In an interview with American Family Association (AFA) radio yesterday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) argued against repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT), arguing that basically, members of the U.S. military are too bigoted to be willing to fight and die for the “guy in the next foxhole” if that guy happens to be gay:

INHOFE: For those of us — and I’m one of them — who have gone through the military, gone through basic training, and you stop and think — it just doesn’t make any sense. Second of all, it’s just not working. You have women, men, then you have a third group to deal with, and they’re not equipped to do that.

And you know — you hear the stories all the time. A military guy — I happen to be Army, and Army and Marines always feel that when we’re out there, we’re not doing it for the flag or the country; we’re doing it for the guy in the next foxhole. And that would dramatically change that.

Watch it:

Inhofe shouldn’t assume that all members of the military are as homophobic as he is. A December 2006 survey of servicemembers who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan found that 73 percent of those polled were “comfortable with lesbians and gays.” The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network has reported that more than 500 U.S. soldiers are “out” to their colleagues and continue to serve. When Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen announced his personal belief that now is the time to repeal DADT, he cited the fact that he has served with gay comrades since 1968.

“I also believe that the great young men and women of our military can and would accommodate such a change,” he added, giving members of the military more credit than Inhofe did. “I never underestimate their ability to adapt.” (HT: Right Wing Watch)

Cross-posted on ThinkProgress.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, Secretary Gates put further pressure on Senate Republicans looking to oppose START. Gates emphasized that the treaty had the “unanimous support” of the US military and that past arms-control treaties had passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. In other words, Gates was telling Senate Republicans that opposing this treaty would put them in direct opposition to the uniformed military and historic Republican support for arms-control.

Gates couldn’t have been more clear on the military’s support for START:

The New START Treaty has the unanimous support of America’s military leadership—to include the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all of the service chiefs, and the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, the organization responsible for our strategic nuclear deterrent.

Gates added that similar past treaties have garnered overwhelming bipartisan support:

For nearly 40 years, treaties to limit or reduce nuclear weapons have been approved by the U.S. Senate by strong bipartisan majorities. This treaty deserves a similar reception and result.

The clear implication of these statements is that Senate opposition to this treaty demonstrates extremism. Yet conservatives are still desperately searching for grounds over which to oppose the treaty. This has increasingly put them at odds with military leaders. For instance, on missile defense, Senator James Inhofe insisted at a Senate Armed Services hearing a few weeks ago that General Patrick O’Reilly was wrong in his assessment of the new missile defense plans.

The Gates oped comes as a preview for a slew of hearings on START that not only involve him, Secretary of State Clinton, and Admiral Mullen but James Baker and Henry Kissinger. The testimony of Secretaries Baker in Kissinger will likely further expose the growing struggle on the right between traditional conservative foreign policy leaders and the emerging far right tea-party approach to foreign policy.

These hearings also come on the back of recent testimony by former Nixon Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, a figure that the Wall Street Journal called the “yoda” for nuclear strategists and is a beacon for the far right on nuclear policy. Schlesinger came out in support of the START treaty at a Senate hearing and when asked if he had confidence in Secretary Gates, Schlesinger said, he had “great confidence in Secretary Gates.”

Gates’ oped also further clarifies the fact that conservatives in the Senate are not just facing a test of their ideological and partisan bent, but whether they are so far to the paranoid right that they don’t even trust our military leaders anymore.

In an interview with American Family Association (AFA) radio yesterday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) argued against repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT), arguing that basically, members of the U.S. military are too bigoted to be willing to fight and die for the “guy in the next foxhole” if that guy happens to be gay:

INHOFE: For those of us — and I’m one of them — who have gone through the military, gone through basic training, and you stop and think — it just doesn’t make any sense. Second of all, it’s just not working. You have women, men, then you have a third group to deal with, and they’re not equipped to do that.

And you know — you hear the stories all the time. A military guy — I happen to be Army, and Army and Marines always feel that when we’re out there, we’re not doing it for the flag or the country; we’re doing it for the guy in the next foxhole. And that would dramatically change that.

Watch it:

Inhofe shouldn’t assume that all members of the military are as homophobic as he is. A December 2006 survey of servicemembers who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan found that 73 percent of those polled were “comfortable with lesbians and gays.” The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network has reported that more than 500 U.S. soldiers are “out” to their colleagues and continue to serve. When Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen announced his personal belief that now is the time to repeal DADT, he cited the fact that he has served with gay comrades since 1968.

“I also believe that the great young men and women of our military can and would accommodate such a change,” he added, giving members of the military more credit than Inhofe did. “I never underestimate their ability to adapt.” (HT: Right Wing Watch)

If Solicitor General Elena Kagan is confirmed to take the seat of Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court, one of the cases that she will likely be confronted with is a constitutional challenge to Arizona’s recently passed immigration law. President Barack Obama has condemned the law and Attorney General Eric Holder is weighing a possible federal lawsuit against the state. Kagan could have a direct impact on the role the federal, state, and local governments play in enacting and enforcing immigration laws. Her potential confirmation could also have a more indirect effect on how the nation’s immigration population is treated and who is and isn’t protected by the U.S. Constitution.

As Solicitor General, Kagan has issued opinions on two separate cases which shed some light on how she has approached the immigration issue in the past. One is an amicus brief filed by Kagan on behalf of the United States in Padilla v. Kentucky. In the brief, the government agreed with Padilla that the Kentucky Supreme Court erred in holding that a criminal defense lawyer giving incorrect advice about the immigration consequences of the plaintiff’s plea is not a sufficient reason to reopen a case. In other words, the Kentucky court argued that Jose Padilla, a lawful permanent resident who was charged with drug offenses, could not withdraw his guilty plea even though his lawyer gave him bad immigration advice.

According to Kagan, an attorney doesn’t have to give immigration advice. But if he or she does, that person “has a duty to avoid doing so incompetently.” “Professionally incompetent advice,” according to Kagan, “can support an ineffective-assistance claim.” However, Kagan agreed that Padilla could not withdraw his own plea because the overwhelming evidence against him suggested “that a rational defendant would have pleaded guilty even after receiving correct information.” Kagan’s opinion in this case is significant because it shows that she doesn’t believe that the whole criminal justice system should be rearranged to give immigrant defendants immigration advice, but when immigration advice is given, the Sixth Amendment protects an immigrant’s right to effective legal counsel. The fact that she did not let Padilla — a Vietnam war veteran –off the hook demonstrates that her opinion had little to do with judicial empathy and more to do with pragmatic jurisprudence.

The second immigration case that Kagan has weighed in on is Kucana v. Holder, a case aimed at resolving the question of whether courts have jurisdiction to review decisions made by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). In her amicus brief, Kagan agreed with petitioner Agron Kucana (an Albanian facing deportation who originally was ordered deported because he had overslept and missed his asylum hearing), that judicial review is available in such cases. Yet, Despite citing Kagan the Supreme Court’s traditional presumption in favor of preserving judicial review of administrative action, Kagan still recommended that the Court deny review of Kucana’s case, arguing that his claim was baseless on the merits. Once again, Kagan did not support the specific case of the immigrant petitioner, but she did side with his underlying argument. This is significant because administrative errors can often lead to a wrongful deportation that puts an asylum applicant in perilous danger.

These two cases suggest that Kagan takes a relatively neutral approach to immigration cases, but still appears to hold that immigrants — regardless of their status — are protected by the U.S. Constitution. However, the cases do not carry any direct implications for how Kagan would approach the constitutionality of Arizona’s immigration law. A third case (Chamber of Commerce of the United States v. Candelaria), which Kagan has yet to weigh in on, undoubtedly would. The Supreme Court has been waiting for months on Kagan to file a brief giving the administration’s view on whether Arizona’s sanctions on employers who hire undocumented workers conflicts with federal immigration law — a concept that’s central the constitutionality of Arizona’s most recent immigration law. The justices need the brief some time in May so they can act before the court’s term ends in late June. The legislation in debate was signed into law by current Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano when she was governor of Arizona.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend a discussion at the Cato Institute with Iranian dissident journalist Akbar Ganji, who tonight will receive Cato’s Milton Friedman Liberty Prize. Ganji shared his views and answered questions on the current state of affairs inside Iran, the prospects for Iranian political reform, and the impact that U.S. policy has had on those prospects.

“The democracy movement in Iran is broad-based and strong,” Ganji said, speaking through a translator, “but what we lack right now is the ability — the tools to get our message to the Iranian people.”

Asked about the impact of President Obama’s approach to Iran, Ganji praised the change in rhetoric, and suggested that it helped create a favorable environment for the Iranian democracy movement. “Obama offered a dialog with the Iran,” Ganji said, “and this change in discourse immediately gave rise to that outpouring of sentiment against the Islamic Republic last year.”

On the impact of recent U.S. policy in the region, Ganji said “Unfortunately, the policies of the United States have fanned the flames of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, particularly during the [George W.] Bush administration,” Ganji said. “The belligerent rhetoric of Bush didn’t help us [the Iranian democracy movement], it actually harmed us during that period.” And by taking out the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iran, Ganji said “the U.S. inadvertently increased Iranian power and reach in the Middle East.”

Ganji also suggested that fear of U.S. invasion, of Iran turning into another Iraq, had caused Iranian democracy activists to scale back some of their rhetoric. “Since Iranians, in particular opposition groups, do not want to see a repeat of Afghanistan or Iraq in Iran,” Ganji said, “they’ve actually had to scale back their opposition to the government in order not to encourage an invasion [by the U.S.]”

Ganji was adamant that talk of a U.S. military option was harmful to the cause of Iranian democracy. “If you do not have the threat of foreign invasion and you do not use the dialog of invasion and military intervention, the society itself has a huge potential to oppose and potentially topple the theocratic system,” Ganji said. “What I’m trying to get to is that jingoistic, militaristic language used by any foreign power would actually be detrimental to this natural evolution of Iranian society.” Read more

The outlines of a far-right Republican foreign policy are emerging. This week in the Washington Times the heads of conservative think tanks, as well as former Attorney General Ed Meese now of Heritage, penned an oped – it was actually more like 10 disconnected far-right talking points – intended to provide an easy script for far right candidates on foreign policy. Pat Barry deconstructs their “peace through strength” tag line, but what jumped out at me was the priority given to nuclear testing. It is their second talking point:

2. A robust defense posture including a safe, reliable, effective nuclear deterrent, which requires its modernization and testing

That’s right, after nearly two decades of not testing nuclear weapons, these six far-right influencers want the GOP to start blowing up nuclear weapons again. Think these six wingers are just shouting on the sidelines? Think again. Jon Kyl, the second ranking Senate Republican, is fully on board with nuclear testing. He even wrote an oped in the Wall Street Journal last fall arguing why we need nuclear testing.

The far right’s reasoning is that in order to “modernize” the US nuclear arsenal, we must build new nuclear weapons, and if we build new nuclear weapons we must explosively test them. But this is way off base. We can modernize our nuclear arsenal without building brand new nuclear weapons from scratch. This is exactly what we are doing and studies have shown that it’s effective. The US nuclear arsenal is in fine shape and as long as the US continues to adequately fund programs that maintain the nuclear arsenal (the Obama administration has dramatically increased funding), we have zero need to build new nuclear weapons and zero need to test existing ones. Yet the right is not only opposed to cutting nuclear weapons, they actually want to build more. If you build more, you need to test them.

And for those thinking nuclear testing is safe and reliable, the LA Times reported last November on “Nevada’s hidden ocean of radiation.” It noted that:

Over 41 years, the federal government detonated 921 nuclear warheads underground at the Nevada Test Site, 75 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Each explosion deposited a toxic load of radioactivity into the ground and, in some cases, directly into aquifers… In a study for Nye County, where the nuclear test site lies, Buqo estimated that the underground tests polluted 1.6 trillion gallons of water. That is as much water as Nevada is allowed to withdraw from the Colorado River in 16 years — enough to fill a lake 300 miles long, a mile wide and 25 feet deep.

The US has not explosively tested a nuclear weapon since 1992. We have a moratorium on testing as do Russia, China, UK, and France and in the last decade there have been just two nuclear tests (both by North Korea). The Obama administration has pledged to push for the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would bring into force a world wide ban on nuclear testing. Yet the right is vehemently opposed to the treaty. Instead, of ratifying a test ban which would make it much more difficult for countries to develop nuclear weapons, the right wants to put the US in the same company with North Korea as the only country in the 21st century to test a nuclear weapon.

Testing nuclear weapons is militarily and scientifically unnecessary. Doing so will only destroy US credibility internationally, prompt other countries to resume testing and developing nuclear weapons, and lead to further ecological disaster. Should the right-wing take control post November, Nevadans opposed to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository may soon be getting not just a nuclear waste dump in their backyard but nuclear explosions.