We Love You Pooh Bear
"The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. the first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking."
- A.A. Milne
A place for reasoned debate about the issues of the day.
Mr. Becker here interprets the evidence more narrowly than others might. It is not partisanship that is at issue so much as ideology. It is well known within these circles that in the 1990s Republican political operatives joined together with liberal activists - who otherwise routinely support the Democratic Party and its candidates - in an interpretation of the Voting Rights Act that tended to favor Republican candidates, even as it stood for an interpretation of the VRA that most all conservatives despised (and, I would suggest, most Americans disagreed with). Showing a pattern of supporting Democratic candidates is consistent with the notion that these allegedly non-ideological, non-partisan career civil servants in fact, in many cases, have political views and agendas, that they lean left; and that this may be a reason to think that they are less pure than they are claiming.The key point is that the "Centrist's" post does nothing to assess the
true nature of someone's objectivity, particularly when he cites one
campaign contribution to a notably centrist Democrat as evidence of bias. Simply having contributed on rare occasions to a particular candidate says nothing about alleged bias. I myself have donated to Democrats on rare occasions, but when the Georgia Democrats filed a lawsuit seeking to have their pro-Democrat redistricting precleared in 2001, as lead counsel I led the successful challenge to that plan (at least in the trial court), siding with Republicans who also sought to prevent the plan from taking effect. To simply seek to tar individuals based on small amounts of money they had contributed on rare occasions to particular political candidates is nothing short of character assassination, which has no place in this debate. I challenge the "Centrist" to find one instance, just one, in any of these fine lawyers' careers where in their professional capacities they
took biased positions in favor of ANY political party, let alone the
Democrats. The fact is, he cannot - indeed, I'd venture to say that each of these individuals was engaged in litigation and other policies that more often than not went against the interests of the local, state, or national Democratic party.
It would be nice to be able to look at the career path of the Lonely Centrist as well to ferret out any potential bias. But we can't, because he or she chooses to blog anonymously.
To paraphrase Justice Scalia from his dissent in McIntyre, "I can imagine no reason why an anonymous [blog post] is any more honorable, as a general matter, than an anonymous phone call or an anonymous letter. It facilitates wrong by eliminating accountability, which is ordinarily the very purpose of the
anonymity."
So there you go. I guess that's just one more case in which McCain-Feingold failed - the war on terrorism goes on."Our central question --the question that will determine the security of our cities in the future-- is this: can those American values be expressed by the American government? Can we be more a government of our people? Can we get the greedy, short-sighted interests out from between us and our elected representatives?...
[U]ntil we clean up our government, we will all be the targets of
rising international rage, and our children and grandchildren are not
safe."
No one gives you $1,000 just because they like you, Garvey pointed out. "Have you ever had anyone give you $1,000?" he asked.
"It's because they want something."
Poor Ed. I guess people don't like him as much as they like me. I've had people give me $1000 because they like me, and all they wanted in return was to help me be successful. These were called college scholarships. Some of these people I've never heard from again. Others stayed in touch, providing ongoing encouragement, without ever asking anything more than that I do my best.
Indeed, the same is true in campaign finance. The vast majority of donors, including $1000 donors, never ask for any favors. And oh, Ed - I've also given $1000 at a shot, to worthy causes, and never asked for anything more.
The section also has lost about a third of its three dozen lawyers over the past nine months. Those who remain have been barred from offering recommendations in major voting-rights cases and have little input in the section's decisions on hiring and policy. "If the Department of Justice and the Civil Rights Division is viewed as political, there is no doubt that credibility is lost," former voting-section chief Joe Rich said at a recent panel discussion in Washington. He added: "The voting section is always subjectThe obvious theme is that evil Bush people are distorting the law, over the valiant objections of impartial, disinterested career civil servants.
to political pressure and tension. But I never thought it would come to this."
During the redistricting process, Ms. Wilde was in constant contact with both Keith Borders and Thomas Armstrong, the DOJ line attorneys overseeing preclearance of Georgia's redistricting efforts. See Tr. IV, at 39, 231. There were countless communications, including notes, maps, and charts, by phone, mail and facsimile, between Wilde and the DOJ team; those transactions signified
close cooperation between Wilde and DOJ during the preclearance process. The Court was presented with a sampling of these communiques, and we find them disturbing.It is obvious from a review of the materials that Ms. Wilde's relationship with the DOJ Voting Section was informal and familiar; the dynamics were that of peers working together, not of
an advocate submitting proposals to higher authorities. See, e.g., Pltf.Exh. 57H, 57I. DOJ was more accessible-and amenable-to the opinions of the ACLU than to those of the Attorney General of the State of Georgia. See Pltf.Exh. 52, 54, 57, 57A-M, 165; Tr. V, at 3-4. It is clear from our proceedings that Ms. Wilde discussed with DOJ lawyers the smallest details of her plan, constantly sending
revisions, updates, and data throughout the period from October, 1991 to April, 1992; she occasionally sent documents to DOJ lawyers “per your request.” Ms. Wilde worked with DOJ in other ways: During the reapportionment process for Georgia's House districts, DOJ attorney Nancy Sardison told Mark Cohen, the Senior Assistant Attorney General for Georgia, to meet with Ms. Wilde to revise
a majority-black House district. Mr. Cohen had presumptuously thought the district satisfactory, but was dutifully informed by Ms. Sardison that Ms. Wilde was “still having some problems with it.” Tr. V, at 3.Contrary to Mr. Armstrong's claims at trial, the max-black
proposal was not merely “one of the alternatives [DOJ] considered,” and Ms. Wilde was not simply one of various advocates. Her work was of particular importance to DOJ lawyers, whose criteria for and opinions of Georgia's submissions were greatly influenced by Ms. Wilde and her agenda.Alas, it is true that none of the DOJ
attorneys testifying at trial admitted to the influence of Ms. Wilde and her max-black plan on their preclearance deliberations. This Court finds it distressing that Messrs. Borders and Armstrong lacked any significant memory of important elements of the 1991-92 preclearance saga. Both of them-especially Mr. Borders-intimately involved with the redistricting for months, just “don't recall” basic details of either important meetings or the preclearance process. See, e.g., Tr. IV, at 8-51; 145-150. Those in far more peripheral roles had no great difficulty remembering the events central to our inquiry. Frankly, based on the factual record and trial testimony, the Court finds Borders' and Armstrong's professed amnesia less than credible. Luckily, the surrounding evidence speaks quite clearly.
The Court finds it particularly difficult to believe that Borders simply
“doesn't remember” why the Voting Section would have told the General Assembly to extend the Eleventh District all the way down to Chatham County.
[T]he heart of the problem with our party and its angry activist base [is] not so much that we're living in a parallel universe, but that we have dueling conceptions of what's mainstream, especially on abortion and other values-based issues, and our side is losing. We think that if we simply call someone conservative, anti-choice and anti-civil rights, that's enough to scare people to our side. But that tired dogma won't hunt in today's electorate, which is far more independent-thinking and complex in its views on values than our side presumes....
We do badly need leaders with courage--the courage, that is, to push our party (to borrow a phrase) to move on, to accept that we can't win with the same lame ideological arguments in post-9/11 America, and that we must develop an alternative affirmative agenda that shows we can keep the country safer, make the economy stronger, and govern straighter than the ethically challenged Republicans.
According to the Washington chattering class, Bush and the Republicans' governing majority are suddenly but surely in decline. Many among the selfsame talking heads who were only recently talking Republican realignment, conservative hegemony, and Bush's lasting Reagan-like legacy, are now talking conservative crack-up, the lame-duck president's political meltdown, and the Democrats' winning back the House in 2006.***There is only one problem with this latest conventional political wisdom. It is, like the conventional political wisdom that immediately preceded it, almost completely wrong in virtually every respect.***Conservative Republicans, beset by deep ideological divisions,
are not even close to becoming the country's permanent ruling class. Neither the post-Reagan Republican Party in general, nor the present Bush White House in particular, ever actually rode so high politically.Just the same, neither the GOP nor the president is in any definite long-term political trouble. Conservative Republicans, even without permanent-majority clout, are still more potent politically than liberal Democrats, and likely to remain so. Centrist and
neoprogressive Democrats could credibly compete for power with conservative Republicans, but they must first pry their party's presidential nomination process and key leadership posts from the old-left hands that still primarily control them.Not even the New Democrats have ever really reached out to the
culturally conservative and anti-abortion Democrats who have been defecting to the Republican Party since the Reagan years.
Libertarians aside, the GOP's most interesting but least well-understood intraparty political schism is among its religious conservatives. On the one side are what some political scientists term the party's religious purists. Essentially the purists want to push for policies that challenge constitutional church-state limits and to nominate as federal judges those whom only an activist opposed to abortion or gay rights could love. On the other side are its religious pragmatists. Essentially the pragmatists want government to be more
faith-friendly while remaining pluralistic; and, though they are mostly for restricting abortions and against same-sex marriage, they want traditional family values to be promoted less through pitched battles over federal judgeships and more through bipartisan "fatherhood" or "healthy marriage" initiatives and the like.
In truth, too many leaders and activists in both parties are way
"off center." It takes at least two to do the ideological polarization tango.
The most partisan and ideological Republicans — and Democrats —
in Congress are not the elected members themselves but their respective culture-war-mongering, inside-the-Beltway staff members.
The center is a lonely place to be in Washington...
As the so-called "Abramoff scandal" becomes the media's cause du jour, Democrats are becoming quite fond of telling us that 65% of the money went to Republicans. One reasonable question is whether this indicates that Republicans are more corrupt than Democrats, or that Indian tribes adjust their giving according to who is in power. ...
In the 1996 election cycle, a Center for Responsive Politics report notes, Indian gaming interests gave over $1.5 million in soft money to national party committees. According to National Journal, six of the top 10 soft money donors among interest groups nationwide in 1999-2000 were Native American tribes. The No. 3-ranked Seminole Tribe of Florida donated $325,000, 85 percent of which went to the Democrats. After making the donations, the Seminoles gained approval for electronic gambling machines. The No. 5-ranked Mashantucket Pequot Tribe, operators of the gargantuan Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, donated $319,000, 83 percent to the Democrats.
But that's not the best part. There was one Republican on whom the tribes lavished great attention: Final tallies are not in yet, but analysts say the top individual recipient of Indian gaming money during election 2000 was none other than anti-soft money crusader Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who sits on the Senate Committee of Indian Affairs.