Arguing from the future: President Obama's legacy considerations

How will President Obama be remembered?

It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future. - Yogi Berra

Jack Balkin has written a thought provoking piece titled Arguments from the Future'A New Modality of Constitutional Argument. In its context, it is a fascinating piece. For example, discussing Justice Kennedy's upcoming votes on the gay marriage cases, Balkin writes:

I noted that one of the strongest influences on the Justices, and especially Justice Kennedy, was how they believed their decisions would look in in ten or twenty year's time.  Would they be seen as defenders of liberty and equality, or would they be viewed in hindsight as defenders of prejudice, fighting against the tide of progress?

Mark Tushnet has pointed out to me that he believes that someone like Anthony Kennedy is likely to vote for gay rights in the Marriage Cases'or at least not to vote on the merits against gay rights'because he doesn't want to be remembered as being like Henry Billings Brown, the author of Plessy v. Ferguson. Kennedy would rather be remembered as being like Earl Warren, the author of Brown v. Board of Education, which effectively overruled Plessy.

It's interesting to me that Tushnet (and Balkin?) believe that Justice Kennedy has made his prediction for the future regarding gay rights'the wrong side of history is opposing them. I think he is right but I would contrast his views on gay rights and his likely view on voting rights, where he has given indications that he is more than willing to be the fifth vote striking down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. How would that vote look in 10 or 20 years?

In any event, as interesting as these questions are, I think it is even more interesting to consider the question of arguing from the future in other contexts. Consider this passage from Balkin:

There is little doubt in my mind that arguments from the future can be extremely powerful, especially to judges who don't have to worry about keeping their jobs, but might well worry what their legacy will be. Indeed, the less you have to worry about your job security in the present, the more you might tend to worry about the future. (Think about what drives second term presidents, for example.). [Emphasis supplied.]

Yes, let's think about second term Presidents, for example. What can we tell about what President Obama sees as compelling "argument from the future"? What does he believe will be remembered, favorably or unfavorably, from his Presidency and how can he shape his remembered legacy in his second term?

Follow me to the other side to read a few musings on the subject.

Yes, she can...run for office and win

This last election was a very good year for electing Democratic women to national office.

We seated Elizabeth Warren (MA), Tammy Baldwin (WI), Mazie Hirono (HI) and Heidi Heitkamp (ND) in the Senate, and Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) will now be serving a full term.

There are new freshwomen in the House:

(AZ)Ann Kirkpatrick and Kyrsten Sinema, (CA) Gloria Negrete McLeod, Julia Brownley,
(CT) Elizabeth Esty, (FL)Lois Frankel, (HI) Tulsi Gabbard, (IL) Tammy Duckworth, and
Cheri Bustos, (NV) *Dina Titus, (NH) * Carol Shea-Porter and Ann McLane Kuster,(NM) Michelle Lujan Grisham (NY) Grace Meng, (OH) Joyce Beatty and (WA) Suzan DelBene.

(* has been in Congress before)

And there is a chance that we will see more bids for the White House made by women, in the years ahead.  

That's the good news.

Here's the bad news.

The United States ranks 77th in the world in women's participation in government.

Oh sure, we do way better than Saudi Arabia which has no women's suffrage, so they rank zero, but 77th?  

That, combined with an all out war on women by our other major Party'the Republicans, means we still have a lot of work to do.  

Let me be more specific.

Just because a politician is female does not mean she is going to represent progressive women's values. This is not about ovaries'it's about empathy. We have the Sarah Palin's and Jan Brewer's and Michele Bachmann's who make that perfectly clear.

Obviously there are also men who are feminists. Without them having voted for our issues and our rights we wouldn't have come as far as we have since women got the right to vote and hold office.

I know this is women's history month but it's just as important to talk about the future. We need to get up off our assets and start building it.

Follow me below the fold to take a look at the research, some action plans and two inspiring stories.

Renters make good Democrats, and other demographic observations

You've probably noticed that it takes certain kinds of congressional districts to elect certain kinds of Representatives. At an instinctual level, you can probably guess that a mostly non-white district in a northeastern city is going to elect a liberal Democrat, and a mostly white district in the rural south is going to elect a conservative Republican. Things get a little more complicated with, say, a middle-class suburban district in the west; that's the kind of place where candidate strength, fundraising, and what the direction the national winds are headed all play a role. But there a lot of other variables that go into shaping a district's makeup, and those variables can tell us something about a district's political potential.

Why talk about this now, with the next election more than a year and a half away? Partly because now is the time when targets get picked and candidates get recruited; competitive races don't usually just pop up out of sheer will but require a lot of groundwork. But more importantly, the Census Bureau finally graced us last month with demographic information for the nation's congressional districts. Although the most recent Census has been in the books for several years now, things got slowed down by the redistricting process (which, of course, relies on the Census' initial population figures); they had to wait until the new district lines were finalized to be able to calculate new district data.

With access to that data, finally, I initially planned to write a piece about the various superlatives in congressional districts (whitest districts! poorest districts! best educated districts! and so on). That's interesting trivia, of course, but by itself doesn't tell us much about how we can reshape the House in 2014 and in future years, so I also decided to pinpoint Republicans in the districts with the demographic categories that seemed most hostile to them (say, for example, the five congressional districts with the highest percentage of African-American residents that are still represented by Republicans).

Rather than put up dozens and dozens of tables, though, that left me wondering: which variables actually matter the most? Which particular demographic categories are most strongly related with whether a district tends to elect a Democrat or Republican? That way, we could focus on only a few most important categories. So, with that in mind, I calculated correlations for each of the categories in the Census' release, factored against the percentage the Democratic candidate for the House got in each district. Some of the results are predictable, but others were a total surprise. Here's a chart of the characteristics that had the strongest positive and negative relationships with Democratic share of the House vote:

Some of the other things that you'd think might matter turn out not to matter much at all. For instance, the correlation coefficient on median household income is only 0.02, meaning no relationship in any direction. (With correlations, 1 or -1 means a perfectly corresponding relationship within the data, while 0 means nothing but random noise.) It's tempting to think of the Republicans as the "party of the 1 percent" and to think of all the Democrats representing blue-collar districts in the cities, but stop and think about the number of affluent suburban districts that elect Democrats, or the number of abjectly poor areas in the Appalachians that elect Republicans.

Follow over the fold for full discussion on why these factors might matter, and the promised lists of Republicans vulnerable according to these criteria ...

Animal Nuz #140

CPAC 2013: Rand Paul wins the CPAC Straw Poll

It's not exactly the most meaningful thing in the world, but Rand Paul took home the honors in this year's CPAC Straw Poll. Among the CPAC attendees, Paul garnered 25% of the vote. Marco Rubio was a very close second at 23%, and Rick Santorum (yes, really) took third with a more mundane 8%.

That's actually maybe a less impressive win for Paul than I would have expected. As those of you who have been following my posts from here at CPAC for the past few days, the audience seems to made up primarily of two groups: young libertarian types on one side, and older tea party types on the other. Given that both those groups have some heavy admiration for Rand Paul, you'd perhaps expect him to run away with the thing. Then again, Rand Paul's primary contribution to American discourse so far has been from his family connection to Paul the Elder and from his recent filibuster performance, so even this is a pretty good showing for a relative political newcomer. (It should also be noted that at one point during today's presentations, a convention organizer at the podium specifically stated, hint-hint, that there's no reason you can't vote more than once in the Straw Poll, and perhaps some people did.)

Again, it shows the split in the party that is very evident here. In announcing the results, In noting that the number of votes cast the last two years have trended modestly down each year (less than 3000 votes were cast this year; I believe event organizers were claiming an overall attendance of 10,000), Tony Fabrizio supposed it was because the conservative movement "hasn't quite come to consensus yet." Rand Paul is the libertarian choice, and has strong support in among the Tea Party. Marco Rubio is the more conventional, party-groomed candidate. Rick Santorum has strong support here from the fundamentalists and outright theocrats (and, apparently, the racists), a smaller but persistently loud minority.

I'm not seeing a link to the full poll results yet, but the results match up pretty closely with my own observations here, which is good because it means I'm not blind or daft, at least not yet. A very dominant 52 percent of Straw Poll voters were from people between 18-25, which matches up with the crowd here; while perhaps half of all attendees aren't in that age range, they definitely make up a good half of the CPAC "core", the diehards who were here from the first moments on Thursday. There were twice as many men voting as women, which Fabrizio says "looks skewed, but isn't that different from previous years." A whopping 70+ percent list their top priority as being "limited government", and roughly the same percentage say that the deficit should be patched through spending cuts alone; only 16 percent say that pairing tax increases with those cuts would deb preferred.

About 50% of the attendees say the United States should step back from global military issues and let our allies "fend for themselves" more often. 86 percent say it's not all right to kill U.S. citizens using drone strikes, and 70 percent say it's not OK to spy on U.S. citizens. So there you go.

The bad news: sadly, the Straw Poll in reality doesn't mean all that much. While the announcers made the point that in the past they've asked the Straw Poll questions to a national sample and gotten pretty much the same results, demonstrating that these samples, too, should be reflective of America, in reality the odds that Rand Paul is going to be the dominant choice for the 2016 campaign are, to put it charitably, probably low.

You can see the full Straw Poll results (PDF) here.

Expect dirty bathrooms and long lines at the Grand Canyon, thanks to sequester

Planning a trip to the Grand Canyon this summer? Thanks to Republicans insisting on sequestration in order to protect corporate tax loopholes, you can expect:

... a two-hour reduction in summer hours at the park's main visitor center, longer processing times for back-country permits and extended lines to enter the park, which has an average 4.38 million visitors a year.

Grand Canyon's restrooms and campgrounds will be cleaned less often, and repairs to damaged trails will take longer, Uberuaga said in a phone interview. Sequestration cut $1.1 million from $21 million in 2012 federal funding. The park has stopped hiring and eliminated staff travel and overtime, except for an emergency, he said.

Have fun, and don't forget to thank a Republican! When you do, please be sure to mention that dirty bathrooms and long lines for travelers aren't just an inconvenience, they're a result of reduced hours and job cuts that will slow the economy.

But, pshaw, forget all that. There is good news for Republican members of Congress, because the cuts to that one thing they care about may be reduced slightly: President Obama is looking for a way to resume White House tours for school groups.

Tell Republicans to quit whining about White House tours and start worrying about the people whose paychecks are being cut.

Sunday Talk: Get your freak on

Every March, millions of conservative activists and thought leaders get dressed up in their best white robes, and gather for a few days of hating on "others" and trolling for gay sex.

This year's conference featured the usual suspects, with a few notable exceptions.

Conspicuously absent from the festivities were New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie'who committed the totally unforgivable sin of publicly thanking President Obama for his efforts in the wake of Hurricane Sandy'and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell'who committed
the equally unforgivable sin of raising taxes.

Also excluded from the reindeer games was GOProud, which is guilty of the greatest sin of all'promoting acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle.

The void they left was filled by up-and-comers like Senators Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, down-and-outers like Rep. Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, and total crackpots like Pam Geller and Orly Taitz, DDS, Esq.

And thanks to the inclusion of Sen. Tim Scott, former Rep. Allen West, and Dr. Ben Carson, CPAC 2013 was shaping up to be a real celebration of diversity.

But that all fell apart on Friday afternoon, when a couple of white supremacists (quite understandably) mistook a panel discussion about GOP minority outreach for a Klan rally.

Ten reasons why Ronald Reagan would be persona non grata at CPAC 2013

As most of the leading lights of the fractured Republican Party gather in Washington for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), organizer Al Cardenas is looking backwards for guidance in taking the GOP forward. Reflecting on Ronald Reagan's 1975 post-Watergate address to the conclave, Cardenas recalled the Gipper's lessons that "conservatives will never compromise their principles because that's the surest way to lose" and "you can't just be a conservative, you've got to be a good candidate."

Of course, Cardenas's mantras seem more than a little ironic in 2013. After all, the American Conservative Union chief refused Chris Christie, the most popular Republican in the nation, a speaking slot until he "earns his wings." And as it turns out, despite having addressed the gathering a dozen times in the 1970's and 1980's, today that ever-compromising, Republican in Name Only Ronald Reagan would never be let through the door of CPAC 2013.

Here are 10 reasons why:

1. Reagan tripled the national debt
2. Reagan raised taxes 11 times
3. Reagan expanded the size of government
4. Reagan supported the "socialist" Earned Income Tax Credit
5. Reagan negotiated with terrorists in Tehran
6. Reagan sought to eliminate nuclear weapons
7. Reagan gave amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants
8. Reagan approved protectionist trade barriers
9. Reagan signed abortion rights law in California
10. Reagan eventually debunked AIDS myths Republicans continued to perpetuate

(Click a link to jump to the details for each which follow below the fold)

Aging schools need $270 billion in basic repairs, twice that to be brought up to date

Our school buildings are being neglected just like our bridges. In 1995, a report found that it would take $112 billion to repair America's school buildings. Today, a new report estimates that that amount has more than doubled, and it would take $270 billion to repair school buildings, bringing them back to their original condition. And that's just to make the buildings function as they were supposed to when they were built, 50 or more years ago. Bringing them up to date would cost $542 billion.

The Center for Green Schools' researchers reviewed spending and estimates schools spent $211 billion on upkeep between 1995 and 2008. During that same time, schools should have spent some $482 billion, the group calculated based on a formula included in the most recent GAO study.

That left a $271 billion gap between what should have been spent on upkeep and what was, the group reported. Each student's share? Some $5,450. [...]

Horror stories abound about schools with roofs that leak, plumbing that backs up and windows that do little to stop winds.

School funding is often reliant on property taxes, which means that schools in rich areas are better funded than schools in poor areas, and people without kids in the schools push to keep property taxes low, whether because property taxes are regressive and they're house-poor or because they just plain don't want to invest in the future if that means other people's kids and not their own.

This desperate need for investment in school buildings highlights the bankruptcy of American politics coming and going. Repairing these buildings would create jobs, stimulating the economy and putting jobless people back to work. It would also make it easier for teachers to teach and students to learn, no longer struggling to deal with classrooms that are too cold in winter and too hot in summer, leaking roofs, or air too dirty to breathe'the 1995 report "indicated 15,000 schools were circulating air deemed unfit to breathe." But these needed repairs are for the most part left up to the patchwork of local politics, exacerbating inequality and straining local budgets when the sheer numbers involved demonstrate that this is an issue of national concern.

At some point there has to be a tipping point where the Republican pastime of saying America's the greatest and best and most powerful while doing everything possible to ensure that it doesn't make the investments in the future needed to be any of those things takes us past a point of no return, or at least a point where return will require generations of rebuilding. The question is, are we there yet?

Dairy industry warns of shortages and rising prices if it doesn't get cheap guest workers

The current H-2A agricultural guest worker program just doesn't work for dairy farmers'and they're hoping immigration reform will change that. If it doesn't, they warn, we could see dairy shortages and rising prices. There is this one flaw in the argument, though:

"They can never adequately explain why they can't raise wages," said Eric Ruark, research director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform in Washington. "If there's a labor shortage, you raise wages. That's classic supply-and- demand. Maximizing profits for the producer should not be the main goal of our food system."

H-2A visas are only for seasonal or temporary work; since dairy farms operate year round, that's not very useful to them and they want a guest worker program that meets their needs. Without immigrants, a report by the National Milk Producers Federation claims, retail dairy prices could rise by 61 percent. But that's if you just subtract immigrant dairy workers and don't replace them with anyone else, leading to milk shortages. The milk producers apparently aren't giving any thought to raising wages significantly from their 2008 average of (according to the same report) $9.97. And while subtracting the 41 percent of dairy workers who are immigrants from the industry, leading to major shortages, might well increase retail prices by 61 percent, raising wages even by 50 percent would have a much smaller effect on prices, since wages are hardly the only component of pricing. In other words, it's a little like when the CEO of Papa John's exaggerates how much providing health coverage for full-time workers will increase the cost of a pizza.

So when dairy farmers are out talking to reporters about how even though they could sell more milk if they had it, they can't expand their operations because of a shortage of immigrant labor, and saying they can't raise wages because it would cut into their profits too much, what you have is a pretty obvious dairy industry campaign for cheap immigrant labor. And while we need immigration reform, it should not be geared toward providing cheap, long-term but ultimately disposable at the whim of the employer, labor to avoid raising wages over $10.

Team 26 and the Connecticut Effect: An interview with Monte Frank

Team 26 riders supporting a team member up a long hill
Photo Credit: Becky Frank On March 9, Team 26 cyclists left the Reed Intermediate School in Newtown, CT with an important first stop at the Sandy Hook Fire Department to remember the 26 people slaughtered on 12/14 at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Four days and 400 miles later, they arrived in DC with an escort from the Virginia Tech Victims Cycling Team to deliver a message about gun responsibility from Sandy Hook families to the politicians in Washington who need to act. Important rallies along the way included mayors and a VA Tech victim's family, and a key stop was in the city of Baltimore to link suburban and urban gun responsibility issues in a tangible way.

The message? Forget about politics. Just get it done.

These elite and dedicated cyclists rode not just for Newtown (where I live) but for Connecticut and all of America. You can retrace their progress on their Facebook page, or by clicking the Team 26 tag here on Daily Kos, where a miniblogathon chronicled their progress.

Some examples of the excellent coverage the ride got can be found here and here.

Having arrived back in Newtown, we are delighted to present an interview with Team 26 leader Monte Frank. Follow us below the fold for a talk with the Newtown resident responsible for creating Team 26.

This week in the War on Workers: Striking student guest workers go to NYC McDonald's

The student guest workers who last week walked off the job to protest conditions at the Pennsylvania McDonald's restaurants where they were working on J-1 cultural exchange visas protested at a Times Square McDonald's this week.

In a statement e-mailed during the protest, McDonald's announced that [franchise owner] Andy Cheung 'has agreed to leave the McDonald's system.' The company added that it was 'also working on connecting with the guest workers on an individual basis to most effectively address this situation,' and providing franchisees with information about the J-1 visa program's requirements. The National Guestworker Alliance did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the McDonald's announcement.

McDonald's did not immediately respond to a request for further comment regarding the strikers' demands, which include providing full-time work for US employees, disclosing where guest workers are employed in its stores, signing an agreement establishing organizing protections for workers, and ensuring that the students are compensated for unpaid wages. [...]

In an e-mailed statement, striking students called the McDonald's announcement 'an important admission of labor abuse at its stores,' but said that, 'a change of management at three stores will not protect the guestworkers and U.S. workrs at McDonald's 14,000 other stores in the U.S.' The strikers reiterated their call for a meeting with the company's CEO 'to come to an agreement on how to protect all McDonald's workers.'

As the students insist, the way to address the kind of abuse they faced isn't one-on-one. This is a problem both with McDonald's more generally and with the J-1 visa program, and has to be addressed from the top.

CPAC 2013 Roundup, Day 2

Here's what you missed yesterday from the wilds of CPAC, where I am currently nursing a headache and a strong desire to hire a police sketch artist to come up with a composite representation of what these people think a "liberal" is.

Walking the halls here, there was a noticeable difference between Thursday and Friday. Thursday morning saw most attendees suited up to the gills, a professional crowd, or at least a crowd pretending at it (I think I wrote somewhere, or at least I know I muttered, that CPAC that day looked like a Comic-Con in which almost every last one of the attendees are cosplaying as Congressional pages.) Friday saw some more casual visitors, but more nuts on the main stage, and stranger conspiracy theories from those nuts, and then both actual non-conservatives and actual racists showed up and things went to hell in a handbasket. A short rundown:

• Racism at CPAC. A belligerent white supremacist disrupted a panel on how to not be seen as racist with actual, full-on statements of white nationalism; even then, he still was perhaps treated with more respect than an irritated black non-conservative woman at the same panel. More than a few thoughts from me on the conservative problem with ongoing racism, both overt and not, even as the entire movement remains dedicated to denying that racism even exists.)
• Paul Ryan says nothing. He may be the intellectual of the party, but that's only because intellectualism in the party demands you never bother with the details.
• Wayne LaPierre and Michele Bachmann both spoke yesterday. What do they have in common? In a conference obsessed with budget-slashing and outright mockery that government would dare attempt most functions, both conservative stalwarts proposed government spend dump trucks full of money for things. In Bachman's case, for a very liberal thing. Of course, that's not how they put it.
• CPAC in pictures. Pictures and brief notes from the conference and exhibit halls.
• Everybody loves Rand Paul. They don't really know or care what he's "standing" for, but they like the "standing" part very, very much.

Saturday features a who's who of the Republican Party's biggest crackpots. Steve King, Scott Walker, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Artur Davis, Sarah Palin, Phyllis Schlafly, Ann Coulter and Ted Cruz: I won't lie to you, this one's gonna hurt.

The conference organizers apparently decided to stuff the last day chock full of conspiracy theorists and people known throughout the land specifically for the asinine things they keep saying. They have an entire conference on conservatism, and these are the people they pick as their best and brightest representatives? All empathy I have for this crowd is lost: if you think Palin, Coulter, King and Cruz are the kind of people you want to hold up as the best possible conservatives, you just do that then. But please stop asking afterwards why the rest of the country isn't taking you seriously. This is why. This, right here.

New report highlights inequality in the Social Security debate

The Institute for Policy Studies does a tremendous service in a new report by looking at how proposed benefit cuts would impact health industry CEOs versus home health aides. Specifically, how would the industry CEOs who also happen to be leaders in the corporate lobby group Fix the Debt, which is pushing for massive new corporate tax cuts paid for with cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, compare to a typical home health aide, a worker in the fastest growing industry in the country? These jobs are among the lowest paid with the longest hours, dominated by women and minorities, with 40 percent of workers needing public assistance to supplement their income.

The report looks at the retirement security of, the CEOs of CVS Caremark and United Health, Larry Merlo and Stephen Hemsley, compared to home health aide Rhonda Straw. Merlo has a retirement fund of $46 million, and if he invested that in an annuity starting at age 65, he'd get $263,169 a month for life. If he took Social Security, too, he'd get $267,445 a month. Hemsley isn't doing quite as well, with just $18 million in his retirement account. But he'd still get $104,671 from it every month, $108,607 if he takes Social Security. Now for the home health aide, Straw, who at age 50 makes $9 per hour, 40 hours a week. She's only ever had minimum wage jobs. But she has $475 in a 401(k) account, which will net her $2 a month in retirement. With her Social Security benefits, she'll have about $2,704 per month in retirement income for the first 20 years.

Three guesses who will feel the most pain under the proposal Fix the Debt is pushing: chained CPI and raising the retirement age?

If Congress adopts the most draconian approach'a combination of 'chained CPI' and raising the retirement age to 70'health aide Rhonda Straw could face a nearly 16 percent reduction in her total retirement payments over 20 years. That's compared to reductions of only 0.3 percent and 0.7 percent for Merlo and Hemsley, respectively.

How easy is it to tell others they need to have "skin in the game" and share in the sacrifice when your part of the sacrifice is less than one percent of your income? When you have the security, too damned easy. The Rhonda Straws of America should be who our leaders are paying attention to.

Send an email to the White House telling President Obama to immediately stop proposing any cuts to Social Security.

In weekly address, Obama declares it's time to create Energy Security Trust

President Obama took a break this morning from discussing the sequester in his weekly address and instead pitched his new Energy Security Trust to listeners, an endeavor he first announced yesterday when he toured the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.

First, he pointed out progress:

We produce more oil than we have in 15 years. We import less oil than we have in 20 years. We've doubled the amount of renewable energy we generate from sources like wind and solar ' with tens of thousands of good jobs to show for it. We're producing more natural gas than ever before ' with hundreds of thousands of good jobs to show for it. We've supported the first new nuclear power plant since the 1970s. And we're sending less carbon pollution into the environment than we have in nearly 20 years.

But, he said, gas prices have risen in recent weeks and we clearly there are more steps that need to be taken. Yes, auto efficiency standards are in place now that weren't in the past, and this too is progress. "But," he told listeners, "the only way we're going to break this cycle of spiking gas prices for good is to shift our cars and trucks off of oil for good." And that's where the Energy Security Trust, first announced in his State of the Union address, comes in:

Here's how it would work. Much of our energy is drawn from lands and waters that we, the public, own together. So I'm proposing that we take some of our oil and gas revenues from public lands and put it towards research that will benefit the public, so that we can support American ingenuity without adding a dime to our deficit. We can support scientists who are designing new engines that are more energy efficient; developing cheaper batteries that go farther on a single charge; and devising new ways to fuel our cars and trucks with new sources of clean energy ' like advanced biofuels and natural gas ' so drivers can one day go coast-to-coast without using a drop of oil.

In an obvious effort to forestall objections from the right, he made a quick disclaimer: Hey, it's not my idea! It's the idea of CEO's and big business!

Now, this idea isn't mine. It's actually built off a proposal put forward by a non-partisan coalition of CEOs and retired generals and admirals. So let's take their advice and free our families and our businesses from painful spikes in gas prices once and for all.

Exploring and investing in new energy alternatives is crucial, he said, but can be carried on while we continue an "all-of-the-above energy strategy"'continuing use of domestic fossil fuels while transitioning to alternatives.

To read the transcript in full, check below the fold or visit the White House website.

This week in the world of progressive state blogs: The cognitive dissonance just keeps adding up

This Saturday feature spotlights a dozen examples of what's been written in the past seven days at progressive state blogs. Just as states with progressive lawmakers and activists have themselves initiated innovative programs over a wide range of issues, state-based progressive blogs have helped provide us with a point of view and inside information we don't get from the traditional media. Those blogs deserve a larger audience. Standard disclaimer: Inclusion of a diary does not indicate my agreement or endorsement of its contents.

At NorthDecoder, Chet writes Republicans Built This:

I can't help but grimace when I see how Republicans don't see what they are doing to themselves and to North Dakota. It's like watching someone giving themselves a round-house punch to the face. They elect these corporate sell-outs who are destroying Western North Dakota, and then get mad that Western North Dakota is being destroyed. In a tragic, sick and sad way, it's funny. It's unfortunate.  Let me draw you a map.

The Mayor of Watford City is a fellow named Brent Sanford.  He's mad as hell and he's not going to take any more.  What's he mad about?  He's mad that the North Dakota Highway Department isn't doing anything to stop the slaughter of people on our Western North Dakota highways. [...]

He's mad because our state's leadership has failed to build and maintain infrastructure that can handle the kind of industrial pressure being put on the entire western half of the state.  He's mad the state's leaders haven't prepared to handle what they've let loose on his town and county. At the same time, Mayor Sanford supports the Republicans who are doing this to us. Makes sense, right?

At Calitics, Brian Leubitz writes Roll Call Peers Into the Future of California Congress Delegation:

Congressional seats don't come up often, and when people get there, they tend to stay. The California Congressional delegation is no different. Except right now, the delegation has several septuagenarians, and as Pete Stark learned, there are always a few people spoiling for a fight. And so Roll Call, a publication that caters to DC insiders, takes a look at some of the potential replacements.

At Raging Chicken Press, Sean Kitchen writes, Rep. Madeleine Dean: Tom Corbett's Budget is Misguided and has Missed Opportunities:

Representative Madeleine Dean scolds Governor Tom Corbett's budget and attacks the governor's plans for shot's for tots, the lack of a medicare expansion plan and the LACK of a real Marcellus Shale Tax.  Watch the video here.

Rape trial defense: 'She didn't affirmatively say no.' Defendant: She 'was like a dead body.'

As high school football players in Steubenville, Ohio, are tried for raping a 16-year-old girl who was so drunk they had to carry her from party to party as they continued raping her over a period of hours, their defense is that she consented. So drunk that at one point she was carried by her arms and legs, nonetheless, the defense asserts that she consented, because "She didn't affirmatively say no" even though she was at some moments during the evening sober enough to be able to speak.

The girl's text messages as she learned what had happened (something she had to learn later because she was too impaired to remember what had been done to her) are a powerful rebuttal to that ridiculous claim:

'I wasn't being a slut. They were taking advantage of me,' stated one text message sent from the girl's phone, according to Ms. Gibb's testimony.

To a friend of Mr. Mays, the girl wrote in another text message: 'Who was there who did that to me?' She added, 'You couldn't have told them to stop or anything?'

'I hate my life,' the girl also texted, stating at another point: 'Oh my God, please tell me this isn't' true.

Texts from one of the defendants actually provide another strong rebuttal to the defense attorney's claim, as we'll see below the fold. Because there's no way we're having a real conversation about consent when it comes to someone described as these texts describe the girl.