s a badge of honor for anyone in public health to be sued by Philip Morris”

It’s probably not a coincidence that Philip Morris is suing in California, the same state that brought the question of corporate personhood and First Amendment protections for commercial speech before the Supreme Court previously. California was one of the first states to adopt false advertising legislation (Sections 17500-17509 of California State Law), and California’s restrictions on both advertising and unfair competition are quite strict. In addition, California is the nation’s largest single market and as such it drives much of the nation’s regulations(which is why energy and automobile companies fight tooth and claw against California’s strict carbon emissions law, among others). A win in California would have a great deal of influence on regulations throughout the rest of the country, including at the federal level with the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection – Advertising Practices Division.

For more on corporate personhood, please visit Reclaim Democracy.

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Money, speech, and corporate personhood
Have we finally discovered a disadvantage to corporate personhood?

How DARE you stand on that stage, on the shoulders of generations of women who have struggled and sacrificed to allow a woman to achieve what you have, and spit in their faces the way you have done over the past few weeks? For a serious candidate for vice president to turn in such a poor performance in interview after interview that the fact that you managed not to pee on the stage meant that you exceeded many people’s expectations is a crying shame. In the month since you were named as candidate for VP, you have embodied every single negative stereotype ever put forward as a “reason” why women are not fit to lead a nation. You have been shallow, superficial, disorganized, and clearly uninformed on a wide range of issues that the president MUST understand. That is absolutely disgraceful. You are no longer Miss Wasilla – this is not a beauty contest that you can win by chirping “World peace!” into a microphone and waiting for someone to show up with your tiara and sash – it is deadly serious. How do you propose to take over the presidency, should that be necessary, when it takes you weeks of preparation and drilling and rehearsal in seclusion to get through a 90 minute debate? You are so afraid of the press after your three disastrous interviews that you have decided to avoid them completely – don’t think that we can’t see through your attempt to spin the situation to cast yourself as a victim of the evil, mean, press corps. Do you seriously believe that that would be an option for you, should you ever become president? What will you do then?

How DARE you stand up there and criticize other nations’ lack of women’s rights, when you have systematically worked to strip women of their rights since you have had power of any sort? Your city led the fight in Alaska to charge women for the rape kits used to gather forensic evidence after a woman has been sexually assaulted. Your state leads the nation in number of forcible rapes per capita, but you’ve done nothing to stem the tide. You speak out against socialized health care – you don’t want the government involved in what you believe are private decisions – but you’re more than happy to take away a woman’s right to choose whether to continue an unwanted pregnancy, even if that pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.

How DARE you stand in front of us as a nation and claim that you are prepared to lead us in finding a way to improve education, when you have demonstrated over and over again your own lack of understanding of basic principles of science, history, and civics? Any high school freshman should be able to name at least one or two other Supreme Court cases. Finding ones you disagreed with might be a bit harder, although for me, Bush v. Gore, Plessy v. Ferguson, and District of Columbia v. Heller come to mind pretty quickly. One would hope that you would also disagree with the verdict of at least the second case in that list. How is it that you propose to lead our nation in its interactions with other countries, yet you can’t be bothered to do some studying to find out what the Bush Doctrine might be? You don’t seem to grasp the concept that if you do not understand what is causing climate change, you will not be able to do anything to stop it. Yes, the climate has warmed and cooled in the past without it being caused by human activity – but the difference is those climate changes happened over centuries and millennia — not decades. They also tended to be accompanied by mass extinctions. It seems to me that, even if you don’t believe that humans are to blame, it’s worth taking action to make absolutely sure that we’re not part of the problem. Your position in opposition to comprehensive sexual education is fatally flawed. As the gap between puberty and marriage widens for more and more young people, abstinence becomes more and more unlikely. Young people will have sex, and nothing that we say or do will ever stop that. Sex is a basic drive for humans. We can either accept this fact and make sure that these young people have comprehensive sex ed – including a thorough understanding of how to prevent pregnancy and disease – and access to condoms and other forms of birth control to prevent unwanted pregnancies and the spread of STIs, or we can continue to see young people’s options in life severely limited by disease and unplanned pregnancies. I have been unable to definitively substantiate reports that you are a young-earth creationist who believes that dinosaurs coexisted with humans, but if that is true, it is one more proof that you are unfit to lead this nation. Science and technology are the US’s only hope for maintaining its position in the global economy. We cannot move forward as a nation and maintain our position in the vanguard of science and technology behind a leader who rejects even the most basic scientific understanding in favor of myths and legends.

How DARE you claim to be part of a middle-class family? The AP reports that your family income is approximately $230,000 per year, with assets in excess of $1 million. That’s almost 4 times the average income in Alaska, and over 5 times the average income in the entire US. That’s approximately 3 times the net worth of Joe Biden. The folksy, aw-shucks routine is a calculated fake with which you hope to lie your way into national-level power – what other reason could there be for you refusing to release your financial information before the VP debate, other than your hope that no one would bother to fact-check your claim to be in the middle class? God help us if you actually succeed at this. You are nothing more than a conniving, grasping politician who favors style over substance. You talk of your status as an “outsider”, but your true colors showed tonight as you talked of your hopes of expanding the power you would wield as vice president, were the American people crazy enough to elect you. Dick Cheney has already had his crack at running the country into the ground by wielding powers to which he had absolutely no right, from a Constitutional standpoint. The LAST thing we want to do now is expand those powers further for the likes of you.

We’ve been lied to for eight years already. We’ve dealt with cronyism and abuse of power. We’ve watched the government stonewall inquiries into even its most blatantly illegal and unethical actions. (We’ve already seen evidence of how you’re more than happy to do these things as well, in your less than two years as Alaska governor. Why is it that you are no longer asking us to “hold you accountable” in your ethics inquiry? Why are your people now refusing to answer subpoenas so that the inquiry can proceed?) We’ve seen our homes and jobs and money stolen, and watched wealth concentrated in the hands of the rich while the poor and the middle class suffered. We’ve watched oil company profits shoot up, and no-bid contracts handed out unapologetically to companies with undeniable ties to the Bush/Cheney regime. We’ve watched scientists routinely manipulated or squelched if their findings were inconvenient to the administration’s political objectives. We’ve seen ally after ally throughout the world alienated. We’ve watched thousands of young men and women die in a preemptive war which the government lied to us to start, yet we’ve continued to fail to catch the people who were actually the ones that attacked us on 9/11. We’ve watched the economy tank, and the deficit skyrocket. You talk about “change”, but spout the same old policies we’ve seen over and over and over and over. You are nothing more than 4 more years of Bush.

And it’s time we said “Enough.”

As for you, the best thing you could do for the nation is to take your family, and go back to Wasilla. Spend time in that lovely house you own – the one by the lake. Or maybe in one of your vacation cottages. Relax. Maybe read a book. You can use your private plane to get there. But leave the rest of us alone. We’ve had enough of your type.

Sincerely,

Nan Rhyner

Nan Rhyner is an aspiring teacher, an animal lover, and a flaming liberal. Nan lives in the Midwest with far too many rescued dogs, cats, and guinea pigs, and an extremely tolerant roommate. She rants about politics in her spare time.

Arkansas’ Governor Orval Faubus was taking a stand against the Supreme Court ruling that ordered all United States public schools to racially integrate and sent the state’s National Guard to block the entrance to the school for the black students. Twenty days later on this date President Eisenhower broke the blockade and sent in the 101st Airborne Division to escort the nine students inside. Here is a short but great documentary of what happened during that month.

Two years later, jazz composer Charles Mingus tried to break new ground with a song protesting Faubus and the long inaction by Eisenhower with “Fables of Faubus“:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Actually, that song wasn’t released in its intended format for another year. Columbia Records thought that the lyrics were too racially charged for it’s audience and had the lyrics removed and the tone whitewashed. Mingus went to a smaller independent label later for that raw version to come out and called it “Original Faubus Fables”.

The lyrics don’t pull any punches as you can hear Mingus mock the chant: Two, four, six, eight; They brain-wash and teach you hate

That’s the debate I’ve been having with an old college friend whom I’ve recently reconnected with. He’s become a Catholic since we knew one another back in the ‘80s, and is a deep-thinking, deeply principled man. He will not be voting for Barack Obama in November. Nor will he be voting for John McCain. He will vote, but he will cast a blank ballot. He urges me, if I am serious about my moral commitments, to do likewise. Neither candidate, in his opinion, cares enough about ‘life issues’ to merit an affirmative vote.

The New York Times reports that other Catholics are struggling with what do with in the upcoming election. The most troublesome issue for many remains abortion. Some, like Joe Biden, believe we must make accommodations for differing views in a pluralistic society, despite his own embrace of personhood at conception. Others, like my old friend, see Biden’s support for legal access to abortion as no different from espousing the Holocaust – if not in deed, then in complicity.

Can a Catholic possibly vote for a Democratic candidate who has regularly received a 100% approval rating from Planned Parenthood and indeed, as a state senator, voted against an Illinois version of the Born Alive Infant Protection bill passed by Congress? Can I, as a person of faith who believes all life is sacred? I am going to answer ‘yes,’ and in so doing, proclaim myself also a utilitarian and a realist, with all the moral conundra that pragmatism involves.

If you’ll stay with me in this somewhat lengthy exposition, I’ll do my best to lead you through my reasoning. Along the way, I want to call liberals and conservatives alike to a fresh engagement with these most critical of issues, questions of the nature of our humanity and our obligations to one another, scrutiny of our mutual hypocrises, and a renewal of our willingness to tackle these profound dilemmas in a manner that can help us reach “common ground for the common good,” an expression used often at the inaugural Faith Council caucus at the Democratic National Convention, and at the DNC panel discussion of Democrats for Life. Only by refusing platitudes and rejecting ideology will we ever begin to achieve progress on these divisive concerns that continue to rend our body politic and erode our civility.

Although I am not Catholic, I am drawn to the “seamless garment” perspective that proclaims a holistic reverence for all life, and calls for a consistent pro-life ethic that seeks to protect life wherever it is threatened, whether by abortion, war, poverty, racism, capital punishment or euthanasia. I share the goal expressed by Consistent Life, a network of progressive pro-life interests, that what we are trying to achieve is “a revolution in thinking and feeling, an affirmation of peace and nonviolence, an infinite gentleness, a value for the life, happiness and welfare of every person, and all the political and structural changes that will bring this about.”

Within that overarching moral framework I see complexity, particularly when the pro-life interests of individuals conflict. Which is more deserving of protection, embryonic stem cells, or an adult suffering and ultimately dying from Parkinson’s disease? Is it ever justifiable to sacrifice thousands of civilians in a war to resist an evil regime that would otherwise kill even more innocents? Can one insist on the birth of all conceived babies while at the same time support, even laud, the use of capital punishment in a race- and class-biased system where innocent people are wrongly killed? Are the lives of babies lost to abortion more important than the lives of AIDS orphans in Africa lost to poverty and disease and warfare? Is one murder by intention and the other murder by neglect, and are there therefore moral distinctions between the two?

The challenge for shaping public policy in a manner that honors life amid such philosophically complex and often conflicting “life interests” does not lend itself to cut-and-dried, black-and-white terms or positions. What does “pro-choice” really mean? Does the fetus get a choice? Does it deserve one? Are conservatives willing to create a social structure in which a mother can choose life and be confident that the quality of her child’s life is also part of that ethos? Are liberals willing to examine the moral inconsistency of a worldview in which prairie dogs are accorded more value than unborn human life? There are plenty of folks in Boulder, Colorado, where I live, who regularly campaign for the welfare of the proliferating rodents yet refuse to recognize that a woman’s “right to privacy” involves a private choice to kill developing human life, which is what happens when you “terminate a pregnancy.” Their opponents on the right, however, disdain the importance of protecting the very ecosystems on which all life relies, failing to recognize, for instance, that the prairie dog is a keystone species whose presence contributes to a rich diversity of life that sustains us. Often, those who are first to speak against abortion are the same people, like Sarah Palin, who are also quickest to advocate destruction of the very environment that a Christian worldview deems God’s sacred creation, to be stewarded with care for all generations (for more on this, see Tom Yulsman’s 9/17 post).

The irony, the non sequiturs, the hypocrisy, are enough to turn anyone into a cynic, or at least further jade an already polarized society unwilling to engage one another in good faith on these enduring concerns that continue to split our electorate. Is it foolish to speak of “common ground for the common good”? Can we, amidst a field of always-flawed candidates, still find enough faith to vote in relatively good conscience and hope that within the parameters of our decisions, we can work toward policy outcomes that reflect at least some of our basic shared values? In this regard, should we not be able to agree on at least the fundamental premise that reducing the number of abortions in this country, or the number of lives lost to war, is a desirable thing?

To do that, we must summon the willingness, the energy, and the character to plunge into further discussion on life issues in a manner that seeks such bridge-building. The Democratic Party was right to include events such as the first-ever interfaith caucus, and to sanction Democrats for Life, as part of this essential effort. At the same time, the party is home to secularists as well, with whom we – including conservative Republicans — must co-exist.

As Jim Wallis, moderator the DNC Faith Council, said, the answer to the religious right is not a religious left, but a moral center. But few on either side seem invested in trying to get there.

My sense on the streets of Denver during the DNC was that many convention-goers were tired of, dismissive, even bored with the graphic photos of dismembered fetuses held high on signs outside the gates to the Pepsi Center and displayed in bloody, brutal relief on the sides of the Operation Rescue truck driving through downtown. Some turned away but most ignored the images, including that of a perfect, miniature hand laid against a quarter, perhaps the size of George Washington’s head. More chose to pay attention to equally gruesome photos of Falun Gong torture victims, whose faces were methodically burned by electric batons, or whose genitals were torn off.

I was arrested by all of these images, which were paraded side by side along a full block of 15th Street. Though I adamantly reject the harsh, often hostile efforts to engage passersby by many anti-abortion demonstrators in Denver (I was told by one that I was “going to hell” when I challenged him to use more Christ-like methods in his delivery), I just as adamantly believe there is a place for their message, including such photos. If liberals are going to argue against Chinese terrorist methods used in religious suppression but support the suctioning of late-term fetuses’ brains while their heads are exposed outside their mothers’ bodies, there needs to be an honest, explicit engagement with that apparent moral disconnect, and non-combative efforts to explain why. If conservatives are going to reject all embryonic stem cell research, they need to make a careful case as to why the sacredness of those microscopic cells is greater than that of my uncle who is declining with Parkinson’s and will likely see a premature end to his life as a result.

And if Senator Obama agrees that it is infanticide and a crime when a new mother discards her newborn infant in a trash can, yet supports doing nothing when a fetus survives an abortion and is placed in a medical waste can, then he needs to be forced into an engagement with the moral incongruity of that position. Obama has claimed that the reason he did not support a similar Illinois state version of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act that was simultaneously passed by a unanimous vote in the U.S. Senate is because of a concern (and I am paraphrasing here) that it would create an undue burden on the mother who sought the abortion, and would create a slippery-slope situation potentially leading to an undermining of legal abortion access of any kind.

Obama has claimed that his position on abortion is one that respects the plurality of moral views in American society. He wrote in The Audacity of Hope, “If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons but seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.”

With regard to the overwhelming bipartisan support for the Born Alive Infants Act, Obama is clearly outside the critical mass that deems that fully born infants should not be left to lie alone to die. Obama’s critics are correct: he is in effect saying that the potential erosion of a woman’s right to choose is more important than the life of a baby that emerges alive from an abortion. It is more important to let that baby die than to jeopardize – even hypothetically — abortion rights.

I could not disagree more. And yet I am going to vote for him in November. As my Catholic friend beseeches me to explain, “Why??” How could I?

And there is where my pragmatism comes in. On virtually every other issue that ties into the preciousness and quality of life, an Obama presidency would be more beneficial than another round of failed Republican policies and philosophies that serve the rich and powerful far more than those most in need. From the economy to health care to energy to climate change and the very future of our ability to live on this planet, an Obama administration would be more likely to effect policy change that would realize the social justice aims that are so important to many voters of faith, including my own progressive Christian faith.

One prominent Catholic is in agreement with me, and it’s gotten him banned from taking communion, just as Joe Biden has been. Douglas Kmiec is a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University and a former law faculty member at Notre Dame and Catholic University. He was also head of the Office of Legal Counsel for Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He spoke on an interfaith panel at the DNC Faith Council where he provided an answer to that posed in the title of his new book, “Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question About Barack Obama.”

Kmiec has stunned fellow conservatives with his endorsement of Obama, acknowledging as he addressed Democrats of faith at the DNC that “It’s unusual to be here.” Challenging those “who are making the argument under the guise of faith that it is a sin to vote for Barack Obama,” Kmiec has come to see Obama as “the best representative of the Catholic ‘path of life’” and a man of “deep faith…great intelligence, great integrity and great honesty.”

“That label of pro-life has to be a commitment to all of life, to a culture of life,” Kmiec said, contending that such a culture includes things like a living wage, adequate shelter, access to health care, and a recognition that we must live in community together.

But how does Kmiec, or how do I, or any other voter concerned about abortion as a moral crisis, ignore Obama’s views on such a central component of a consistent life ethic? We don’t. We search for and work together for that common ground. A Catholic, Kmiec argues in his book, can support the “non-negotiability of protecting human life” through the use of “imaginative means within Catholic social teaching to supply that protection.”

Kmiec quotes Obama:

“And so for me, the goal right now should be – and this is where I think we can find common ground, and by the way I have now inserted this into the Democratic Party platform – is how do we reduce the number of abortions, because the fact is that although we’ve had a president who is opposed to abortions over the last eight years [not to mention a majority of Supreme Court justice and federal judges who are Republican appointees – my addition], abortions have not gone down.”

Kmiec continues:

“If Republican Faith Partisans [those who condemn a vote for Obama as a sin – my addition] were actually capable of protecting human life through their singular focus on overturning Roe, the claim might have greater plausibility.”

Here again my pragmatic bent enters in, yet it is not incompatible with my overarching philosophical/religious orientation: I do not believe that Obama’s extreme views in support of abortion rights — and they are extreme, if we look at a basic bell curve of American opinion, with Obama on one end and Sarah Palin on the other – are likely to gain real traction in Congress or among the judiciary. Nor, for that matter, would Palin’s or McCain’s positions be likely to be turned into policy, given the moderate views held by most Americans. I do not anticipate that the Freedom of Choice Act will be passed, nor that Roe vs. Wade will be reversed, and even if it were, how likely is it that real inroads would be made in reducing the abortion rate as a result? The matter would merely be thrown back to the states for even more contentious and vitriolic political wrangling. The approach advocated by Obama and embraced by Kmiec, to enact policies that would reduce current abortion rates, is much more likely in the realm of political reality to be effective.

Polls continually show that Americans see abortion as a complex, multi-faceted moral issue. Most make distinctions between taking a morning-after pill that would expunge a fertilized egg versus a partial-birth procedure that sucks the brains out of a potentially viable, developed baby’s head. And most see a difficult continuum of developmental stages, each with ramifications for the morality of “choice,” in between. In a 2008 Gallup poll that asked voters whether they supported abortion in “all circumstances, some circumstances, or no circumstances,” respondents came down largely in the middle.

Many Christians, even Catholics, see such a spectrum of gray. My Catholic friend does not, and I respect him for the consistency of his position. Within his moral framework, human life – human personhood – begins at conception, and to destroy it for any reason is equivalent to committing murder. We have laws against murder in our society, and they trump our right to privacy. A woman enduring domestic abuse may wish to make the private decision to murder her abuser, but society says his right to life trumps her individual choice. If one believes, as my friend and many Christians do, that abortion is no different from murdering anyone already born, then there is a moral imperative to deny the legality of such a practice. To his credit, he is consistent on sanctity of life issues: unlike far too many religious conservatives, he doesn’t oppose abortion, then turn around and vote for a candidate who supports the war in Iraq or policies that keep kids in ghettoes well stocked with machine guns and assault rifles so they can keep killing each other (the same invalid slippery slope argument Obama makes applies most of the time to gun rights advocates, too).

I cannot make that same choice not to participate. As I see it, we humans are fallen and flawed and our institutions are, too. But they are the only structures we have within which to work toward our nobler goals of justice, fairness and the common good. There is a lot we can do outside of government. But government, whether a “necessary evil” or agent of our “better angels,” is a fixture in our collective welfare, and I believe we have a moral obligation to participate in it.

When it comes to resolving the social problems that prompt so many women to have abortions, I have faith that Democrats can do more to solve them than anything Republicans are proposing, despite their claim to be the pro-life party. As Kristen Day, head of Democrats for Life, said in an interview with the New Republic last month, “Republicans do nothing to help pregnant women who are facing pregnancy…Many women don’t have the resources to sustain a healthy pregnancy, let alone a child.” Data shows that Democratic policies such as those espoused in the Pregnant Women Support Act endorsed by Obama – providing prenatal resources, expanding health care – are effective in helping to reduce abortion rates.

It is one thing to speak out about against abortion, as Republicans do, but quite another to take action that makes meaningful inroads against its prevalence. Toward that utilitarian realization of an end, as Day said, “If a voter’s top priority is reducing abortion, she should vote Democratic.”

For many Catholics, abortion is that top-priority issue. For me, the whole gamut of issues that concern our quality of life as human beings, on earth, in community with one another, are just as central. Those are central concerns to many conservatives, too. As my staunchly Republican cousin claims whenever we talk politics, “We really want the same things in the end…we just disagree on the means to get there.” In many respects I think he’s right. But where I think he is wrong is in believing that yet more Republican policies will get us anywhere near our shared desire for a more humane society. My faith is buoyed, however, that we are talking, that I am talking with my Catholic friend, that we are being honest and respecting one another while cultivating conversation. The seeds of that elusive common ground we so desperately need in this country can only germinate in the soil of civility fertilized with integrity.

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S&R: John Podesta said today [at the Energy and Climate Change roundtable] that the process of decarbonizing, of getting ourselves off of fossil fuels, would be a massive and breathtakingly difficult process for our country and the world. How will PCAP help the President and Congress convince the American people that decarbonizing our economy won’t be too difficult to undertake at all?

Bill Becker: Well, a couple of things. John is right, this is going to be a massive undertaking. We’ve got 200 years of a fossil economy that we need to reinvent, and we need to do it on a dime – turn on a dime. And we need to do it as a global community instead of as one country. And we don’t have a czar who can impose this on us – the democratic process is frustrating to say the least. So it’s a huge undertaking.

The comparison I hear most people make is to FDR and World War II, how we turned production of automobiles into tanks on a dime, where we began to produce what we needed to win that war, where we rallied the nation to get involved with victory gardens and war bonds. They even had something called victory speakers which reminds me of Al Gore’s training of a thousand people to go out and give his speech. People in the community actually went out and gave 10, 15 minute speeches about supporting the war effort. What FDR had, finally, after a long, frustrating time, was strong public support to lead because of Pearl Harbor, because of the Depression.

This is a more subtle and insidious issue. It isn’t like we’re suddenly attacked. It’s like the frog in the water that heats up slowly until it’s boiling. It’s a leadership challenge to be sure. But I have a feeling that the American people are waiting to be asked to do something, that our political leaders in recent times have not had the courage to enlist the American people the effort, whatever it might be, in reducing gasoline consumption or oil use. [Our political leaders] didn’t have the courage to tell the people of New Orleans that they shouldn’t move back into this place because it’ll be flooded again.

I think there’s a pent up, sort of Kennedy-esque “ask what we can do for the country” spirit, and the American people are waiting to be asked to get involved. I think that one of the things the next President needs to do is rally that spirit and tell people what they can do, suggest what every American can do in every home or every automobile, and get us all involved. But there has to be a clear goal that we all can strive for. There needs to be amazingly inspirational leadership of the kind that John Kennedy often gave with his speeches, and I think we’ve got a candidate that can do that.

I think also that the weather is going to conspire and the oil market is going to conspire and, when we put a cap on carbon, the economic signals will conspire to help people change their behaviors. What we saw with gasoline prices going above $4 is that people began to voluntarily do what those of us in the energy conservation and efficiency business have wanted them to do for many years. They began to buy more smaller vehicles, more fuel efficient vehicles. They began to drive less, to use more mass transit, they began to walk more. All of those things. Their behavior was changed by the marketplace. So because oil is a declining resource, the price is naturally going to go up, a carbon tax would make prices up as well, so I think that economically people will want to change.

But I think that the President can rally us toward a cause. And the cause is to maintain the country that was created by the Founders, was defended by generations before us, and is going to be inhabited by generations after us. I think the patriotic thing to do, and the President can make this clear, is to address this problem, address it quickly, and to ensure a decent future for our kids.

S&R: You’ve talked about cap-and-trade, specifically cap-and-trade with an auction instead of a giveaway. I’ve wondered myself ever since I started blogging on energy and climate why the focus is on cap-and-trade over carbon tax. What’s PCAP’s reason for focusing on cap-and-trade as opposed to a carbon tax?

BB: Because the momentum seems to be behind cap-and-trade, and we could try and fight trench warfare about a carbon tax, which most economists seem to agree is the better and simpler approach, or we can go with where the momentum is. But the truth is if Congress passed a cap-and-trade or cap-and-auction system like we’re talking about, it’ll be a virtual tax. I use that term because taxes are like the third rail of politics, unfortunately, and I’ll say something about that in a minute, but we believe that if you have system that moves upstream and deals with 1500 entities it’ll be a good system and a workable one.

The really intrinsic advantage of cap-and-trade over a carbon tax is that with a cap-and-trade you’re assuring the level of carbon emissions. With a carbon tax you’re assuring the amount of income, in a sense. So the more effective approach is to cap carbon emissions and be certain by adjusting the price signal that the cap will be met. I do think cap-and-trade is superior in that way to a carbon tax.

S&R: [Senator] Clair McCaskill mentioned [during the Rocky Mountain Roundtable on Energy and Climate Change] that cap-and-trade might be too big to manage. Do you think that going to the 1500 points of entry upstream will make it viable?

BB: It’ll make it infinitely easier to manage.

What you have now is a system that’s the result of political compromise and tradeoffs. It’s trying to make sure that everyone’s taken care of, which is a good thing, but the result is a real patchwork with all kinds of nuances, all kinds of complexity. It’s hard to administer and probably pretty costly to administer. I think you need a system that the marketplace can trust, the American people can trust, that is transparent and that we can understand how it works so it’s hard to game. The people within the system can’t game it because it’s completely transparent. The administration costs are low. I think a system like that has a much better chance of working. I think it has a better chance of being perceived as equitable, so that’s the way we would go

The downside to that, I admit, is that, if you go upstream, the big emitters like big industries or power plants will not have a permit they can sell. And there’s a number of people I respect who contend “you’ll never get an upstream system through the Hill because there’s not people pushing for it, not enough people are going to profit from it.” So there’s going to have to be some sort of balance when we talk about the national interest vs. the property interest of utilities and large industries. Not any approach is perfect, but I prefer the upstream and I think that PCAP as a project does too.

S&R: The Congressional Budget Office did an analysis of cap-and-trade vs. carbon tax, and one of their concerns on the cap-and-trade option was that we’d end up with wild carbon price fluctuations leading to the end users’ bills fluctuating month to month, even week to week or day to day if you’re talking spot markets and oil. How can you address that with a cap-and-trade system?

BB: Well, I haven’t read the CBO report, but I do know that one of the attributes of cap-and-auction has to be flexibility, and what I mean by that there needs to be a quasi-independent entity – some people have talked about a carbon Fed, for example – that can monitor the marketplace and see whether the price that they’re setting is adequate to bring down carbon emissions or whether the kind of adverse effects you talked about are happening, and that is empowered by Congress to make, within limits, adjustments to the cap-and-trade system so we don’t have to go back to six more years of debate on the Hill in order to fine-tune it. It may be a while before we get it right, before we know exactly what price has the effect we want, what mechanisms need to be in place.

One of the things we’re proposing while we do that experimentation and fine tuning is that the President encourage EPA to immediately begin regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. As you know, the Supreme Court virtually said it was [the EPA's] obligation to do so. This administration has delayed that. But a technicality is that the President doesn’t have the power to order the administrator of the EPA to do that – Congress has delegated that authority to the administrator. But the President can strongly encourage the administrator, can probably even hire someone who promises to do it right. But we need to begin to regulate [carbon emissions] under the Clean Air Act, probably the State Implementation Plan (SIP) process. And we’ve been talking to a number of states, including California, who think that’s a workable system. With a few administrative tweaks they think that [the SIP] regulatory regime can be applied to carbon emissions.

Now, the thing is, some people object to regulation – it’s a safety net. If cap-and-trade doesn’t work like we thought, we’re still reducing greenhouse gas emissions and we have a regime in place. If cap-and-trade is a marvelous success, if it’s wildly successful, then the regulatory regime becomes moot because there’s no emissions to regulate or because we’ve already achieved the targets set by the regulations. We think that has to happen. It’s kind of the belt and suspenders approach – you’ve got both levels of support, if one fails, the other doesn’t.

Yesterday: Part 1
Tomorrow: Part 3

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

— from the Declaration of Independence; July 4, 1776.

The executive branch shall construe the provisions of H.R. 3199 that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch, such as sections 106A and 119, in a manner consistent with the President’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive, or the performance of the Executive’s constitutional duties.

— from a March 13, 2006, signing statement by President Bush explaining how he will interpret the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005; despite oversight provisions in the law that directed he inform Congress regarding the FBI’s use of the act’s expanded police powers, President Bush, in effect, told Congress he felt no obligation to do so; emphasis added.

In the annals of the human race, the separation of one people into two, is an event of no uncommon occurrence. The successful resistance of a people against oppression, to the downfall of the tyrant and of tyranny itself, is the lesson of many an age, and of almost every clime. It lives in the venerable records of Holy Writ. It beams in the brightest pages of profane history.

— from “An address, delivered at the request of the committee of arrangements for celebrating the anniversary of Independence, at the City of Washington on the Fourth of July 1821 upon the occasion of reading The Declaration of Independence” by John Quincy Adams.

Provisions of the Act, such as sections 2104 and 6024, purport to require congressional committee approval prior to certain obligations or expenditures of funds appropriated by the Act. The executive branch shall construe such provisions to require only prior notification to congressional committees, as any other construction would be contrary to the constitutional principles set forth by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1983 in INS v. Chadha.

— from an Aug. 2, 2005, signing statement by President Bush attached to the Department of Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2006; emphasis added.

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us — the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of “anything goes.” Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.

The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an “awesome God” in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

— from the keynote address by Sen. Barack Obama to the 2004 Democratic Convention; July 27, 2004.

I cannot give you that list.

— response of Michelle Boardman, deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, after Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., asked her during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to provide a list of laws that President Bush has decided, through signing statements, not to enforce; June 28, 2006.

I am proud that we worked together with such bipartisan spirit in the weeks following the despicable attacks on our Nation. My Administration will work together with the Congress to address additional needs as they become known during the second session of the 107th Congress.

— from a Jan. 10, 2002, signing statement by President Bush attached to the Department of Defense and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for Recovery from and Response to Terrorist Attacks on the United States Act of 2002; emphasis added.

A realistic president recognizes that he is president within the Constitution and that the Constitution provides the framework in which he can exert considerable power. But the power depends on persuasion, and it depends on consent. And our great presidents have, on the whole, exerted that power within the Constitution.

— from a 1980s clip of Arthur M. Schlesinger, author of “The Imperial Presidency,” aired on PBS; March 1, 2007; emphasis added.

The executive branch shall construe as calling solely for notification the provisions of the Act that purport to require congressional committee approval for the execution of a law. … Section 513 of the Act purports to direct the conduct of security and suitability investigations. To the extent that section 513 relates to access to classified national security information, the executive branch shall construe this provision in a manner consistent with the President’s exclusive constitutional authority, as head of the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief, to classify and control access to national security information and to determine whether an individual is suitable to occupy a position in the executive branch with access to such information.

— from an Oct. 9, 2006, signing statement by President Bush attached to the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2007 in which he tells Congress he has the power to edit DHS reports regarding whether it obeys privacy rules while handling background checks, ID cards and watchlists; emphasis added.

Section 503(c) of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, as amended by section 611 of the Act, provides for the appointment and certain duties of the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Section 503(c)(2) vests in the President authority to appoint the Administrator, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, but purports to limit the qualifications of the pool of persons from whom the President may select the appointee in a manner that rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office. The executive branch shall construe section 503(c)(2) in a manner consistent with the Appointments Clause of the Constitution.

— from an Oct. 9, 2006, signing statement by President Bush attached to the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2007; according to The Boston Globe’s Charlie Savage, “To shield FEMA from cronyism, Congress established new job qualifications for the agency’s director in last week’s homeland security bill. The law says the president must nominate a candidate who has ‘a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management’ and ‘not less than five years of executive leadership”; Oct. 6, 2006; emphasis added.

The president hasn’t vetoed any bills, but basically he has done a personal veto. He has said which laws he will not follow and … put himself above the law, even the same law he has signed.

— Sen. Patrick Leahy during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing; June 28, 2006.

Provisions of the Act, including sections 841, 846, 1079, and 1222, purport to impose requirements that could inhibit the President’s ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, to protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and to execute his authority as Commander in Chief. The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President.

— from a Jan. 28 signing statement by President Bush attached to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008; emphasis added.

Congress is Republican-controlled. Polling shows that a large majority of Americans are willing to give up their civil liberties to prevent another terror attack. The USA Patriot Act passed with overwhelming support. So why didn’t the President simply ask Congress for the authority he thought he needed?

The answer seems to be, quite simply, that Vice President Dick Cheney has never recovered from being President Ford’s chief of staff when Congress placed checks on the presidency. And Cheney wanted to make the point that he thought it was within a president’s power to ignore Congress’ laws relating to the exercise of executive power. Bush has gone along with all such Cheney plans.

No president before Bush has taken as aggressive a posture — the position that his powers as commander-in-chief, under Article II of the Constitution, license any action he may take in the name of national security — although Richard Nixon, my former boss, took a similar position.

— excerpt from FindLaw column by John W. Dean, former counselor to President Richard M. Nixon; Dec. 30, 2005; emphasis added.

Sections 8007, 8011, and 8093 of the Act prohibit the use of funds to initiate a special access program, a new overseas installation, or a new start program, unless the congressional defense committees receive advance notice. The Supreme Court of the United States has stated that the President’s authority to classify and control access to information bearing on the national security flows from the Constitution and does not depend upon a legislative grant of authority. Although the advance notice contemplated by sections 8007, 8011, and 8093 can be provided in most situations as a matter of comity, situations may arise, especially in wartime, in which the President must act promptly under his constitutional grants of executive power and authority as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces while protecting certain extraordinarily sensitive national security information. The executive branch shall construe these sections in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President.

— from a Jan. 2, 2006, signing statement by President Bush attached to the Department of Defense, Emergency Supplemental Appropriations to Address Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, and Pandemic Influenza Act, 2006; emphasis added.

As the letter from the Acting Attorney General explained in considerable detail, the assertion of Executive Privilege here is intended to protect a fundamental interest of the Presidency: the necessity that a President receive candid advice from his advisors and that those advisors be able to communicate freely and openly with the President, with each other, and with others inside and outside the Executive Branch. In the present setting, where the President’s authority to appoint and remove U.S. Attorneys is at stake, the institutional interest of the Executive Branch is very strong. The Acting Attorney General’s letter clearly identifies the subject matter of the deliberations and communications at issue and provides an extensive treatment of the issues implicated by the subpoenas and the legal basis for the President’s assertion of Executive Privilege.

— from a July 7, 2007, letter from Fred F. Fielding, counsel to President Bush, to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy and Rep. John Conyers Jr. asserting executive privilege “with respect to the testimony sought from Sara M. Taylor and Harriet E. Miers covering White House consideration, deliberations or communications, whether internal or external, relating to possible dismissal or appointment of United States Attorneys”; emphasis added.

I have to wonder if the White House’s refusal to provide a detailed basis for this executive privilege claim has more to do with its inability to craft an effective one.

— comment of Sen. Patrick J. Leahy following receipt of Mr. Fielding’s letter; July 11, 2007.

The clear message of these decisions taken together is that the Court is willing to allow Congress some leeway in putting limitations on executive power but that it is wholly unwilling to permit Congress to participate in administering the laws itself or through its agents.

— Alan B. Morrison, a Washington lawyer who filed a brief as a friend of the Court supporting a special prosecutor law adopted by Congress in the wake of investigations of Reagan Administration officials and former officials; the law provided for judges to appoint special prosecutors in such cases, insulated from presidential control. The Reagan Administration argued that this was an unconstitutional encroachment on the president’s power; the Court ruled 7-1 against the administration; June 30, 1988.

The executive branch shall construe section 11(c) of the Act, relating to executive branch reports to the Congress concerning investigations of alleged criminal and fraudulent activities in connection with a specified project, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authorities of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information the disclosure of which could impair the performance of the Executive’s constitutional duties, including the conduct of investigations and prosecutions to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

— from a Dec. 25, 2006, signing statement by President Bush attached to the National Transportation Safety Board Reauthorization Act of 2006; emphasis added.

In late 1947 Clark Clifford and James Rowe instructed Harry Truman, “The worse matters get, up to a fairly certain point—real danger of imminent war—the more is there a sense of crisis. In times of crisis the American citizen tends to back up his President.” The result was the famed war scare of 1948, in which that accidental President started trumpeting “the critical nature of the situation in Europe,” the necessity for “speedy action,” the “great urgency” of the problem of the Soviet threat. He did this even though, as State Department counselor Charles Bohlen explained in a confidential January 1948 memo, the government considered its position “vis-à-vis the Soviet better now than at any time since the end of the war.”

— excerpt from a commentary in The Nation. by Eric Alterman; Feb. 7, 2002.

RUSH LIMBAUGH: Is this really part of an effort by some in the Senate to try to convince the American people we don’t face a threat anymore, and there’s no reason to run the risk of violating people’s civil liberties, blah, blah, blah?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, it’s been focused especially on the Democrats in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Pat Leahy, chairman of the committee, has opposed parts of the statute that we think are essential in terms of going forward, including specifically this retroactive liability provision. But I don’t like to question people’s motives. I assume he’s got reasons why he believes the way he does, but the fact is it’s their inability to resolve that issue that’s delayed passage on this legislation.

I think there are people out there, frankly, Rush, that don’t like what we’ve done, that are opposed to the bold action and tough decisions the President has made since 9/11. I think there were a lot of people who were panicky in the aftermath of 9/11, but now that we’ve demonstrated our ability to defend the country for the last six-and-a-half years, they want to act as though there’s no threat and we don’t need to take these important measures.

But the fact of the matter is, the threat is still there, it still exists. I look at it every day in our intelligence brief. We need to perpetuate and protect our capabilities here, as well as in terms of our ability to interrogate prisoners.

— excerpt from radio interview of Vice President Dick Cheney, conducted by Rush Limbaugh; Jan. 30; emphasis added.

Debates about the extent of presidential constitutional powers are as old as the republic itself, as the debates between James Madison and Alexander Hamilton illustrated. There is, however, general agreement that the past wartime presidents, including Lincoln, Wilson and F.D.R., have exerted their constitutional powers to the utmost. At the same time, any president should endeavor to work cooperatively with Congress as much as possible.

— from a written statement from the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, quoted in a New York Times analysis by James Risen; June 22.

photo credits:

• Declaration of Independence: Library of Congress
• Agenda for America poster: 4president.org
• Michael Brown, former head of FEMA: Allen Fredrickson, Reuters
• President Nixon leaving the White House, Aug. 9, 1974: Nixon Presidential Library & Museum
• President Bush: Joyce N. Boghosian, The White House
• President Harry S. Truman with pistols: Harry S. Truman Library and Museum
• Vice President Cheney: David Bohrer, The White House

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

I don’t have pet peeves. I have major, psychotic hatreds.

— George Carlin, who died early this week at age 71; June 23

At this very moment, as we sit here, women around the world are giving birth, raising children, cooking meals, washing clothes, cleaning houses, planting crops, working on assembly lines, running companies, and running countries. Women also are dying from diseases that should have been prevented or treated. They are watching their children succumb to malnutrition caused by poverty and economic deprivation. They are being denied the right to go to school by their own fathers and brothers. They are being forced into prostitution, and they are being barred from the bank lending offices and banned from the ballot box.

— excerpt from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s address to the U.N. 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing, China; Sept. 5, 1995.

Democrats never agree on anything, that’s why they’re Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.

— Will Rogers

Sen. Specter: In our initial conversation, you talked about the stability and humility in the law. Would you agree with those articulations of the principles of stare decisis, as you had contemplated them, as you said you looked for stability in the law?

Judge Roberts: Yes, Mr. Chairman, I would. I would point out that the principle goes back even farther than Cardozo and Frankfurter. Hamilton, in Federalist No. 78, said that, To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the judges, they need to be bound down by rules and precedents. So, even that far back, the founders appreciated the role of precedent in promoting evenhandedness, predictability, stability, adherence of integrity in the judicial process.

— exchange between Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., then-chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and John Roberts during confirmation hearings on Judge Roberts’ nomination to be chief justice of the United States; Sept. 13, 2005.

Since our decision in Miller, hundreds of judges have relied on the view of the Amendment we endorsed there; we ourselves affirmed it in 1980.

— from Justice John Paul Stevens’ dissent in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the U.S. Supreme Court, in throwing out a D.C. ordinance against handguns, ruled that the Constitution protects an individual’s right to have a gun; Miller was a 1939 case that directly addressed the Second Amendment; June 26; emphasis added.

You guys are great on ‘Beat the Clock.’

— an exasperated Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., as members of the House Judiciary Committee questioned David Addington, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and John Yoo, formerly of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, on definitions of torture and executive authority; June 27.

Cities routinely build in the flood plain. That’s not an act of God; that’s an act of City Council.

— Kamyar Enshayan, a professor and director of an environmental center at the University of Northern Iowa and a Cedar Falls, Iowa, City Council member, explaining that recent Midwest flooding has more to do with human nature than nature; June 19.

The congressman’s appropriations projects are carefully vetted to ensure they are consistent with the needs and interests of his constituency, and there is no connection between his fundraising efforts and his work in Congress.

— Vincent Perez, spokesman for Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, explaining that no connection exists between a $4 million earmark for Digital Fusion and $18,000 in campaign contributions from Digital Fusion executives; The Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow Jr. reports that “[m]ore than a year after Congress pledged to curb pork barrel funding known as earmarks, lawmakers are gearing up for another spending binge, directing billions toward organizations and companies in their home districts”; June 13.

This legislation will bring unprecedented transparency to lobbyists’ activities. On the first day of the 110th Congress, we passed a landmark rules package, and this is another important step to strengthen accountability and public trust.

.
— from a July 31, 2007, press release on the Senate Web site of Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, in which he announced his vote supporting the final House-Senate agreement on the Honest Leadership, Open Government Act of 2007, an act that, according to his release, would “[s]trengthen Senate Ethics Rules, similar to already enacted House Reforms: Includes a variety of changes to Senate rules, including a ban on gift and travel by lobbyists and full disclosure of earmarks.” [emphasis added]

This is a con job. It’s a diversion. These guys ought to be given a Mandrake the Magician permanent title, for pretending that this has anything to do with solving gas prices today.

— Rep. David R. Obey, D-Wisc., chairman of the Appropriations Committee, after adjourning a hearing in which, according to a story by David M. Herszenhorn of The New York Times, “he was ambushed by Republicans with an amendment to allow drilling on the outer continental shelf off both coasts”; June 27.

A two-page “survival guide” issued in 2007 to interns in Rep. Don Young’s (R–AK) office lists nine transportation lobbyists as “The A Team” and informs interns that “[t]hese people can talk to whomever they want” when phoning the office. Phone calls from other Members of Congress, however, must be directed to two Young staffers, according to the memorandum. The document is titled “The 2111″, a reference to Rep. Young’s Rayburn Office Number.

— from a report on the Web site of Taxpayers for Common Sense; June 18.

When you see a 15 percent yearly increase, that is an epidemic that is out of control. And yet we don’t see a response that recognizes it is an epidemic out of control.

— Phill Wilson, head of the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles, in a Washington Post story by David Brown reporting that “[t]he number of young homosexual men being newly diagnosed with HIV infection is rising by 12 percent a year, with the steepest upward trend in young black men” according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; June 27.

Years ago, when there was an accident or an injury, neighbors would usually come and help each other. Nowadays, there are fewer family farms and fewer children on those farms, and it’s just not as easy for neighbors to help one another anymore.

— UPS pilot Bill Gross, whose non-profit group Farm Rescue helps farmers who have suffered a major illness, injury or natural disaster; June 27.

President Bush has set forth a clear and detailed plan for making our public schools excellent, so that every child in this country can have access to a quality education. He has included in that plan not only the objectives, but the support and the flexibility that states and school districts and schools and parents need in order to reach the objective.

President Bush has assumed this as his mission — the mission that no child will be left behind. He’s made it clear that he sees the urgency involved in making our classrooms safer and equipping every child with reading and math skills, and closing the inexcusable achievement gap that exists among students attending public schools across this country — primarily among minority students and economically disadvantaged students.

— from remarks by Dr. Roderick Paige during his swearing-in as Secretary of Education; Jan. 21, 2001.

Q: Has the President ever considered an executive order that would ban torture specifically? There’s a letter out now from a bipartisan group of former Secretaries of State, including Secretary of State George Shultz, with whom the President was a couple of weeks ago, and former Defense Secretaries and military officials saying that there should be an executive order with the force of law saying that torture is unacceptable.

MS. PERINO: Well, we certainly respect the views of George Shultz. And one thing I would point to is that we have a set of laws that have been passed during this administration, and an executive order, in fact. There was the Detainee Treatment Act, there was the Military Commissions Act, and then there was the President’s executive order interpreting Common Article 3.

So we feel like we have taken steps to address that issue. And I would also point out that we face a very different enemy today than America has ever faced before. We face an enemy that respects no borders, respects no uniforms, and certainly has no regard for civilians, especially innocent women and children and the elderly. So we take his position seriously, but we do think that we have the mechanisms in place to address the issue.

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a White House press briefing; June 25.

I am shocked. I think all this is a provocation. If I get punished, I’ll quit training and do something else.

— Bulgarian weightlifter Ivan Stoitsov, who took two gold medals at last year’s world championships, after he and 10 teammates — seven men and three women — tested positive for the banned anabolic substance methandienon; Bulgaria withdrew its weightlifting team from the Olympics; June 27.

[W]e are making broad and dramatic progress against corporate fraud in America. We’re defending our free enterprise system against corruption and crime. And we’re beginning a new era of corporate integrity. Corporate responsibility is essential to America. It’s essential to shareholders. It is essential to investors.

— President Bush, unveiling a Corporate Fraud Task Force at the White House-sponsored Corporate Fraud Conference on Sept. 26, 2002.

That was a complete victory for the defendants. The judicial system has become more conservative and more sensitive to economic rights and business interests. This is one of many cases that has restricted the scope of investor recovery.

— Georgetown University law professor Donald C. Langevoort, commenting on the Supreme Court’s decision in Stoneridge Investment Partners v. Scientific-Atlanta that “strictly limited the ability of investors who lost money through corporate fraud to sue other businesses that may have helped facilitate the crime”; Jan. 16.

There isn’t a lot of latitude these days to indulge controversy or ideas in fashion, and so even Miuccia Prada in her strong collection seemed far less intent than usual on engaging in what Carlo Antonelli, the editor of Italian Rolling Stone, termed “the discourse about gender.” In other words, Prada ditched the peplums and other feminizing elements of her last, determinedly noncommercial collection and sent out a tightly organized presentation that combined elements of sports and formal wear and that eroticized men without rendering them drones.

— from a review of the Milan Fashion Week by Guy Trebay of The New York Times; June 26.

I have a million children.

— Kermit Love, the creator of many “Sesame Street” characters including Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, who died this week at 91; June 26.

photo credits:

• George Carlin: HBO promotional photo via Associated Press
• Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack O’Bama at “unity” rally: Jim Bourg, Reuters

• Rep. Silvestre Reyes: Rep. Reyes’ Senate Web site
• male model at Milan Fashion Week: Matteo Bazzi, EPA

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

Texans view today’s “landmark” decision in much the same way a fond parent regards the efforts of a four-year-old to load a single-action revolver: there’s a sense of indulgent pride, stifled giggles so as not to discourage the little cowboy, and the knowledge that once the Justices get past these first fumbling steps, they can look to us to lead the way into the explosively exciting world of unregulated gun ownership. Call us bellwethers; call us progressives; call us what you will… just don’t call us late at night without identifying yourself, ha ha. Because we can shoot you. No, really. We probably can.

In fact, whom we can shoot with impunity is the primary concern of the more judicially advanced Texas gun debate. The right to own guns hasn’t been an issue in Texas for.. for.. well, forever. We take for granted the ability to walk into Walmart and pony up for handguns, rifles and shotguns without all that permit, registration and licensing crap. We applaud our like-minded neighbors (most of the nation, you anti-gun anti-freedom bleeding hearts, and now the Supreme Court) but we’re so far past that old  argument it’s hard to get lathered up about it. What we want, what we demand, is the right to shoot more people in more situations with less provocation and fewer consequences. And I’m proud to say that progress continues. As of September 1^st, 2007, any Texan, including me, now has the chance to legally live out that greatest of all Old West gunslinger fantasies.

I can shoot you for lookin’ at me funny.

Breathtaking, isn’t it? All I need to prove to a jury after I blast you into kingdom come is that I felt legitimately threatened by something you were doing: committing a crime, standing between me and the door, looking at my chi-chis in an ominous manner, whatever. I don’t have to try to get away or warn you that I’m armed (this is Texas, dumbass). And if I’m female, middle-class and white and you’re not, not and um, not – well, that’s a bet this modern Annie Oakley will take any time. Squeeze out a few tears, look vulnerable, and you’re in like an armor-piercing bullet with any red-blooded Texas jury.

So congratulations, Supreme Court. We here in the Lone Star State eagerly await the maturation of the rest of the nation’s views on the sacred rights to self-defense and blowing away pesky varmints at will, and we’ll be here to set the standard for generations to come.

Unless we cross someone’s property line after dark. Price of freedom, Bubba.

In a 5-4 decision, the Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to allow candidates facing self-financing, wealthy opponents to accept larger-than-normal contributions. This decision will decrease the number of financially viable congressional candidates.

The Court struck down a provision of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act known as the “millionaires’ amendment.” Congress wrote that into the reform act as a means to combat the perception that seats in Congress could be “bought” by regulating “soft money” flowing into campaigns. “Soft money” is, generally, that given to political parties but not specifically to support a particular candidate.

The case was brought by Buffalo, N.Y., businessman Jack Davis, who used about $3.5 million of his own money — more than 90 percent of what he raised — in two losing campaigns for the House. Mr. Davis argued that the amendment discriminated against those who chose to self-finance campaigns to “convey a message of independence from lobbyists, large donors and other political ‘insiders.’ ”

His argument prevailed at the Court. The wealthy who can afford to self-finance campaigns are unaffected by the decision. But the amendment’s means for the not-wealthy to challenge such rich candidates — higher limits on campaign contributions, $6,900 rather than $2,300 — has been taken away.

That’s a severe setback for such candidates, because congressional campaigns have become extraordinarily expensive. Says Public Citizen:

The cost of congressional campaigns has skyrocketed, from an average of about $87,000 spent for successful House elections in 1976 (about $308,000 in 2006 dollars) to an average of $1.3 million spent on winning campaigns in 2006. Successful Senate candidates in 1976 spent an average of $609,000 (about $2.2 million in 2006 dollars), and in 2006, the average Senate winner spent an astonishing $9.6 million.

In the wake of this decision, the not-wealthy are immediately disadvantaged.

Justice John Paul Stevens, in another stinging dissent, lampooned Mr. Davis’ argument:

The millionaire’s amendment quiets no speech at all. On the contrary, it does no more than assist the opponent of a self-funding candidate in his attempts to make his voice heard; this amplification in no way mutes the voice of the millionaire, who remains able to speak as loud and as long as he likes in support of his campaign.

The Davis v. Federal Election Commission decision, written by Justice Samuel Alito, is another strike by the Roberts court against congressional attempts (albeit lukewarm and self-serving) to regulate campaign finance. In 2007, the Court, in another 5-4 decision, loosened restrictions on political advertising paid for by corporations or unions in the weeks before an election, saying such restrictions amounted to censorship.

Critics of the Davis decision fear a five-member majority of the Roberts court appears intent on dismantling all forms of campaign finance reform. Adam Liptak’s New York Times story quotes Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles:

Supporters of reasonable campaign finance regulation are now zero for three in the Roberts court. This is a signal of what is to come. What could easily fall following this case are the longstanding limits on corporate and union spending in federal elections. [emphasis added]

Expect incumbency rates in congressional elections to rise as campaign costs rise, leaving the less well-to-do unable to afford to compete with the wealthy. The electorate will be the poorer for it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Who knew Will. I.Am was so popular out at the home?

Okay, okay – that’ll be enough of that. Sure, Sen. McCain has a few miles on him, and yes, if he were elected he’d be the oldest person to ever hold the office of president. There’s even a Web site dedicated to making fun of his age by pointing out all the things that are younger than McCain. For instance:

• the margarita
• the peanut butter and jelly sandwich
• automatic transmission
• the US Flag Code
• Ron Paul
• Woman’s Day Magazine
• nachos
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
• the Zip Code
• the Area Code
• duct tape
• the 12 steps of AA
• penicillin
• minimum wage
• nylon
• the Golden Gate Bridge
• chocolate chip cookies
• Alaska
• Hawaii
• plutonium
• Mt. Rushmore
• Israel
• Keith Richards
• DNA (well, the discovery of DNA, anyway)
• Ronald Reagan during his presidential years
• the AARP

I think this meme is catching on, too, because everywhere I turn I hear people joking about it. Complete strangers come up to me in the street and say things like “John McCain is so old that his first job was helping build the pyramids.” A waitress at my coffee shop the other day informed me that McCain is so old he has an autographed Bible. The bartender over at the Chop House says McCain is so old his first Christmas was the first Christmas. It goes on and on. According to the wiseasses McCain is so old:

• he learned to write using hieroglyphics.
• his prom date’s dad was a Roman centurion.
• his first driver’s license photo was a cave painting.
• he took driver’s ed in a chariot.
• he was one of the beta-testers when they invented dirt.
• his memory is in black and white.
• he learned to tell time on a sundial.
• his first-grade spelling book was a stone tablet.
• when he was a kid he had a pet dinosaur.
• his prom date was Cleopatra.
• he has all the apostles in his Rolodex.
• Jurassic Park brought back memories.
• his birth-certificate expired.
• he has a picture of Moses in his high school yearbook.
• when he was in school they didn’t have a history class.
• he planted the first tree at Central Park.

I really can’t endorse all this, even in cases where the accusations are potentially accurate. After all, I’m hardly one to complain about someone’s age. Besides, age isn’t really the issue. I can think of people older than McCain who’d make fine presidents and America has millions in the prime of life who really shouldn’t be allowed outdoors off-leash.

No, the issue isn’t that Sen. McCain is so old his Social Security number is 1. Instead, it has to do with the plausibility of his me-too rhetoric of “change” in light of a well established record of … not change. Hardly a day passes without further evidence that McCain’s presidency would be little more than a continuation (or expansion) of Bush’s imperial executive reign of error. Just this morning, for instance, the NY Times reported this:

A top adviser to Senator John McCain says Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team.

That doesn’t sound like change. (And change notwithstanding, it also doesn’t sound like a very good idea for a nation that [cue Lee Greenwood] prattles endlessly about its dedication to liberty.)

Bush certainly sounds convinced that no change is forthcoming. McCain Source catalogues the litany of continuity by noting the president’s assertion “that McCain would be the best to carry forth his agenda.” On “100 More Years” McCain’s foreign policy: “he’s not going to change when it comes to taking on the enemy.” And this bit is priceless:

During an appearance on MSNBC’s “Harball,” Chris Matthews asked McCain, “Does the president notice the pattern of your extreme loyalty to him?” McCain said, “I call him every day and try to remind him.” [MSNBC, Hardball, 3/13/06]

We find even less evidence of McCain’s fervor for change when we examine his record of support for Bush’s judicial nominees. According to People for the American Way, McCain has voted to confirm every one of Bush’s appointments. All of them. So if you like Bush’s judges and “Justices” Alito and Roberts, you’re probably going to be okay with four more years of the same.

And so long as we’re looking at voting records and how closely McCain aligns with his mentor, what percentage of the time do you think Sen. John McCain voted to support Bush’s positions on issues facing the Senate in 2008? Go ahead, take a shot.

You ready? That’s right: 100%. Granted, he was a bit more maverick-like in 2007, when the number was only 95%.

But over the course of a year – 100%. And not just any year, but an election year in which he’s trying to brand himself as a straight-talking, straight-shooting, express-driving maverick sonuvagun who kowtows to nobody, you lily-livered sodbuster. I don’t know about you, but I don’t agree with myself 100% of the time.

So call me cynical. I suppose it’s possible that, upon inauguration, McCain could morph into the second coming of FDR. Anything’s possible in politics, which is, after all, the art of the possible. But only a moron walks into the voting booth more fixated on possibility than plausibility.

Fortunately for McCain, America is just packed to the rafters with morons, and their votes count as much as everybody else’s.

Yes, we should be cautious of the change rhetoric offered by Sen. Obama, as well, because his record to date hasn’t been exactly revolutionary. But where his promises of change should be met with critical questioning, McCain’s ought to be met with thunderous laughter.

Not because he’s old. Because he’s lying.

Click here to view the embedded video.