Daily Kos

House Republicans reacted to President Obama's historic announcement in support of marriage equality with some good old-fashioned legislative gay-bashing.

House Republicans voted Wednesday night to bar the Justice Department from using any federal funds to oppose the Defense of Marriage Act. They added the prohibitions to an appropriations measure. [...]

Also Wednesday night, the House Armed Services Committee voted to bar gay and lesbian service members from getting married or holding “marriage-like” ceremonies at military facilities.

The Justice Department announced last year that it would no longer defend DOMA in the courts because it had determined the law was unconstitutional. House Speaker John Boehner promptly announced he wasn't going let a little thing like unconstitutionality get in the way of discrimination, and that the House would take up the cause. They've now one-upped that to prevent the administration from actually fighting the unconstitutional law.

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi got this one exactly right:

"On an historic day and in the dark of night, House Republicans have voted to tie the hands of the Obama Administration with respect to their efforts to end discrimination against America's families."

In a newly released video (watch it above), the Obama campaign is hammering Mitt Romney's opposition to gay marriage and civil unions, saying he wants to move "backwards on equality."

The video starts with a clip of of President Obama announcing his support for same-sex marriage and quickly moves to a clip of Mitt Romney yesterday saying he opposes both marriage equality and civil unions, setting up the forward versus backwards contrast that is by now quite familiar.

The video lists the implications of Romney's position: no health insurance of same-sex couples and their children; no ability for same-sex couples to adopt; no legal framework for making emergency medical decisions for partners; and no federal hospital visitation rights. It also points out that Romney's opposition to civil unions puts him to the right of George W. Bush, who campaigned on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in 2004, but now favors civil unions. And the video includes a clip of Romney endorsing that constitutional amendment during a 2012 Republican primary debate.

The video concludes with a return to the campaign's core message. "President Obama is moving us forward," it says. "Mitt Romney would take us back."

One day after President Obama announced his support for marriage equality, the Washington Post reports on the early days of Mitt Romney's evolution on equal rights:

Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors. [...]

“It was a hack job,” recalled Maxwell, a childhood friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred. “It was vicious.”

Some 30 years later, Lauber—who died in 2004—told one of the witnesses to the assault that:

It was horrible ... It’s something I have thought about a lot since then.

So, all these years later, is Mitt Romney sorry for assaulting a classmate? Or is he trying to dismiss it as a youthful indiscretion? Nope. According to his campaign:

... the former Massachusetts governor has no recollection of the incident.

How convenient.

7:44 AM PT: If?

[Discussion is also underway in a recommended diary by Rolling Snake Ball].

Reposted from Comics by Barbara Morrill

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Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by David Nir Leading Off:

• FL-16: Much of the grey cloud that hangs over Republican Rep. Vern Buchanan's head has to do with the House Ethics Committee pursuing him over campaign finance violations, and indeed on Wednesday, the panel voted 6-0 to expand their ongoing investigation because "there is substantial reason to believe that Representative Buchanan attempted to influence the testimony of a witness in a proceeding before the FEC in violation" of federal law and congressional rules. The full report is available here (PDF). The picture looks pretty bad for ol' Vern, and remember, this is on top of a separate House ethics inquiry into Buchanan's allegedly incomplete personal financial disclosure and further on top of a joint FBI/IRS probe into his business dealings and campaign finances.

But that's still not all: Buchanan is also getting a roasting in the local media over a topic that may be more resonant to everyday news viewers: thousands of purportedly fraudulent transactions at the network of auto dealerships that Buchanan owns. Consumer advocates point to former employees and customers who've allegedly forged signatures on loan docs and falsified loan application data, all in the interest of closing more deals. (David Nir & David Jarman)

With the House set to vote as soon as Thursday on their "Sequester Replacement Act" to renege on the Budget Control Act they agreed to last year, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says it'll be DOA in the Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid(D-Nev.) announced today that Senate Democrats would not agree to replace mandated spending cuts unless Republicans agree to a “balanced” approach that asks the wealthy to help pay for it. [...]

“The Republican budget and their so-called reconciliation bill don’t just renege on that bipartisan, bicameral agreement to reduce spending,” Reid said. “They reflect fundamentally skewed priorities.

“They hand out even more tax breaks to multi-millionaires and shield corporate defense contractors, all at the expense of hard-working, middle-class families, the elderly and those in greatest need,” Reid continued.

The House is moving forward with the Romney-endorsed Ryan budget, attempting to overthrow the agreement they made last August, to further slash taxes for the wealthy (on top of the Bush tax cuts, which they'll fight to maintain), decimate the safety net, and actually increase defense spending. It's not a real policy statement, since it will be rejected by the Senate and President Obama, so it's the political statement Republicans are making for November's election.

Republicans are committed to making this their political marker: ending Medicare as we know it and gutting every government program but defense so that they can give even bigger tax breaks to rich people. This is their party platform for November, but it's also their attempt to drag the debate as far to the right as possible for the critical lame duck negotiations, when Congress will have to deal with the automatic budget cuts, along with the Bush tax cut extension and a number of other end-of-the-year fiscal messes.

Recapping yesterday's action:

The House snuck in a few suspension bills early on, before diving back into the Commerce, Justice, Science appropriations bill. It was another marathon session, and by late last night they debated some twenty-plus proposed amendments. Oh, let's see... there was one prohibiting the use of funds for defending court challenges to the Affordable Care Act. And one to prohibit the use of funds to litigate against any of state on behalf of the National Labor Relations Board pertaining to secret ballot union elections. And one to prohibit the use of funds by the Department of Justice to bring any action against any state for implementation of a state law requiring voter identification. And of course, one to prohibit the use of funds to implement a section of the Americans with Disabilities Act which allows miniature horses to be used as service animals. Gotta have that.

You get the idea, though. Minus that last one, maybe.

The Senate returned, at least technically, to the motion to proceed to the student loan bill. But they never did get around to reconsidering the cloture vote, which probably means there were some negotiations going on in the background, but no movement on votes. As a result, they had to fill their floor time with random debate, and a few non-controversial items passed by unanimous consent. Not much.

Looking ahead to today:

Another late, late night in the House left us without a schedule posted before midnight, but by the wee hours, the Majority Leader's site had something for us to go on. It looks like we can expect a brief break in the appropriations action, clearing the way for the budgetary shenanigans aimed at undoing the defense-related portion of those supposedly automatic, across-the-board spending cuts imposed by the debt ceiling deal from last August. At the beginning of the week, the schedule said that was supposed to come in the form of the "Sequester Replacement Act," and its sister bill, the "Sequester Replacement Reconciliation Act." But now, the two bills have been folded into one, and the reconciliation bill will be the one coming to the floor today.

And yes, I did say... RECONCILIATION!

Remember when it was all the (Republican) rage to pretend that reconciliation was the same thing as the "nuclear option"? Hilarious! But of course, it's all cool now. This despite the fact that normally, the authority to bring a reconciliation bill to the floor must arise from the adoption of a budget containing reconciliation instructions. Of course, no such budget has actually been adopted. But no matter. The Republicans "deemed" their budget passed last month. Remember? Well, that fake budget had reconciliation instructions in them. Only, we found out yesterday that the numbers were wrong, and they had to deem some new ones in there, by jamming a fix into the rule for the appropriations bill they're still working on.

So how about these last few weeks, huh? The insane Ryan budget, the return of "Demon Pass," and now the use of reconciliation without any actual authority for it, but doable because they deemed themselves authorized, and waived all the rules against bringing the bill to the floor. And just for good measure, the whole thing will be debated for just two hours, with no amendments allowed. Who'd have thunk it? Besides everyone in the whole damn world, that is.

Meanwhile, the whole thing is a farce anyway, since the deeming is only valid insofar as the House is concerned. The House can't deem anything for the Senate, and there's no indication the Senate has any interest in passing any of this crap. Besides which, reconciliation's magic is only really of interest in the Senate, since it's protected from the filibuster there (where it gets 20 hours of debate, by the way). The House never really needed special handling rules for reconciliation, because they could always make them up as they went along. But the special magical powers reconciliation has in the Senate have to be triggered by the adoption of reconciliation instructions in a budget resolution, and the Senate hasn't done that, and doesn't seem likely to do so. They certainly aren't interested in adopting the ones the House deemed them to have passed. So in the end, although House Republicans are breaking all the rules in order to pretend they have both a budget and a reconciliation bill, there's a whole other house of the Congress that knows it's all make believe, and to which none of this pixie dust bullshit applies.

The Senate, for its part, isn't even really entirely sure what they'll be up to today. The student loan bill—or rather, the motion to proceed to it—is still hanging out there. If Harry Reid has reason to believe there's been some movement on the votes, he retains the right to call for its reconsideration, since he switched his vote to "no" on the last attempt at cloture on this motion. (Any Senator who voted with the majority has the right to call for reconsideration.)

But absent any movement on cloture, Plan B is to take up the Export-Import Bank Reauthorization Act. I'm not sure offhand what the status of that bill is, and whether there would be any resistance to moving directly to consideration of the bill (as opposed to getting bogged down on a motion to proceed to it). But if the sun comes up in the East today, I think there's a good chance Republicans will say no to this one, too.

Whatever they do, it'll be done while they happily ignore the make-believe game going on in the House.

Today's floor and committee schedules appear below the fold.

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…

5 4 3 2 1 month 'til Netroots Nation!!!

With only 28 days 'til the convention in Providence, you can almost hear the packing of the steamer trunks. Here's your weekly update:

• Thursday night's keynote address will be given by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. Other announced speakers at the convention include Providence Mayor Angel Taveras, environmentalist Bill McKibben, Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards, the NEA’s Lily Eskelsen, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) and Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI). More announcements to come.
• Panels with dates and times are here.
• Volunteers are needed to make everything run smoothly at the convention. There's a limited number of volunteer scholarships available for folks who commit to four hours a day. If you're interested, email Shanna at volunteers [at] netrootsnation.org to request an application. Deadline to apply is this Friday.
• The C&J dinner/meetup is a GO for Wednesday eveniing, June 6 at Union Station Brewery (rumor has it they serve beer), just steps away from the convention center. Space is limited. If you want to atttend please RSVP to my partner, Michael, at cuckolds04103 [at] gmail.com..

  (And because someone always asks: Cuckolds is the name of our favorite lighthouse. Awww...)

• One of the must-see sights in Providence is Waterfire, aka the "crown jewel of the Providence renaissance." Their scheduled event for Saturday, June 9 is dedicated in part to "Welcoming Netroots Nation." Well, shucks.
• The Netroots for the Troops blogathon is still going on. Please help us make our goal so Tony and his crew can buy the items we'll be putting into the care packages at Netroots Nation and sending to our troops in remote combat areas overseas and VA hospitals here at home. The donation link is here. We'll be packing the boxes Saturday, June 9, and the more people who join us, the merrier.
• To register for the convention, click here.
• To stay in the loop, get on the email list and follow NN12 on Facebook and twitter.

Oh, and just to be clear: I call dibs on the top bunk.

Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

_{Visual source: Newseum}

Courage is articulating your personal convictions and evolution in a split country. Pride is what many of us feel today. Cowardice is the other guy, who can't stand up to his own followers. A sampling follows:

Frank Bruni:

Hooray for President Obama, who indeed risked something today. You will hear in the coming hours and for the rest of the week that because of Joe Biden’s bit of Sunday-morning loquaciousness, Obama more or less had to do this, lest he diminish his “brand” of high principle and authenticity, lest he lose moneyed gay donors, lest he look like a troglodyte in an administration of more enlightened sorts.

And perhaps he and his aides did conclude that politically, this was the optimal course, the better wager.

But there’s plenty of doubt and plenty of dispute about that. Plenty.

Nate Silver:

President Obama’s decision to endorse same-sex marriage undoubtedly entails some political risk, but recent polls suggest that public opinion is increasingly on his side.

According to surveys included in the PollingReport.com database, an average of 50 percent of American adults support same-sex marriage rights while 45 percent oppose it, based on an average of nine surveys conducted in the past year.

This is a reversal from earlier periods: support for same-sex marriage has been increasing, and opposition to it has been decreasing, at a relatively steady rate of perhaps two or three percentage points a year since 2004.

David Frum:

The president's statement today about marriage rights changes nothing—and everything.

The statement changes everything because it powerfully symbolizes an awakening that so many people have had, myself included: here is a social change whose time has come, and more than come. Denying marriage rights to same-sex couples inflicts real harm on real people, while doing nothing to prevent the deterioration of marriage among non-affluent Americans.

The statement changes everything because it puts marriage rights on the 2012 ballot as a voting issue. Mitt Romney has declared—not only his opposition to same-sex marriage—but his intention to use the power of the presidency to stop and reverse it. One may doubt how intensely Romney feels about that commitment, really. My own guess: about 1/1000 as intensely as he feels about Sarbanes-Oxley. But the issue is joined even so.

Frank Rich:

And so, Obama has finally finished evolving on same-sex marriage.

And about time! I, for one, never understood the point of saying you were “evolving” when many of the voters you were pandering to don’t even believe in evolution.

Mike Bloomberg:

"This is a major turning point in the history of American civil rights. No American president has ever supported a major expansion of civil rights that has not ultimately been adopted by the American people – and I have no doubt that this will be no exception. The march of freedom that has sustained our country since the Revolution of 1776 continues, and no matter what setbacks may occur in a given state, freedom will triumph over fear and equality will prevail over exclusion. Today’s announcement is a testament to the President’s convictions, and it builds on the courageous stands that so many Americans have taken over the years on behalf of equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, stretching back to the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village."

BuzzFeed:

After three years of political compromise on issues from health care reform to spending cuts, Obama delivered a surprise gift to what many of his core supporters view as the civil rights issue of the day, simply by saying what everyone assumed he believed. But the distinction between implying a change and saying it outright will more than symbolic in the crucial area of campaign fundraising. Already, gay donors, mostly men, reportedly constitute 1 in 6 of Obama’s top fundraisers known as bundlers. And in the first 90 minutes after the news broke Wednesday, the campaign received $1 million in spontaneous contributions, a Democrat told BuzzFeed.

“This is beyond unifying — it’s electrifying,” said Eugene Sepulveda, a former top bundler who withdrew to take a non-political job early this year. “This man stands for right, despite the political consequences.”

Mark Blumenthal:

In a recent New York Times column, Pew Research president Andrew Kohut noted that while "much of the growing support for gay marriage is generational," it also reflects changing opinion among older Americans. "Since 2004," Kohut writes, "support for gay marriage has increased from 30 percent to 40 percent among baby boomers, and even among seniors (from 18 percent to 32 percent)."

Jonathan Rauch:

What happened? Harry Truman was fond of quoting Mark Twain: "When in doubt, do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest." Now and then, politicians have a "goddammit" moment. Obama's position had clearly shifted on the issue (who was he kidding with his talk of having "evolved" but being unwilling to make news?), and there was never going to be a better time to make the switch than now--at least not while he is certain to be a non-lame-duck president.

So Obama decided it's worth a roll of the dice to make history. Which is what he has done.

As of his announcement, favoring gay marriage is now fully, indisputably, and permanently a mainstream political position. All hint of weirdness or stigma is gone. It is also now the stated position of one of the two major political parties (only 16 years after President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, signed the anti-gay-marriage Defense of Marriage Act). Precisely because the issue is unlikely to decide the election this year, November's result will not revoke the issue's promotion in status even if Obama loses. Though gay couples have not achieved full legal equality, gay marriage, as an issue, has achieved full political equality. That is a landmark in the ongoing marriage debate.

So goes conventional wisdom, but here's betting Rauch (see his post) is wrong and the upside in the end outweighs the downside. However, Obama can't know that, so count this as courage.

Jonathan Cowan (Third Way):

Our four years of research on the middle and marriage taught us this — if Americans in the middle believe that gay and lesbian couples want to marry to make a promise of lifetime commitment and fidelity, not to gain rights and benefits, they’ll accept it. The president’s statement was pitch perfect when it focused on allowing committed gay couples to make the public promise that marriage entails. If marriage supporters stay on that message, the middle can be won.

This Slate piece published just before Sen. Dick Lugar lost his primary bid to the more froth-friendly Richard Mourdock is notable primarily for the number of looney statements freely proffered by the participants:

Taking out the Republicans who compromise with Democrats is a cold, logical decision, the easiest one they make. Jim Bopp, a lawyer who’s worked on dozens of lawsuits to break up the campaign finance regime, was one of the first notable Indiana Republicans to dump Lugar. His USA Super PAC sent out around $100,000 of mail for Mourdock. It wasn’t personal.

“Lugar is an honest and decent man, but he's voted wrong too many times,” says Bopp. “His approach is just wrong now. When Reagan was president, we could afford someone who approaches these issues in a moderate, bipartisan way. But now we have an administration out to destroy us, and we need a fighter. Here’s another way to say it. We’re in a march to socialism. Obama’s getting us there at 100 mph. If you endorse bipartisanship, you get us there at 50 mph.”

This seems to be the common refrain in certain Republican circles. Barack Obama has us, apparently, on a high-speed march to socialism. What the hell socialism is supposed to entail or how we might be getting there as a damn baffling thing, since it seems the most radical positions yet taken by the entire Democratic caucus don't amount to much more than what Reagan would have done on his more coherent days. There's that whole healthcare thing, which became socialist at the exact moment a Democrat proposed it, no matter how many damn years or damn think tanks conservatives spent proposing the same damn thing. There's supposed gun law changes that Did Not Fucking Happen. What's the rest of it?

It is a damn peculiar thing, how people on the left can lament the agonizing devotion to centrism that marks nearly everything the White House has done, and how the media can document over and over the Obama attempts to compromise on this, on that, and on the other thing, and how many stories can go by where the administration has gone out of their way to pre-compromise on legislation, only to have to compromise yet again, and likely even then find themselves predictably burned when whatever resulting "bargain" they negotiated for was batted away again six months later. Really, it's been in all the papers. You can't really miss it.

There's that version of reality. Then there's another one in which we're on a high-speed train to socialism (well, high-speed by U.S. standards, since that is yet another area in which the United States has patriotically decided to suck turnips, rather than to do anything Europe, Japan or China can do in their sleep at this point), and the train is being conducted by a non-compromising madman who will stop at nothing until the United States has marginally increased spending toward non-fossil-feul energy sources, or who rabidly demands we not cut critical assistance to poor folk by quite as much as Rand Paul, American Patriot, demands, or—you know what? I have no idea. If there's a plot there, it was lost long ago. There was the lightbulb law; that one was passed under George W. Bush, who was not known for his rampant forays into communism. There's now Teh Gays thing, in which Obama is a socialist for now expressing the same opinion as a very wide swath of America. It's not just a question of not knowing what the word "socialist" means. It's an entirely different plane of reality. You can only think Barack Obama is hurtling toward "socialism" if you think he's an extremist, and you can only think he's an "extremist" if you are so very, very fucking removed from reality that even Ronald Reagan himself now looks like a potential communist. Which, as it turns out, is exactly where we are:

“I’ve read New START, and it doesn’t address North Korea or Iran,” says [Greg] Fettig. “Why would we want to limit our arsenal and hope that Russia does when we’re not even addressing other nations? I've been to Lugar’s office in D.C. It's wallpapered with pictures of him climbing in nuclear silos in Russia. I guess that's the legacy he sees himself leaving, but it's an outdated legacy. He not only refuses to leave the beltway, he refuses to leave the 1980s.”

Well, that bastard. Here he cares about nuclear disarmament, and doth hast hanged some pictures up in his office of him doing that sort of thing, but the end of the Cold War is just so damn boring. Avoiding accidental nuclear annihilation is just so passe, so archaic; the modern conservative is obsessed instead with the existential crisis of nations who would be hard pressed to deliver so much as one nuclear bomb. Screw diplomacy with all the countries that already have them.

And so we have the spectacle of a supposed true conservative, a fellow of the clan that looks to Ronald Reagan as a god among men, complaining bitterly about someone being stuck in the 1980s. This would be funny if it did not involve at least some level of absolute batshit stupidity, and of the sort that normally people would be eager to hide from the outside world and not parade around publicly.

These Mourdock supporters, though, have nothing on the man himself. Here we have a man who on first impression seems to do his level best to be an arrogant, pompous ass with no particular redeeming qualities, a man for whom the only purpose of government is to do precisely what he says or to be destroyed. His post-primary victory statements were positively turgid:

RICHARD MOURDOCK: Well, what I've said is that I certainly think bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view. [...]

To me, the highlight of politics, frankly, is to inflict my opinion on someone else with a microphone or in front of a camera. [...]

I feel I can defend the purpose of conservatism, and more Republicans should be doing it just as I want to.

That sounds less like a potential legislator than a bratty pre-teen telling the world off. Do what I say has never been less eloquently expressed. What a toad.

I do wonder at the delusional world "true conservatives" now find themselves in. It is a world in which they literally will tolerate no compromise, upon pain of being primaried and Super PACed out of existence—but it is the other side that is made up of radical extremists. The people willing to go to war over the mere suspicion of a bomb are patriots; those that want to address a thousand or so of them are living in the past. And leading the radical, radical charge toward socialism is ... Barack Obama. Or the Democrats. Or anyone who is merely not quite as conservative as the "true" conservative wishes.

I admit it; I would feel better if the Republican Party was merely under the thrall of business interests, or the wealthy, or Super PACs for either of them. That, at least, would be expected. I could at least wrap my brain around social conservatism if it still merely consisted of the tribal, despise-everyone-and-anything bigotries that they have been obsessed with for decades. But I think instead that the election of the first black president sent a good portion of them completely off their rockers, perhaps for reasons not even they themselves can parse out. When you look around you, after an economic collapse caused by greed and fraud and imaginary paperwork, and after all the bullying pseudo-patriotism of the Bush years, and after seeing all the simple, easy-to-understand charts that show how certain wealthy interests have made off better and better over the last years and decades, while everyone else, the whole of the rest of the country, has been doing worse, and when you read about how advertisers are no longer targeting the "middle class" so much because there is not really much of a "middle class" anymore—if you can look around at all that and see a march to socialism in all of it, than you are simply not a rational person. There is something wrong with you. You, dear conservative, are fucking nuts.

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2010:

Spencer Ackerman has been in Guantanamo for the past week, reporting on the pre-trial hearing of Omar Khadr. The whole of his coverage is worth reading, but probably the most critical of them is this one:

GUANTANAMO BAY — Two weeks’ worth of proceedings in the pre-trial hearing of Omar Khadr found an unexpected meta-conclusion this [Thursday] afternoon as the public affairs shop in the Office of the Secretary of Defense banned four reporters from returning to Guantanamo Bay. Their offense: reporting the name of a witness whose identity is under a protective order.

The four journalists are Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star, Steven Edwards of Canwest, Paul Koring of the Globe & Mail and Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald. They are not being thrown off the base, but, as of now, they are barred from returning.

A letter written by an official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s public affairs division specified that each had published the name of a witness who testified to the military commissions today under the name “Interrogator #1.” Identifying information about that interrogator was entered into the record of the hearing during open court testimony by both the prosecution and the defense. Ironically, the letter confirmed that witness’s identity.

In other words, as Adam Serwer says the Pentagon banned these reporters for doing their jobs.

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High Impact Posts. Top Comments.

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by Steve Singiser

It pretty much has to be said at this point—Gallup and Rasmussen (the only two pollsters offering up a daily tracking poll of the presidential race) are on an island. Today brings another set of polls that stand rather far from the assessment of those two firms on the state of the race.

Not only is there contrary national polling, but there are also a set of three state polls that don't look far enough from the 2008 presidential numbers to justify the 10-12 point swing to the GOP that Gallup and the House of Ras are claiming.

To the numbers!

PRESIDENTIAL GENERAL ELECTION TRIAL HEATS:

NATIONAL (Angus Reid): Romney d. Obama (49-46)

NATIONAL (Associated Press/GfK): Obama d. Romney (50-42)

NATIONAL (Gallup Tracking): Romney d. Obama (47-44)

NATIONAL (PPP for Daily Kos/SEIU): Obama d. Romney (48-45)

NATIONAL (Rasmussen Tracking): Romney d. Obama (49-44)

NATIONAL (YouGov/The Economist): Obama d. Romney (44-43)

FLORIDA (Suffolk University): Obama d. Romney (46-45)

MASSACHUSETTS (Rasmussen): Obama d. Romney (56-35)

NEW JERSEY (Fairleigh Dickinson): Obama d. Romney (50-36)

DOWNBALLOT POLLING:

TX-SEN—R (Dresner Wickers Barber Sanders for a PAC supporting David Dewhurst): David Dewhurst 51, Ted Cruz 16, Tom Leppert 7, Craig James 2

WI-SEN—R (North Star Opinion Research for Eric Hovde): Tommy Thompson 30, Eric Hovde 27, Mark Neumann 23, Jeff Fitzgerald 10

A few thoughts, as always, await you just past the jump...

The Ohio House, dominated by Republicans, is trying to pull a fast one on Ohio voters, and still keep Democratic-leaning voters away from the polls in this critical election in a decisive state.

Last June, the legislature passed House Bill 194, to restrict early voting, prohibit counties from sending absentee ballot applications to registered voters, and eliminate the requirement for poll workers to help voters find their correct polling place, among other restrictions. In September of last year, Fair Elections Ohio succeeded in getting enough signatures to get a referendum on the new law on November's ballot, effectively nullifying the law for the 2012 election.

The Republican-dominated legislature didn't want its voter suppression work entirely undone, so it has now passed a repeal of the law to prevent voters from killing it entirely.

"By taking the action that we're proposing to take today, we discourage people in the future from taking advantage of the initiative and referendum right," Rep. Dennis Murray, a Democrat from Sandusky, said on the House floor. "This goes fundamentally to the question of who it is in this state that holds the power of government. I think that's the people of this state, and I think the action we're taking today violates the constitution." [...]

Democrats and voting rights advocates argued the legislation is not a "clean" repeal of HB 194 because it leaves in place a prohibition on in-person early voting the weekend before an election. The restriction will remain in effect because it was duplicated in a separate bill.

The Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted says the referendum won't be on the ballot because "there is no longer a question to place before the voters." But Fair Elections Ohio disputes this, because determinations of what goes on a ballot are not made by the Secretary of State unilaterally, but by the petition committee that organized the referendum.

This is an entirely unprecedented action, so it's unclear now whether Husted or Fair Elections Ohio has the law on their side, and if the referendum will be on the ballot in November. Also unclear is whether the in-person early voting will be available, since it's both subject to the referendum and was passed in a separate bill. These are determinations that are likely going to be settled by the courts.