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Tide moving against same-sex marriage ban

Is it me or is there an increasingly inexorable tide beginning to swell across the nation in the move to legalize marriage between two people of the same sex?

Virginia is the latest state to have its ban on same-sex marriage overturned. It joins Oklahoma and Utah among the ranks of states that have had similar laws tossed aside.

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/judge-strikes-down-virginia-gay-marriage-ban

The federal judge in this case was appointed to her post by President Obama.

U.S. District Judge Orenda Wright Allen wrote: “Our Constitution declares that ‘all men’ are created equal. Surely this means all of us. While ever-vigilant for the wisdom that can come from the voices of our voting public, our courts have never long tolerated the perpetuation of laws rooted in unlawful prejudice.”

So it goes on.

Texas remains on the list of states where gays and/or lesbians might sue for similar results.

The Texas Constitution has been amended to disallow same-sex marriage. Its language says virtually the same thing the Oklahoma Constitution says it its ban. Yet a judge in the Sooner State tossed out the prohibition for the same reasons that Judge Allen did in Virginia.

What has been most interesting to me was that Texas already had a statute on the books that prohibited same-sex marriage, but the Legislature and Gov. Rick Perry decided it wanted to double-down on the prohibition by adding an amendment to the state Constitution.

I’m betting the tide is going to catch up eventually with Texas’s ban. It’s likely just a matter of time.

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Yes, GOP needs to ‘change’

Rand Paul says the Republican Party needs a radical makeover if it hopes to win the presidency in his lifetime.

Interesting, coming from a Kentucky senator whose philosophies have played a part in the GOP’s losing strategy the past two presidential election cycles.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/rand-paul-without-change-gop-will-not-win-again-in-my-lifetime/

Paul says the party cannot “tinker around the edges.” It needs radical change, he said.

Here’s an idea: Why not return to the ways of the Republican old guard, you know, the guys who won while running behind the likes of George H.W. Bush, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush?

They’re all different, to be sure. Ike was a war hero who was destined to win the presidency in 1952. He governed from the middle and helped oversee a period of unprecedented prosperity during the bulk of the 1950s. Richard Nixon he turned out to be a disgrace and doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath with Ike, Reagan or the Bushes.

Ronald Reagan was a true-blue conservative. However, he didn’t demonize his foes. He befriended them after hours and worked with Democrats whenever opportunities presented themselves.

George H.W. Bush — in my mind — was arguably the most qualified man to serve as president. War hero, ambassador to the U.N., congressman, special envoy to China, party chairman, CIA director and vice president. He also was a mainstream politician who also could work with the other guys.

W. campaigned as a “compassionate conservative” and while he made some mistakes — the Iraq War and his hands-off financial policies that contributed to the economic collapse at the end of his presidency — also sought to govern reasonably.

The change Paul has called for cannot take his party down the do-nothing road. Government has to play a role in helping people. Republicans and Democrats need to look proactively common ground instead of looking for reasons to oppose one another.

Paul is calling for a “more diverse party.” How he’ll seek that diversity remains a mystery, given the GOP’s insistence on laws that make voting more difficult, seeking to block efforts to improve the immigration system, continuing to meddle in people’s personal lives and putting the interests of wealthy Americans above those of the rest of us.

I want the Republican Party to reshape itself. Honest. It’s got to emerge in the manner that Rand Paul says he envisions, and not in the form of some crazy cabal of kooks — many of whom have taken the Grand Old Party hostage.

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UAW loses vote at Tennessee VW plant

Well, at least my dismal record of predicting political outcomes remains intact.

Tennessee autoworkers have rejected a bid by the United Auto Workers to unionize the operation. I had thought most of the workers would seek to join the UAW — and I said so on this blog.

Silly me.

Auto workers reject union in Tennessee

I get that the UAW lost the vote and I’ll accept that outcome. That was their call.

What’s still difficult to accept is the interference thrown in front of the effort to unionize the workers by a member of the U.S. Senate, a former mayor of the city where the Volkswagen plant is located. Republican Bob Corker argued vehemently against the unionizing effort and threatened the VW plant with retribution if its workers endorsed the UAW effort.

The troubling aspect of this is not that Corker opposed the union per se. It is that he was elected ostensibly as a pro-business conservative who, I think I presume correctly, has suggested that government should stay out of the affairs of private business. VW moguls had said they would not oppose the unionizing of its Chattanooga, Tenn. workforce.

So why did the Distinguished Gentleman feel the need to throw the weight of his public office, his own high profile in the state and the power of the federal government behind something that was essentially a private business decision?

What’s done is done. This particular VW plant’s workers won’t be unionized. I’m hoping the company treats them right.

I ought to stay the heck out of the predicting business.

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Do as we say, not as we do

What a revoltin’ development!

It turns out that five men seeking to become Texas’s next agriculture commissioner all are highly critical of federal “intrusion” into state affairs, all the while taking money from those dreaded feds in the form of farm subsidies.

Who knew?

http://www.texastribune.org/2014/02/14/farm-subisides-go-anti-federal-govt-candidiates/

The Texas Tribune reports that the five Republican ag commissioner candidates received $1.3 million in payments from the feds during the past 20 years.

Fascinating, isn’t it?

President Obama recently signed the new farm bill into law, which reduces aid for food stamp recipients by $8 billion. Two of the GOP candidates, Sid Miller and Eric Opiela, said the food stamps cuts didn’t go far enough, according to the Tribune.

Miller told the Tribune that he favors “good legislation, not expedient legislation,” and that the farm bill fails the “good” standard.

He and several other candidates said they would have voted against the farm bill. I wonder.

A fellow with some farm and legislative experience of his own, former Democratic U.S. Rep. Charles Stenholm, sees it differently. “I’ve had this request made to me many times. Farmers say, ‘Charlie, just separate the farm portion from the food stamp portion.’ I say, great, we’ll have no farm bill,” Stenholm told the Tribune.

The salient point, though, is that these individuals seeking to run the Texas Department of Agriculture are talking a good game but are playing a different one. I am fully aware that politicians of all stripes do one thing and say another. Hypocrisy doesn’t adhere to a political monopoly.

However, if you’re going to campaign on a pledge to keep the federal government out of the state’s business, shouldn’t you at least have the courage to reject the feds’ money when they seek to fatten your own bank account?

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‘There isn’t a Republican Party’

Vice President Joe Biden occasionally gets mocked and ridiculed because he tends to say some off-the-wall things.

This link contains a curious truth about the state of a once-great Republican Party.

http://www.msnbc.com/hardball/biden-republican-party

It is that, as Biden noted, the Republican Party has morphed into perhaps three sub-parties.

If you watched President Obama’s State of the Union speech and then listened intently to the so-called “Republican response” to it, you heard three responses.

One came from a Washington state member of Congress, Cathy McMorris-Rodgers, speaking for the “mainstream” or “establishment” wing of the party; another came from a senator, Mike Lee of Utah, who spoke for the tea party wing of the GOP; then came the response from Rand Paul of Kentucky who spoke for, well, the Rand Paul wing of the Republican Party.

The budget deal that was worked out by the Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., divided the party along two fissures.

Then this week we saw Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, force fellow Republicans to cast a vote in favor of raising the debt ceiling without strings, which he did to embarrass members of his own party — and in the process he incurred the wrath of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who’s facing a tough primary challenge from the tea party wing at home.

The vice president said, “I wish there was a Republican Party. I wish there was one person who would sit across the table from us, make a deal, make a compromise, and know when you got up from that table, it was done.”

He added, “All you had to do is look at the response to the State of the Union. What were there, three or four?”

A Texas Panhandle Republican, the late state Sen. Teel Bivins, used to lament how Republicans occasionally would “eat their young.”

Bon appetit, GOP.

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We’ve got your drought right here, Mr. President

Dear Mr. President:

I see that you and your team are visiting California to talk up a drought-relief package for regions ravaged by the lack of rainfall.

That’s a good thing. But let me offer this invitation: Come see us in West Texas too.

http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/198393-obama-to-launch-administration-wide-drought-response

I know what you might be thinking: They despise me in that part of the country.

Let’s agree that you didn’t poll too well here in the past two presidential elections, but you are the president of all the United States of America and that includes Texas — and that includes the western region of this big state.

The California drought is serious and is cause for huge concern. I get that the Golden State is the most populous of them all and that the central part of California is known as America’s Food Basket.

Texans, too, produce a lot of grain and beef. Some of the grain farmers rely exclusively on rainfall, which hasn’t been falling here the past couple of years. Much of the grain they grow feeds cattle. So, as you understand, with no grain to feed the cattle, ranchers have to sell their livestock that are under weight, producing less income for them.

I hope you can find time in your schedule to come here to see for yourself how the drought is hurting this region of the country just as much as it is hurting the folks in California.

I’ll concede that there some folks here won’t welcome you with open arms. However, we likely won’t bite.

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Kerry cannot possibly be an anti-Semite

An interesting development has emerged in Secretary of State John Kerry’s difficult struggle to find peace in the Middle East.

It turns out that the angry charges leveled at him by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet members — that Kerry’s promoting “anti-Semitic” notions — cannot possibly be true. Kerry’s family name originally was Kohn and that Kerry’s family has Jewish origins.

Grandpa Kerry/Kohn changed his name and his religion, from Jewish to Catholic, which John Kerry learned shortly before announcing his presidential candidacy in 2003.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/kerrys-brother-johns-not-anti-semitic-were-jewish-n30576

In fact, Cameron Kerry — the secretary of state’s brother — is a practicing Jew to this day, having married a Jewish woman.

Israeli foreign ministry officials, of course, are quite sensitive to any comments they construe to be against their interests. John Kerry said recently that “The risks are very high for Israel” after meeting with Iranian officials about plans to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program. Israeli officials took that to mean Israel needed to watch its step if it continued to threaten Iran with military action.

Naftali Bennett, an industry minister, said, “We expect of our friends in the world to stand by our side against the attempts to impose an anti-Semitic boycott on Israel, and not to be their mouthpiece.”

I understand fully the Israelis’ angst over negotiating with a country that has declared its intention to wipe Israel off the face of the planet. Let us take care, though, to avoid throwing around pejorative terms like “anti-Semitic” where it regards someone whose family roots run deep in the Holy Land.

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Reliving old scandal scars a familiar victim

Now that Rand Paul has dug up an old political scandal in an effort to score points in a possible pending new political campaign, it’s good to recall one of the principals in that long-ago event.

Monica Lewinsky was “that woman” with whom President Clinton said he “did not have sexual relations.”

She was a 20-something White House intern to whom the married president became attracted in the late 1990s. He fooled around with her. A special prosecutor who had been assigned to cover another story — the Whitewater real estate investment matter — stumbled upon reports of indiscretion. The president was forced to testify before a federal grand jury and then he lied under oath about what he did with the young woman.

The House of Representatives impeached him for it. The Senate tried him, but he was acquitted.

Sen. Paul may seek the Republican presidential nomination in two years and now he is suggesting that possible Democratic nominee, Hillary Rodham Clinton — the wife of the former president — isn’t trustworthy because she’s married to a “sexual predator.”

But what about Lewinsky?

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/monica-lewinsky-reconsidered-103513.html?hp=t1#.Uv4Hc1KYat8

She’s been leading a fairly private life since those bad ol’ days. Few of us out here have heard or seen a thing about her. I don’t even know how she’s making a living these days.

Frankly, I had hoped never to see her face again. It looks as though those hopes have been dashed now that Rand Paul has dredged that sordid story from the trash heap.

What’s more, I feel a kind of sympathy for her now that she’s about to be dragged through the media arena once again. Maybe she just wants to be left alone. Perhaps she has turned the page on that hideous chapter in her life and her infamous activities that led to the second presidential impeachment in U.S. history.

Surely she cannot welcome this kind of attention yet again. Can she?

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UAW gets the shaft from Tennessee pol

A Tennessee politician — a self-proclaimed pro-business conservative — is doing something that simply boggles the mind.

He is trying to use government muscle to coerce a major automaker from allowing its workers to unionize.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/02/12/sen-bob-corker-cant-stand-the-united-auto-workers-an-annotated-interview/

The politician is U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, a Republican and a former mayor of Chattanooga, Tenn. The automaker is Volkswagen, which years ago built a huge auto assembly plant in that fine city. The United Auto Workers is now trying to get a toehold in the plant by unionizing its 1,500 employees. The company says it won’t fight the idea. The autoworkers appear ready to join the UAW.

A business is entitled to conduct its affairs as it sees fit, according to many conservative Republicans. Except, apparently, when it involves the introduction of unions that historically have favored Democratic politicians.

So, enter Sen. Corker, the aforementioned pro-business conservative. He doesn’t want the UAW involved. To make his point, Corker is threatening to deny Volkswagen tax incentives that go normally to businesses seeking to expand. The threat is meant to dissuade the employees from voting to join the union.

What gives here? Is Corker a true conservative or has he become a closet — dare I say it — socialist who believes in government interference in private businesses’ affairs? Which is it, senator?

This interference is unconscionable.

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Gov. Martinez says ‘no’ to CPAC

If you get way up on your tippy-toes, you almost can see New Mexico from Amarillo.

Which makes me wish I could feel the angst among Republican conservatives in the eastern part of that state over news that GOP Gov. Susana Martinez — contrary to earlier reports — is skipping next month’s Conservative Political Action Confernce meeting in Maryland.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/02/13/susana_martinez_will_not_attend_cpac_121579.html

Martinez is considered a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2016. CPAC had announced she would make a major speech at the convention. Today, Martinez said it would happen.

Tea party conservatives and other right-wingers had hoped Martinez would be a presence there, burnishing their image among the party’s more, um, ideological members.

This is a big loss for CPAC. Martinez is considered a big Republican star, being the first Hispanic Republican governor in the country. Indeed, the party still has work to do to improve its image among Hispanic voters, who turned out in huge numbers in 2012 for President Obama.

The GOP had considered Martinez’s participation at CPAC as a potentially major event. She gave a rousing speech at the 2012 Republican convention, whetting the appetites of those who want to hear more from her.

CPAC will not lack for bomb-throwers: Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum all are among the speakers scheduled for the event.

They’ll all spew enough nonsense so that no one will miss Gov. Martinez.

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