I have developed an ongoing fascination with Chuck Hagel over the last couple of years. He’s a principled guy. When I say that, I mean in it in almost precisely the opposite of how most ideologues and partisans mean the word when they use it. I bought his book, America: Our Next Chapter this summer, but had a hard time reading it. I eventually did read most of it, but skipped a few chapters. It was terribly pedestrian. Hagel, however smart he may be, is no intellectual. Even with a co-author who no doubt did the heavy lifting of putting Hagel’s thoughts to paper, it often comes off like a high school student’s “write your own biography” assignment. You need not be an intellectual to be smart and to be shrewd. Tonight, I read an interesting portrait of Hagel that came out in the New Yorker just before the election. It’s worth checking out.

It will be interesting to watch whether the legal argument being put forth by the San Francisco City Attorney against Prop 8 holds sway with the court. I haven’t been in California long enough to know the history of the court or much about the individual justices, so I’m not going to take any guesses on whether the argument will win out with them. It’s a simple argument. It’s one that I think logically applies to this case. It’s about the difference between an amendment to the constitution and a revision of the constitution. A revision changes the underlying principles of the constitution. An amendment doesn’t. Based on nothing other than the logic of the case that allowed gay marriage, the court would seem inclined to buy that Prop 8 changed the underlying principles by denying previously held rights.

What I can say with a lot of certainty right now is that we don’t want this thing to go to the U.S. Supreme Court. We’ll lose. Maybe in a court that’s been shaped by a two term Obama presidency we would be better off. If you look at the court and modern life spans, though, Obama is likely to be replacing liberal justices. That’s good in that it keeps the court from turning further to the right. It keeps Roe alive. It doesn’t do much to help us reverse the trends of recent years, though. Our best chance for replacing a conservative is Anthony Kennedy. He’s the swing vote of the conservatives and has a pretty good record on gay rights. He (as a single example among many) wrote the opinion in Lawrence v. Texas that overturned the sodomy law in Texas.

A two term Obama presidency has an outside chance of replacing Scalia. Scalia and Kennedy are the same age, but Scalia seems like the type to hold on until he dies or just before. In interviews, it is clear that he absolutely lives for that court.

Clarence Thomas is twelve years younger than these two.

Alito is two years younger than Thomas. Chief Justice Roberts is only fifty three!

Any of y’all know any thirty year old pinko judges we can get on the nomination list?

If you are going to vote in person at a polling place tomorrow, make damn sure your vote counts. A few weeks ago I said that if we had a free, fair election without a staged terrorist attack, coup, or other extreme circumstance that Obama would win this thing. I believe it.

Don’t for a second think that Republican operatives aren’t trying their damnedest right now to steal this election. We know that tens if not hundreds of thousands of voters have been purged from the rolls this year by Republican secretaries of state or equivalent Republican elections officials all across this country. We know that they have done this in spite of laws that forbid them from doing it. They don’t care about the law. The “this time only” decision in Bush v. Gore shows that even at the highest levles, they only care about power. They don’t care about democracy. They don’t care about seeing that votes are counted and the will of the people is respected.

If anyone tries to give you a provisional ballot, fight that like hell. Most of them are never counted in the total. If anyone tries to stop you from fighting, fight that like hell. If you think the touch screen voting machine that you find yourself using is playing loose with your vote, you raise a stink.

If all the votes are counted tomorrow, Barack Obama will win this thing. Let’s hope the margin is so large that they can’t steal it.

I was reading a Reuters article today* that asks the question what’s next for conservatives if McCain loses. The nice thing about the article is that you get a slight sense that the conservative activists have already written 2008 off. They’re actively talking amongst themselves about 2010 and 2012. I was heartened to read two things in the article that make me very happy if the conservatives really go down this road. One is that they’re talking about Sarah Palin as the conservative standard bearer for 2012. Given some of the things that have been coming out in the last week about tensions between the McCain and Palin camps, this isn’t a real surprise. But the other is that they’re talking about the culture wars as a path back to victory. Racist, fascist asshole William Donohue who is head of the Catholic League has this to say: “I’ve been on the phone the last couple of days with some of my friends … and we’re getting ready for the biggest culture war battles ever,” Donohue said.

If they think that’s their path to beating Obama in 2012, they’re dead wrong. It’s not the way back to majorities in the house or senate either. I agree with the log cabin Republican guy in the article who says in the long run that’s the path to to being a party that holds onto 160 or so house seats in the south and midwest.

*I lost the original link when my first attempt to post this blew up. I’ve found the same article at the Canada post site.

Another great moment for Chris Matthews today. He was listening to right wing nutjob congresswoman Michele Bachmann prattle on about how Barack Obama associates with all sorts of anti-American people and then starts implying that anyone who is liberal or leftist might be anti-American. Matthews just started questioning her about the rhetoric she was using, asking if some of the people she had directly referenced like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were anti-American. She kept this awful, unflinching stepford wife smile on her face and wouldn’t back down from it. He pointed out what large percentages of the country are self-described liberals and conservatives and asked again if all the liberals were anti-American. She demurred, but then went back to implying that there may be members of congress who are anti-American. Matthews finally asked her how many of the congresspeople and senators that she serves with does she suspect of being anti-American. She said that it would be good to know and said flat out that the media should start investigating and do an expose on the anti-Americans serving in congress. She was pretty much directly calling for a new McCarthyism.

I’m watching an episode of The Daily Show from earlier this week. Charlize Theron is the guest. She is promoting her movie about the WTO protests in Seattle a few years ago. Disturbing thing #1: they showed a clip from the movie with riot gear wearing cops, tear gas, etc. Stewart jokes that this is what his walk to work looked like every day during the Repubican convention. Then goes on to kind of casually toss out that there were all kinds of protesters and cops in riot gear, but you didn’t see it in the coverage. WTF? Why not. Disturbing thing #2: In discussing the film, Theron says that she didn’t really know anything about the WTO before doing the film, but knows now how it effects every aspect of our lives from what you eat for breakfast in the morning onward. I’ve long thought of Charlize Theron as someone on the smarter end of the so-called Hollywood elite. Hearing that she knew nothing about the WTO until doing the movie was discouraging enough on its own, but I was more upset by the implication of just how few people probably know or understand about about the WTO, GATT, etc. How do you even debate what we’re doing as a nation when most people don’t even understand what it is that we’re doing. Half the people who are somewhat familiar with these things just think they equal “free trade” and are, therefore, good.

I haven’t really seen this highlighted yet, but it’s been a busy week for me where I haven’t had time to read other political blogs. In a lot of right wing analysis of the current financial meltdown, they seem to be trying to shift the blame to “1930s era regulation” or “depression era regulation”. I’ve seen several McCain surrogates, including Sarah Palin use this formulation this week. It’s impressive, at times, how focused the GOP is on its long term missions. One of those is to completely discredit anything from the New Deal era. That gets easier as fewer and fewer people who were alive during that era are around now to give first hand dispute to that shit. The Republican Party is currently laying the groundwork, rhetorically, to blame this crisis on regulation and set the stage for more deregulation as soon as it is politically palatable. They, of course, have it exactly wrong. It has been the repeal of New Deal era regulation that has led to this. It has been an intentional failure to extend the existing New Deal era regulation to the new financial services that have grown up in my lifetime that has led to this crisis.

New Deal era regulation would have prevented this stuff if it had been left in place.

It looks like Katrina helped the Republicans in ways that even the most cynical lefties might be loathe to say out loud. As Gustav approaches New Orleans gun sales are way up. First you convince people that government won’t be there for them by failing spectacularly. Then you encourage the population to arm itself heavily. People who can count on the government for major services or even the basics like keeping order, then don’t want to pay the taxes for those services. You get a nice little vicious spiral.

Gena at Deadly Stealth Frogs has an interesting post about the repeated cover ups of the rapes and murders of female soldiers. It’s worth a read and worth writing to your elected representatives about.

J. Edgar Hoover sent a plan to the White House just after the outbreak of the Korean War that would have suspended Habeas Corpus and imprisoned 12,000 Americans indefinitely, without access to a trial.