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Obama Stands By His LGBT Nominees Under Attack From The Right: ‘I Will Not Waver In My Support’

By Amanda Terkel on Oct 10, 2009 at 9:18 pm

President Obama received a warm welcome at the Human Rights Campaign’s annual dinner tonight, where he promised to sign hate crimes legislation — which just passed the House — into law and repeal both Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act, although he didn’t outline a specific timeline. Acknowledging some frustrations that there hasn’t been quicker action on these issues, Obama reiterated that he remains committed to the fight for LGBT equality:

OBAMA: This story, this fight, continues, now, and I’m here with a simple message: I’m here with you in that fight. (APPLAUSE)

For even as we face extraordinary challenges as a nation, we cannot and we will not put aside issues of basic equality. I greatly appreciate the support I’ve received from many in this room. I also appreciate that many of you don’t believe that progress has come fast enough. I want to be honest about that. (APPLAUSE) Because it’s important to be honest amongst friends.

Obama also addressed right-wing criticisms being hurled at his LGBT nominees and staffers, such as EEOC nominee Chai Feldblum and Department of Education official Kevin Jennings. Both have been the subjects of extremely homophobic slurs. WorldNetDaily editor and CEO Joseph Farrah said that Obama must find “people” like Feldblum on “Perverts.gov,” and the Traditional Values Coalition wrote that she wanted “the gay agenda to trump the First Amendment and religious freedom.” Rep. Steve King (R-IA) has claimed that Jennings wants to push a “homosexual agenda” in U.S. schools.

While Obama didn’t specifically point to any of his nominees, he strongly reiterated his support for them and condemned homophobic slurs:

OBAMA: For the first time ever, an administration official testified in Congress in favor of this law. Nobody in America should be fired because they’re gay, despite doing a great job and meeting their responsibilities. It’s not fair, it’s not right, we’re going to put a stop to it. (APPLAUSE)

And it’s for this reason if any of my nominees are attacked not for what they believe but for who they are, I will not waver in my support because I will not waver in my commitment to ending discrimination in all its forms. (APPLAUSE)

Watch it:

Transcript: Read more

Related Posts

Yglesias

Recent Attacks in Pakistan

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 10, 2009 at 7:06 pm

NYT:

Mr. Mehsud said in a news conference last weekend, his first since taking over from Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed in a missile attack by an American drone in August, that the Taliban would not let the planned offensive go unanswered.

The assault on the military headquarters, along with bombings last week on United Nations offices in the capital, Islamabad, and a crowded market in Peshawar, could be the start of the escalation Mr. Mehsud had warned about, military analysts said.

This is all pretty horrible and scary. At the same time, it doesn’t sound all that savvy. The Pakistani military is often seen as having mixed feelings about militant groups, but nobody has mixed feelings about militant groups that attack their own key installations. And blowing up UN food aid workers and people trying to do their shopping doesn’t exactly scream out “we’re standing up for Muslim interests vis-à-vis American imperialists.

Yglesias

The Land of the Free

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 10, 2009 at 6:12 pm

I’m back home!

Standing on line at Dulles passport control, I was reminded of a crazy thing I was told in Germany, namely that the U.S. congress recently voted to impose a tax on foreign visitors in order to fund a program aimed at . . . encouraging people to visit the United States. Apparently the idea of encouraging them to visit by not charging a special tax on foreign visitors didn’t occur to them. What a weird idea!

Culture

The Portland Offense

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 10, 2009 at 3:58 pm

John Hollinger explains how last year’s Trailblazers put together one of the best offenses in the league:

The Blazers succeeded with the unusual style that Nate McMillan imported from Seattle. His teams have a unique signature — they regularly rank among the league leaders in offensive efficiency and offensive rebound rate while simultaneously finishing among the league’s slowest-paced teams. Most people think of offensive juggernauts as wild run-and-gun outfits, but the Blazers succeeded with half-court execution and second shots much as McMillan’s outfits with the Sonics did.

Portland played the league’s second-slowest pace, averaging only 89.3 trips per side, and that both muted the players’ averages and obscured how devastating they were offensively. The Blazers were deadly efficient, averaging 110.3 points per 100 possessions — ranking second only to Phoenix in offensive efficiency. Despite a lack of brand-name players, they placed ahead of both the Lakers and Cleveland.

People tend not to believe that Portland had a great offense last year. This is in part because the slow pace led to low per game totals, but also because of the perception that they lack effective offensive players beyond Brandon Roy. This in turn stems in part from the quirk whereby people tend to think of put-backs and such as a kind of second-class scoring. The reality, however, is that grabbing offensive rebounds that lead to easy points is a way of putting points on the board that count toward the final tally. “Believe it or not,” Hollinger writes “they did it while barely shooting better than the league average.” But the minimized turnovers and maximized offensive rebounds and that got the job done.

Climate Progress

Skeptical Science explains how we know global warming is happening: It’s the oceans, stupid!

By Joe Romm on Oct 10, 2009 at 3:13 pm

The empirical data has spoken. Cancel the global cooling party. Global warming is still happening.

The planet is heating up, thanks to human-generated emissions of greenhouse gases.  But as a new NOAA-led study, “An observationally based energy balance for the Earth since 1950” (subs. req’d, release here) concluded:

[S]ince 1950, the planet released about 20 percent of the warming influence of heat-trapping greenhouse gases to outer space as infrared energy. Volcanic emissions lingering in the stratosphere offset about 20 percent of the heating by bouncing solar radiation back to space before it reached the surface. Cooling from the lower-atmosphere aerosols produced by humans balanced 50 percent of the heating. Only the remaining 10 percent of greenhouse-gas warming actually went into heating the Earth, and almost all of it went into the ocean.

Note that this Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres study was done “without using global climate models.”

Figure 1: “Total Earth Heat Content [anomaly] from 1950 (Murphy et al. 2009). Ocean data taken from Domingues et al 2008.”

That figure comes from the first of two posts by the terrific website Skeptical Science, which I repost below.  Skeptical Science is an excellent, well-organized site to send convincible people for a shredding of the standard, long-debunked denier talking points.

Now I’m sure the deniers and delayers out there are shrieking, “There are peer reviewed analyses that document that upper ocean warming has halted since 2003!” — a claim I dealt with in my July post, “Like father, like son: Roger Pielke Sr. also doesn’t understand the science of global warming “” or just chooses to willfully misrepresent it.”

Subsequently, however, another JGR article, “Global hydrographic variability patterns during 2003-2008” (subs. req’d, draft here) details an analysis of “monthly gridded global temperature and salinity fields from the near-surface layer down to 2000 m depth based on Argo measurements.”  Background on Argo here.   Their findings are summed up in this figure:

Figure [2]: Time series of global mean heat storage (0-2000 m), measured in 108 Jm-2.

Still warming, after all these years!  And just where you’d expect it.  The study makes clear that upper ocean heat content, perhaps not surprisingly, is simply far more variable than deeper ocean heat content, and thus an imperfect indicator of the long-term warming trend.

UPDATE:  Yes, I am aware of the recent upper-ocean heat content data on the web.  Please note that plots of very recent, highly variable upper-ocean content heat data down to 700 meters from unpeer-reviewed sources do not trump peer-reviewed analysis of much longer-term data down to 2000 m.  Is it too much to ask people to actually read this entire post before posting comments?

Read more

Yglesias

As Long As You’re Going to Be in Scandinavia…

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 10, 2009 at 2:28 pm

250px-Oslo-montage-wiki

I have no idea if this influenced the Nobel Committee’s decision-making, but it’s worth noting that one thing I’ve heard a lot about in Europe is disquiet over Barack Obama’s failure to commit to personally attending the COP15 conference on climate change in December. There’s a lot of sentiment that the president putting his personal credibility on the line could be an important factor.

The conference is being held in Copenhagen and it starts on December 7 but runs for a couple of weeks. Interestingly enough, the Nobel Prize is going to be handed out in Oslo on December 10. In other words, in the middle of the conference. And Oslo is pretty close to Copenhagen. And Obama will be in Oslo to accept the award. Under the circumstances, it will be hard for the White House to come up with a good reason why it’s impossible for Obama to pop by Copenhagen.

Politics

Energy Secretary Chu: ‘I Think It’s Wonderful’ That Companies Are Leaving The Chamber Over Its Denialism

By Zaid Jilani on Oct 10, 2009 at 1:35 pm

Recently, there has been a “business backlash” against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for its extreme global-warming denier views. Businesses, fed up with the Chamber’s resistance to taking any sort of action to curb carbon emissions, have been leaving the business federation one after another. In the past month alone, Pacific Gas & Electric, Exelon, Public Service Company of New Mexico, and Apple have left the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its extreme views on climate change.

Yesterday, during a solar energy event at the National Mall, Energy Secretary Steven Chu was asked by a Reuters reporter what he thought about the exodus of businesses from the Chamber. He replied by telling the reporter that he thinks it’s “wonderful” that companies are leaving:

CHU: I think it’s wonderful. I think that companies like that, Exelon, for example, others are saying that we have to recognize reality. In order to position the odd states in an economically competitive place and also to make the world minimize the dangers of significant climate change for our children and grandchildren we’ve got to go in this direction. So they’re saying, we can’t be a party to foot-dragging, to denials to things of that nature.

Listen here:

The Chamber has responded to the business exodus with scorn. After the flight of the most recent company, Apple, U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue bitterly responded, “It is unfortunate that your company didn’t take the time to understand the Chamber’s position on climate and forfeited the opportunity to advance a 21st century approach to climate change.”

Update

Yesterday, in a speech on financial reform, President Obama criticized the Chamber for running misleading ads:

And yet, predictably, a lot of the banks and big financial firms don’t like the idea of a consumer agency very much. In fact, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is spending millions on an ad campaign to kill it. You might have seen some of these ads — the ones that claim that local butchers and other small businesses somehow will be harmed by this agency. This is, of course, completely false — and we’ve made clear that only businesses that offer financial services would be affected by this agency. I don’t know how many of your butchers are offering financial services.

Yglesias

What American Wind Needs

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 10, 2009 at 12:57 pm

SDC10218

We met yesterday with the top communications guy from Vestas, a Danish company that’s the world’s number one maker of wind turbines. I found myself a bit surprised by the pristine simplicity of what he was saying—he didn’t talk about the need to price carbon, he wasn’t asking for feed-in tariffs, didn’t say much about renewable energy portfolio regulations, didn’t say much about utility regulations, indeed didn’t say much about much of anything. He was, instead, just extremely bullish on the US as a market. He thinks it’s completely feasible to bring large-scale commercially viable wind power to the United States on the basis of large wind farms based in the “wind corridor” running through the middle of the country:

wind-energy 1

This of course raises the one real problem he cited. You need a modern electrical grid that can move the power from where the wind is to where the cities are. And he didn’t really see any technical challenges to doing this. He said Denmark has a grid that’s just fine and we could build one in America to if the money and political will existed. Indeed, despite Denmark’s heavy use of wind power he seemed to view us as having a more promising set of fundamentals—basically large amounts of empty space where there’s wind and you could put up wind turbines.

Economy

Is The Administration’s Mortgage Modification Program Going To Be Enough?

By Pat Garofalo on Oct 10, 2009 at 12:00 pm

AP080315046971This week, the Treasury Department announced that the administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) — which is part of the larger Making Home Affordable (MHA) program — has resulted in lower monthly mortgage payments for 500,000 homeowners. According to Treasury, the program has hit this milestone three weeks ahead of schedule.

While a half-million modifications is nothing to sneer at, as Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com said, “it’s a help on the margin…but it’s not going to end the foreclosure crisis.” And Theo Francis at BusinessWeek noted this distressing tidbit of data:

Mortgage servicers actually signed up fewer homeowners in September than they did in August — 100,216 last month, down from 133,192 the month before. That was even below the 110,397 signed up in July. Deceleration doesn’t bode well for a program that hasn’t yet hit its halfway point.

Especially troubling is that some banks still can’t get their modification programs rolling, despite the bevy of federal incentives that HAMP provides. Bank of America has only managed to modify mortgages for 11 percent of eligible homeowners. Every time that Treasury releases new data, it becomes painfully apparent that some banks just aren’t up to the task — or aren’t interested — in dealing with the mortgages that they hold.

In a report released yesterday, the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) for the Troubled Asset Relief Program said that another problem with HAMP is that the foreclosure crisis has expanded far outside the scope of mortgages for which HAMP applies:

Many of the coming foreclosures are likely to be payment option adjustable rate mortgage (ARM) and interest-only loan resets, many of which will exceed the HAMP eligibility limits. HAMP was not designed to address foreclosures caused by unemployment, which now appears to be a central cause of nonpayment, further limiting the scope of the program. The foreclosure crisis has moved beyond subprime mortgages and into the prime mortgage market. It increasingly appears that HAMP is targeted at the housing crisis as it existed six months ago, rather than as it exists right now.

The COP advocates looking at a bridge loan program for unemployed workers, modeled off of Pennsylvania’s Homeowner Emergency Mortgage Assistance Program, while Tim Fernholz points to the merits of allowing homeowners “to remain in their home as rent-paying tenants.”

I still think that mandatory mediation — which requires lenders to meet with the borrower, judges, housing advocates and attorneys to try and come to some alternate arrangement before finalizing a foreclosure — has a lot of merit. A mandatory mediation program in Philadelphia has kept 60 percent of borrowers out of foreclosure, while a state-wide program in Connecticut has a 57 percent success rate. At a minimum, the federal government should be supporting any state or local mediation programs and requiring mediation on all federally owned mortgages.

Politics

Gingrich gripes that Obama doesn’t have an ambassador to Brazil yet (because he’s being blocked by DeMint).

By Matt Corley on Oct 10, 2009 at 11:49 am

Earlier this month, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) attempted to block government funding for Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-SC) trip to Honduras as retribution for DeMint’s obstruction of two of Obama’s diplomatic nominations, including Thomas A. Shannon Jr., the nominee to be ambassador to Brazil. But DeMint’s hold is being criticized by a major Republican. At Harvard on Thursday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich decried the lack of an ambassador to Brazil:

“If you want to live in the most productive, creative, and prosperous nation in the world, what is it you have to do?” Gingrich asked. “The answer is to reform litigation, regulation, taxation, health, education, and infrastructure.”

“Bureaucracies just don’t work,” he said. “When you build a bureaucracy, the bureaucracy ages, and the bureaucracy develops self-interest. We still don’t have an ambassador to Brazil, for example, eight months into the new administration.”

Gingrich should direct his ire at DeMint. The South Carolina senator has said that he “will not lift the hold on these nominations until the United States works out an arrangement with the Honduran government to recognize the outcome of the elections in Honduras and restores the U.S. foreign aid that has been cut by the Obama administration.”

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