The Feld-Blog

Sometimes it’s important to keep things in perspective. America today seems preoccupied with a woman’s right to choose. Granted this is an incredibly important issue, and one that is hotly contested. It may, however, be overboard for so many voters and citizens to consider this as their primary if not sole voting criteria or criteria for support of a Supreme Court nominee.

In Civil rights, America may be behind much of the developed world, at this point, but remember there are still atrocities against women being committed around the world which are much more heinous than overturning Roe v. Wade and thus relegating abortion decisions to the state (Keep in mind that if Roe is merely overturned, abortion will not be illegal, but merely left up to the individual states to decide how it should be regulated).

South Africa just recently passed a law banning virginity tests for women. These unscientific and frequently incorrect tests can decide a woman’s fate for the rest of her life in Africa. In some areas, the social stigma a woman carries from failing such a test might make her a pariah in her own town. Though a new law declares a maximum penalty of 10 years to towns and people still administering virginity tests, this will not stop many villages who have firmly entrenched traditions which include these tests.

Though it is true that America must continue to fight for womens’ rights in the US, we must keep in mind how far behind some countries are lagging. Though it is not always our responsibilities as Americans to stymie civil rights abuses around the world, maybe more of our civil rights efforts should be focused abroad where they can make the most difference rather than continuously screaming our heads off about details here in the US.

(NOTE: I am pro-choice and believe that it is a vitally important issue. I merely think that we should not allow any one issue to develop a stranglehold on the political process. Government affects many aspects of our lives and each should be given due consideration.)

To all of you who think ‘politics’ (in its dirtiest sense) should be stripped out of policy making – To those who think Presidents and Senators and Members of Congress should replace their political advisors with more policy experts, take a good look at the final session of the Senate before it adjourned. The Senate voted to extend the Patriot act for 5 weeks for further consideration, but they did it with only one Senator even present in the Senate Chambers.

Education: (Skip this if you already understand Senate Rules)

The Senate requires a quorum (a minimum number of Senators present in the chamber) to conduct business. Though a quorum is rarely actually present, any member of the Senate can make a “point of order that quorum is not present” – essentially saying that what it happening is not allowed by Senate rules and the Senate must wait until a quorum arrives to actually do whatever it is they are trying to do. Usually this occurs for votes. The Senate’s President Pro Tempore (or the appointed stand in) will call for a voice vote and declare who he thinks to be the winner (usually whatever position he himself holds). Because there is almost always someone who disagrees, someone will call for a recorded vote and ask that quorum be present for that vote. In this way, the minority party can make sure that their votes are counted and that the Pro Tempore can’t merely say he thinks his party wins every vote.

Something went wrong though on December 22rd. The acting Pro Tempore, Senator John Warner, gaveled the Senate open just long enough to call for a voice vote on the one month extension of the Patriot Act that Senator James Sensenbrenner, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, released to the floor to be voted on. Warner called for a voice vote, voted in favor, and since no other senators were in the chamber to claim a point of order, the motion passed just as if a majority of Senators had actually voted for the bill.

If opponents of the Patriot Act really wanted to shove this bill in the dirt and bury it forever, they would have needed someone in the Senate Chamber on the 22nd. Anyone, citizen or Senator, could easily have missed this. Political Advisors are the ones most likely to have caught such a devious scheme. It is also true that President Bush threatened to call a special session of Congress (it would have been the first since 1922) if the Senate allowed the Patriot Act to fizzle as its expiration date passed.

Good policy ideas don’t matter if you can’t get them passed and good policy sense doesn’t make any difference if you can’t implement it in Congress. You need to know the tricks of the trade. It’s a skill set and a knowledge base as broad and as intricate as any policy area. So why not dedicate a staff position or two to expertise in the art of politics. It might not be the prettiest job, but if last week is any indication, it’s certainly an important one.

My own opinions on the Jews for Jesus aside, did each and every member sleep through the entirety of the dot com boom? Jews for Jesus are quite literally suing Google for not releasing jewsforjesus.blogspot.com. Google isn’t squatting a dot com, they aren’t even squatting a .blogspot.com. Google created a free blogging website and have allowed whomever applied for the url jewsforjesus.blogspot.com to have it. I am pretty sure Google is allowed to do that.

So I haven’t seen the papers for the suit – I have been looking for them, but haven’t yet found them. If anyone wants to send them to me or show me where they are that’d be great. As it stands though. Google is providing a free service and I don’t think Jews for Jesus have a right to their namesake webdomain. The squatting phenomenon during the dot com boom clearly showed that just because your organization has a name, you aren’t necessarily entitled to .com. Why oh why, then, should the Jews for Jesus be entitled to a subdomain within blogspot.com. Shouldn’t the owner of blogspot.com be able to do whatever they want with their own property? Am I missing something? What exactly entitles the Jews for Jesus to tell Google what they can or can’t do with their website?

What’s next? Are the Jews for Jesus going to sue for jewsforjesus@aol.com? jewsforjesus@aol.com? I go to Stanford…. are they going to sue for jewsforjesus.stanford.edu? Where does this line of reasoning stop? Do I get to sue for michaelfeldman@gmail.com? ‘Cause that might be nice. I actually have wanted that. Do you see what I am saying?

Jews for Jesus – I know this might be a lot to ask, but stop being ridiculous. Google has the right to give their subdomains to whomever they want. Furthermore, you can’t just silence your critics by suing to take their voice away. It’s just ridiculous. If you don’t like what they say, refute it. But don’t take a cheap shot trying to undercut their platform. Get some chutzpah.

# posted by Michael @ 1:27 PM 0 comments

What do Yasser Arafat and Mother Theresa have in common? Desmond Tutu and Dalai Lama? Gorbachev and Martin Luther King, Jr.? They all won the Nobel Peace Prize. That’s right. All six of them won the Nobel Peace Prize. Now granted not all of these people lived virtuous lives from birth, but all were able to make significant progress towards peace at some point in their lives. So where am I going with this? I think the point is that it is possible for someone to reform his or her life. Tookie Williams, former co-founder of the Crips, and late children’s author and Nobel-Peace-Prize nominee, is a perfect example.

Schwarzenegger, the California Supreme Court, and The US Supreme Court failed to stay Tookie William’s execution. His funeral was held on Tuesday. Why did it come to that? In the end, Schwarzenegger had the last say in whether or not Williams was to be executed. So now for my next rhetorical question: How does anyone publicly refuse to save a man who is nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize?

I am not necessarily saying Williams should have been set free, but someone could have at least stayed his execution. I won’t deny that he did a lot of harm in his early life, but America needs to recognize the potential for people to reform. At this point I hope he wins the Nobel Peace Prize. He has done a tremendous amount of good to stem gang violence in his adult life. Furthermore, who else is going stand up and face gangs? To reach these kids, we need someone with credibility and no one but Williams had that kind of credibility.

I hope Williams wins the Prize. He deserves it. To turn his life around and do all that good in America when it would have been infinitely easier to give up on himself and the world while staring at the inside of his prison cell is an incredible achievement. Desmond Tutu turned his life around and his efforts were recognized. Yasser Arafat put left his terrorist ties to sit down at the negotiating table for peace in the Middle East (though little came from it). Williams has definitely earned this status. He turned his life around and worked his entire adult life to fix the problems he caused in adolescence. He deserves it. He deserved to live, but now, this is the least we can give him.

Something just doesn’t add up. Well actually, a lot of things don’t add up. Bush recently announced that secret wiretaps won’t stop claiming "I swore to uphold the laws. Do I have the legal authority to do this? And the answer is, absolutely."

Yet despite this seeming confidence Bush is scrambling to overcome the Senate’s recent filibuster of certain provisions of the Patriot Act including the one that gives the government the power to get secret warrants from secret courts to secretly tap Americans’ phones. Exactly what laws is he referring to that give him the right to blatantly violate Americans’ constitutional protection against illegal search and seizure. Is it the Patriot Act? Because if we spin it that way, I would guess that many fewer Members of Congress would vote for it. Furthermore, if it is the Patriot Act, will Bush finally stop these obnoxious atrocities against American’s civil rights when these provisions aren’t renewed? And if he thinks these powers of his come from somewhere other than the Patriot Act, why exactly do we need the Patriot Act at all.

Now lets take a closer look at these suspected terrorists we absolutely need to spy on. Lisa Meyers at MSNBC published a report outlining exactly who the Pentagon is spying on. I’ll give you a couple of interesting tidbits, but I really just recommend that you read the article. Many of the targets are remarkably biased and partisan. Apparently the Bush administration doesn’t just want to disenfranchise homosexuals, he actually thinks they are terrorists. A UC-Santa Cruz "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" protest, which included a gay kiss-in, was labeled as a "credible threat" of terrorism. An NYU protest organized by LGBT undergrads and the law schools LGBT group “OUTlaw” was labeled as “possibly violent.” The Pentagon also spied on groups demonstrating in opposition to Military recruiting in underprivileged high schools and colleges.

Does this sound like effective use of the Patriot Act to you? Whatever your position is on gay marriage, I seriously doubt that these rallies mentioned above constitute credible threats to our nation’s security. Time and time again Bush comes to the plate to take gigantic swings at defending the Patriot Act, The Iraq war, etc. What does it say that he has to step up to the plate almost every week to keep making pleas to the American people? The more the public knows the less they are approving of these issues. When is Bush going to realize this and back off? I’m waiting for the day.

Great Britain just legalized homosexual civil unions. South Africa declared that full marriage rights must be extended to homosexuals. This on the heels of Italy and Spain’s similar declarations. Still in spite of these powerful, world-wide, progressive breakthroughs in civil rights, you’d have to dig through quite a few pages to find the mentions of these cases. Instead, everywhere you look front pages of magazines and lead stories on broadcast news are flooded by stories about the war on Christmas. I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone who truly believes that anyone is waging a war on Christmas and no matter how PC we are getting, Christmas will be clearly apparent in the coming weeks. Furthermore, why are Bill O’Reilly and Conservative interest groups mad at the malls who have changed the words “Merry Christmas” into “Happy Holidays” rather than those who changed Christmas from a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ into an excuse to blow a ton of money on presents and wrap a bunch of flammable tinsel around a rapidly dehydrating pine tree? (two quick comments: 1. I think it odd that I am now defending being politically correct since it is one of my pet peeves. 2. I do understand the irony in the fact that I am about to continue to discuss the war on Christmas and conservative groups in general rather than talking about the worldwide breakthroughs for equal rights).

I will hand this to conservative interest groups: they know how to turn up the volume. When the ACLU or PFAW get ticked off, they are sometimes profiled for a day in the New York Times or earn a 30 second spot on national broadcast news. When the conservative Christian base feels the whim, they seem to be able to initiate a media feeding frenzy on command and merely by snapping of their fingers. The right-wing Christian base of this country is powerful enough to create an uproar over something as absurd as a war against Christmas in this country where Bush is president; the anti-abortion movement is alive, kicking and starting to get a majority on the Supreme Court; and our civil rights movement for homosexuals is so stagnated that we are now less progressive than Italy and South Africa. Somehow when you stop and look around, Christians aren’t doing so badly in this country.

I guess I just wish the ACLU or PFAW or MoveOn.org could learn to turn up their volume as effectively as the conservative interest groups. Either that or Democrats need to make a concerted effort to pick up some seats in the House and Senate. Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America helped the GOP pick up 50 seats in Congress. That’s uncanny. Come on Democrats, lets see some initiative. Not only are you not fighting for liberal causes, you are losing wars you haven’t even started to fight.

For those of you keeping track, you may remember that last month (November 16th) I lamented that British Parliament was able to swat down overreaching and obtrusive anti-terrorist legislation while American Congress was not. Well apparently that has changed. Although the House renewed the Patriot Act, the Senate stopped it flat in its tracks with a bipartisan filibuster. In the cloture movement 47 Senators voted against renewing the Patriot Act. BRAVO!

Kudos as well to Senator Russell Feingold (D-Wisconsin), pictured above, for leading the charge. The only member of the Senate with the foresight to have voted against the Patriot Act the first time around (in a 99-1 vote – talk about chutzpah) seems to have attracted some followers. It has taken a little more than four years for Congress to realize that perhaps giving the FBI the right to request secret warrants from secret courts to tap everyone’s cell phone in an 20 mile radius because one person who lives or works in that area has been to the Middle East recently might be overstepping the bounds of citizens civil rights. OK, I am exaggerating of course, but is scary how little exaggeration is there. Roving wire taps really are allowed. Secret court documents are not available to anyone but the FBI and those with security clearance. And as we’ve seen from Bush’s proclivity to hold ordinary citizens at GITMO and in overseas detention centers along with the legitimate terrorists, it doesn’t take much for the Bush Administration to assume someone is a terrorist.

If the Patriot Act had come up for a legitimate vote, it might have passed. 52 Senators voted to end cloture. When the filibuster is all that stands between the citizens of the United States and legislation that would cripple civil rights, it is a wonder that Majority Leader Frist is still threatening to wipe it off the face of the books. Though I understand he must be frustrated that the filibuster has been invoked and threatened so often during this administration, perhaps he and Bush should take a look at their own hands and see what exactly it is they are doing that is inspiring so many filibusters. Congress is largely the same. Relatively few seats changed hands in the last Senate election so most sitting Senators sat under the first GWB administration and many under Clinton and before. Perhaps, then, it is not Senatorial whimsy that has caused the uptick in filibusters, but Bush’s slap-in-the-face, cronyism-infused appointments and ridiculously overreaching legislation. If you try to shove pure conservative ideology written down in bill form though a senate with 45 Democratic Senators, you shouldn’t be surprised when you meet powerful and determined opposition.

The Senate has turned up the heat. Republicans may be in power; they may threaten the nuclear option of detonating the filibuster, but Democratic Senator Byrd stepped up to the plate this week threatening "If the senator wants a fight, let him try. I'm 88 years old but I can still fight and fight I will for freedom of speech," Byrd said. This in response to Majority Leader Frist’s preemptive warning that he will attempt to erase or heavily restrict the filibuster should the Democrats attempt to use it to block Alito. Frist said, "Supreme Court justice nominees deserve an up-or-down vote, and it would be absolutely wrong to deny him that."

Where has Frist been for the last few months? Members of his own party, the Republicans, wailed and called so loudly for Miers to withdraw her nomination to the Supreme Court. They wouldn’t allow her an up or down vote. Where was Frist’s nuclear option when Republicans wouldn’t give Miers an up or down vote?

I understand that Frist called upon Senators to come to the Floor to support Miers in the height of the scandal, but has he yet noticed that he is alone. Did he notice that only one other senator answered this call for public support on the Senate floor? And what of his double standard? Why the incredibly inflammatory rhetoric even before Democrats consider a filibuster on Alito while standing idly by as Republicans scream to avoid a vote on Miers?

This is a double standard at best and most likely outright hypocrisy. The rules and regulations of Congress exist in order to provide mechanisms to tie up legislation. If a simple majority of voters can turn any bill into law, what is to stop 51 Senators from logrolling or passing a bill that is actually bad for America but good for the Senators themselves or their individual constituencies.

The point is, how dare Republicans threaten to remove a traditional and important elements of the legislative process just because they are annoyed at Democrats use of obstructionist techniques, espessially when Republicans use similar tactics just as often.

In one week my Fall quarter will be over. I will breathe a sigh of relief and head home until early January when I dive back into my books. Fortunately, this means I’ll be able to be will my family for Chanukah. Unfortunately, this means I wont get to see my school friends over the holidays. Because of this, my friends and I have will throw a Chanukah party early before we all go home.

While we college students are going home, however, President Bush is already at his home - the White House, He lives there (or at least is supposed to live there) year-round and will likely stay there through the holidays. Why then, did he hold a Chanukah lighting ceremony more than three weeks early?

Every year the President pardons a turkey (another silly tradition) on Thanksgiving. I am sure there is a Christmas tree in the White House this month, and I am sure there will be a commemoration of the celebration on the 25th. To boot, the White House has a big target to aim at with this holiday. Chanukah is 8 days long! He could have held the ceremony any time that week, but instead held it almost an entire month early. Check a calendar every once in a while. There’s gotta be a Jew somewhere in the White House. Right?

Anyway…. I know this isn’t the biggest problem the White House is facing right now, but sometimes it is just the little things that bug me.

Whew.... It has been quite a week so far, and its barely half over. Once finals are over I hope to return to posting on a fairly regular schedule.

Now, as promised here is a nearly 20 page paper analyzing Donna Frye's campaign for mayor of San Diego - specifically her campaign's shift in emphaisis from transparency and open government to her financial plan to rid San Diego of its financial woes.

The Paper is posted on My Stanford Webspace and is titled Frye4Mayor.
Enjoy.

Hey All,

So I haven't been posting as consistantly as I might like recently. Finals are coming up and papers are coming due and its been pretty hectic. Just so you know I haven't been ignoring the glut of political strife out there, however, let me just show you what I've been working on.

I, along with 3 other students in my Introduction to International Relations class wrote a policy brief proposing trade-barrier reductions for Africa in lieu of increased aid which has proven ineffective due to African governmental corruption. Perhaps not your individual cup of tea, but if you are interested you can find the report on My Stanford Webspace. It is titled "Feldman-Ruiz-Foster-..>."

I am also working on a research paper on Donna Frye's more than year-long campaign for San Diego city Mayor. That should be done wednesday, so I may post that as well. Enjoy.

I'll be back with another installment of political rantings on the absurdities of the day as soon as my schedule permits. Looking forward to it. (beleive me)

President Bush has been summoned to jury duty in Waco, Texas. While it's true that Jury Duty is an often annoying but important civic duty, even I will readily admit that it is likely Mr. Bush has more important issues to tend to than flying to Texas to sit in a waiting room waiting to be screened to sit on a jury. I will also admit, though, that this whole situation is just a little bit funny.

Just to throw in a pinch of seriousness into this post: it is true that John Kerry was called to and served on a Massachussetts jury last month. With an upcoming Congressional recess, serving on a jury was probably a bit more feasible for Kerry than for Bush. Still, Kerry's willingness to serve his call to jury duty is an impressive showing of his sense of civic duty (he was actually elected foreman of the Suffolk Superior Court jury). Afterall, Bush is known to take long vacations for no apparent reason. Maybe this would be a good reason to head home for a bit.

The Texas court judge quipped that he is not about to send the sherriff after Bush to drag him back to a Texas courtroom, which is probably reasonable, but still sorta funny.

Americans love to walk in circles and show off their hand-painted signs. If there’s a big controversial event going on in America, someone will protest it. It’s possible though that we’ve gone too far. While the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Ayotte vs. Planned Parenthood, the court’s first abortion case in about 5 years, demonstrators on both sides of the abortion issue lined up outside the courthouse to protest. Why?

America has worked hard to preserve an independent judiciary. Good laws are not always popular and so if the courts were accountable to public opinion through votes, they would not be able to impartially interpret and administer the law. Supreme Court Justices do not and should not allow themselves to be swayed by public opinion much less by protestors. As such, it seems a futile effort to demonstrate in front of a political body whose job it is to ignore what you have to say.

Abortion has become such a charged subject that people merely hear the word and are automatically compelled to tell you their opinion. If these people are truly concerned about the future of abortion cases in the Supreme Court, they should be lobbying their Senators for or against Alito’s confirmation rather than marching their egos in front of the media’s cameras for no purpose but publicity - as if this issue needed more publicity. Think before you protest. What are you trying to accomplish and is this the most effective use of your time to accomplish that goal? In these protesters’ cases, I would conjecture that it’s not the most effective strategy.