Democrats need to fight back - President Obama's First State of the Union Address

I'm not going to watch the State of the Union address live. Instead, I'll record the PBS broadcast and check it out after I fire up the season finale of "Lost." It's not that I don't enjoy a good Obama speech, it's that the occasion and the venue have lost their luster. George W. Bush made a mockery of the address in 2003 when he represented the idea that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium in Niger as fact when he knew it wasn't, and "Joe the Congressman" Wilson cheapened the chamber when he screamed "You lie!" at President Obama a few months ago. The speech is like a WWE match now — you already know what's going to happen before it starts, but watching the guy get to the ring is always an adventure.

Plus, it's not like any of the Republicans in the room are going to be listening to what our president is saying since they already decided not to work with him. Remember when our economy was on the verge of collapse and every Republican in the House voted against the Recovery Act? That was a declaration of war against President Obama. Right off the bat, that showed they didn't respect the outcome of the landslide Democratic victory; and on every bill since, they've shown that they don't accept the fact that he and his party have a mandate to govern. I thought my head was going to explode on Sunday when I heard senators McConnell and McCain say they would only work across the aisle if the Democrats promised not to say no to every Republican proposal — as though they have some new ideas the voters didn't already reject in November of 2008. The Republican point of view was summed up perfectly on "Meet the Press" by the infuriatingly phony Peggy Noonan who said, "the 2008 election settled nothing, America is still in play." The proper response to this instant and consistent legislative hostility is to change the rules of the Senate so that bills can be passed by a simple majority, taking away the Republicans' ability to filibuster the Democratic agenda to death.

As for what we know about the things our president is going to propose tonight, they will work well to keep Democrats together. A freeze on discretionary spending is a nice bone to throw to the Blue Dogs yipping about deficits; and it will be good for President Obama to use that bully pulpit to stand up for the middle class while heaping scorn on Wall Street so progressives hear him sounding like candidate Obama the populist community organizer again.

But between now and the end of July, the Democrats need wins. They simply can't go into the fall with equal pay for women and the stimulus package as their only legislative accomplishments; not while unemployment is still high and Gitmo is still open. Their programs don't need to be designed perfectly, but the filibuster has got to go because their bills must pass — by any means necessary.

This isn't about my home state electing a Republican because he's good looking, but Scott Brown becoming the junior senator from Massachusetts actually makes my point for me. This guy ran on a campaign promise to filibuster health care reform and happily signs autographs with the number "41" because it takes 41 votes to block any legislation. Think about it, he is actually taking pride in the fact that his vote is critical in preventing the other 534 members of Congress from doing the job he and they are elected to do — pass laws that help solve our country's problems. It's almost like the Republicans are saying, "why should we allow potential solutions to these problems to be implemented so that the Democrats get all the credit if they work?" They'd rather undermine and sabotage the legislative agenda that voters from coast-to-coast supported, then try to run on a "give us a shot because the other side failed" platform. It's the most delusional plan since John Edwards' attempt to get a job in the Obama administration and, like the filibuster, it's all the Republicans have left.

Time is not on the Democrats' side. The Republicans have set up a false dichotomy in which the candidates in the governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey and the special Senate election in Massachusetts were really running against the president, not their actual opponents — and that the election of Republicans anywhere is a rejection of Obama. He'll be carrying every Democratic candidate who runs this November and he needs to be able to shake off dead weight like Martha Coakley. Eliminating the 60-vote threshold to get a bill through the Senate while taking away the primary Republican weapon against their party would be a great start for the president and the Democrats in Congress. After all, being blamed for doing what you have to do to implement an agenda that doesn't work is much better than being blamed for not implementing an agenda at all.

Sister Sue is running show at Saint John's - The nun who craps on a community

Who is in charge? That's what I thought last September as raw sewage flowed out of Saint John's Health Center, through our streets, into our storm drains, and onto Will Rogers State Beach, which was closed for four days because of a (supposedly unrelated) 10,000-gallon sewage spill.

Keep in mind that this hospital, one of 15 owned by the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth Health System, contaminates the air around it for four hours at a time, twice a week, every week, when it pumps its sewage into trucks to be hauled away. The hospital's story is that a "design flaw" prevents sewage from being pumped into city pipes and it's too expensive to fix; even though the SCLHS had the $300 million it needed to take over two Denver hospitals last year. I was watching the SJHCIMPACTS video on YouTube, remembering the stench from my days living on 23rd Street, and wondering why nobody from City Hall was saying or doing anything about it.

A little investigative journalism revealed the answer, and it didn't bode well for the hospital's neighbors — including McKinley Elementary School — because the person in charge at Saint John's lives in Kansas and only cares about the people of Santa Monica inasmuch as we pad her bottom line.

So I set out to determine who in city government should be protecting us from Sister Sue Miller of the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth and her giant hospital corporation. I'm sorry to report that our first line of defense, the Planning and Community Development Department, has failed. What's worse is they don't even realize it.

The week after Thanksgiving, the editor of your Daily Press informed me that a meeting was being scheduled with Planning Director Eileen Fogarty to discuss the status of the city's development agreements. I knew from City Councilmembers Kevin McKeown and Gleam Davis that Ms. Fogarty is the first person with oversight of Saint John's, and I was looking forward to asking some specific questions arising from the now infamous development agreement between the hospital and City Hall.

When she opened the meeting by saying that all 11 agreements are up to date and all parties are in compliance, I was excited to get answers to the questions the hospital's neighbors have been asking for years. But not only did Ms. Fogarty, Planning Division Manager Amanda Schachter, and Principal Planner Brad Misner (point-person on the Saint John's agreement) have literally no answers to my questions, Ms. Fogarty actually got upset with me for "interrogating" her. Out of fairness, I held this column for six weeks over the holidays to allow them to set the record straight. I'm sure they're all good people and I appreciate the hard work they did (especially in the last few weeks of December gathering hundreds of pages of documents), but that doesn't change the outcome — which is all bad for the people of Santa Monica.

On the big issues related to Saint John's Health Center — sewage and the construction of an underground parking garage — the agreement refers to two specific documents the planning department should have, neither of which it has been able to produce. They are an "urban runoff mitigation plan" and a "parking operations plan" for that garage.

The first is important because of the aforementioned "design flaw." It's possible the plan to deal with runoff required the hospital to take preventive measures like fixing the sewage system, but we'll never know until someone finds it. The second document is critical because it was supposed to have been submitted and approved before construction could begin on the new inpatient suites. The language of the agreement is unmistakable. "No construction of the inpatient suites may commence prior to approval of such parking plans by the planning director."

Since those suites are now completed, the hospital's submitted and approved plan for operating the North Subterranean Parking Garage should be in a file somewhere. But more than a month after it was requested, the document remains elusive.

There are two key legal points at issue: First, City Hall may change the agreement if it determines that failure to do so would be dangerous to the health or safety of residents — and rivers of filth are definitely health hazards. Second, the agreement is a city ordinance; so not complying in good faith is a violation of law. When there is no mention of an underground parking garage on the site map of the new Saint John's, no designs or specifications for that garage, and no evidence of a plan for operating that garage (which is to be completed by summer), it is hard to argue good faith compliance.

Sister Sue has a cute little quirk in her corporate structure that allows the 15 local hospitals to cry broke because they can't spend money (that authority is exclusively hers). With the help of high-priced lawyers like Chris Harding, who has been on this case from the beginning, she may think she can use her cash to crap on our community forever and ever. But despite the best efforts of local sellouts like Harding and Shane Miller and the failure of our Planning Department, we still have the power. No matter what anyone does or doesn't do, it will eventually fall to our City Council to either lie down for Sister Sue or shut her down until she does the right thing.

Prop. 8 supporters have no defense - The evolving justifications for legalizing discrimination

I love that a lawyer's only job is to make an argument and that the good ones can take the same set of facts and "argue it round or argue it square." I love that most legal proceedings are designed to let one side expose the weaknesses in the other side's argument, so I'm really loving the coverage of the trial of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, going on right now in San Francisco, over the legality of discriminating against same-sex couples.

On one side are David Boies and Ted Olson, the heavyweights who represented Al Gore and George W. Bush in the 2000 Florida recount. They are arguing that by not allowing same-sex marriages to be legally recognized in the same way as opposite-sex marriages, California's same-sex couples are being denied their 14th Amendment rights to due process and equal protection. They have decades of legal precedent on their side and a 2008 California Supreme Court ruling that a person cannot be denied the fundamental right to marry because of his or her sexual orientation. Also on their side is one of the named defendants, Attorney General Jerry Brown, who took the basically unprecedented step of joining the plaintiffs after correctly deciding (along with Gov. Schwarzenegger) not to defend the lawsuit.

None of the named defendants would stand up for Prop. 8, so that task falls to "Protect Marriage" and lead attorney Charles Cooper. He is arguing that California voters are entitled to overrule their Legislature and their judiciary and use a ballot initiative to amend the state Constitution in order to legalize discrimination against same-sex couples. What he wasn't able to articulate is exactly why a small majority of California voters (remember that Prop. 8 passed by 600,000 votes in a state with a population of over 35 million) should be able to take rights away from a group of people whose rights would otherwise be protected by law.

The plaintiffs' opening statement was pitch-perfect. The defendants … not so much. Olson started with, "This case is about marriage and equality. Plaintiffs are being denied both the right to marry, and the right to equality under the law." He went on to say, "In May of 2008, the California Supreme Court concluded that under this state's Constitution, the right to marry a person of one's choice extended to all individuals, regardless of sexual orientation, and was available equally to same-sex and opposite-sex couples. In November of 2008, the voters of California responded to that decision with Proposition 8, amending the state's Constitution and, on the basis of sexual orientation and sex, slammed the door to marriage to gay and lesbian citizens … . Proposition 8 singled out gay men and lesbians as a class, swept away their right to marry, pronounced them unequal, and declared their relationships inferior and less-deserving of respect and dignity. In the words of the California Supreme Court, eliminating the right of individuals to marry a same-sex partner relegated those individuals to 'second class' citizenship, and told them, their families and their neighbors that their love and desire for a sanctioned marital partnership was not worthy of recognition."

That statement basically won the case on trial day one. It was brilliant in the way it challenged the defense to show its opposition to marriage equality was about anything other than the sexual orientation of the couple. It clearly put Cooper on the defensive because he didn't open by telling the judge what Prop. 8 was about, but what it wasn't about. Specifically, it wasn't about "ill-will nor animosity toward gays and lesbians," he said, "but special regard for the institution of marriage." He said that it is "the purpose of marriage — the central purpose of marriage — to ensure, or at least encourage and to promote that when life is brought into being, it is by parents who are married and who take the responsibility of raising that child together."

The argument that people marry in order to breed is only the latest in a series of justifications for taking away the rights of our gay and lesbian friends and neighbors. Initially, it was the lie that parents wouldn't have the right to object to kids being taught about same-sex marriage in school. When challenged in court, Prop. 8's raison d'être then became this threat to baby-making if non-breeding couples are allowed to marry. But the defense wasn't able to show any potential harm to the state's "procreation purpose" when Judge Vaughn Walker asked back in October and, as of yesterday, still couldn't.

In his opening, Cooper said a "broad consensus of leading scholars will show that marriage is about socially-approved sexual intercourse and the production and protection of children," revealing his side's true motivation — and destroying the lie that they're worried straight people won't hump around once same-sex couples' rights are restored. The bottom line is they don't approve of gay sex and want to deny people who have gay sex the right to marry and raise children. I'm no lawyer, but even I know that doesn't make any sense. And as the best lawyer I've ever seen, Johnnie Cochran, might have put it, "if it doesn't make sense, it's not a defense."

Bush is the story of the decade - Nothing was bigger than Operation Iraqi Freedom

Unless you were under a rock last week, you were exposed to more than your fair share of those "Story of the Decade" lists covering every aspect of every conceivable thing across every platform of American media. There was so much traffic around those lists that Tina Brown and our own Arianna Huffington must have been beside themselves with the click-throughs on The Daily Beast and HuffPo between Christmas Eve and this past Sunday.

But don't let 'em fool ya, there is only one story of the past 10 years. It's that President George W. Bush used his 2003 State of the Union address to lie to our nation and the world to justify the pre-emptive invasion of a sovereign country and fellow U.N. member state that neither attacked nor posed a threat to the United States. Every other big story of the decade — the rise of China as a global superpower, the rise of Iran as a regional player, and the rise of the jihadi — happened as a consequence of the great Neo-Con-job that was Operation Iraqi Freedom.

China's larger role on the world stage came as a result of its economic power, demonstrated by its financing the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Because the People's Republic extended credit to the U.S. government, the Bush administration was able to take the unprecedented step of cutting taxes at wartime so that no group of Americans (other than military families) would have to sacrifice for the war effort. Had we done what we usually do to pay for a war (passed a war tax or sold war bonds or both) instead of borrowing from the Chinese, the Beijing Olympics would have looked much different.

We now have to deal with Iran as a power within the region because we removed the largest check on the Shiite Islamic Republic: the minority Sunni military regime of Saddam Hussein ruling over the majority Shiite population in neighboring Iraq. Thanks to W's disastrous disarming of the dictator, the Iranian regime (and its paramilitary wing, Hezbollah) is able to impose its will from the Afghanistan/Pakistan region of Western Asia through Iraq to Lebanon — from which it can fire rockets into Israel. Because we changed the Iraqi regime, Iranian clerics now have a sphere of influence from Af/Pak to the Mediterranean; with Saddam in power, the Iranians would still be largely contained.

The failure of President Bush's global war on terrorism to prevent the rise of the jihadi would have been the biggest story of the past 10 years if not for his monumental blunder in Iraq. We can't forget that the world was on our side in September of 2001 with newspapers in France and Italy proclaiming "We Are All Americans." It's impossible to tell how different the effort to win over hearts and minds in the Muslim world would have been if Osama Bin Laden had been captured or killed in the months after the hijackings of that September, but it would have been easier. Muslims are active and energized as a group (remember when hundreds of thousands protested cartoon images of the prophet?) and we could have used the senseless killing of Muslims by other Muslims as a starting point for a discussion about jihad in the modern world.

But once Lil' Bush got a hold of Bill Kristol's "How To Change a Hostile Regime in 90 Days or Less" handbook, it was on to Iraq where images of American soldiers killing Muslims would be beamed around the world via satellite to inspire a new generation of jihadis willing to die to defend their brothers and sisters.

As for the 2003 State of the Union address, there can be no doubt that President Bush lied. A lie is a conscious effort to deceive or a deliberate attempt to create a false impression; and there were two key deceptions/false impressions created by the president. The first was the deception that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was trying to acquire uranium to build a nuclear weapon and the second was the false impression that Iraq might then give that weapon to al-Qaida to use against the U.S. The White House had been notified in an "unequivocal" memo weeks before that the uranium story was "baseless and should be laid to rest," and the CIA had already reported that "al-Qaida, including Bin Laden personally, and Saddam were leery of close cooperation." Yet President Bush still represented the infamous "16 words" as fact and asked us to "imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein" as though it was a realistic possibility. Then he told the U.N. where to stick it and introduced the world to "shock and awe."

Measured in the trillions of dollars spent, the millions of displaced refugees, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, or the tens of thousands of casualties, the invasion and occupation of Iraq stands as the story of the past decade. Factor in the opportunity costs of destroying any credibility the U.N. had left and losing American prestige and moral standing around the world, and nothing else even comes close.