Former president
Bill Clinton writes a must-share opinion piece calling for the overturn of the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act:
When I signed the bill, I included a statement with the admonition that “enactment of this legislation should not, despite the fierce and at times divisive rhetoric surrounding it, be understood to provide an excuse for discrimination.” Reading those words today, I know now that, even worse than providing an excuse for discrimination, the law is itself discriminatory. It should be overturned.
We are still a young country, and many of our landmark civil rights decisions are fresh enough that the voices of their champions still echo, even as the world that preceded them becomes less and less familiar. We have yet to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, but a society that denied women the vote would seem to us now not unusual or old-fashioned but alien. I believe that in 2013 DOMA and opposition to marriage equality are vestiges of just such an unfamiliar society.
More analysis of the day's top stories below the fold.
Paul Krugman of The New York Times looks at all the dire prediction of how President Barack Obama was going to destroy the economy:
the important point about these particular bad predictions is that they came from people who constantly invoke the potential wrath of the markets as a reason we must follow their policy advice. Don’t try to cover America’s uninsured, they told us; if you do, you will undermine business confidence and the stock market will tank. Don’t try to reform Wall Street, or even criticize its abuses; you’ll hurt the plutocrats’ feelings, and that will lead to plunging markets. Don’t try to fight unemployment with higher government spending; if you do, interest rates will skyrocket.
And, of course, do slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid right away, or the markets will punish you for your presumption.
By the way, I’m not just talking about the hard right; a fair number of self-proclaimed centrists play the same game. For example, two years ago, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson warned us to expect an attack of the bond vigilantes within, um, two years unless we adopted, you guessed it, Simpson-Bowles.
So what the bad predictions tell us is that we are, in effect, dealing with priests who demand human sacrifices to appease their angry gods — but who actually have no insight whatsoever into what those gods actually want, and are simply projecting their own preferences onto the alleged mind of the market.
Carl Hulse at
The New York Times on the
other filibuster:
In a vote just before Mr. Paul, the junior senator from Kentucky, tried to blockade the nomination of John Brennan as director of central intelligence over drone policy, the Senate failed to end debate on the nomination of Caitlin J. Halligan of New York to a seat on the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia.
The filibuster of Ms. Halligan didn’t blow up on Twitter the way Mr. Paul’s impressive 12-hour stand did. But of the two, it was the one that could renew a feud over rules governing filibusters and how the Senate handles high-level judicial nominations — an issue that has torn the chamber for years.
Democrats are already in discussions on how to respond to the Halligan filibuster. They believe Republicans are dead set against confirming qualified Obama administration nominees to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. They accuse Republicans of exaggerating their objections to Ms. Halligan to justify a filibuster under a 2005 agreement that short-circuited the last partisan showdown over filling judicial vacancies.
Robert Nolan at U.S. News & World Report on the scars of the Iraq War:
Finally, while Sen. Rand Paul's filibustering speech on drones stole headlines regarding the vote for John Brennan to become the next director of the CIA this week, it's a Senate report on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques that could pose a greater problem for Brennan either now or early in his tenure. Though the report remains classified, The New York Times reports that Sen. John McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, will push for at least parts of it to be made public. Insiders note the report offers a scathing criticism of CIA interrogation programs like those portrayed in the film Zero Dark Thirty revealing a pattern of failure to disclose details or grossly distorting the success of the program.
If Zero Dark Thirty's performance at the Oscars is any indication—it was nominated but failed to win in any major categories—the American public doesn't care much to discuss the uncomfortable lessons of our involvement in Iraq over the past decade. As always, we avoid them at our own peril. As the saying goes, those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it.
Ron Dzwonkowski at
The Detroit Free Press has a great profile of Senator Carl Levin, who has announced that he won't run for another term:
Seemed like every time we met, Carl Levin was wearing the same suit -- not quite gray, not quite brown, always a little wrinkled. Add the ever-present plastic reading glasses on the end of his nose and a wild swirl of gray hair that covered less of his head every year, and this was either a carefully cultivated professorial image or a guy who had more important things on his mind than how he looked.
After just a few of the regular meetings we had during my years on the Free Press editorial page, I knew it was the latter. But that's not to say there wasn't some of the former in the mix.
In an era when politicians take courses in telegenics and sound bites, Carl Levin was pretty much ... Carl Levin, and that was apparently OK with the voters of Michigan, who elected and re-elected him six times to the U.S. Senate and would probably have given him a seventh term next year if Levin hadn't said Thursday that he's done running.
Brad Bannon on how the Republican Party's policies are anything but mainstream:
At the surrender ceremony after the British defeat at Yorktown in 1781, the British band played “The World Turned Upside Down.” Republicans, like the British, will realize that America has changed only after they lost the battle and the war. A new generation of selfless voters, the millennials have replaced the baby boomers as the focus of American politics but Republicans are stuck in a time warp in the 1980s. As the world changes, Republicans cling to the past as hard as Fox News hangs onto the myth that it is fair and balanced.