…and I have confidence in you, America; I don’t have to worry about another Texas governor being elected president and screwing things up from that end. (Don’t let me down!)
Photo: Politico screen grab Caption: HIPRB
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The ACLU explains why even non-terrorists should care about NSA spying on Americans
Since the news broke last month about the domestic spying programs laid out in the secret documents Edward Snowden leaked I’ve tried to make the case why all of us should be angry that our government is spying on us. Some have argued, “but I’ve done nothing wrong so I don’t have anything to worry about.” Well, you may not have done anything illegal…but do you really want the government knowing and storing information about everything you do? The folks at Upworthy tweeted a link to this ACLU video that has an answer for those people.
The TV news is an ass, the sequel
I failed to give credit where it was due when I wrote early yesterday about how television “news” ignored the dramatic events at the Texas state capitol. There was a filibuster-to-adjournment over a bill that would drastically reduce the availability of abortions in Texas and that caused citizens to fill the galleries, and later to express their anger when they saw, plain as day, the lieutenant governor and his supporters try to railroad the process, and at one point saw that an official record of a vote had been changed. I was annoyed that I couldn’t follow the story on television–it was not being covered on any of my local stations in Houston nor on any of the national cable “news” channels. I was keeping up on Twitter.
What I neglected to do was to consult other avenues available on the Inter-Webs, and I was reminded of that today by Time and by Rachel Sklar. The state senate was live-streaming itself, and the big show was available on other live streams, too, with some great work done by the Austin American-Statesman. Congratulations to them all for recognizing a newsworthy event when they saw one and doing something to let the rest of us keep up.
Time: “As protesters massed in the gallery, the GOP majority attempted to close debate and bring a vote, and Democrats maneuvered to stall after their rivals forced [Senator Wendy] Davis to stop speaking on procedural grounds, well over 100,000 YouTube viewers were tuned to the channel–closer to 200,000 as zero hour approached. That’s a six-figure viewership, after primetime in most time zones, watching legislators argue over Robert’s Rules of Order and who properly held the floor.”
Sklar: “The clock struck midnight. Victory! They had run out the clock! The chants continued. Twitter exploded. But that was weird, it seemed like that vague roll call was still going on. What, exactly, was going on in that huddle by the Chair?
This is what was going on: They were taking the vote. It was after midnight, and suddenly that strict adherence to rules didn’t seem so strict anymore. Whispers were trickling out, confirmed by the AP: SB5 had passed, 17-12.
Twitter was going bananas. I checked the networks again. CNN was re-running Anderson Cooper. MSNBC was re-running Lawrence O’Donnell. Fox was re-running Greta van Susteren. Journalist Lizzie O’Leary tweeted, ‘Interesting choice you made tonight, cable news executives.'”
By now you’ve heard how it turned out: the good old boys intent on changing a law that most Texans thought didn’t need changing (and despite having failed in their effort to change the law during the regular session, by the way) were gobsmacked at the reaction of the crowd, yet tried to push ahead and took a vote on the bill after the deadline and declared victory, only to be confronted with not only the evidence of their failure to act within the rules of the chamber but evidence that someone messed with the records (Anthony De Rosa posted screenshots of the evidence, here and then here) and ultimately conceded defeat of the bill on other technical grounds. And just as expected, Governor Haircut issued a call for another special session starting next week so legislators can have a third bite at the apple.
Yeah, but we didn’t need to see any of that live as it happened, did we…
UPDATE 6/28 8:00 am CT: Patti Kilday Hart at Houston’s Leading Information Source solves the mystery over the conflicting reports of when the Texas Senate voted on the abortion restriction bill, and it turns out there was no hanky-panky. The respected secretary of the Senate Patsy Spaw explains that the vote started before the special session ended at midnight–she knows because it’s her job to check the clock before starting the roll call–and the rules allow such a vote to count; because of the noise in the chamber the staffer charged with recording the vote had to leave her desk to hear the result, and it was past midnight when she returned to her workstation to enter the result; someone later manually changed the date in the system to reflect the correct date of passage. But the bill ultimately was not passed legally because, as Lt. Gov. Dewhurst said at the time, it hadn’t been signed by the presiding officer “in the presence of the Senate” as required by the state constitution: all official action of the special session ended the moment the senators left the chamber (because of the noise) after midnight, and could not resume when they returned some time later Wednesday morning.
SCOTUS dumps DOMA: fair, simple, American
Brown v. Board of Education; United States v. Windsor: do they belong together? Yes they do: today’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Windsor case is just that historic. In a very specific and non-technical way Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion makes clear what the 5-4 court ruling says the Constitution requires: the “[Defense of Marriage Act] is unconstitutional as a deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth Amendment.” You can read the professional reports on the decisions announced today here and here, and elsewhere, but here’s my take:
All people deserve equal treatment under the law. If the federal government grants certain legal privileges to dual-sex couples who are legally married under the laws of their state, the same privileges must be available to single-sex couples who are legally married under the laws of their state. Equal treatment; fairness. The court did not rule on the constitutionality of gay marriage today; it ruled on an issue of equality before the law. In refusing to rule on the Hollingsworth case regarding California’s Proposition 8, which outlawed gay marriage in the state, it sidestepped ruling one way or another on the constitutionality of gay marriage…perhaps another day. But that decision does have the effect of re-legalizing gay marriage in California, making it state #13.
In practical terms the Windsor ruling means same-sex couples should be treated the same way as opposite-sex couples when it comes to federal tax law and Social Security and insurance and immigration, all that federal stuff. In fact there are more than a thousand benefits coming into play here, and McClatchy does a good job summarizing that here. And for fun, TV Guide summarizes the celebrity reaction to the rulings here.
This is not about what one religion or another teaches about homosexuality; this is about how the civil law treats American citizens regardless of their religious belief, or their gender or their race or national origin. A religion is free to believe and teach what it wants about the morality of homosexual behavior or same-sex marriage, and its teachings and laws are important to the members in good standing of that particular faith. But those teachings are not binding on Americans who are not members of that denomination. The civil law, which orders how we all deal with one another in the secular society outside the confines of our many private clubs, is blind to such moral questions. States have the right to decide who can “marry” and who can’t, and the federal government has to treat all “married” couples in the same way, regardless of the gender of the spouses. Simple, really. Fair. American. Congratulations, U.S.A., on another successful day at the office.
The TV news is an ass, and they proved it tonight in Texas
From all reports received—on Twitter—the people of Texas just filled our state capitol building and shouted down the Republican majority in the senate as it tried to trample a Democratic senator who’d been filibustering since 11:00 a.m. to stop passage of a bill that would have forced the closure of almost every abortion provider in the state. It sounds like an incredible thing that I would have dearly loved to witness.
Too bad, because every Houston television station on my cable system that prides itself on being first with the news…kept running its regular programming. And every cable news network that tries to convince us they’re covering the news continued with their reruns of the evening’s talk shows.
Shame on every one of you. Worthless!
Now Twitter tells me that the senate voted to pass the bill, but did so after the statutorily-mandated midnight adjournment of the legislature’s special session, so there’ll be court hearings coming.
Something big happened in Austin, Texas tonight, and almost all of us didn’t see it. The TV News that insists it knows best about these things decided it wasn’t important enough, not interesting. Let’s all look at the local Austin video later today and see just how wrong they are.
Thank you, Twitterverse, for doing the job that journalists are supposed to do.
