Newsday had an interesting article about the 2008 Democratic presidential field yesterday. I think it kind of misses the mark, though. The left-right dichotomy is useful at times. I don’t think that it is when it comes to Edwards and Clinton. John Edwards’s politics have something in it that Bill Clinton’s had: southern populism. President Clinton’s much vaunted (or despised) triangulation was built on that foundation of southern populism. It’s naturally liberal on economic issues, but somewhat distrustful of large bureacracies. It’s more moderate to conservative on social issues, but surprisingly liberal on some of them, varying from candidate to candidate. President Clinton skillfully and cynically manipulated those natural tendencies for his own electoral and PR benefit. Politicians who don’t hail from the south have a harder time pulling that off in a way that is at all natural. It comes off as nothing but cynical and insincere. For a lifelong liberal (and one with a real authoritarian streak in her) such as Senator Clinton, all we see when she does this are the worst aspects of her husband’s political calcuations. She may really be a natural hawk. That doesn’t surprise me or seem calculating at all. It fits in well with the kind of liberal tradition that she’s from that could easily be summarized as being the Kennedy and Daley branch of liberalism. Joe Biden, by the way, is busy trying to wrap himself in that coat, if you haven’t noticed.

Edwards is running as a classic southern populist, but one who is very moderate in his tone and style. He will appeal to a lot of liberals, but that doesn’t mean he’s just running to the left of Clinton. He’ll be on par or to the right of her on a few things, unless she actively just positions herself to the right of anything he does. Where I do agree with Newsday article it comes by inference more than anything they’ve directly stated. If the media chooses to frame the Edwards vs. Clinton battle in the primaries as him on the left and her in the center, that benefits her in the general election, assuming she gets that far. But I don’t think it hurts Edwards if he’s the one who gets that far. His natural demeanor, political skills, and voting record in the senate probably make it difficult for anyone on the R side to just tar him with the L world. His amiability and ease with the media make it less likely that they’ll just accept the R narrative on Edwards like they did with Gore and Kerry, both of whom lacked that ability to make social ties with the media members who covered them. In the unlikely event that Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney get the Republican nomination, we may see the first election in a generation that’s played out on slightly more complex ground than “america hating pinko” vs. “crazy, right wing religious fascist’. Edwards might come off as the more conservative candidate in either of those match ups, depending on what the most important issues are 20 months from now.

K-Fed is going to be on some wrestling program in the near future. The premise seems to be as follows:

You know you hate him. Let’s let him run his mouth for a few minutes, then you can watch some musclebound steroid freak pound him with a folding chair.

I just might watch that.

Personal stuff has kept me off the internet most of yesterday and today. It’s always good to keep checking the websites of your favorite politicos, though. www.johnedwards.com had converted to being the Edwards 08 campaign website by mid evening last night, pacific time. I’m glad he’s in the race. I can say that he is and will be the guy that I support in the Democratic primaries, no matter who else runs, unless or until he drops out. Hopefully, that won’t happen and this will be one long, hard, but fun ride through to the convention. I started off putting my money where my mouth is last night, making my first contribution to his campaign. So from here on out, y’all know where my bias lies. I’ve been hoping he would run. I think his message of rewarding work, not wealth, and of trying to stop and even reduce the inequality that’s been growing in our society quite purposefully for the last two generations is exactly the message the Democratic Party needs to make it a majority party again. Truly, if the Democrats could have John Edwards’ policy ideas and Howard Deans organizing and strategizing at the same time for a while, we’d set things right.

I pride myself on being a bit of an elections nerd. While I will definitely and unapologetically shill for Edwards when I think he’s right over the next couple of years, I will do my best not to let that get in the way of my cold, honest evaluation of his electoral strategies or those of any other candidate.

Wall Street has had such a great year that some firms are warning their employees not to be too lavish in their spending of Bonus money. This is bonus money that ranges from a million dollars to sixty million or more. There are not enough Ferraris and $20 million properties in New York to meet the demand. The poor suckers who are only raking in a million bucks or a little more in bonus money are putting it in savings. The poor bastards could lose their jobs and be virtually destitute next year. My god, they might have to drive American cars.

I didn’t like, but could live with, this stuff in the late 90s. Our government was on track to run surplusses. It looked like we might have the money to start reinvesting in our own people and infrastructure. Real wages were going up and it wasn’t just college educated white people that were benefitting. I can’t stand this kind of shit when the rest of us are losing ground again. This really makes me think that the rich have permanently circumvented any kind of democratic accountability via their control of the media and massive funding of right wing think tanks, etc over the last generation. There’s no mass movement to curtail this stuff. The average worker seems to be so afraid of the mobility of capital across international boundaries that the idea of doing something about the rich isn’t even legitimate in most people’s eyes anymore.

A few years ago, there was much ado about the fact that women were starting to outnumber men at many large universities and that they had much higher high school graduation rates. On the optimistic side were those who said this might finally bring about something closer to pay and opportunity equity in the workforce. The logic there being that it’s hard to discriminate against the majority for too long. On the more regressive side were those who cried about how the educational system was failing boys. Well, it looks like the good ol’ boys have little to fear. According to this article in the International Herald Tribune, the gender pay gap is firmly in place. It may actually be growing among men and women with four year degrees, in spite of the increasing percentage of women in the college educated workforce. Among the highest paying jobs such as medical specialists, executive management, and others, the opportunity and pay gap is growing with no signs that it’s going to narrow for decades.

This is a great example of why, as much as Atlanta appeals to me, I am skeptical about the notion of ever living in the south again. What the story below doesn’t tell you is that the 17 year old boy was black and his 15 year old girlfriend was white.

Ga. Supreme Court rejects teen’s appeal in sex case
12/16/2006

ATLANTA (AP) — The Georgia Supreme Court has turned down an appeal from a teen who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for having sex with a 15-year-old.
In a ruling released Friday, the court denied a motion for reconsideration filed by lawyers for Genarlow Wilson, who was 17 when he and the 15-year-old engaged in consensual oral sex. He was sentenced for aggravated child molestation.
Wilson’s case was one of two cases that were cited earlier this year when lawmakers passed a law that otherwise strengthened penalties for sex offenders, but reduced the penalty from a felony to a misdemeanor for some teenagers convicted of sodomy.
Presiding Justice Carol Hunstein noted that in easing the penalties for teens, ‘‘the Legislature expressly chose not to allow the provisions of the new amendments to affect persons convicted under the previous version of the statute.’’
Hunstein added she was ‘‘very sympathetic to Wilson’s argument regarding the injustice of sentencing this promising young man with good grades and no criminal history to 10 years in prison without parole and a lifetime registration as a sexual offender because he engaged in consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old victim only two years his junior,’’ but said the court was bound the by limits set by the Legislature. ———
On the Net:
Georgia Supreme Court: http://www.gasupreme.us.

In case you missed it, Dennis Kucinich has announced that he’s running again in 2008. Read why he thinks he can win without having to outspend his opponents. Let me know if you think that interview just smells of the kind of self-righteous ego that makes any human think they deserve to be president.

I freely admit that I don’t live the kind of lifestyle that gives me much time to research these things on my own, but I’m wondering why I’m just now hearing about the Ex Parte Milligan decision from 1866. As described in the following excerpt of a sometimes brilliant, sometimes dreadful article by Chris Floyd below, it’s a Supreme Court decision that is extremely relevant to the course of our national debate over the last few years. It’s also a clear, bold, and stunning rebuke by the Court of the notion that presidents have unrestrained powers during a time of war, that they can readily suspend civil liberties, etc, etc, etc. It was written just after the Civil War–a conflict that certainly provided more compelling rexcuses to suspend civil liberties than anything in our current ‘War on Terror’ has provided. It was written by a Lincoln appointee on a court that had a majority of Lincoln appointees. Can you imagine Bush’s cronies having the personal integrity to do something like that? I can’t.

    To understand more fully the nature of the atrocity inflicted on Jose Padilla - and the whole penumbra of constitutional and moral issues raised by Bush’s liberty-gutting “unitary executive” dictatorship - we must go back precisely 140 years, to December 1866, when the Supreme Court rendered its formal opinion in the case Ex Parte Milligan. It was a decisive ruling against a government that had far overreached its powers, stripping away essential liberties in the name of national security. The justice who authored the unanimous majority opinion was a Republican, an old friend and political crony of the president who had appointed him. Even so, his ruling struck hard at the abuses set in train by his patron. He stood upon the law, he stood upon the Constitution, even in the aftermath of a shattering blow that had killed more than 600,000 Americans and almost destroyed the nation itself.

    This is what the Court decided: “The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false; for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it, which are necessary to preserve its existence.”

    The author was Justice David Davis, an Illinois lawyer appointed by Abraham Lincoln after helping run the campaign that gave his old colleague the presidency in the fateful 1860 election. (Davis was also, by a strange quirk of history, the second cousin of George W. Bush’s great-grandfather.) By the time the Court issued its ruling, Lincoln was dead, but the after-effects of his ever-expanding suspension of civil liberties during wartime were still roiling through the courts, and through America’s fractured society. The Milligan ruling was, in the words of legal scholar John P. Frank, “one of the truly great documents of the American Constitution,” a “bulwark” for civil liberties, expansive and exacting in the constitutional protections it spelled out.

    The ruling acknowledged that there are times when the writ of habeas corpus may have to be suspended, in an area where hostilities are directly taking place - but even this power, they noted, was highly circumscribed and specifically delegated to Congress, not the president. Lincoln exceeded this authority on numerous occasions, increasing the scope of his powers until the entire Union was essentially under martial law, and anyone arbitrarily deemed guilty of never-defined “disloyal practices” could be arrested or silenced - in the latter case by having their newspaper shut down, for instance. (Lincoln would sometimes - but not always - seek ex post facto Congressional authorization for these acts.) Some parts of the Union that the Lincoln administration thought particularly disloyal were officially put under martial law - like southern Indiana, where anti-war agitator Lambdin Milligan and four others were accused of a plot to free Confederate prisoners, and were summarily tried and sentenced to death by a military tribunal.

    It was this case that the Court - five members of which were Lincoln appointees - overturned in such a decided fashion. The ruling is plain: constitutional protections not only apply “equally in war and peace” but also - in a dramatic extension of this legal shield - to “all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances.” No emergency - not even open civil war - warrants their suspension. Even in wartime, the president’s powers, though expanded, are still restrained: “he is controlled by law, and has his appropriate sphere of duty, which is to execute, not to make, the laws.”

    All of this - and much more of the ruling besides - is directly applicable to the transparently illicit and unconstitutional regime set up by the Bush administration to prosecute its self-declared “War on Terror.” Indefinite detention, torture, military tribunals, the arbitrary creation of novel legal categories such as “unlawful enemy combatant,” warrantless surveillance, extrajudicial killings, kidnapping and rendition of uncharged captives, secret prisons - in short, the entire apparatus whose machinations led to the destruction of Jose Padilla’s mind - is completely without basis in law, as the US Supreme Court ruled 140 years ago.

    In fact, the current Court drew heavily on Milligan in another case involving an American citizen imprisoned in the “War on Terror” (after being captured on the battlefield, unlike Padilla, who was grabbed while walking through the Chicago airport): Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld. It was this 2004 ruling that sent the Bush administration back to Congress for rubberstamp approval of a bill that turned out to be not a limitation of the presidential dictatorship, but its vast expansion, including the permanent loss of habeas corpus rights even by Terror War captives who had not engaged in hostilities against the United States. (Indeed, as administration officials have explicitly stated, these strictures could also apply to people who had unwittingly aided an accused terrorist organization in some fashion.) Many legal experts agree that the deliberately vague language of this new bill - the now-infamous “Military Commissions Act” - includes American citizens among those who can be arbitrarily designated as “unlawful enemy combatants” and held forever without charge or trial at the pleasure of the “unitary executive.”

    The MCA was regarded by many as the final guttering-out of the Republic’s ancient flame. It wholeheartedly accepted the principle of the “unitary executive” and Bush’s claim of “inherent powers” which allow him to disregard any part of any law that he doesn’t like - despite the fact that such ghostly powers do not exist in the Constitution, as the Milligan ruling clearly stated. By codifying the principle of presidential dictatorship into “law” - now understood merely as the ratification of the executive’s arbitrary decisions - the MCA transformed the fundamental nature of the American state. As noted above, all liberties are now at the mercy of the executive. The abuses of power that this principle has led to are already enormous; the potential for further abuses under this new-style state is virtually without limit.

    But suddenly, in the Republic’s darkest hour, came a ray of light: against all odds - and a vast GOP vote-fixing operation that shaved off at least three or four million likely Democratic votes, as Greg Palast has documented - the American people ousted Bush’s willing executioners of liberty from their stranglehold on Congress. Hopes long quelled by years of unanswered outrages sprang back to life: Surely now will come a day of reckoning. Now will come a restoration. Now the great double helix of law and power will be stitched back together again.

    But will it?

For about a year now, I’ve been pimping Keith Olbermann and his show to anyone who would listen to me. It’s the best news broadcast on cable. Alternet has a nice article on Olbermann and his show. What he’s doing is not only good, it’s successful. Olbermann’s ratings had been on a slow, but steady upward path for a while. Since August alone, though, they’ve suddenly shot up. They’re up by 55% since then. Making Olbermann the co-anchor of MSNBC’s election night coverage brought them up by 111% in the 25-54 age set. I’m part of that audience. I don’t think my TV left MSNBC more than a total of 10 minutes the whole night.