Sally, Mildred & Me

By Diane Silver

My new Hope and Politics column is up at Camp-KC.

Thank you, California! (State high court overturns ban on same-sex marriage)

By Diane Silver

[updated 12:34 CST]

The California Supreme Court has just overturned the statewide ban on marriage equality, setting the stage for a huge fight over amending the ban into the state constitution. Today is a day for celebration, though.

Thanks to the high court for recognizing that all people really are created equal.

[updates]

The San Francisco Chronicle provides perspective and detail.

The Marriage Equality blog has quotes from the opinion and a link to the full document.

Salon.com, clean coal, blogging & life

By Diane Silver

I have been a horrible, terrible, not-very-good blogger and have been neglecting this space. I do have some good excuses, though.

One is that I've been building a new area of expertise on climate change. My latest piece is on the multi-million-dollar effort to sell coal to America and can be found today on Salon.com at Celebrate clean coal, come on!

Among other projects is my new, personal web site, www.dianesilver.net.

I'm also hard at work learning more about the wonderful world of geology and paleoclimatology and getting ready to head to WisCon.

My latest Hope & Politics column will also be out soon in Camp KC and the Liberty Press.

Life is good!

"Iraq is a corpse."

By Nancy Jane Moore

So said the great investigative reporter Seymour Hersh (pictured at left) at a lecture in San Antonio April 4.

He was speaking as part of a series named in honor of another great iconoclast: Maury Maverick Jr. (pictured at the bottom), who lived up to his name. (In fact, the term "maverick" evolved from his family name -- he came from a long line of mavericks as well as Mavericks.)

Hersh is blunter as a speaker than he is as a reporter. In his excellent coverage of U.S. foreign policy in the pages of The New Yorker -- here's a recent example -- he puts together a set of damning facts and lets the readers draw their own conclusions. But in person he counts down the remaining days of the Bush administration and warns that Bush will be dangerous until "11:59 AM on January 20, 2009."

Hersh, who opposed the Iraq war from the beginning (as I did), thinks journalists as well as politicians let us down. I have been grateful for him and the few other brave souls who kept giving us the facts that no one seemed to want to hear until a couple of years ago.

He discussed a lot of things in his speech -- including the scary idea that the Bush administration hasn't given up on war with Iran -- but what really grabbed me was his emphasis on just how big a mess our government has made of Iraq. There are millions of refugees, both in other countries and even within Iraq. The U.S. military is perceived as just another militia in a country full of armed camps. The Iraqi people are more and more segregated by religious belief -- Sunnis and Shia no longer live in the same neighborhoods. Baghdad doesn't even function well, much less anyplace else.

Cleaning this up is not as simple as just pulling out the U.S. troops, Hersh says. It's just too big a mess. He didn't have a list of ways to solve this problem, but he did challenge the Democratic candidates (he had no hope that McCain would listen) to talk honestly about how difficult it was going to be to fix things and to come up with ideas.

Much as I wish we could just bring the troops home and pretend the Iraq war never happened, Hersh is right. This isn't just a moral issue -- even though all that human suffering should keep us awake nights. Iraq and the Middle East as a whole is a volatile area of the world, with problems rooted in a couple of centuries worth of outside interference by a variety of superpowers. All mistakes made there come back to haunt not just the region, but the entire planet.

So we can't just walk away, though it's possible that anything we do will cause new problems down the road. As I've said more than once, the only useful solution I can find to the Iraq mess is time travel -- go back to 2003 and stop the invasion (or better yet, go back to 2000 and prevent Bush from stealing the election). Unfortunately, time travel violates physics as we know it, so we need to work with the messy current reality and try to do our best.

Regardless of what happens in Iraq itself, the fallout from this war will haunt our country for many years to come. The $3 trillion or so we've spent will have to be paid off somehow. The large number of injured soldiers -- particularly those with brain injuries -- will be a painful legacy, and I fear there will be even more PTSD in Iraq veterans than there has been in those who fought in Vietnam. Our military has been badly damaged.

Our economy is in the toilet right now. Actually, I don't think that has as much to do with the war as it does to many other bad policies from the Bush years -- the erosion of regulation and lack of support for crucial areas -- and the lionization of wheeler dealers on Wall Street coupled with the insane idea that the housing market (like the dotcoms before it) couldn't crash.

But the incredible waste of this war will definitely harm us down the road. We're going to be paying off that war instead of rebuilding our infrastructure and making sure we have an educated populace ready to face the future. I often fear that Bush has led the country so far down that we will never come back, even if we should elect several gifted presidents and end up with a Congress full of people interested more in the common good than their own careers.

Still, it's not just the fault of Bush or Congress or the journalists, though all have let us down. The latest New York Times poll says 81 percent of the American people think the U.S. is on the wrong path. They're right, of course, but why did it take them so long to figure it out? The country's been on the wrong path for seven years now.

We sure do need a lot more mavericks.

Perhaps we will be equal someday

By Diane Silver

Oh my, how much you can learn from a joke. Campaigns and Elections' Politics Magazine has a fascinating article on the changing young Evangelical voter. In it Peter Ilyan, who describes himself as a Christian environmental evangelist, recounts a joke.

"So now when James Dobson says it's only gay marriage and abortion we should care about? One of our jokes is that gay married couples have the fewest abortions of anybody."

That's a tiny joke, but it represents an enormous shift in attitude.

Hat tip to Marriage Equality News.

Ranting about taxes & being gay

By Diane Silver

In my latest Hope & Politics column, I mull over what April 15 means to a lesbian. (Can you say "rant?" Can you say "second-class citizenship?")

Will Rogers: "I don't belong to any organized party. I'm a Democrat."

By Nancy Jane Moore

I experienced the truth behind the famous quote from Will Rogers (pictured at left) last Saturday at the Travis County Democratic Convention.

Though the problem wasn't infighting among the candidates; on the whole, Obama and Clinton supporters were quite civil to each other. Supporters of both candidates made speeches from the platform, and while they praised their candidates, they also all said the party was lucky to have a choice between two good barrier-breaking candidates and reminded us that the stakes in this election are huge.

The lack of organization was logistical, mostly because just about everybody showed up. There were somewhere between 7 and 8 thousand people there. Just getting to the venue was a problem: it took the people from my precinct about 15 minutes to get across town to within a mile or so of the county exposition center (I think it's for rodeos and such), and then at least another hour to actually get into the parking lot. And that was with carpooling.

Then we stood in line for another hour or so to get badges. Everything was supposed to start at ten, but it was well after noon before things really got underway. And it was after four before we finally did the most important thing of the day: electing the delegates and alternates from each precinct for the state convention.

My precinct only had one of each, but both the people we sent off are pledged to Obama, as were a significant majority of all the delegates chosen in Travis County. It was obvious from the crowd -- when Obama supporters Congressman Lloyd Doggett and former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk made speeches, they got loud support from the crowd. Clinton supporter Terry McAuliffe got polite applause, but a great deal less noise when he made his pro-Clinton comments.

The Texas Two Step isn't over until the state convention in June, when delegates to the national convention will be chosen, but it's obvious from Saturday's results that Obama will win the delegate count. The Austin American-Statesman reports that Obama is likely to take about 60 percent of the delegates.

Meaning, as I said earlier, that Obama won Texas. He got the delegates. And it's important to understand how he got those delegates: grassroots organizing. My precinct was entitled to 18 delegates to the county convention. Because many more Obama people turned out at the precinct, 13 of us were pledged to Obama. And we all showed up. Only three of Clinton's five delegates showed up.

I was originally an alternate, but I moved up to fill a vacancy. That's why we got all 13 of our delegates -- our leader made sure all the delegates and alternates were kept informed. We even met in advance.

That's what organizing is all about -- communicating with volunteers and getting them to show up. Our group of Obama delegates was diverse: male and female, black, white and Asian, and young and old. Of those I asked, one was a nurse, another a chef, one worked for the state, another as an assistant to a TV reporter. The main thing we have in common, outside of supporting Obama, is that a large chunk of us live in the same apartment complex (it's a big complex). But none of us knew each other before the Obama organizing started.

Now we do. Now we know where to start if we want to organize more political activity in Austin. The Democrats need more of this kind of organizing if we're going to clean up the mess Bush and his cohorts have made of our country.

What really happened in the caucuses?

By Diane Silver

Did bands of unruly kids act as thugs for Obama in the Texas caucuses? Does Obama win caucuses in general because his supporters threaten defenseless, cowering Clintonites? That is the accusation included in comments on a post by my co-blogger Nancy Jane Moore.

Nancy has already responded once, noting that her experience in a caucus in Austin wasn't anything like that described by "K." She hasn't had a chance to respond yet to "JamesK." (The same person as K? There's no way to tell. Neither K nor JamesK posted a profile.)

I can only speak for my experience in Kansas. I went to a caucus in Lawrence that drew 2,200 people, far more than the handful of folks who usually attend. I live near the University of Kansas, and this caucus site was filled with college students. There were also many folks my age and older. (I'm 55.) I didn't see anyone intimidating anyone. We milled around for several hours, got tired, foot sore and hungry. We laughed and discussed politics, but no hoards of students were doing anything to Clinton supporters. I didn't even seen any individuals being impolite to anyone.

Hillary Clinton's supporters did seem miserable, though. There were barely enough of them to make up the 15 percent required for their candidate to be counted in the caucus. They sat quietly in one corner, looking rather stunned.

But this accusation of thuggery intrigued me, so I looked farther into what happened in Texas. I searched Google News, using the keywords Texas, caucus, police.

What I found were complaints about overwhelmed caucus sites and some concern about the large crowds getting out of hand. I found one incident where an Obama backer may have mishandled things and one or possibly two incidents where a Clinton backer mishandled things. For that last incident, involving former Dallas City Council member Sandra Crenshaw, even the local newspaper seemed to waffle over time about what happened and who was to blame.

So far, I haven't found any evidence of Obama's young supporters -- or any of his supporters -- engaging in wholesale intimidation.

Working backwards through time, this is what I found.

Dallas Morning News editorial
March 12

And if party leaders had any lingering uncertainty about the urgent need to simplify this process, the almost-too-strange-to-be-true Sandra Crenshaw saga should convince them to start rewriting their rules. The former Dallas City Council member ran a caucus that nearly turned violent and eventually ended in a standoff at a police substation after Ms. Crenshaw told Obama supporters that she planned to alter voting totals to bolster Mrs. Clinton.

Associated Press
March 11

In Hidalgo County, a border stronghold for Clinton, the count has been stymied because Democratic chairman Juan Maldonado changed his cell phone number after losing re-election and wasn't available for several days at his business, a bail-bond office that also offers state teacher certification.

Associated Press
March 6

Tempers flared among emotional supporters of Clinton and Obama. Birnberg said Houston police were dispatched to a half-dozen locations to keep matters under control.

"Someone walking into a room with a blue uniform on has a very calming effect," he said.

Dallas Morning News
March 6

Among the major complaints being investigated in Dallas County on Wednesday were reports that an Oak Cliff precinct chairwoman, former Dallas City Council member Sandra Crenshaw, was tailed to a Dallas police station by election volunteers. They say she said she was taking sign-in sheets home to "correct" them.

In another incident, an Obama backer from New York took over a caucus at Florence Middle School in southeast Dallas, and somehow lost all of the sign-in sheets dedicated to Mrs. Clinton.

"We're collecting information and we're forwarding it to the state" Democratic Party, Ms. Ewing said. "We're trying to weed out what's real from what's not."

Dallas Morning News
March 5

Election volunteers trailed former Dallas City Council member Sandra Crenshaw, who was serving as a precinct chairwoman, through Oak Cliff late Tuesday. They allege that she sent away hundreds of angry convention-goers and told them she was taking sign-in documents favoring Barack Obama home to "correct them."

Ms. Crenshaw, who supports Hillary Rodham Clinton, paints a different picture – of a mob of Obama supporters from other states who were so unruly that she had to seek refuge at a police substation.

Meanwhile, Salon posted an account of a caucus in San Antonio. Here are other reports from CBS News, The Washington Post, and the Austin American-Statesmen. The Washington Post and Austin American-Statesmen have the most in-depth review of problems in the Texas caucuses.

This just in: Obama won Texas

By Nancy Jane Moore

NPR reported tonight what I suspected all along: unofficial results show that Barack Obama has a substantial delegate lead in the Texas caucuses.

I added up the partial delegate totals on the Texas Democrats website and figured out that if the current ratios hold up, Obama is likely to end up with 37 delegates to Hillary Clinton's 30. Add that to the projected totals from the primary (Obama 61, Clinton 65) and you get the actual outcome of the race: Obama 98; Clinton 95.

Now that's not a concrete number yet. For one thing, all the caucus results haven't been totaled up yet. (Don't ask me why. The process isn't that complicated.) For another, what we're calling caucuses are actually precinct conventions, which elect delegates to the county conventions, which elect delegates to the state convention, which elects delegates to the national convention. It's conceivable that some odd things can happen in all that process.

But still, it seems very likely that Obama took more delegates than Clinton in Texas. Since getting delegates is the purpose of the process, it should be clear that whichever person ends up with the most delegates wins. Winning the popular vote in the Texas primary was good for Clinton's momentum and it got her very close on delegates, but she didn't win Texas.

I know some people are now complaining about the process. But the system wasn't invented to help Obama. It's been in place for awhile. It was designed to give heavily Democratic districts a stronger voice in selecting the Democratic nominee. And that's what it did. Those who are objecting to it now should have argued for different rules back when it was set up.

Obama's success in caucus states makes one thing very clear: His campaign knows how to do grass roots organizing. The people who ran my precinct convention weren't political insiders; they were enthusiastic people who showed up and brought their friends.

The Democratic Party has been weak in this area for a long time -- a real shortcoming in a party that should represent the interests of the working class. Obama is showing how it's done. The rest of the party should be paying attention.