Thoughts on the State of the Union

Two days ago I was invited to participate in a panel of citizens who represent different parts of the political spectrum and who had all agreed to watch President Obama’s State of the Union address and discuss it on the PRI program, To the Point.

So I made sure I could tune in my local PBS station and sat down with my kids to watch the President deliver the last State of the Union address of his first term.

I was impressed with President Obama’s strategic decision to touch on themes that would likely play well to moderate or independent voters – ending the war in Iraq, preserving the middle class dream of owning a home or sending your kids to college, and above all, a call to businesses to bring jobs back from overseas to a country that still suffers from having too many people out of work.

I was also pleased that the President was willing to assume a more adversarial stance towards Congress, which has played Russian roulette with the debt ceiling and still threatens to let unemployment benefits and an extension of the payroll tax reduction expire out of what can only be described as an act of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

But I have to admit I was a little taken aback when I found that the first question I was asked on To the Point concerned the Republican response and not the State of the Union speech itself. Fortunately, I’d listened to most of that too, so I could point out that that Governor Daniels’ assertion that “One in five men of prime working age, and nearly half of all persons under 30, did not go to work today” was misleading at best.

What I really wanted to ask was why Governor Daniels was focused primarily on how many men are unemployed when women make up over half of the US labor force. Is the female unemployment rate unimportant to the GOP? But I was already representing the Democratic point of view on the program, and to throw in “feminist” as well might unnecessarily rile the other two panel members, who were both male and Republican so I decided not to press the point.

But here I can say explicitly that while I suspect that Governor Daniels’ examples were purposely selected to make the unemployment situation look as bad as possible, it also strikes me that the focus on men here is symptomatic of the GOP’s blind spot when it comes to working women, just as the Republican leadership foolishly persists in describing the increasing economic gulf between rich and poor as “class warfare,” when even a majority of Republican voters thinks that those making over $1 million should pay a greater percentage of their income in taxes.

That is the main reason I believe President Obama has an advantage going into the current election cycle. Americans are no longer buying the “politics of envy” rhetoric any longer, especially when it comes out of the mouths of millionaire candidates like Mitt Romney. Of course, Mitt Romney can claim that paying a 15% tax rate is perfectly legal, and that he shouldn’t pay more than he owes. But he embodies the very inequity of the tax system and has said nothing about what he would actually do to address this inequity. In fact, both Romney and Gingrich bridle at the suggestion that millionaires contribute the same percentage of their income to the treasury as middle class Americans, who are paying 25% if they make more than $35,000 as a single filer and more than $47,000 as a head of household.

President Obama also sent an inspiring message when he mentioned the military as an emblem of what can be accomplished when every person is focused on a common purpose.

Those of us who've been sent here to serve can learn a thing or two from the service of our troops. When you put on that uniform, it doesn't matter if you're black or white; Asian or Latino; Native American; conservative, liberal; rich, poor; gay, straight. When you're marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails.

Certainly, as an institution, Congress is about as far from the military as you can get. It’s meant to be a place where people represent different points of view and argue for different solutions to our nation’s problems. But the increasingly divisive, tit for tat, petty partisan politics that has dominated Congress during the past year has rightly disgusted voters on both the left and the right.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Landmark civil rights legislation, the Clean Air and Water Acts, and even welfare reform under President Clinton were all undertaken with cooperation between the two parties and with a sense of the common good.

Statesmanship in the best sense of the word is all but extinct in today’s Congress, and in an election year, there seems little chance of its resurrection, but by advocating moderate policies in clear, unvarnished terms, President took the first steps towards a reasonable and thoughtful way for both parties to respond to the nation’s most pressing need.

Hubert Humphrey said that the “essence of statesmanship is not a rigid adherence to the past, but a prudent and probing concern for the future.” It’s time for our representatives to stop lobbing bombs at one another and show just this kind of consideration for the future of the country rather than wasting another year in an unprofitable and potentially dangerous stalemate.

The Hundred Day Mark

I can't help but participate in the media frenzy over Barack Obama's first 100 days in office. After all this is the first time in over 10 years that the candidate I voted for actually won the presidency, so I feel a special responsibility for his success or failure.

Looking back it's hard to image the very real fears some Americans felt about electing the first African-American president. In a series that NPR ran on voters in York, Pennsylvania, during the fall campaign, you could sense how uncomfortable some whites felt about him. As one woman put it, “"I don't want to sound racist, and I'm not racist. But I feel if we put Obama in the White House, there will be chaos. I feel a lot of black people are going to feel it's payback time,” ("York Voters Express Post-Election Hopes, Fears," NPR, October 24, 2008). Some white voters like this woman, sincerely thought there would be a racial backlash against whites as a result of this election, if not by Obama, than by voters of color who supported him.

Or course, this seems absurd now. President Obama acts neither like a black president, nor a white president; instead, he has presented himself above all as an American president, and projected an idea of America both here and abroad that is strongly welcoming of those who have felt left out of the political process: the middle class, recent immigrants, people of color, religious minorities, even atheists. Overseas, repressive governments may well feel that the greatest danger posed by Obama is not a resurgence of American imperialism but simply the outpouring of admiration and support among the young, particularly in the Middle East where most of the population is under the age of 30.

Here at home, the Republican Party watches in dismay as Obama woos voters away from their bases of support in the Midwest, West, and even the South. Demographics, both generationally and in growing minority populations, favor Obama's style of politics.

It is true that President Obama has had his own stumbles, particularly with candidates for cabinet and agency positions who turn out to be as beholden to special interests as Republicans nominees before them. For a while, it seemed that just about every nominee had a “tax problem” of some dimension, a few minor, a few serious enough to make it necessary for such candidates to take themselves out of consideration.

It is also true that President Obama finds himself constrained by the nation's overwhelming financial problems from addressing the many ethical questions left behind by the Bush Administration, including its perversion of the Constitution to justify torture, abrogate the right to habeas corpus, and spy on its own citizens in the name of fighting terrorism.

As a pragmatist, Obama has already made it clear he wants to delegate these constitutional and moral issues to the Justice Department so that he can cut the necessary deals with Republicans in both houses to make headway on his ambitious domestic agenda: expanding health care, pushing “green” industries, addressing climate change, and jump starting the economy, not to mention juggling two wars overseas and an ever-evolving series of foreign policy crises in North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, and the Middle East.

While it's too early to give Obama a “grade” for how he has performed domestically and internationally, he certainly deserves high praise for the work ethic he has demonstrated since he took office. No one is likely to compare his days spent on vacation with those of his predecessors, Reagan and Bush. His energy, ambition, and drive are literally breath-taking, yet so far, he exudes a cool-headness about his agenda rather than a sense of hubris.

But Obama's greatest accomplishment so far has been the change he has helped to effect in public confidence. Americans of all political persuasions give him high marks for character and personal integrity, something many thought had all but disappeared on the political stage. More importantly, an increasing number of Americans now believe that the country is on the right track. This month saw a surprisingly sharp uptick in consumer confidence,(1) which is a good indicator that Americans may start spending a little more freely, a necessity if economic activity is to expand again.

Anyone looking at the achievements of the President's first hundred days should also give credit to his wife, Michelle, for the tone she has helped set at home and abroad. Her warmth contrasts with his relative aloofness, and her down-to-earth intelligence combined with great personal charm has given rise to unexpected moments of connection, like the hug she shared with Queen Elizabeth that so shocked veterans of Buckingham Palace.

Obama's own memoir, The Audacity of Hope, seems like an appropriate label for his first hundred days. He has shown considerable audacity in what he has taken on, and he has given Americans hope that he can actually pull it off. That alone gets his Presidency off to a strong start.

(1) "The New York-based Conference Board said Tuesday that its Consumer Confidence Index rose more than 12 points to 39.2, up from a revised 26.9 in March. The reading marks the highest level since November's 44.7 and well surpasses economists' expectations for 29.5," AP, April 29, 2009.

Talk about a “Stale Debate” - Why we Need to Stop Arguing about the “Ticking Bomb” Scenario

One thing is clear in the aftermath of President Obama's release of the so-called “torture” memos: those who wrote these memos and their apologists want to frame the debate as one in which torture saved the world from terrorism. Vice-President Cheney has called for the release of the information gathered by practicing these techniques, alleging that this will prove that the ends justified the means.

Of course, one cannot prove that a terrorist event that didn't take place was definitively related to the gathering of such information or that such information could not have been garnered by other means. We're still left with a putative connection between evidence and and something that might have happened as a result, and those connecting the dots have a vested interest in turning that connection into a narrative of the world saved by a last minute necessity, however brutal or indefensible in any other circumstances.

Behind all of these justifications for resorting to torture lies the specter of the “ticking bomb.” In this hypothetical and highly unlikely scenario, a terrorist who is directly responsible for the setting of a ticking bomb refuses to tell authorities where the bomb is. At that point, some argue that torture is justified to get this information and save the lives of those in harm's way. Those who make this argument as a defense of the Bush Administration's torture policies may believe this to be true or they may simply want to sway public opinion in their favor before they end up as defendants themselves.

Unfortunately, many Americans tend to buy the “ticking bomb” scenario because it's the plot behind just about every Hollywood action flick in which the seconds tick off and the bomb is stopped just in time, usually through the violent intervention of the hero. The popular TV series 24 relies explicitly on the appeal of the “ticking bomb” plot. The world is saved and the hero's vigilante actions demonstrate that in the world of terrorism the ends justify the means.

But real life is not at all like a Hollywood action flick as police officers can tell you when they have to sort out real bomb threats from pranksters or attention seekers. And the perpetrators of terrorist acts like the mentally handicapped woman who was induced to become a suicide bomber in Iraq can also be victims of terrorist plotters just like those who died as a result of her suicide bombing.

In addition, mistaken identity can lead to terrible consequences as a German citizen, Khaled al-Masri, can attest after he was apprehended by US authorities who thought he was a terrorist. US authorities then used the principle of extraordinary rendition to send him directly from Kennedy Airport to be tortured and jailed in a Syrian prison until Condoleeza Rice intervened to order his release.

But the main problem with debating the “ticking bomb” scenario is that it is all about debating unprovable outcomes. We can't prove that authorities will never face the perfect ticking bomb situation, and those who believe that torture is never justifiable under any circumstances can never prove that alternate methods would result in extracting the same information that torture could produce. (For an excellent analysis of this scenario, see Gary Kamiya's article in Salon).

However, we can take as a given that under the ticking bomb scenario, someone will act to stop a terrorist. We witnessed this in the closest thing to a real ticking bomb scenario the U.S. has experienced, namely, when the passengers on Flight 93 realized that the airplane they were flying on was intended as a suicide bomb. The initiative they took to stop that bomb at the expense of their own lives demonstrates that both courage and common sense can prevail in such extraordinarily dangerous circumstances. Nor would we blame the military if they had been forced to shoot down that plane before it could crash into the White House or other buildings in Washington D.C.

Yet what we should be debating far more seriously than these extraordinary circumstances are the effects of policies that give legal authority to use methods explicitly outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, whether you call them “enhanced” interrogation techniques or torture.

How do we protect our own soldiers from being tortured when we use such methods against others? Do we really think that our enemies are going to distinguish between a soldier and a military combatant or even a civilian who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time?

What will we do with the prisoners at Guantanamo who were tortured? If they are dangerous, we should be reluctant to release them, but under what pretext can we continue to detain them when our legal system requires that they be charged and tried even at this late date? Yet how can we try these prisoners when the evidence against them has been extracted by torture and will not be admissible in any serious court of law? We know that those who are tortured will say anything to stop the pain; therefore, we can never fully rely on the validity of what such prisoners say under duress. Indeed, after such treatment, it is unclear whether those who were tortured are even mentally fit to stand trial.

In fact, the information gathered by torturing Al Quaeda leaders like Abu Zubaydah often blurred the distinction between real threats and imaginary alarms as much of the information he gave led to unnecessary and expensive surveillance of American landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty and even large malls when no real threat existed. Ask any American if s/he is really worried about our being at “orange” alert level, and you realize how dangerous the dissemination of bad information can be in lulling Americans into a false sense of security, and no one yet knows or has acknowledged how much useless information was tortured out of individuals along with information that had some value.

But the real problem with the torture memos is that the United States traded a potential short-term gain for vastly more negative long term consequences. If the real goal of our government is to stop terrorism, we have instead prolonged and strengthened the impetus towards terrorism by our actions. Every act of torture recorded by the Red Cross, every photo of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib, every case of mistaken identity that ended with in the abuse of an innocent person has served as a recruiting poster for Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.

Yes, we have not experienced an act of terrorism on U.S. soil, but in the interim the incidence of terrorism around the world has risen significantly since 9/11, even as respect for and cooperation with the U.S. government has plummeted.

Worse, by giving up on our Constitutional principles and respect for the rule of law, the United States has abandoned the ethical in high ground that gave hope to millions around the world who look to the U.S. as a defender of laws and of human rights. That makes it much much harder for the United States to condemn the actions of a Russia or a China against its own citizens when those actions can so easily be coded as acts to prevent “terrorism” whether in Chechnya or Tibet.

The Obama Administration has taken an important step in rectifying the United States's past mistakes by making the torture memos public. But this is only the first step, and much more remains to be disclosed before we can close the door on this sordid chapter of our history.

What we should do now is stop debating whether or not torture is ever necessary and start recognizing the ways our practice of torture has already damaged our national security and our relations with the rest of the world.

We remain a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, but it will be a long time before the rest of the world trusts us to uphold them. We need to start building that trust now by repudiating torture in the strongest and most unequivocal terms.

The Obama Administration is trying to steer a middle course between letting bygones be bygones and taking on a full-scale prosecution of those who committed torture by bringing past practices to light but not taking legal action against the perpetrators. That is understandable given the President's inherent pragmatism and the enormous challenges he faces domestically that will require the cooperation of Republicans in Congress.

But that does not mean that the Justice Department and Congress itself need follow this course. For example, Congress has the ability and the right to impeach Judge Jay Bybee who signed two of these memos. Senator Carl Levin has stated: "I really think it's important that the Justice Department make the decision as to who, if anybody, is prosecuted here,” adding that it is his personal opinion “that the legal opinions here were abominations,” ("Congress: Who's Accountable for Torture Memos?" Morning Edition, April 23, 2009).

If the United States wants to demonstrate to the rest of the world that we truly are a nation of laws, we should let our own rule of law take its course and bring those responsible for these memos to justice, according them the basic human rights they so easily denied to those who were brutally treated as a result of their perverse interpretation of our Constitution and our common understanding of what constitutes “torture."

In Politics, the Poor are Expendable

It's a truism that politicians talk a lot about their concern for children and the poor, especially when they are in front of cameras. But when it comes to voting, too many politicians pay the most attention to their donors and to the constituents they believe are most likely to participate in the next election.

Unfortunately, the most recent compromise on the President's economic subsidy proposals proves this truism correct once again. With Republicans going on and on in front of TV news cameras about the inclusion of “millions of dollars for contraceptives,” President Obama caved in and jettisoned an important subsidy for poor women to gain access to contraception. Thus conservative hypocrisy won over common sense, and good public policy lost out to political expediency.

Hypocrisy is a strong term for describing conservative objections to this subsidy, but I cannot think of anything less accurate. With their emphasis on self-sufficiency, Republicans surely can not be said to be in favor of the poor having more children they cannot afford, and they are even more adamantly opposed to terminating an unintended pregnancy. Can you imagine the outrage they could have generated by showing up on Fox News and shouting, “This stimulus plan includes millions for publicly funded abortions”??

Yet what logical reason can they put forward for objecting to helping poor women control their family size and prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases? Is money spent helping pharmaceuticals offer contraceptives any better or worse than subsidizing an expensive drug plan for the elderly? According to most economists, it doesn't matter where you spend the money, as long as the government is pumping cash into the economy. So why are contraceptives any worse a product to subsidize than corn or wheat or any other commodity?

Do conservatives want poor women to stop having sex? Perhaps so. But given that poor women are disproportionately young and less educated, many of them may not have the power, real or perceived, of just saying “no” to a sexual partner. Moreover, since many conservatives are also libertarian in their thinking, they surely cannot favor the government either explicitly or implicitly getting into the business of dictating such choices.

And since Republicans always want the government to spend less, why wouldn't they want to spend a little on contraception in order to avoid spending a lot more subsidizing health care, education, and Aid to Dependent Children as well as the public spending on AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases that could be avoided by more women using contraceptives?

So why do poor women have to lose again? By courting conservative votes (which he didn't get), and avoiding any kind of controversy (especially around sex), President Obama chose to cede this issue to the conservative right. But that doesn't mean that voters have to go along with such political expediency. If those of us who take our ability to access contraceptives for granted don't speak up on behalf of poor women who don't enjoy that privilege, no one will.

A Day to Celebrate for All Americans

A Day to Celebrate for All Americans

I have just witnessed history. Tonight America elected its first African-American president.

I supported the candidacy of Senator Barack Obama because I felt that he was the best candidate. But I am also proud to have cast a vote for him as a white woman because I feel that his election is an important symbolic and material step towards the healing of America's racial wounds and the ugly legacy of slavery.

Today is a first for me on many levels:

It is the first time my oldest son cast his vote in an American election.

It is the first time in my lifetime that I can face my children and say candidly, “Anyone can grow up to be the President of the United States.”

It is the first time that millions of voters cast their vote for the first time and joined me in the privilege of exercising the right to vote in one of the world's great democracies.

I know that tonight is a moment of disappointment for many Americans, not least of which are many of my family members, who have been Republicans for generations. But I hope that they will join me in my hope that the election of Barack Obama is a moment of healing for America's racial divisions and a step towards the recovery of America's reputation as a leader on the world stage.

Barack Obama's campaign brought millions of new voters to the electoral process, especially young voters, Hispanics, and African-Americans, and whatever your party affiliation, we all can only benefit when the number of register voters expands and the number of registered voters reaches historic highs.

Whatever anyone feels about the outcome of the election, this voting experience is historic on so many levels, and we should all celebrate an election in which so many of us participated and so many could see tangible evidence that another barrier to the Presidency crumbled to the ground.

Guilt by Association: Obama and the “Secret Muslim” Charge

Guilt by Association: Obama and the “Secret Muslim” Charge

The most striking part of Colin Powell's interview with Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press Sunday was not his endorsement of Barack Obama but rather his disapprobation of the political tactics of the Republican party in trying to associate Obama with the specter of the 9/11 terrorists.

I have long admired Colin Powell, but I have never admired him more than on this past Sunday when he stated that he was troubled by the “approaches” of the McCain campaign and the efforts of the Republican party to taint Senator Obama with the insinuation that he is a secret Muslim and therefore potentially a terrorist sympathizer.

In Powell's words, the party has created an atmosphere in which:

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.

Yet it is not just the more recent threat of Islamic terrorism that Republicans are seeking to evoke in this smear campaign, but also the older, deep-seated association of “radical” black movements and figures from the 60's like Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and The Nation of Islam.

If Republicans can create enough links between “black,” “Muslim,” “radical,” “socialist,” and “terrorist,” in the minds of voters, already nervous about Barack Hussein Obama's uncommon name and mixed race origins, they believe they can frighten them into voting for John McCain or at least into staying away from the polls.

What Colin Powell states powerfully is the fundamental American belief, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, that Americans should have the right of free association, and that no one should be tainted or smeared because of their association with an individual or group that happens to be unpopular.

Sadly, in contemporary America, where the drumbeat against the threat of terrorism has generated suspicion of anyone who appears to be of Middle Eastern origin, as a Presidential candidate, Barack Obama has not dared to enter a mosque and has met leading Islamic figures privately rather than openly.

This has left many Arab-Americans feeling rejected by both parties, even as many also feel the need to forge a common voice in the American democratic polity.

“'What's upsetting to me is you're completely discounted by both parties,' said Ahmad Ezzeddine, an associate vice president at Wayne State University” according to a recent Boston Globe article. “Ezzeddine, who immigrated to the US from Lebanon 20 years ago, said he voted twice for President Bush, but now feels politically orphaned, adding, 'There's no attempt to reach out. Obama wants us, but is so afraid because he doesn't want to be labeled, and the Republicans . . .'” (Michael Paulson, “Arab Americans Yearning,” Boston Globe, October 21, 2008, http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/10/21/arab_americans_yearning/?page=1).

Since the Powell endorsement, Republican campaigners have simplified the guilty by association tactics even further by talking about the “pro-America” parts of the country and in the case of Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, a call not only to investigate the “anti-American” aspects of Barack Obama but of the entire Congress.

Now by extension we can accuse Obama of being a secret Muslim, radical, socialist, terrorist, anti-American. The perfect bogey-man, made-up and marketed on every TV channel just in time for Halloween.

But it's not just the guilt by association tactics that should concern every American but the associations that are being tainted with guilt. It is no crime to be of Arab descent in this country, and no Arab American should be suspected of any criminal activity simply because that individual is of Arabic descent. Arab Americans are a diverse group in themselves, comprising both Christians and Muslims, and representing a wide geographic distribution from the horn of Africa to the Arabian peninsula.

After November 4th, these ugly campaign tactics will likely cease, but the rhetoric that sees every person who looks Middle Eastern as a Muslim and that suspects every Muslim of terrorist sympathies will continue to infect our public discourse until more of leaders find the courage of a Colin Powell to say: “Let every Muslim American child and every Arab American child dream that he or she can be be President of the United States, and let us make certain that those dreams can become a reality by overcoming our fear.”

McCain Sounds A Bit Like My Mother

McCain Sounds A Bit Like My Mother

Don't get me wrong. I agree with the initial pundit response on the first McCain Obama debate: 1) namely that it was an actual debate and not just an exchange of sound bites; and 2) that both candidates performed well, playing to their strengths and minimizing most of their weaknesses,

But there was one area in which I found Senator McCain just a little bit irritating, and that was because his constant references to his age and experience, and his repeated mantra of “Senator Obama doesn't understand x, y, or z” started to sound a lot like my mother.

I well remember my mom saying to me as I reached my high school years,
I'm 62 years-old, and I don't need some smart-ass teenager telling me what I know about x, y, or z.”

Substitute McCain saying, “I'm 72 years-old, and I don't need some smart-ass 40-something junior senator telling me what I know about x, y, or z” and you have the same effect.

Senator McCain was born in 1936, a spring chicken compare to my mother who was born in 1918 and died in 1989, but the rhetorical effect is still the same: “I'm older than you, there I know more” had the same resonance in 1980 as it does in 2008. I still thought, “Hey, mom, you voted for Ronald Reagan, even though he's planning to cut the very social security benefits that are intended to help me fund my college education, and I personally think you're nuts for doing this.”

Similarly, Senator Barack Obama countered Senator McCain's condescension with a consistent reference towards his ill-judged decision to support the Iraq War in the first place when it has provided such a distraction from and diversion of resources from Afghanistan, which is the real center of Al-Queda insurgency.

Senator McCain's repeated, almost hypnotic use of the refrain, “What Senator Obama doesn't understand,” combined with his rude refusal even to make eye contact with his opponent, underscores the generational divide between them.

Many voters, from the 40-somethings on down, and I count myself among them, do not want want condescension from our presidential candidates. We want accountability for the terrible decision to go to war with Iraq and to continue to spend $10 billion per month on a conflict we never needed to engage in. Senator Obama has been much more clear-eyed and cogent about the real national security threat facing our nation, and this threat has never been Iraq.

If there is anything either Senator and the American public “needs to understand,” it is that as little money as possible must be expended in a war with Iraq than we can ill afford, and that resources need to reallocated to actual, contemporary threats, both military and domestic. That will be the true test of leadership for our next president, particularly if the next terrorist threat comes from Afghanistan or Pakistan, which are underfunded and underestimated by the current administration, and the current Republican nominee.

No Summer Vacation for Attacks on our Civil Liberties

No Summer Vacation for Attacks on our Civil Liberties

It might seem that June has been a great month for advocates of civil liberties, particularly with the Supreme Court's stinging rebuke of the Bush Administrations to deny prisoners at Guantanamo due process and the rights of habeas corpus.

But if it seems that enemy combatants will finally get a chance to confront their accusers in court, Americans at home are facing the prospect of more spying on every phone call, every key stroke, every text message they send.

Nor will they ever be able to find out if their telecommunications companies spied on them and how extensive that spying was.

Why? Because it appears that Democrats may be getting ready to capitulate to a lame duck administration and effectively grant these telecommunications companies immunity from prosecution.

Even more cynically, they are dressing up this capitulation with a legal fig leaf. Congressional aides have leaked the information that a new bill will allow the “federal district court deciding on retroactive immunity [to] review whether there was 'substantial evidence' the companies had received assurances from the government that the administration’s program was legal.”

In other words, these companies only have to demonstrate that the Bush Administration told them the spying was legal and they're off the hook, not just for the spying they've allegedly engaged in, but for all future spying. As long as our government gives them a “Get out of Jail Free” card in advance, they can spy on as much as they want, and we'll never know if, when, or how much.

A New York Times June 18^th editorial entitled, “Mr. Bush v. the Bill of Rights,” notes that “approving [such] immunity would be tantamount to retroactively declaring the spying operation to have been legal.” Even worse, according to this editorial, is that the new “compromise” bill would give the government “too much leeway to acquire communications in the United States without individual warrants or even a showing of probable cause, greatly reduce judicial review, and remain in force for six years, which is too long.”

What should anger all Americans is that this important legislation which undermines our Constitutional right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure is being passed in the last days of a Presidential administration when voters are on vacation, distracted with high energy costs, and generally not paying attention to anything except the election campaigns.

Sidelining this legislation would do nothing to jeopardize current and ongoing efforts to fight terrorism. Current FISA legislation still lets the Bush Administration spy now and get a warrant later.

So why is Congress rushing to pass this ill-considered immunity for telecommunications companies and an even worse sell out of our civil liberties? And where is the Democratic leadership of Steny Hoyer, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and yes, Barack Obama, on this issue?

Maybe Americans should call their representatives and tell them that even if they're on vacation, they're not out to lunch when it comes to their basic rights and corporate accountability.

All in the Family: Love, Loyalty and Racism

All in the Family: Love, Loyalty and Racism

Today Senator Barack Obama gave a powerful speech to a small group of his supporters in Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love.” Unfortunately, the topic the Senator had to address was not about unity or compassion, but about racial division. He was there in Philadelphia to publicly repudiate some remarks made by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who had used what Obama termed “ incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation, and that rightly offend white and black alike.”

Yet even though Senator Obama unequivocally rejected the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, he did not reject the man. Instead he said, “As imperfect as he may be, [Jeremiah Wright] has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children.” Senator Obama said that he could no more reject the man, Jeremiah Wright, who had been like a father to him, than he could reject his white grandmother, “a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

Like many Americans, Barack Obama has a family he loves deeply, but whose members may well hold racist attitudes that do not accord with his own. And who among us has not had the same painful experience of hearing loved ones voice opinions at the dinner table that make us cringe, even as we debate whether or not to challenge them or to let things go in order to preserve family harmony or at least not to raise a long, painful, and ultimately fruitless subject of debate? We may not be able to convince them that their views of those with a different religion, or ethnicity, or skin color are wrong, but we cannot help but love them just the same.

I loved and respected my parents, but I recognized their racist attitudes even as a young child. It was brought home to me painfully one afternoon, when the son of our neighbor's black maid drove up beside me to ask if he had the right address for the home where his mother worked.

We all loved his mother, Rosa, who was one of the kindest, warmest human beings I ever knew. But here I was on the sidewalk confronted not just by a stranger, but by a black male stranger with a Southern accent I could barely understand. I took one look and all of my parents' underlying fears of blacks, particularly young black men in the late 60's took hold of my heart, and I fled like the devil was at my heels.

My mother was mortified and scolded me heartily in front of everyone- Rosa, her son, and our neighbors. But I looked at her and saw the fear and the hypocrisy written on her face. If this young man weren't Rosa's son, she would have fled at my heels just as fast.

In later years when I heard Mollie Ivins say, "Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything," I remembered that moment and realized I had found a kindred spirit.

At that moment as a young girl I started to question, if only in my head and my heart, what my parents said about Blacks, Asians, Jews, Catholics – just about anybody who didn't belong to the “right” group – German Lutherans (and even then they had to be “Missouri” Lutheran).

Yet I was also struck by the contradictions Senator Obama noted in his former pastor because they suggested the same contradictions I saw in my parents: “Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect," Senator Obama said of Jeremiah Wright. "He contains within him the contradictions — the good and the bad — of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.”

My parents also often treated individuals of different races, creeds, and ethnicities, far better then they talked about those groups in general. When the first black family moved in across the street from us in our modest home on the east side of Detroit, I trembled at how my mother would behave. But she walked across the street, welcomed them, and mentioned that she had been a school teacher and was available for tutoring if any child needed her. My father's funeral was attended by men he had worked with who were from other races and religions, even though he supported the candidacy of a man like Alabama Governor George Wallace because of his stands against integration of public schools.

It was as if my parents could kept two concepts of race simultaneously balanced in their minds and hearts-- their negative views of Blacks, Latinos, Jews etc. in general-- and the exceptions that they made for so many individuals in those groups whom they welcomed as colleagues and even friends.

It is for this reason that I sympathize with the dilemma of Senator Obama who will have to pay a political price for the snippets of Pastor Wright's sermons that get played over and over on YouTube.com and Fox Television.

But before Americans condemn Senator Obama for his loyalty to his former pastor, they should ask themselves: How many family dinner conversations would I be comfortable posting on YouTube.com? How many racist comments by family members have I let slide? Can we ever get past the issue of race without acknowledging that many of those we love and respect as individuals occasionally express views we would disavow, even though we could never reject them as members of our family?

If we begin to consider such questions honestly, we may have a chance of going into the 2008 presidential election without making a race a divisive issue but rather a fruitful one: an opportunity to address our past and our prejudices openly and without fear, no matter what the color of our skin.

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

This past week as I was driving I found myself listening to a recording of Dr. Martin Luther King's final speech, the one he gave in Memphis the night before he was assassinated.

Towards the end of the speech, I was struck by his use of the story of the Good Samaritan, which he presented as a parable of a man reaching across racial lines. He described the Samaritan as “a man of another race [who] came by [and who] decided not to be compassionate by proxy. [Instead] he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying that this was the good man; this was the great man because he had the capacity to project the “I” into the “thine,” to be concerned about his brother,” even if that brother was a man of a different race.

At the very end of the speech, Dr. King told a cheering crowd: “ I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”

The very fact that today in 2008 we have a white woman and a black man running serious campaigns for President suggests that we are a good deal closer to the “Promised Land” of racial and gender equality that Dr. King evoked. We may even have a chance of hearing the shattering sound of one or another glass ceiling in November if we elect the first black or the first female president of the United States.

However, the emergence of race and gender as weapons to be used directly and by proxy in both the Clinton and Obama campaigns raises disturbing questions about their effects on voters. Not just black female voters who may feel deeply torn between their allegiances to the advancement of women and to the advancement of all people of color, but all voters who are excited by the prospect of having such strong candidates to choose from, and yet dismayed by the inevitable political tendency to go negative.

When the Clinton and Obama campaigns take their jabs at one another, I can't help thinking of the Old Testament tales of sibling rivalry that so often ended in disaster – Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. It's clear that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama deeply and even desperately want to win the nomination of the Democratic party, but it may be time for the party leadership to suggest that each risks alienating voters that may be vital to Democratic success if they try to destroy each other's reputation in the primaries.

One thing is certain: whether Clinton or Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, that nominee will face a tidal wave of mud-slinging across the airwaves that is likely to make the Swift Boat attacks look like a school-yard scuffle. There is no need for either of them to give this opposition more ammunition in advance.

Since Clinton and Obama are both self-proclaimed Christians, I'd suggest that they consider another Gospel parable, that of the woman taken in adultery. Not that I'm suggesting that either of them is guilty of the sin in question, but they might want to take Christ's advice to heart when he answered the scribes and the Pharisees: “Let anyone among us who is without sin be the first to throw a stone” (John 8:7).

Dr. King responded to death threats by saying that he had been to the mountain and seen the Promised Land, and he died prophesying that all of us as a people would get there. In 2008 the Democratic party has its best chance in years to help achieve Dr. King's vision if its candidates can keep their eyes on the prize and not get bogged down in the political mud.