Common Sense Democracy

Crooks and Liars has a good post on Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution, which outlines the President’s power of appointment.

He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.

Read the full post at CrooksAndLiars.com.
Technorati: Constitution, Judicial nominees

Leave Comment

“The House and Senate Republican leaders have reached a tentative agreement on a budget.” via CNN.com

The plan calls for $10 billion in “savings”. By savings, they mean program cuts. Savings in the context of this article means savings for the government. That translates into loss of benefits for the poor and ederly.

The Blogging of the President has more analysis and insight about the tentative agreement.

Read the original article on CNN.com
Technorati: budget, medicaid

Leave Comment

Crooks and Liars has posted a video clip of the Gay Watch segment on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He gives a wrap up of the latest gay rights decisions and stories going on around the world. If you are fan of The Daily Show, you’ll love this clip.

View the blog post and video clip at Crooks and Liars.
Technorati: Microsoft, The Daily Show

Leave Comment

Via CNN.com
With a vote of 406-20, the House overwhelmingly voted to reverse Republican-written rules in the ethics committee.

What is at issue is . . . whether the House is going to continue to have a credible ethics process. Nothing less than this is at stake here tonight.

Read the full article at CNN.com
Technorate: ethics, Democrats, Republicans

Leave Comment

More follow-up on the Microsoft story. In case you haven’t run across this aleady… Towleroad has posted a new draft letter from Microsoft employees to the executives of the company.

Read the letter at towleroad: Microsoft Employees Draft Letter to Executives
Technorati: Microsoft, gay rights

Leave Comment

The New York Times reports that Bill Gates has said he may reconsider….

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, has indicated he may reconsider his company’s decision not to support a Washington State gay rights bill amid the growing firestorm inside and outside the company that exploded after the recent disclosure that Microsoft had changed its position on the bill.

Read the full article at The New York Times
Technorati: Microsoft, gay rights

Leave Comment

Crooks and Liars has posted a clip of a video from 1968 with Walter Conkite about a Republican Senator using the filibuster on President Johnson’s Supreme Court nominee. The Senate has claimed that the use of the filibuster by Democrats to stop judicial nominees is unprecedented. Clearly we see that the filibuster has been in use for a very long time and has served as a weapon for both parties.

Read more and view the video clip at Crooks and Liars.
Technorati: filibuster, judicial nominees

Leave Comment

Another follow-up post about the Microsoft story. This post comes in from an employee at Microsoft who sent a reply to Steve Ballmer’s memo on their recent lack of support for the WA State anti-discrimination Bill that failed to pass by one vote. I know I’ve blogged quite a bit about this whole Microsoft story but I lived in Seattle for 7 years so it’s close to me and many of my friends. I also think it’s an example of what is happening in this country with the battle over church and state and just how much religious pressure people will put up with. It’s not about faith or religious values, it’s about religion and government and what happens when they merge. This isn’t about whether you believe in God, it’s about forcing everyone to believe in your God. I think the Microsoft story is important, not only because of what Microsoft did (or failed to do) but also because of the fallout, much of it very passionate, as a result.

You can read the full reply to Ballmer’s memo at Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger
Technorati: Microsoft, gay rights

Leave Comment

Why are we even having to deal with this? Why are religious organizations now political lobbying groups? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… What about the people in this country who aren’t part of the christian faith or the religious right’s specific set of values. Where is Their representative government? It seems like the separation of church and state in this country now means, separation so long as its everyone else’s faith except the christian right.

Christian radio and television networks on Sunday called for an all out attack on ending the fillibuster on judicial nominees in the US Senate. Of course the christian right knows what is best for the entire country and they are only protecting all of us. I mean over 200 years of using the fillibuster as part of the rules of the Senate were just plain wrong. The forefathers were off their tracks when they created the fillibuster. Those christian forefathers.

So what happens when the Republicans are not the majority party in congress and “liberal activist judges” are just sailing through the confirmation process? The christian organizations might think that whole fillibuster idea suddenly seems like a good thing. There is a reason why legislation moves through our branches of government at a snail’s pace. It’s so that this country is not subjected to the whims and trends of the prevailing radicals of the day. We are forced to think through our decisions, pass through the checks and balances, and make sure the laws we enact apply to and protect all of us, regardless of our faith.

Read more on the story at Yahoo! News
Also at Technorati: fillibuster, religious right, judicial nominees

Leave Comment

A follow-up to the Microsoft Anti-discrimination legislation story. towleroad has posted new information about an internal memo from Steve Ballmer clarifying their position and responding to the increasing attacks. I think it’s a well positioned memo and may help Microsoft ease the bludgeoning media and blog attacks. I think think, however, that Microsoft could have still come out in support of the legislation. Afterall, if they already have a corporate non-discrimination policy, why would supporting this new legislation surprise or offend anyone? The people that work for Microsoft with strongly held beliefs of the opposite viewpoint, would not be working for Microsoft in the first place if they were so bitterly against this type of support for diversity. It’s not like Microsoft would have been taking an extreme turn into some previously untalked about issue. They are already on record for this type of thing, why go neutral?

Read the entire Steve Ballmer memo at towleroad.

Leave Comment

Interesting post via AMERICAblog.com.

Apparently the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center, the largest gay and lesbian organization in the world, has issued a press release asking that Microsoft return the Corporate Vision Award it recieved in 2001. The award was given to Microsoft because of it’s support of anti-gay initiatives.

This is the type of reaction I was talking about in my previous post. The fallout from Microsoft’s decision not to support the WA State legislation could begin to spin further then they expected.

Read more at AMERICAblog.com.
More at Technorati: Gay Rights, Microsoft

Leave Comment

Via CNN.com

The Senate panel approved two more judges, sending them to the full Senate for confirmation. The debate over the use of the filibuster could get heated.

Read more at CNN.com
Technorati: Filibuster, Senate, Judicial nominees

Leave Comment

Just a follow-up to our previous post about Microsoft being bullied by the the religious right. Many employees of Microsoft are disgruntled by their 11th hour pull-out from backing the legislation. The bill ended up being defeated in the state Senate by one vote. Rumor has it that Microsoft turned tail due to pressure from local religious leaders who said they would organize a nationwide boycott of Microsoft if they continued to back the legislation.

A boycott?! What are they going to do? Go door to door and tell everyone to throw out their computer operation system?

Some decisions have to be more then just revenue based. This sets in motion a terrible perception of Microsoft, who has traditionally received awards for being so pro-gay rights.

As they say, it takes a lifetime to build a reputation and one simple act to destroy it. The statement that this makes about how Microsoft does business could be much more damaging then any boycott the religious right could have orchestrated.

Read more at Technorati: Microsoft, Gay Rights, anti-gay discrimination

Leave Comment

I have several friends who work for master Microsoft, so I’m sure this news will generate some strong feelings.

Read more at towleroad: Microsoft Secretly Withdraws Endorsement of Gay Rights Bill
Also at Technorati: Gay Rights, Microsoft.

Leave Comment

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is continuing to pick fights with the judiciary, this time attacking Supreme Court Justice Kennedy, a Republican judge appointed by President Reagan.

Hopefully if he picks enough fights, the playground bully will eventually kick his ass.

Read more at MSNBC.com.
Also at Technorati: Justice Kennedy, Supreme Court, Tom DeLay, Judicial Activists

Leave Comment

The Senate has passed a resolution requesting that President Bush submit projected war costs in the U.S. budget he submits to Congress. The resolution was authored by Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV). He said,

Over the last three and a half years, at a time when the government is swimming in red ink, the White House has charged an additional $280 billion on the national credit card, without proposing a single dime of that spending in its annual budget proposals

“The White House said war costs are too hard to predict”. So not only do we have a President who can take our country to war without the consent of Congress (because they provided him with that authority) but he can apparently spend whatever he wants without the consent of Congress.

I’m not sure there is much left in our form of government that resembles a Democracy.

Read more at Yahoo! News

Leave Comment

In case you missed the first part of this story, a law student at New York University asked Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia “Do you sodomize your wife?” Scalia was speaking at the school in a crowded auditorium when the law student stood up to speak. Scalia refused to answer the question. [Read more on original story, at the New York Post.

Obviously, this has created quite a stir and there are many that say the student was out of line in asking such a question. The student has now responded in an email to the school’s student body. His response is great and very well written. I urge anyone interested or involved in LGBT issues to definitely read it. I have included the text of the email here.
Continue reading this post…

Leave Comment

More on how the GOP push to get rid of the filibuster on judicial nominee selection, could come back to haunt them should the Democrats get the majority in future elections.

The balance of power in government is a pendulum. What comes around, goes around and the majority today may not be so tomorrow.

Read more at Boston.com

Leave Comment

I try to scour the political spectrum of news for credible points of view from both the left and the right. I tend to lean toward the left because to me, these days, it just seems to make more common sense, and that is what we’re all about here. I grew up a Republican, but somewhere along the line I got an education and realized that money and corruption is not the same thing as believing in something.

I stumbled across a post tonight on the Right Wing News blog that discusses the so-called left’s hypocrisy about Gay Marriage. This writer has somehow tried to link the recent comments by Bill Clinton, regarding Republican strategist Arthur Finkelstein, to the entire Democratic Party’s position on gay marriage. Sometimes you just have to respond to something so completely stretched and manipulated. Here is the original post at Right Wing News. I posted the following comment to their blog:

Bill Clinton’s attack of Finkelstein wasn’t about Bill Clinton’s view of gay marriage. It was about Finkelstein, a man who, for years has helped elect conservative, right wing Republicans to office who oppose gay marriage. It’s about Finkelstein who lobbies behind the scenes to promote an agenda of discrimination and hate. It’s about Finkelstein who supports an administration that opposes every fiber of gay marriage, and who then runs off to Massachusetts to marry his gay partner. Bill Clinton was merely pointing out that this right-wing Finkelstein either “believes his party is not serious… or is self-loathing”. What does this two-faced republican’s hipocrisy have, AT ALL, to do with the Bill Clinton’s view or the Democratic Party’s view of gay marriage???

Leave Comment

Oregon’s Supreme Court has invalidated 3,000 marriage licenses issued to same-sex couples on the grounds that they were unconstitutional.

Oregon’s Supreme Court said in its ruling that the licenses issued in left-leaning Multnomah County “were issued without authority and were void at the time they were issued.”

Kelly Clark, a lawyer with the Defense of Marriage Coalition in Oregon, said,

Marriage by historic definition is best between a man and a woman and that’s what creates the best foundational unit for society.

What is this historic definition? The historic definition of the right to vote, for example, also states that only white males can vote, but society somehow matured past this narrow-minded view. Marriage, this so-called “best foundational unit for society” is averaging a 50% divorce rate in the U.S. What are we really protecting here? Gay people just want the right to get divorced and take their spouse to court like every other straight couple. People who throw history around should be very careful of the argument they bring up. History also includes civilizations like Rome, thousands of years old, that accepted homosexuality. Civilizations like Rome, that wrote the book on Democracy.

Read more at Yahoo! News – Oregon’s Top Court Annuls 3,000 Gay Marriages
Search for more on Gay Marriage at Technorati.com.

Leave Comment