I question the value of employing faith based social outreach on tax payers dollars. It strikes me that the ability to be even handed in the dispensention of funding for religious orgs is going to be very complicated. I am very skeptical that non-christian groups are going to be reciving the same rate of funding as the christian groups.
Barack Obama is a very religious man. He is very supportive of faith based groups and its not particularly surprising considering his work as a community organizer. He is on record as supporting these groups only so long as they do not proselytize or try to recruit followers with the money given to them by the government. what are the chances that this holds true in practice? not very high i would think. Sure a church group can deliver food to the homeless and provide other much needed social services but there will always be a religious affiliation there. Can you really take the religion out of churches activities?
The outreach also provides a problem of oversight not found in secular relief or social organizations. There needs to be an added level of oversight to assure that the money is not going to fund the church's religious activities. That creates added bureaucracy and seems like a rather unnecessary hassle when we could just avoid dealing in faith based groups.
there are going to be situations where it appears that the only people willing to step in is a church. this is illusory though because as long as the incentive is provided a different group will spring up to fill the void. These groups that work with social ills are not doing this for profit but they need to be financially viable directing aid to other groups could most likely solve an situation where it appears a church is the only answer.
When the government gets into religion everything gets messy and complicated. This is a country where religion is supposed to be absent from government and faith based orgs receiving federal funding just does not seem to work with that.
In a newly disclosed legal memorandum, the Bush administration says it can bypass laws that forbid giving taxpayer money to religious groups that hire only staff members who share their faith.
The administration, which has sought to lower barriers between church and state through its religion-based initiative offices, made the claim in a 2007 Justice Department memorandum from the Office of Legal Counsel. It was quietly posted on the department’s Web site this week. ... several law professors who specialize in religious issues called the argument legally dubious. Ira C. Lupu, a co-director of the Project on Law and Religious Institutions at George Washington University Law School, said the opinion’s reasoning was “a very big stretch.”
And Marty Lederman, a Georgetown University law professor who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel from 1994 to 2002, said the memorandum’s reasoning was incompatible with Supreme Court precedent. He pointed to a 2004 case, in which the court said government scholarships that could not be used to study religion did not substantially burden recipients’ right to practice their religion because they could still study theology with their own money.
In the same way, Mr. Lederman said, World Vision is free to have an antigang program that hires by faith without using taxpayer money.
I remembered this while writing the brief piece on the OLC and low and behold the man i put forth in that post is the man the Times went to for a quote on this story.
This is the type of decision that hopefully gets overturned and reversed by an Obama administration. I think it is a reasonable inference that the Bush administration went looking for a way to fund religious organizations with tax payer money and they used the OLC to justify it. Whenever that happens the legal reasoning is always going to be transparently thin.
This is an object lesson that activism in law is not done by the liberals alone. Conservatives are just as if not more active in power.
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The office of Legal Counsel (OLC) is one of the many appointments that President Obama will have to make for his administration. This appointment may not be as high profile as a treasury secretary of secretary of defense but the appointed person plays a critical role in the executive branch, giving opinions of the legality of something. The numerous and infamous memo's suborning torture and infinite detention of "enemy combatants" were products of OLC. The person Obama appoints will have the chore of going through these legal memo's and bringing them into compliance with real law instead of the imaginary law that President Bush subscribed to.
The Anonymous Liberal explains what can happen when the person in charge of keeping it legal is unprepared and unqualified.
After 9/11, John Yoo used his perch at the OLC to authorize a number of illegal activities--from torture to warrantless surveillance--that are not only deeply troubling but have badly damaged America's image in the world. Yoo was allowed to do most of this because the head of the OLC at the time, Jay Bybee, was not familiar with the relevant executive power issues and therefore allowed Yoo to run amok.
When Jack Goldsmith took over the OLC in 2003, he discovered--to his horror--that a multitude of Bush administration programs rested on entirely indefensible legal opinions drafted by the OLC during his predecessor's tenure. He was forced to walk most of them back, a move that caused a major internal dispute within the Bush administration and nearly resulted in the total implosion of the administration just prior to the 2004 election.
Whoever President Obama selects to head the OLC will have a critically important job. Virtually every opinion the OLC has issued during the post 9/11 era--even those written after Yoo's departure--will need to be reviewed and, in all likelihood, rewritten. Moreover, many of the terrorism-related laws that have been passed in the last few years--relating to surveillance, detention, torture, etc.--are filled with ambiguities and language that will require careful interpretation. Many new legal opinions, opinions that will be of enormous consequence, will need to be drafted.
There is a lot at stake. Just as Obama has put together a team to review 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse the president on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues there is going to be a lot of people working on fixing the legal system.
To fix these issue will take some time. Rewriting and Re-researching all the legal memo's that have come out of the OLC under Bush will take an army of lawyers and researchers. The person selected to oversee the office will need to be ready to go from day 1. AL, Glenn Greenwald and Orin Kerr all have one person in mind, Georgetown Law Professor Marty Lederman.
Professor Lederman is exactly the sort of person I would want in charge of this important task. First, he's deeply familiar with all of the relevant executive power issues, having written about them extensively over the last few years. He is also intimately familiar with the workings of the OLC, having worked there from 1994-2002. And most importantly, I think Lederman has a good sense of what the OLC's role should be (i.e., not merely rubber-stamping whatever the president wants to do).
Seems to make sense. Experienced, apparently competent and qualified. Those should be positives.
I must believe that Obama will not be trying to commit activities he knows to illegal. There is a world of difference between getting an opinion on what is an is not legal and deciding to do something and justifying it after the fact. With Bush gone we might return to the former.
Glenn Greenwald over at Salon has a post on the possibility of Obama working to repeal The Defense of Marriage Act. Many in California, myself included, were simply appalled by the passage of proposition 8. Rest assured that the youth of California has no plans for letting this hang around long term. If prop 8 is not abrogated by the courts i give it less than 10 years before it is repealed by ballot initiative. Until then, the best move for an increase in gay rights is to kill DOMA. Glenn seems to think its possible if not likely and i agree with him.
Here is Obama on his view regarding same sex marriage. Watch all in full if you can and if you may only watch one watch the first one because the follow up is pretty good,
and Biden From the "debate" with Sarah w. Palin,
Other than Alan Keys is crazy, what we can take away from this is that Barack Obama and Joe Biden clearly do not now nor will they ever be a vocal proponent of gay marriage. Obama simply does not believe in it. It is not rationale for us to hold that Obama secretly favors gay marriage but chooses to keep that secret. He is consistent and strong is his advocacy for a civil unions instead of marriage.
What Obama has said is that he is very opposed to DOMA.
Barack Obama has, on numerous occasions, emphatically expressed his support for repealing DOMA. When he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004, he wrote a letter to Chicago's Windy City Times, calling DOMA "abhorrent" and its repeal "essential," and vowing: "I opposed DOMA in 1996. It should be repealed and I will vote for its repeal on the Senate floor." But he went on to cite what he called the "the realities of modern politics" in order to proclaim (accurately) that DOMA's repeal at that time -- 2004 -- was "unlikely with Mr. Bush in the White House and Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress." After Tuesday, that excuse is no longer availing.
We know that Obama continues to hold these positions because he reaffirmed them earlier in the campaign for president.
"He supports the complete repeal of D.O.M.A. which is the same position he has held since early 2004," Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt told ABC News.
In order for President Obama's positions on Civil Unions to be coherent he must repeal at least part of DOMA. Specifically he must repeal section three which is the provision that expressly forbids the federal government from extending the same civil rights to gays that it does to heteros. This was a position that was advocated by Sen Clinton in the primaries and would allow for the federal government to make real civil unions possible without disturbing the traditional definition of marriage.
To be clear right now Obama and Biden's stated position on civil unions and LGBT rights is not compatable with DOMA. ONe of them has to go and really i dont imagine DOMA is going to be the winner on this one for an important reason. The repealing of doma is a position that Obama did not originally hold when he was running for senate in 2004,
When he began his campaign for U.S. Senate, he told a group called Independent Voters of Illinois -- Independent Precinct Organization that he supported D.O.M.A. He then switched to an anti-D.O.M.A. position on Feb. 11, 2004, as the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary drew near. According to Obama’s staff, the Illinois Democrat changed positions mid-campaign because he heard from gay friends how hurtful D.O.M.A. was.
Obama presumably continues to have a personal stake in this. The only question becomes "when?" With the economic crisis and the health care initiative and the energy initiatives and the infrastructure projects Obama has a full plate. Will Obama be willing to spend the political capital it will take to get this done with so many other things on his plate? It is clear he might have to fight some of the leadership on this because as Glenn points out,
The conventional Beltway wisdom has already ossified, quite predictably, that Obama and the Democrats must scorn "the Left" and, despite polling data showing widespread support for equal rights for same-sex couples, such a move would be deemed by Beltway media mavens as coming from "the Left." Nancy Pelosi is running around decreeing that "the country must be governed from the middle," while Harry Reid emphasizes that Democrats have received no mandate from the election. And, most significantly of all, Democrats are being told they must avoid the "overreaching" of Clinton's first two years, defined by his attempt to eliminate the ban on gay people serving in the military -- something likely to scare Democrats from touching any gay issues.
Pelosi and Reid are either gun shy or just too clever by half. They are not all that good at playing the rhetorical games with out getting burned. Also keep in mind Obama is not Bill Clinton and he is learning from the mistakes Bill made. He is not going to be pushed around or marginalized like some fear. At the very least he has a very large and impressive email list and voter database that provides massive fund raising potential. The site, change.gov, also allows you to sign up for emails. I can wait to start getting emails from my president with updates on what he is doing for me. This stuff will provide a considerable carrot for those in congress to help Obama out when he has something important he needs to get done. Obama is not without leverage.
In the aftermath of the Prop 8 passage the potential for the end of DOMA is heartening. I don't actually have any gay friends that i am aware of but i consider gay people to be people as equal as any one else in this country. That they should be treated as second class citizens makes me physically ill. In light of this i was happy to realize that Obama's current position is incompatible with the continuation of DOMA and he is on record in favor of repealing it. Hopefully, that change Obama was talking about was a change in treating LGBT people from an oppressed class to full citizens with all the rights and privileges they deserve.
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Political bloggers are no strangers to the ways that the internet is able to circumvent traditional controls on media and information. Nothing could epitomize this more than the story of the man in Malaysia who once controlled the system and the media and now fights against it. A former Prime Minister turned blogger Mahathir Mohamad is a case study in the power of the internet in the furtherance of freedom. Where once he was the man directing the censorship of the press he now undermines it.
We on the tubes that deal primarily with American media and American politics dont always have such a firm grasp on the stark difference between the media we have and the media in third world dictatorships. While it is true that the press has been the propaganda arm of our government on the iraq war and other issues we cannot say the entire media is oppressed or corrupt. We still have some honest people who do good reporting both on tv and in newspapers. Most of the drivel that serves as our national discourse can be chalked up to incompetence rather than outright corruption. This is not the case in other parts of the world and Malaysia is one of those places.
Malaysia is a place where government pressure and intimidation has created a press that is worse than ours. Imagine if all we ever had was Fox News. Now imagine that if you called out Fox news you faced things like imprisonment without trial, attacks in the government-friendly press and defamation lawsuits. It is as if Cheney had a license to simply throw any one in Guantanamo when he felt like it. In an environment like this the ability to disseminate the truth to the population is an invaluable tool in fighting for and securing freedom. This is exactly what Mahathir Mohamad discovered.
In a way Mahathir Mohamad becoming a political blogger fighting for freedom of the press would be like Bush suddenly discovering that the police state was a bad idea after being in power for two decades. He helped to set it up and suddenly when he wants something it gets in his way. oops.
But he has become an irritant and a spoiler five years after stepping down, turning against his handpicked successor, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and falling victim to the press controls he perfected as prime minister.
“Where is the press freedom?” he asked two years ago, apparently surprised at being suddenly ignored. “Broadcast what I have to say! What I say is not even accurately published in the press!”
He is not a particularly sympathetic character. The NYT piece that relates the story of the Malay bloggers would have done better i to focus on Jeff Ooi. Ooi seems to be the Malay Kos because he has moved the Malay Political Blogosphere onto the ground effecting political change.
In March, political experts said, Malaysia’s bloggers helped influence elections, contributing to the biggest upset that the governing party, the United Malays National Organization, had suffered since independence in 1957. For the first time in decades, it held fewer than two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, and it lost control of 5 of the 13 states.
Among the opposition winners in the national and state governments were several bloggers, most prominently Jeff Ooi, who claimed to have prodded Mr. Mahathir into starting his own blog.
“The government doesn’t have a clue how to handle bloggers,” Mr. Ooi said in an interview. “If I were a dictator, I would be despairing. What do you do against this?”
The fight that these Malay bloggers face is harsher than that of getting Barack Obama elected. While we had to overcome the sleaze of John McCain we really never had to fear that the government would come to our houses and toss us into Gitmo. While our constitution has eroded considerably I think this stuff would be hard sell to the public.
Now, a convert to free speech, Mr. Mahathir is using his blog to champion the most recent victim of government censorship, Raja Petra Kamaruddin, the country’s most prominent blogger, who posts on www.malaysia-today.net, his Web site. The site has been blocked, but readers are redirected to another Web site, which continues to be updated.
The government has fallen back on the kind of tactics that Mr. Ooi faced. It charged Mr. Petra with sedition and jailed him for two years without trial for comments he had posted.
Mr. Mahathir sounded almost like Che Guevara when he said in his blog that the arrest showed “a degree of oppressive arrogance worthy of a totalitarian state.”
Furthermore, jailing people is futile, he said in an interview in his office. There is no way the government can arrest all the bloggers, even if it wants to.
I dont want to glorify Matathir because he helped to put the system into place. That he is a person now trying to bring down the system of injustice is the simple fulfillment of a duty he has to the people of Malaysia. However, his story and the story of the Malaysian bloggers who have made a real difference in the freedom of the Malaysian people deserves to get some attention. The internet and freedom of speech are a powerful force as these courageous people have shown. They should be an inspiration to oppressed people everywhere and they should strike fear into the hearts of the oppressors because what jeff ooi was right when he pointed out the power of the internet,
“If I were a dictator, I would be despairing. What do you do against this?”
I follow politics and i have a degree in political science and a minor in history. Someday i will have a law degree. I am a member of the millennial generation and take pride in that.
I started blogging because i had the desire to discuss and debate political issues with other people and because i thought i might, on rare occasions, have good insight.
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