Month: May 2009

Blind Squirrel / Nut

Depending on the day, I think Gail Collins’ opinion columns are either a step above or a step below Maureen Dowd’s level of vapidity. For some reason Collins made the decision that rather than writing serious columns befitting her former role as an editorial writer, she thinks trying to out-Dowd Maureen is a worthy use of her column inches. As a result, I almost never read Collins’ columns and consider them a waste of space. Why should I spend 5 minutes reading Collins or Dowd when I could read Christy Hardin Smith or Digby and actually learn something valuable.

With that in mind, I will say that a column on Bristol Palin’s re-emergence as a main advocate for abstinence sex education piqued my interest and I actually clicked through to read Collins’ column. Buried within a predictable column are these lines, which had me laughing out loud at their poignant accuracy and humor:

“It’s not going to work,” said her ex-boyfriend, Levi Johnston, in a dueling early-morning interview.

If you have ever watched Levi Johnston on TV for two minutes you will appreciate how terrifying it is when he has the most reasonable analysis of a social issue.

Yep, that’s about right. And a solid reminder that someone who got pregnant while in high school because she and her boyfriend didn’t practice safe sex and use condoms is not exactly a role model for abstinence-only education. In fact, Palin is an example of what is so dangerous about abstinence-only sex education. Maybe doing this work will keep Bristol Palin in her the media spotlight and let her mother point to her charitable work for a Christian cause, but it will likely result in the prolonging of abstinence-only education as a respected alternative to comprehensive sex education, thus leading to more unwanted teen pregnancies.

Educating on Employee Free Choice, Part 29

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is running an op-ed today making the persuasive case that workers should have just as much right as Senator Arlen Specter when it comes to choosing their affiliations. William George and Jack Shea, two Pennsylvania labor leaders, write:

Last week we witnessed an amazing example of American democracy in action. Simply by exercising his freedom of association, Sen. Arlen Specter changed his political party affiliation and joined the Democratic Party. Mr. Specter took advantage of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. And, in a classic moment of pure irony, in the same speech announcing his decision to switch parties, he reiterated his opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act.

The Employee Free Choice Act guarantees workers the right to join a union simply by indicating that they want to be part of one, the same way Mr. Specter joined the Democratic Party. This is America. It should not take a new law to guarantee workers the right to freely associate in a labor union, but too often workers are denied the basic rights most Americans take for granted.

…

Mr. Specter has demonstrated time and time again he is capable of bold action. When he withdrew his support from the Employee Free Choice Act in March, he left the door open to supporting labor law reform. We invite him to boldly walk back through that door and join like-minded senators in his new political party and take part in fixing America’s broken labor laws.

This is a powerful argument and one that I expect workers in Pennsylvania to continue to use to move Specter back to supporting the Employee Free Choice Act (a bill he’s previously voted in favor of).

Those With Knowledge…

Glenn Greenwald has had personal interactions with Judge Sonia Sotomayor in his work as a litigator. Here’s what he says about her:

My perception of Sotomayor is almost the exact opposite of the picture painted by Rosen.  I had a generally low opinion of the intellect of most judges — it’s one of the things I disliked most about the practice of law — but I found her to be extremely perceptive, smart, shrewd and intellectually insightful.  The image that has been instantaneously created of her as some sort of doltish mediocrity, based on nothing but Rosen’s water-cooler chatter, is, at least to me, totally unrecognizable.  Of the countless federal judges with whom I had substantive interaction over more than ten years of litigation, I would place her in the top tier when it comes to intellect.  My impressions are very much in line with the author of this assessment of Sotomayor, who had much more extensive interaction with her and — unlike Rosen’s chatterers — has the courage to attach his name to his statements.

It’s noticable that contrary to Jeffrey Rosen’s TNR smears, people who know and have worked with Sotomayor find her extensively qualified for consideration as a Supreme Court justice.

Meaningful Perspective From Dodd

This is pretty much why I think Chris Dodd will be reelected in 2010: he has real perspective about what his job is now and the importance of doing the peoples’ work ahead of worrying about electoral politics. My rough transcript (video courtesy of Connecticut Bob):

People say you’re going through tough times, political times. Winning and losing elections isn’t tough. Losing you home is tough. Losing your job is tough. Losing your retirement is tough. Watching your kid get sick and you can’t afford to take them to the doctor, that’s tough. Winning or losing elections is not tough. And so I’m going to just do my job the best I can over the coming weeks and months to help get this country back on the right track again — not that I expect that to miraculously occur. But I didn’t get elected to get reelected. I got elected to do a job. And that’s what you do. And if you do your job – and no one expects perfection, no one expects you’re going to make every decision correctly, and if people think that, then they’ve got the wrong guy — but I’m going to try to do everything I can to get this working in the right direction. And if you do that, then the elections will take care of themselves to some degree. But if people don’t trust you, don’t think you’re on their side, that if they think you have a different standard for yourself than other people, then they’re going to let you know that pretty quickly.

Dodd is humble here and shows he has real perspective. He is a hard worker and I think he’ll get a lot of credit back home if his CREDIT Card Act passes the Senate this week, as it will rein in unscrupulous, predatory practices and show Dodd as using his position as Banking Committee chair to fight for working people during tough economic times.

Agenda Management

Greg Sargent’s take on Arlen Specter’s Meet the Press denial that he had promised President Obama that he would be a “loyal Democrat” is a spot-on analysis of what Democrats need to take away from this first week with Arlen and how his behavior relates to their need to manage a successful agenda.

So Specter wants us to believe that this story is false — even though he and his office stayed quiet about it and didn’t dispute it for a full five days after it appeared. If Specter privately fibbed to Obama in vowing loyalty to him and the Dems, and is now publicly fibbing about having ever said this, it seems like something Dems might want to keep in mind about their newly-minted Senator.

Specter will be a useful member of the Democratic caucus insofar as he deems it politically expedient for him to be a “loyal Democrat,” regardless of promises to the President.  This obviously isn’t a problem limited to Specter, but what we also see from conservative Democrats like Lincoln, Landrieu, Ben Nelson, and a couple others. Managing these Senators will almost certainly determine how successful the Obama agenda is in the early going.

Personally I think these people should be put on a short leash and threatened electorally by the party institution if they stand in the way of the agenda the American public overwhelmingly voted to put in place last November. But I’m just a DFH…