People For President Kathryn Kolbert joined American University law professor Jamin Raskin on Tuesday to discuss Barack Obama and the Supreme Court on Pacifica's What's at Stake. Among other things, Kolbert and Raskin discussed what progressives should look for in an Obama nominee to the Court.
Click below to listen to the interview:
Following up on my previous post about Sen. Feingold....
My main man Russ yesterday sent a letter to the President-elect "urging President-elect Barack Obama to take 'concrete steps' to restore the rule of law after the eight-year assault by the Bush Administration on the Constitution. In a letter to the President-elect, Feingold offered recommendations for action in four key areas – the separation of powers, excessive government secrecy, detention and interrogation policy, and domestic surveillance and privacy."
Read it. It's good.
http://feingold.senate.gov/releases/08/12/20081210.html
President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Melody Barnes to be Director of the Domestic Policy Council:
Melody Barnes is co-director of the Agency Review Working Group for the Obama-Biden Transition Team, and served as the Senior Domestic Policy Advisor to Obama for America. Barnes previously served as Executive Vice President for Policy at the Center for American Progress and as chief counsel to Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee from December 1995 until March 2003.
Yesterday was obviously a really good day for progressives, but it was also a pretty amazing day for democracy -- note the small "d."
The Politico reports today:
More than 130 million people turned out to vote Tuesday, the most ever to vote in a presidential election.
With ballots still being counted in some precincts into Wednesday morning, an estimated 64 percent of the electorate turned out, making 2008 the highest percentage turnout in generations.
In 2004, 122.3 million voted in what was then the highest recorded turnout in the contest between President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.).
Previously red states targeted by the Barack Obama campaign demonstrated remarkable turnout, setting records in North Carolina and elsewhere. Increased turnout was also reported in states including Virginia and Indiana.
In case you needed another reminder that the Right isn't going to go away quietly, here's a web site demanding impeachment procedures against President Barack Obama. (Via Ben Smith.)
Last week, Studs Terkel, Pulitzer Prize winning author and activist, died at age 96. Pictured above with Barack Obama, Terkel spoke at People For’s Chicago Spirit of Liberty event in 2004, and his stories about the blacklist and Mahalia Jackson had people hanging on every word. His message to the crowd was to “say NO” to the official line, the Bush administration’s abuse of the Constitution, etc.
I have to think that he took some great pleasure in his final days from the coming end of the Bush administration and the big changes that appear to be headed our way.
As the Editor & Publisher reported yesterday, Barack Obama is winning the race for newspaper endorsements in a landslide, 112-39. Especially notable is the fact that at least 25 papers that supported Bush in 2004 have endorsed Obama this time around.
The Supreme Court consistently appears as one of the foremost concerns.
The Kansas City Star, a key swing state paper, touts a prospective Obama administration as a “safeguard for liberties”:
Obama wants judges who won’t favor the strong at the expense of the weak. He offers hope for a Supreme Court that would reject excessive executive power and protect precious freedoms.
The Santa Fe New Mexican writes:
At least as important is that we can also trust him to restore the credibility of our judiciary as vacancies occur at district and appellate levels, as well as at the Supreme Court. Civil liberties in particular, and justice in general, have suffered enormously in recent years.
Obama endorsers understand that the Supreme Court is on the ballot November 4th, and they understand the importance of repairing the damage done to the federal court system by the Bush administration. Obama, if elected, will have a mandate to do just that.
In all the effort to defend Barack Obama against the rumor that he’s secretly a Muslim, too may people have missed the real point. Why would it matter if he were a Muslim? The Constitution clearly states that ”no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States” but the anti-Muslim smear is usually only addressed as an afterthought, with a Sienfeld-esque “not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
In his interview on Meet the Press, Colin Powell elegantly swats down the rumor that Obama is a Muslim, without taking his eye off the real issue.
I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.”
Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim; he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian.
But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America.
Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?
Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.
I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards -- Purple Heart, Bronze Star -- showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old.
And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross; it didn’t have the Star of David; it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life.
A good reminder that the “correct answer” isn’t always the same as the “really right answer.”
In case you didn’t think that attacks against Senator Obama could get any worse, they, umm, did.
Barack Obama, the Democratic Party's nominee for President, has become a target for white supremacists and other extremists on various Websites and Internet forums since he began his campaign.
The Anti-Defamation League has been tracking these kinds of threats, and they’re pretty nauseating.
I do not want a half-breed negro prancing around the White House in a loin cloth, smoking crack…I see no reason at all to allow a Communistic negro to occupy the most powerful political office on earth. I see no reason at all to allow a sub-human to do for the United States, what his sub-human pals have done in their countries like Zimbabwe, South Africa and other black-run failed states…Wherever blacks run things, those things are totally corrupt, grossly dysfunctional and ultimately, complete failures.
Click through to read more, but it’s difficult to get through the whole thing.
Ezra Klein points out how the right is using the ACORN pseudo-scandal to undermine the Obama presidency – before the election has even taken place.
It's worth being very clear about what's happening here. It looks like Barack Obama is going to win the election. A directive has been sent down at Fox News that their shows should begin pushing a narrative that the election was stolen for Barack Obama by a group illegally registering poor minorities. In other words, Fox News is working to convince its viewers that the black guy won because a lot of black people voted illegally. Charming.
The politics of Karl Rove are alive and well! As we near Election Day, we're seeing more smears and attempts at character assassination. The combination of win-at-all-costs politics and the growing financial crisis makes me nervous, because economic hardship has historically provided fertile ground for scapegoating vulnerable people.
People For is working hard to expose, refute, and defuse the kind of dangerous demagoguery the Right is pumping out. A number of pundits have blamed the housing market crash and subsequent drop in people's retirement savings on minority homebuyers who can no longer afford their predatory mortgages. They're trying to stir racial resentment and bigotry among voters who may already be uncertain about casting a vote for a black presidential candidate. The same candidate is falsely portrayed as a subversive Muslim extremist. Sarah Palin this week went so far as to accuse Barack Obama of "pallin' around with terrorists."
Sadly, these attacks work at whipping some people into a hateful frenzy. There were media reports, which were apparently serious enough that the Secret Service launched a threat investigation, that at that same speech Palin made her "terrorist" comment, a member of the crowd shouted "kill him" and another one yelled "treason" loud enough to be picked up by TV mics. It was unclear whether "kill him" was directed at Obama or William Ayers, to whom Palin was referring, but it really doesn't matter.
All of this shows what we are up against, and it shows that real progress means changing the culture as well as public policy. One of the main reasons I came to People For was that it wages the struggle for the heart and soul of America as fiercely as it fights for progressive policies. Two specific ways we'll do both are 1. winning at the ballot box, and 2. by sustaining a movement.
Winning at the polls: People For the American Way Voters Alliance is funding 24 progressive House candidates (all but one challengers) in close races against right-wing opponents in a very strategic way. The Voters Alliance issued a challenge on its ActBlue page pledging an additional $3,000 to the candidate who raises the most on that page by October 15. This encourages blogs to drive traffic to the site to support their favorite candidate, and it encourages the candidates to do the same for themselves (and it gives them the opportunity to ask for support in a different way). The page has already raised over $50,000!!! (Please consider a contribution to one or several of these great candidates and to the Voters Alliance, and spread the word!)
Sustaining the movement: People For the American Way Action Fund is using ActBlue to build the progressive movement's farm team by funding a group of bright young candidates for state and local office. The Right has engaged in similar efforts for decades — Sarah Palin is actually a graduate of GOPAC, the Right's primary candidate recruitment and training program. People For's Action Fund is running ads voiced by Rachael Maddow on Air America Radio starting next week in support of young progressives. Check out these candidates and again, consider a contribution (in these state and local races, a little bit can really go a long way).
THAT'S building progressive power.
Thanks to those of you who wrote in response to last week's note for the very warm and supportive e-mails. Keep the great feedback coming! E-mail me at Kathryn@pfaw.org.
It’s not as if we didn’t see this coming, but the ugliness is still shocking. McCain strategists, right-wing bloggers, and their Fox TV propaganda arm have decided that the only way to turn around the seriously slumping numbers for the McCain-Palin ticket is to knock aside discussion of the nation’s economic problems and focus on trying to destroy Barack Obama with charges that would make the Swift boaters blush. Pitbull Palin is at the forefront, beaming broadly while telling crowds that Obama thinks the nation is so imperfect that he’s willing to pal around with terrorists.
The portrayal by Palin, Sean Hannity, and others of Obama’s relationship to William Ayers is so dishonest, so dishonorable, and so disgusting that it’s hard to imagine where things will go over the next four weeks. Actually, it’s not so hard -- we can get a pretty good idea, based on the other elements of the new smear campaign: Obama’s criticism of war-fighting strategy in Afghanistan is misrepresented as a disrespectful attack on our troops, and Palin repeats the bogus charge that he voted to “defund” the troops – even though by the Mc-Palin team’s rationale, the exact same thing could be said of McCain’s Senate votes.
Over the past couple of days, news reports have documented people in the GOP ticket’s audiences shouting “kill him” and “treason” – and telling a black cameraman, “sit down, boy.” If there’s any worry within McPalin’s team about unleashing this kind of ugliness and hatred, there’s no sign of it on the candidates’ smiling faces. They seem to be fully embracing the savagery of the Bush campaign team’s win-at-all-costs tactics, which took McCain down in 2000. And McCain, who has tried so hard and for so long to make his name synonymous with honor, has now welcomed the perpetrators of that dishonorable campaign onto this team and demonstrated his willingness to say and do anything to win his final run at the White House.
John McCain and Barack Obama will meet in Nashville tonight for the second presidential debate -- and you know what that means. Debate games! Get your McCain Bingo here, courtesy Dan Vera, a friend of People For.
And as with the first presidential debate and the VP debate, we'll be liveblogging tonight's proceedings. Join us and submit your thoughts during the debate through the commenting feature.
Considering that George Allen's electoral hopes essentially crashed at the moment he called one of his rival's volunteers "macaca" during a campaign event in Virginia back in 2006, how does the Virginia Republican Party think this is a good idea:
Northern Virginia Republicans, realizing they need to improve their appeal among the region's large ethnic population, will stage a "unity" rally Saturday that they say will draw 1,000 people.
Organizers said the annual rally, which has grown in recent years, is particularly significant this year because ethnic minorities represent an increasingly powerful voting bloc that will help decide which presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. John McCain, wins the state Nov. 4.
...
[Jim Hyland, chairman of the Fairfax County Republican Committee] said he expects as many as 1,000 supporters to turn out for the event at Edison High School, where former senator George Allen and Reps. Tom Davis and Frank R. Wolf are expected to speak. Former Virginia governor James S. Gilmore III is planning to attend, as is a widely known surrogate from McCain's campaign, organizers said.
In an election in which so much is at stake, and so many crucial differences between the presidential tickets, our national conversation keeps getting stuck — and not by accident. It dawned on me this week that race and gender are the elephant (and donkey) in the room — they’re more often exploited in subtle and cynical ways than discussed honestly. You need only witness the side show about "lipstick" that Republicans are using to keep the campaign away from issues that affect Americans and our shared future.
Gary Bauer is all gloom and doom about the prospect of Obama-appointed Supreme Court Justices.
“[I]f the next two or three Supreme Court appointments are appointments made by Barack Obama, confirmed by a Democratic Senate...' -- my friends, the things we have been fighting for 30 years will not only be lost, they may, in fact, be lost permanently," Bauer contends.
But cheer up, Gary! Most Court-watchers speculate that the next few openings on the Court will come from the moderate/progressive wing of the Supreme Court.
One of the amazing and historic things about this presidential campaign is that it's made us blasé about how amazing and historic it's been.
No one's really talking anymore about the fact that the Democratic Party just nominated its first African-American candidate for president. Or that a female candidate got closer than any woman's gotten before to securing the nomination.
Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's presidential runs are now just the new normal. Kids who saw this election play out will grow up not finding it at all remarkable that someone who's not a white male can have a real shot at the presidency.
By the end of the Democratic National Convention last week my feet were aching but my spirit was soaring. I loved meeting People For members, and had a chance to connect with a lot of progressive advocates, political leaders, and potential donors. Our standing-room-only panel on the future of the Supreme Court was thoughtful and lively. Several of our staff did magnificent jobs in other panel discussions throughout the week. And the whole event felt like history in the making.
Contact Us | Privacy Policy | Copyright & Disclaimer | RSS
Other PFAW.org sites: Young People For | Young Elected Officials | Right Wing Watch
Visit us on: 
Facebook | 
Change.org | 
Twitter | 
YouTube | 
Flickr
