Essential News Roundup

- Defying expectations, Democrat Kathy Hochul won the special election to fill a House seat in New York state that family values Republican Chris Lee vacated when he got caught soliciting sex on craigslist just like the rest of us pleibs. The district is heavily gerrymandered to favor Republicans, but candidate Hochul hammered her opponent for supporting dreamboat Paul Ryan's plan to privatize Medicare. Who would have thought that a congressional district drawn to have lots of conservative seniors would vote to preserve health benefits for seniors?

- Indiana governor and architect of the Bush tax cuts for the rich Mitch Daniels has decided not to run for president. Following Mississippi governor Haley Barbour's and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee's exits, the Republican field is looking a little scary-thin, as girls around my age like to say.

- Fortunately, former right-wing senator Rick Santorum is throwing his hat into the circus ring for the Republican presidential nod! I'm putting his name on my list of Republican sideshows who have no shot of winning the nomination right between Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich. I call that a "Santorum sandwich." If you don't know what santorum means and you didn't click the link, I'll just define it for you: it's the frothy mixture of lube, semen, and fecal matter that results from anal sex. Other than that, the august senator is best known for comparing gay sex to bestiality.

Essential News Roundup

- Newt Gingrich's rudderless campaign is on the brink of imploding as donors bail. Who are these people advising Newt to call the Republican budget "right-wing social engineering" while he's running to win the Republican nomination for president?

- In the first successful judicial filibuster since 2005, Senate Republicans blocked Goodwin Liu's nomination to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The 9th is widely considered the most liberal appeals court in the nation, and has the dubious distinction of leading the country in the number of decisions that later get overturned by the Supreme Court. It is also the largest appeals court jurisdiction by far and includes my home state of California. Liu is a law professor at Berkeley (my alma mater) and has won praise as one of the most brilliant legal minds of his generation.

- Yet another potential Republican presidential candidate catches flak for his past support for an "individual mandate" to buy health insurance. Turns out that Jon Huntsman, the former Utah governor and Obama Administration ambassador to China, attempted to attach an individual mandate to health care legislation in his state. Like Romney - and numerous GOP luminaries in years past -, Huntsman concluded that an individual mandate was crucial to the success of health care reform. That is, until Obama adopted this moderate Republican plan and the individual mandate became anathema to the snarling Republican base almost overnight.

More Daily Show Constitutional Jurisprudence

Obviously Jon was still a little thrown thrown off by David Barton's argument about the Bill of Rights not applying to the states. Last night he invited a constitutional law scholar to talk about how the states came to be held to the same standard as the federal government. His guest touched on some of the same points that I made in my response to their debate: that the Fourteenth amendment "revolutionized" the Constitution; that there's a long history of legal reasoning known as "incorporation" that currently guarantees us the same freedoms from the federal government as from state governments; that the Founding Fathers did debate how much of a role religion should play in public life, but ultimately decided to keep them separate. He also alludes to a larger point that both the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment enumerate a wide array of powers and responsibilities to the federal government - something that many conservatives still dispute today.

Speaker Emerita: Nancy's Fashions

Nothing gets my juices flowing like poring over photo galleries of Nancy Pelosi's stylish "powersuits." I just love it when women pull off a classy feminine flair in their business suits, and no one color coordinates while whipping votes and twisting arms quite like Nancy. The Daily Beast and the New York Times have both done some clever coverage on how the Speaker Emerita balances feminine and powerful (the secret, they both agree, is apparently Tahitian pearls). The NYT piece has a great photo of Nancy draping a statement red shawl over a matching red skirt suit.

Charles Dharapak / Associated Press
While she looks effortless in eye-catching red, Nancy is also known to wear purples for important ceremonial occasions - purple being a gimmicky bipartisan blend of Republican red and Democratic blue - as she did at her 2007 swearing in as the first woman speaker in history.

Nancy shatters the "marble ceiling" in a burgundy purple skirt suit.
...and that time she led a procession to the Capitol ahead of the historic health care reform vote in the House. (Disclaimer: there was nothing bipartisan about the health care reform vote, which garnered exactly 0 Republican "ayes" and involved a controversial procedure called reconciliation designed to amend the bill to the House's liking while bypassing a Senate filibuster). Nancy in a lilac skirt suit and matching pumps moments before the final 2010 health care vote:

Lauren Victoria Burke / AP Photo
The Daily Beast compares this outfit to a lavender runway look in the Philip Lim show that same year.

Stan Honda / Getty Images
I prefer this pairing with Nancy looking cosy in camel. I myself have been looking for a good camel jacket for months as well! (LOLOL Harry Reid, what r u doing in this photo? In a matching camel coat to outshine Nancy no less! Opposite Harry Reid, a model in Alexander Wang's Fall 2010 show)

Alex Wong / Getty Images; Slaven Vlasic / Getty Images
And my favorite high-fashion analogy from the Daily Beast: "'Anna [Wintour] is basically the Nancy Pelosi of fashion' [...] Pelosi, for her fearsome authority and consistent style, could likewise be called the Anna Wintour of Congress." That, and they both wear their hair in a fashionable bob.

Associated Press
I also liked Nancy's autumn green outfit with basket weave detailing at last year's State of the Union address. Since we're doing her style in terms of couture, I'm gonna say that the weave detail looks like the intrecciato technique used in Bottega Veneta bags.

Getty Images

Wisconsin Senate race

Democrat Herb Kohl, the four-term US Senator from Wisconsin, has announced that he is not seeking reelection. He is the 6th Democrat and 8th senator overall to announce his retirement ahead of the 2012 election cycle. This complicates things for Democrats' prospects of maintaining their Senate majority: of the 33 seats up for election, Democrats are defending 23 and the Republicans only need to defend 10. With open seats in 6 of the 23 Democrat-head seats, the decks are stacked pretty heavily against them. Republicans only need to pick up 4 seats to regain a majority, or even 3 if they win the presidential election, since the Vice President can cast tie-breaking votes in the event of a 50-50 split.

Some people are already whispering about a battle of titans between Wisconsin political heavyweights Congressman (and RILF) Paul Ryan and progressive hero Russ Feingold. Dreamboat Ryan, whom I recently profiled for his heartless wonkishness and exquisite bubble butt, is best known as the author of the Republican budget to gut Medicare and Medicaid benefits while lowering taxes for corporations and the rich. Russ Feingold was the former three-term US Senator from Wisconsin until his reelection defeat last year at the hands of a tea party imbecile whose name I will not utter here. As a senator, Feingold was most associated with the radical, socialist effort to keep corporate money out of politics.

The capstone of campaign finance reform, the McCain-Feingold Act, was of course ruled unconstitutional in last year's Citizens United case by a supposedly deferential, strict-constructionist Supreme Court. The Court ruled that since corporations are legal persons, they obviously have the right to free speech. And clearly, free speech means spending as much money as you want to influence an election. As such, corporations can spend as much money as they want to influence elections. Since leaving office, Russ Feingold founded an organization called Progressives United whose mission is to overturn the craven idiocy that is Citizens United. I hope they both run and Feingold fucks the shit out of Dreamboat Ryan's little virgin booty all the way to a Senate seat.

-Update-

I just got an email from Howard Dean's Democracy For America with a petition to draft Russ Feingold. Sign it here.

Speaker Emerita: Nancy's Sweets

I just had to point out that Nancy Pelosi's Twitter profile reads: "Democratic Leader, focused on strengthening America's middle class and creating jobs; mother, grandmother, dark chocolate connoisseur."

Technically she's the Democratic Leader, but we refer to her as the Speaker Emerita here, since this is also technically correct and some of us would rather not think about the Republican crybaby who currently wields the speaker's gavel. I also love that Nancy deemed her love of dark chocolate important enough to include in her profile given the character constraints imposed by Twitter. Did you know that she eats entire pints of chocolate ice cream for breakfast?

DILFs exist too!

I've been getting upset thinking about all these hot conservative RILFs, so I decided to do one on the people who invented handsome politicians, the Democrats. The one that I've been enamored with longest is of course my once and future Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom (because I'm still living in France for a few more weeks). What does the Lt. Governor do, you ask? No one really knows. He has a budget of less than $1 million and a staff of three. Compare that to his former DA in San Francisco, current Attorney General Kamala Harris whose office oversees a department with a budget of $735 million and 4,700 staff (latimes.com). No wonder the snarky political pundits in California call his office "Lite Gov." But the gays would keep on loving the Marrying Mayor even if he decided to become a stay-at-home dad with his new baby girl. Julia and I once met him at a Yolo County Young Democrats event.

Photos courtesy of Julia
After Newsom, the list of attractive Democratic men in high office gets a little dubious. I seem to recall a certain Scott Kleeb (pronounced "cleb") running for Congress in Nebraska in 2006 and 2008. He lost both times, but we overlook minor faults like that for corn-fed Midwestern boys here.

Support the Nebraska Democratic Party
Two time failed Senate candidate Harold Ford, Jr. ran an ugly, homophobic campaign in Tennessee, going out of his way to not just oppose gay marriage, but to attack civil unions and support a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in a futile effort to convince Appalachians that he's a moderate sort of Democrat. To make matters worse, he moved to NYC after his loss, reinvented himself as a Wall Street hack, and tried to carpetbag his way into a US Senate seat there just four years later! Of course, you can't win a Democratic primary in New York on nothing but gratuitous homophobia, so Harold Ford promptly announced that he supports full marriage equality for gays all of a sudden. Wow. Why am I even writing about this unprincipled panderer? Oh yeah. He's kinda good-looking.

via NY Post
Maria Shriver and the Governator announced their separation today. For those of you who don't know, they have a very hot son named Patrick Schwarzenegger. Here's to hoping that the Kennedy blood (the aforementioned original handsome pols) wins out and the kid turns out to be a Democrat.


The Republican bench of attractive young men may just be a little deeper than the Democrats' right now. But the moral here is apparently that you can be a conservative douchebag, moderate Democratic gay basher, losing candidate, barely employed Lite Governor, or barely legal teenager but I'll still fantasize about you as long as you're handsome.

Rep. Aaron Schock bares his muscles for the cover of Men's Health magazine

via Men's Health
Looks like RILF is going to be a running feature. Muscle queen Congressman Aaron Schock, whom I recently described as the sexiest member of Congress, has once again revealed himself to us in his true glory - this time on the cover of Men's Health to promote healthy eating and exercise. As is fitting for the feel-good, pea-brained, pumped-up tone of the magazine, Rep. Schock made sure to score a few bipartisan talking points by praising Michelle Obama's work on her Let's Move! campaign. At least that's what I think he was talking about; I was busy looking at his bulging pecs.

via Men's Health

Speaker Emerita

I worked as a research analyst for a few months in 2010. On my first day, all the new RA's were introduced to the permanent staff and we played an ice breaker. We each said our names, the school we went to, a wild animal we would domesticate, what we would name it, and why. When came to my turn, I said, "I'd get a cougar and I'd name her Nancy Pelosi."

I said it to break the ice, but I only half intended it as a joke. I have a very complex adulation for Nancy, but she's a complex intersection of some of my favorite things. Maybe it's because I'm a gay guy, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that gay men are attracted to powerful women. Maybe it's that she's a Californian, or that she's the Congresswoman for my beloved gaysian San Francisco. Or maybe it's because Nancy Pelosi is single most effective, unwavering champion for liberal causes in national politics since I became politically conscious.

It's not just that I want to differentiate myself by worshipping at the altar of someone other than the president. I admire President Obama, but when the White House wanted to abandon comprehensive health care reform in favor of a piecemeal approach after RILF Scott Brown's election to the Senate, it was Nancy who famously rejected the White House capitulation and declared, "You go through the gate. If the gate's closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we'll pole-vault in. If that doesn't work, we'll parachute in. But we are going to get health care reform passed for the American people."

via the Economist
Along with Russ Feingold, Nancy's speakership was the biggest casualty to liberals in the 2010 midterm elections and it's a travesty. I'll never forget that November day when Democrats took back Congress just a few years ago in the 2006 midterms. Bush and the Republicans had been running around unfettered for 6 years - really as long as I knew anything about politics - when Nancy Pelosi appeared on television to declare that "Democrats are ready to lead." It was the first time I remembered a big electoral victory, and the speech was music to my ears. And boy did she give Bush a hard time for the remainder of his presidency. Nowadays, John Boehner calls the shots in the House, but I for one will keep trumpeting the awesomeness of the first woman Speaker of the House until she gets that gavel back!

via the Economist

The Fourteenth Amendment and Incorporation

It isn't often that a TV show causes me to have flashbacks to the constitutional law course I took as a freshman at Berkeley. Or maybe I'm fundamentally uncomfortable with the expository form and need to grasp at any tenuous excuse to segway into a topic of my choice.

On last night's episode of the Daily Show, Jon Stewart had as his guest David Barton, an advocate of what he calls "historical reclamation." In essence, he argues that at the time of the founding of the United States, religion was a far more central and accepted feature of public life than it is today; the part where reclamation fits in is that as we've turned away from overt displays of religion in the public sphere, we have also forgotten or tended to downplay its contribution to early US history. I think that's a very fair description of DB's views. I also think it's fair to say that he considers the legal banishment of religion from government an affront to Christians, whose right to worship is being ever more tightly encircled. Jon, being the "secular humanist" that he is, pretty much disagreed about everything DB said, so from start to finish the entire interview consisted of challenging each other's little factoids, citations, and the context of the citations dating back to founding of the US.

I tend to think that, for the purposes of teasing out questions of present day morality and constitutional law, arguing over the historicity of society and values in early America is a distraction from the real meat. For one, practically everyone at the time could agree that they were Christians and Christianity really did pop up everywhere (sorry Jon). Secondly, - and I know I make this point way too often - I've never been able to understand why we debate ourselves breathless to make the point that the Founding Fathers agree with me and not you, as if having a bunch of 18th century slaveholders on our side vindicates our beliefs or lends us moral credibility. I admire the Founding Fathers for what they are: men - they were all men - who were far ahead of time with revolutionary ideas about liberty and justice. But it's far too easy to get sucked into the originalist/strict-constructionist trap and begin taking every single one of their ideas at face value.

For me the most interesting moment of the debate came when David Barton pointed out that the First Amendment actually reads "Congress shall not pass any law respecting the establishment of religion." This supports DB's claim that the Founders were intentionally silent on the question of whether the individual states could do so. In fact, he's correct that states historically could pass laws establishing or impeding the free exercise of religion in ways that we would today consider unconstitutional. Of course, DB's larger point was that once upon a time, sub-federal jurisdictions could make community decisions to worship in public space with the preference of the law. Never mind that communities can still worship together even without the backing of force of law... In the originalist construction, giving preference to the local religion before the law is just dandy, because there's at least some historical evidence that this was practiced in the early years of the republic.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court came to apply the First Amendment against the states in a process known among jurists as "incorporation of the Bill of Rights," and I wish either Jon or DB had given more context about it because it's a wonderful illustration of the Constitution evolving with country. This process basically interprets provisions of the US Constitution's Bill of Rights, which enshrines principles like equal treatment and due process before the law, and applies them more broadly than we had previously understood by holding not just the federal government to it, but state governments too. Before the First Amendment was incorporated (that is, for most of American history) state governments could issue certifications granting religions the right to proselytize or require that public school students pray together.

Throughout the legal history of incorporation, most cases have occurred through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. According to my con law professor Gordon Silverstein, the 14th has been described by some scholars as a new constitution, because of how dramatically it shifted the balance between federal and state power. That's not surprising, given the historical context of its ratification. The 14th was passed in reaction to the Civil War, which saw the most strident partisans of states' rights defeated by the Union. Among other things, the 14th Amendment expressly reverses the infamous Dred Scott decision by granting US citizenship and its rights to all persons born in the US and codifies the right to equal protection and due process before the law. The idea of amendments itself poses a fatal process to DB's reclamationist logic, for the Constitution's own framers provided for a built-in amendment process to ensure that it evolves with time. And as the capstone of Reconstruction(ism), the 14th Amendment constitutes a real paradigm shift that the original constructionists can't quite account for.

Bounce

I was going to write something about Obama's inevitable (and apparently already measurable) approval ratings bounce on the heels of Mr. bin Laden's termination, but I'm so lazy and approval ratings are so intro-level politics that I can't be bothered. No one thinks this uptick will last very long anyway, unless the employment environment improves appreciably. Nevertheless, history will regard probably regard this as one of Obama's signature achievements as president, along with healthcare reform. Voters, though, tend to have shorter political memories than professional historians.

That's why the cynic in me is bemused to read reports that Obama is travelling to Ground Zero as early as Thursday to bask in triumphant glory and milk this story for all it's worth.

via Discovery Channel
I hope he'll say something about how different the World Trade Center complex is looking 10 years out.

On Osama bin Laden's death

September 11th will always be seared into my memory as a day when our nation lost a little bit of its innocence. This sentiment is perhaps most vivid for those of us for whom this moment was also a coming of age. The attacks occurred on my second day as a freshman in high school, and marked in a very pronounced way the start of a sobering new stage in my life. I think we mostly agree looking back that compared to the decade that preceded it, the years after 9/11 saw a renewed patriotism and sense of solidarity, but that the attacks brought us together while fanning the flames of our fear and distrust of outsiders. In some ways, I actually do miss those days of a nation united by its shared outpouring of emotion - whether it was grief, fear or defiance. It gave us an identity. But I think the net effect, apparent after just a few months, was debasing rather than uplifting, with defiance supplanted by righteousness and grief evolving into wrath. The rash, unmeasured reaction to 9/11 took us to war in Iraq within two years - a decision that had no relation to the war on terror and whose disastrous prosecution continues to overstrain our military even today.

Now that the initial shock of hearing that Osama bin Laden was killed by US forces has worn off, those of us who remember 9/11 this way might be left to contemplate the kinds of emotions on display among some of the celebrating crowds. The mostly young people who turned out to cheer bin Laden's death probably feel, as I do, that al-Queda's actions robbed us of our childhood insouciance, or at least precipitated its loss. I too feel relief that an ugly chapter in history has come to an end, if only symbolically. However, the ecstatic cries of "USA! USA!" in celebration of a death struck me as inappropriate, if not deranged. And as others have pointed out, their zeal for death bears a chilling resemblance to that of anti-American extremists' celebrations (complete with jingoistic banner waving and chanting) following 9/11 and other murders of American civilians in the Middle East.

via TalkingPoints Memo
Have we already forgotten the unmeasured, emotionally-charged foreign policy disasters of the past decade? David Sirota wrote a great piece today criticizing the untempered displays of joy and the media for condoning it:

This is bin Laden’s lamentable victory -- he has changed America’s psyche from one that saw violence as a regrettable-if-sometimes-necessary act into one that finds orgasmic euphoria in news of bloodshed. In other words, he’s helped drag us down into his sick nihilism by making us like too many other bellicose societies in history -- the ones that aggressively cheer on killing, as long as it is the Bad Guy that is being killed.

Our reaction to the news last night should be the kind often exhibited by victims’ families at a perpetrator’s lethal injection -- a reaction typically marked by both muted relief but also by sadness over the fact that the perpetrators’ innocent victims are gone forever, the fact that the perpetrator's death cannot change the past, and the fact that our world continues to produce such monstrous perpetrators in the first place.

When we lose the sadness part -- when all we do is happily scream "USA! USA! USA!” at news of yet more killing in a now unending back-and-forth war -- it’s a sign we may be inadvertently letting the monsters win.

We can all understand jubilation in victory but it would have been a little more human to see some solemnity in remembrance of those who lost their lives in this conflict.