The irony is of the consistency of rich, silky, farm-fresh happy-cow sweet cream: the party of family values is, tonight, going to give a big, raucous cheer to teen pregnancy.
On a question that is flying around here in St. Paul: What about the presence of one Levi Johnston, the 18 year-old father of Bristol Palin's unborn child? At the end of this kind of speech, there is usually a lot of applause, music, and the candidate's family up on stage. Johnston is in St. Paul, I am told, but there has been no final decision about what he will do tonight.
"This is not an issue that we're going to act ashamed or scared about," my source told me.
Somebody should tell Senator Tom Coburn, republican of Oklahoma, who last week - not in the last decade, last year, last month, but last week - said this on the floor of the Senate while trying to block a bill that adequately funds sex education in public schools:
"How many people really think it's in the best interest of young people to be sexually active outside of marriage? Does anything positive ever come from that?"
Whether or not anything positive ever comes out of teen pregnancy isn't for me to decide, but one thing is clear: it's not a problem when the mother of the teenager is running for high elective office as a republican. For that higher purpose, Tom Coburn will cheer his little head off, along with the rest of his party. more this way»
You can file this story in a number of different categories: the inability of many New York politicians to grasp the nature of blogs, the cozy way in which political machines do business, the heavy-handed means by which these same machines preserve their power, and lastly, the perils of hosting a forum where anyone can speak out above stuff.
And by stuff, I mean "things people in positions of power would prefer not be talked about".
Per Room 8, that site was served with a criminal subpoena, coupled with a gag order, demanding the release of logs pertaining to a single anonymous blogger on the site. The subpoena was issued in January by the Bronx District Attorney, who was one of the subjects of the posts of the anonymous blogger; you can deduce from the fact that a subpoena was issued that these posts were not in the nature of praise. Unfortunately, the anonymous poster in question deleted all of his entries, but some of them are cached here (.pdf). As an aside, CultureKitchen Media, the publishing entity of this site and others, keeps a lawyer on retainer as a precaution against precisely this scenario.
Ben Smith and Gur Tsabar, the publishers of Room 8, decided to fight the subpoena with the help of a public-interest law firm, and filed papers in state court demanding it be withdrawn.
So we chose to fight the subpoena, and were lucky to be referred – by our friend Orthomom, whom he’d represented – to a talented, dynamic lawyer at the Public Citizen Litigation Group, Paul Alan Levy, a national expert on online free speech. (Support his work here.) He and our smart, thorough, generous, and knowledgeable local counsel – Charlie Spada and Deepa Rajan of Lankler, Siffert, & Wohl – first determined that the Bronx DA was, in fact, seeking the information. Then, in May, they filed a motion to quash the subpoena in state court. (You can read the legal paperwork here.)
Two months later, after we asked the judge to move on the case, the DA withdrew his subpoena. They withdrew the threat of prosecution for speaking about it only after we threatened to sue them in federal court. We’re thrilled by the outcome, and grateful to our lawyers.
With the immediate legal peril removed and the gag order lifted, it's time to take a look at what actually happened here. The outlines of that are damning. An anonymous poster made comments and posted diaries on a blog that were critical of the bi-partisan Bronx machine, including of the local District Attorney, one Robert Johnson. Shortly thereafter, a Grand Jury empaneled by the same D.A. issued a criminal subpoena demanding details captured by the site in an attempt to identify this poster. Subsequently, the poster - his handle is "Republican Dissident" - or someone presumably acting on his behalf deleted the diaries in question.
The New York Times discusses some of the underlying constitutional issues here.
Lawsuits over information posted online are usually civil, not criminal — that is, they are filed by private citizens or companies trying to keep something off the Web. Courts have developed ways to evaluate the claims, often using tests to balance the First Amendment’s protections of speech against the harm caused by whatever someone wrote or said.[...]
But there are fewer precedents explaining how courts should evaluate criminal subpoenas, according to legal experts. Perhaps that is because prosecutors are more cautious about the risk of violating the First Amendment and so issue fewer criminal subpoenas, or because the subpoenas themselves carry language prohibiting disclosure of their terms.
“In the criminal context it’s trickier because it’s the government asking for stuff, and I think it’s going to be harder to fashion a rule, especially when the government is not exactly willing to part with the reasons” for requesting the information in the first place, said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard.
Without knowing the motives of prosecutors, he continued, judges may be hard-pressed to balance their needs against the importance of free speech.
The core of First Amendment jurisprudence is the concept of a chilling effect on Free Speech; broadly, the government may not take certain actions that might intimidate a citizen from exercising his or her right to speak on whatever he or she may choose. There are obviously restrictions to the general principle, including for libel, obscenity, national security, trade secrets, and the like. What was at stake in this case, however, wasn't any of these concerns; it seems, rather, like an attempt to promote the job security of various elected officials, including the issuer of the subpoena, the elected District Attorney himself.
In short, this looks entirely too much like an abuse of power and of judicial process in the furtherance of strictly political goals. Of course, there may be perfectly reasonable justifications for the subpoena, reasons that outweigh the chilling effect.
We could learn about those reasons by means of an independent investigation. State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who has oversight of the District Attorneys, would be the right man to talk to about that.
Today is the last day of an interminable primary season. When the sun sets tonight, Democrats will have their nominee, and in a stunning turnaround from six months ago, that nominee will not be Hillary Clinton. So what happened?
In no particular order, this.
If Hillary Clinton hadn't voted for the Iraq War and the subsequent Kyl-Lieberman resolution against Iran, she'd probably be the nominee today.
If Hillary Clinton had fought the Bush administration with the same zeal and fervor she devoted to a contest where she had a personal stake, she would definitely be the nominee today. Her ferocious campaign against Democrats, however, made clear that her all-but silence for the last seven years was not a matter of temperament, but one of calculation. When the country needed a champion - a fighter, as the campaign literature has it - she was quietly nursing her own resources for her own turn in the spotlight. Choices matter.
If Hillary Clinton had been as good a candidate in January and February as she was in May, she would have wrapped this thing up a long time ago. But she wasn't.
If Hillary Clinton had realized that the Democratic Party today is not the same tattered edifice she and Bill left behind in 2000, and adjusted her strategy accordingly, she would have won. As it was, she campaigned against MoveOn, against the netroots, against a fifty-state strategy, in favor of the same blinkered, the-White-House-is-all-that-matters approach that led us to disaster in the nineties. more this way»
Senator Clinton has begun claiming a lead in the popular vote as the nominating contest winds down. This requires some thought. Here's what she's saying:
“I think it will be most likely the case in a few days,” Mrs. Clinton said from San Juan. “I will have won the most votes — more than anyone in the history of the primary process.”
She added: “Senator Obama has a narrow lead in delegates. And we’re going to have to make our case to the automatic so-called superdelegates. And I think my case is clear — more than 17 million people voted for me.
“In recent primary history, we have never nominated someone who has not won the popular vote.”
The popular vote in the Democratic primary is as meaningless as it is in the Presidential election itself. It does not determine the nominee; delegates do that. However, the appeal to majoritarian support is a powerful moral argument, which is presumably why Clinton is making it, and why it's doubly shameful that her claim is false, rests on disenfranchisement, and sacrifices commonly held agreed standards of veracity in favor of a nakedly self-interested argument. more this way»
There are few people more worth reading than Paul Krugman in the New York Times. It is an unalloyed public good to have a Progressive economist writing on the nation's senior Op-Ed page.
Unfortunately, Krugman occasionally also writes about politics. Now, that's in itself nothing bad. However, his political instincts are less sure than his economic analysis. Consider this:
It is, in a way, almost appropriate that the final days of the struggle for the Democratic nomination have been marked by yet another fake Clinton scandal — the latest in a long line that goes all the way back to Whitewater.
You can essentially stop reading at that point to think about a larger issue. True enough, Whitewater was never a real scandal; there was no wrongdoing, other perhaps than by journalists against the interests of the American people. Journalists that signally include those working for Krugman's employer, The New York Times, which broke the story, such as it was.
If we posit that a public statement can become the substance of scandal - something that seems true if you consider that George Bush is still being raked over the coals for giving a speech under a banner titled 'Mission Accomplished', in short, for words that he didn't even say - then Senator Clinton's recent remarks about her enduring campaign, Senator Obama, Bobby Kennedy, and the role that assassinations play in American political life qualify. more this way»
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Obama sketched out a different theory of social change than the one Clinton had implied earlier in the evening. Instead of relying on a president who fights for those who feel invisible, Obama, in the climactic passage of his speech, described how change bubbles from the bottom-up: “And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world!â€
For people raised on Jane Jacobs, who emphasized how a spontaneous dynamic order could emerge from thousands of individual decisions, this is a persuasive way of seeing the world. For young people who have grown up on Facebook, YouTube, open-source software and an array of decentralized networks, this is a compelling theory of how change happens.
Clinton had sounded like a traditional executive, as someone who gathers the experts, forges a policy, fights the opposition, bears the burdens of power, negotiates the deal and, in crisis, makes the decision at 3 o’clock in the morning.
But Obama sounded like a cross between a social activist and a flannel-shirted software C.E.O. — as a nonhierarchical, collaborative leader who can inspire autonomous individuals to cooperate for the sake of common concerns.
Clinton had sounded like Old Politics, but Obama created a vision of New Politics. And the past several months have revolved around the choice he framed there that night. Some people are enthralled by the New Politics, and we see their vapors every day. Others think it is a mirage and a delusion. There’s only one politics, and, tragically, it’s the old kind, filled with conflict and bad choices.
