which makes me feel real gun control is off the table for the foreseeable future. Pretty terrible. Assault weapons ban, anyone?

more here

Q: Do you support the DC handgun ban?

A: I want to give local communities the authority over determining how to keep their citizens safe. This case you're referring to is before the Supreme Court.

Q: But what do you support?

A: I support sensible regulation that is consistent with the constitutional right to own and bear arms.

Q: Is the DC ban consistent with that right?

A: I think a total ban, with no exceptions under any circumstances, might be found by the court not to be. But DC or anybody else [should be able to\ come up with sensible regulations to protect their people.

Q: But do you still favor licensing and registration of handguns?

A: What I favor is what works in NY. We have one set of rules in NYC and a totally different set of rules in the rest of the state. What might work in NYC is certainly not going to work in Montana. So, for the federal government to be having any kind of blanket rules that they're going to try to impose, I think doesn't make sense.

_{1."George Washington did not cross the Delaware for Capitalism," -Shmuley Boteach.
2.The Dems haven't punished the GOP enough, so you're going to reward the Republicans?}

Thanks for mentioning Obama's day before rejection of the rule of law announced by a rare liberal majority of the Court, when he might have made a point in supporting that rare majority, the rule of law and separation of powers, while announcing a personal disagreement. Instead we get him commenting on how the liberals misinterpreted the Constitution. What a jerk.

But this is why I have struggled to find a reason to support his candidacy. He shows himself repeatedly incapable of finding the appropriate progressive meme in a given situation while falling into platitudinous support for the right. If he succeeds in winning the election he stands a snow ball's chance in hell of governing from the progressive side as all of his idolatrous supporters hope he will do despite all of his pandering. Actually my guess is that he isn't pandering and it is the real Obama we hear speaking.

This is shaping up as one hell of a miserable election.

(which didn't differ noticeably from McCain's.)

I do think it is a case of having it both ways, a la the Bill Clinton "is", rather than pandering.

"I have said repeatedly that I think that the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances for the most egregious of crimes," "I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that that does not violate our Constitution."

There is no serious governing body that could with any sense narrow down a death penalty for child rape based on the age of the child. so yes, in theory, but no, in fact. Not that Louisiana hasn't tried. And why stop at child rape. Is that worse than say, cutting off a hand of a child? Impossible comparisons and detailed scenarios for all types
of child abuse when "heinous" and heinous alone becomes the defining concept.

I still remember Bill Clinton's rushing to sign into law the death penalty of a retarded man.

It is especially disheartening coming from a man who has worked hard in Illinois to narrow the circumstances in which the death penalty can be applied for murder.

_{1."George Washington did not cross the Delaware for Capitalism," -Shmuley Boteach.
2.The Dems haven't punished the GOP enough, so you're going to reward the Republicans?}

gun control. I think Dem progressives realized 4-8 years ago thay no
longer had a plurality for any meaningful gun control and stopped pushing it( but didn't underline it to their constituencies). But I may well be mistaken.

My despair is "Obama disagrees with the Supreme Court's decision outlawing executions of people who rape children" .

_{1."George Washington did not cross the Delaware for Capitalism," -Shmuley Boteach.
2.The Dems haven't punished the GOP enough, so you're going to reward the Republicans?}

I didn't believe in him last year either.

It's election time and it's the same old sh*t once again. No change, no hope, nothing you can believe in. Get over it, people.

It comes down to voting AGAINST the person you think is the biggest dishonest, lying through their teeth, crook. So far, McBush is a bigger crook.

Unfortunately, as Nov approaches, Obama is narrowing the gap.

This is called "freedom of choice" in the land where *anyone* can be President, right?

he's drawing attention to the issue, that is not likely to go away once he's elected.
Procedurally I see this debate as similar to that of slavery, 160 years ago: there's Constitutional ambiguity that leads to procedural snafu. hopefully we can resolve this without another Civil War.

Personally, I'm torn between wanting to take a reasonable stance: keep the deadliest weapons in the hands of the military only, and in the armories of the National Guard....and the opposing view that "if it can be towed by my pickup I should ba able to buy and use it" view that it's not a gun problem, it's a population problem, and giving guns to everybody (and I do mean *everybody*) might help to relieve some of the problem, because so many people will die in gun violence that the resulting drop in population would make for fewer opportunities for people to meet, and shoot each other.

Yeah, it's a George-Carlin-ian view, and very much that of the curmudgeon in me.....

-5.75,-4.05
"We're all fucked. It helps to remember that." --George Carlin

The problem is with the way he does what he does. The liberal dissent did not dispute the individual rights interpretation. It did dispute the nature of the right. Obama could have noted that the majority's position does in fact constitute the law but could as well have said that he would have preferred the dissent's interpretation of the nature of the right.

The problem, as I noted above, is in the fact that he is incapable of finding the progressive meme. The problem is that he appears to support the reactionary part of the Court while dropping the liberals. As with the death penalty case there was a way to respond that would have supported the liberals. He deliberately chose not to.

Right now my main reason for voting for Obama would be the upcoming Supreme Court appointments. I am very, very afraid, based on his responses to these two cases, that we will not necessarily get the sort of appointments that I would like to see.

Obama is a University of Chicago graduate; from the same law school that gave us John Ashcroft. The University itself can take credit for Paul Wolfowitz, Leo Strauss, Ahmed Chalabi and Zalmay Khalizad. Hardly a glowing bed of red-hot liberalism.

I think Obama's slip showed a bit when asked to comment on the other big Supreme Court ruling involving capital punishment for rapists. See Lilliana Segra's piece on Counterpunch.

In short, I don't look to see advances of any sort in the liberal agenda if Obama prevails. Any Supreme Court nominees will be right-wing moderates at best.

from Harvard Law. He was president of the law review there. Hardly a bastion of red-hot conservatism. I see his appointees as being dependable liberal moderates cut from the same cloth as the Clinton appointees.

But, from the UofC:

From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. The title of Senior Lecturer is distinct from the title of Lecturer, which signifies adjunct status. Like Obama, each of the Law School's Senior Lecturers has high-demand careers in politics or public service, which prevent full-time teaching. Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined.

So, he's not unsympathetic to the atmosphere there.

i am a UofC grad. do you think i am "sympathetic" to the neoconservative intellectual and policy project? if you don't know please read some of my work at corrente.

are all harvard grads sympathetic to bush? he's a grad, is he sympathetic to establishment liberalism a la the kennedy school? there are other more absurd examples i could make of your 'logic.'

let me inform you with some fact: 85% of the Chicago faculty voted for kerry and gore. a higher number of the student population. i was even there at that time. a handful of scholars, even powerful and politically connected ones, almost never represent the full ideological range of the faculty of a school. Chicago is no exception.

I should know better than to stereotype. However, is the split of the liberal/conservative also characteristic of the Law School?

I really need to start reading some of Obama's writings while he was at Chicago.

(P.S. During the 60's, I attended IIT, not that far from UofC in distance, but lightyears away at the same time in terms of political atmosphere.)

its first phd grad was not "white." my advisor at the div school doctoral program i attended was an atheist. there are israeli specialists in muslim art and history there. a black woman and macarthur fellow teaches ancient studies in the classics dept. leo stauss and aj wrote their greatest works at chicago. and as you note, ashcroft held prayer meetings the law school there, while current faculty-jurists of the federal bench pontificate about such mythologies as "takings." smith wrote his famous "map is not a territory" during his chicago years, iirc.

there's not one way of thinking in any department or division at chicago and there's no easy road to perceiving that short of reading a lot of the work done by the scholars themselves. generally, the econ dept and law school produce what we call here 'conservative' scholarship, and there are faculty of similar bent to be found in almost all departments. just like at harvard, berkeley, or any other 'important' school in this country. don't forget: rich people fund chairs and have some say in who sits in them, and universities are often (somewhat) tools of the corporate misinformation production stream as anything else in the media universe. no school is pure, nor totally evil.

It is anything but nuance. It is adoption of the position of the rabidly right majority opinion while rejecting the actually nuanced position of the more liberal dissent. Note that the dissent did not reject the supposed right to bear arms. It would have limited that right more than the majority. If Obama were nuanced he would have embraced the dissent. Note that he found it possible to embrace the dissent (there the rabidly right) in the death penalty case the day before.

I want to vote for this guy...I have to vote for this guy..but pulling that lever is going to feel like rolling the dice.

Sometime before the General he's got to grow a pair and TESTIFY.He can't take the votes he needs from MCain by remaining in this gaseous state.

"Lord! What Fools these Mortals be!"

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

You don't have to vote for anyone. If you're disgusted by the choices on offer, do what a great number of Americans do every four years, and don't vote. (also do a search for George Carlin and voting on youtube for a laugh)

If on FISA, Iraq, Iran, guns, etc. the Dems and Repubes are marching in lock-step, what's the point? Do you think when historians look at the last decade of our empire, they'll notice that for part of it, some women couldn't get an abortion? That some kids in Kansas learned about Creationism in public school in addition to learning about it from their parents and in church? That their president knew about the internet?

We're going to hell in a handbasket and we're arguing about what color the basket should be.

NYT

....
Oh, the ironies. Hillary lost the nomination because many Democrats looked at her and saw a candidate who lacked a principled core, who was prepared to do almost anything to get elected president. They liked Barack better because he was a change agent.

Then just as she was engrossed in her multiple concessions, his campaign started using the same political shape-shifting that Obama had decried in the Clintons.
....
Still, it’s worrisome. You’d like to think that after 17 months of angst over its presidential nomination, the Democrats would not wind up with the exact same candidate they started out with, except for a different gender and a higher quotient of panache.

_{1."George Washington did not cross the Delaware for Capitalism," -Shmuley Boteach.
2.The Dems haven't punished the GOP enough, so you're going to reward the Republicans?}

Obama is running as a bipartisan centrist, "a uniter not a divider" to quote W's 2000 campaign, not as a progressive. To think that he will suddenly become a progressive if elected is naive. That's no reason not to vote for him or work hard for a Democratic victory in the fall. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

BTW, many Republicans have put forward some good ideas and policies in the past, and a bipartisan centrist incorporating them would be an advantage. Liberal democracy is about compromise, not the swing between domination by the Right and then the Left and back again. Obama seems to recognize this.

Moreover, politics is the art of the possible. What is possible is shaped by both popular mindset and prevailing circumstances. Ideological solutions don't work well when imposed on a contradictory reality. Obama seems to realize this also.

Obama may not be a progressive but he is one smart guy. He has already shown that in beating the Clinton "machine," much to their amazement and chagrin. In that sense, he has already won.

Obama is a very competent politician. That does not make him a leader. Vision does. And that is not at all evident in his candidacy. Only raw ambition.

Honesty and Loyalty

Some say we should avoid criticizing Barack Obama, when he sells out on important issues. After all, there's an election to win. We should be supportive. To criticize him is disloyal. It's more evidence that we critics are bitter Clinton supporters who can't give it up. Even though many of us were more Clinton defenders than supporters, have given it up, don't look back at her candidacy, and do look forward to ending Republican rule of the White House, this November. I think it's disloyal to allow Obama to get away with selling out. I think it's disloyal to allow the candidate of Hope & Change to get away with playing Politics As Usual. I think it's disloyal to blindly and silently follow him anywhere. To do such reminds me of the behavior of the followers of candidates from the other party. I think it's best to be honest and reality-based.

If we don't criticize Obama when he's wrong, our criticism of McCain can be dismissed as mere partisanship. If we don't criticize Obama when he's wrong, our praise of him when he's right can be dismissed as sycophancy. If we don't criticize Obama when he's wrong, then there are no political consequences to his continuing to do wrong when it is seemingly more politically convenient than would be doing what is right. I believe that one of the key differences between Obama and McCain is that Obama has a much stronger sense of right and wrong, and a much stronger will to do right rather than wrong. But he is a politician. He is not transformational. He sometimes panders. He sometimes takes the safe path over the better path. He sometimes helps those who can help him, even when he knows it's not in the public interest.

Democrats, in general, and Obama partisans, in particular, have a particular responsibility to criticize Obama when he's wrong. Not that it will always, if ever, necessarily work, but it must be a continuing effort by those who consider themselves Obama voters to always at least attempt to keep Obama honest. Because the game of politics will always work against that. And Obama is a politician. And he's human. And if we don't make the honest effort no one else will.

_{"While not a Playboy reader, she invites a male acquaintance in for a quiet discussion of Chagall, Nietzsche, jazz, sex." - not a Hugh Hefner quote}

he, with help from the DNC and MSM, beat Hillary Clinton.

_{"While not a Playboy reader, she invites a male acquaintance in for a quiet discussion of Chagall, Nietzsche, jazz, sex." - not a Hugh Hefner quote}