National Urban League head Mark Morial recently described the state of black America today as "the best of times and the worst of times." He's right. The inauguration of the first African-American president was a moment worth celebrating as an undeniable achievement of the progress we've made regarding race. Many African-Americans from communities across the county traveled to D.C. to witness the moment. Even more of us gathered around radios, television screens and computer monitors.

It was a brief respite, savored for as long as the day lasted, and then we all returned home, or turned off the television and returned to reality. For reality the day before and the day after was, and remains, an indicator of how far we are from "the Dream" so often referenced on that day. For just as much as "everything changed" for African Americans on that day, at the same time nothing changed, as one article noted days before Obama's inauguration.

Let's look at how the Democrats who were elected to the Senate in 2006 and 2008 voted on yesterday's cramdown amendment.

Class of '06

Sherrod Brown (D-OH)- Yes
Ben Cardin (D-MD)- Yes
Bob Casey, Jr. (D-PA)- Yes
Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)- Yes
Claire McCaskill (D-MO)- Yes
Bernie Sanders (I-VT)- Yes
Jon Tester (D-MT)- No
Jim Webb (D-VA)- Yes
Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)- Yes

Class of '08

Mark Begich (D-AK)- Yes
Kay Hagan (D-NC)- Yes
Jeff Merkley (D-OR)- Yes
Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)- Yes
Mark Udall (D-CO)- Yes
Tom Udall (D-NM)- Yes
Mark Warner (D-VA)- Yes

Only one out of the sixteen Democrats that were elected in the last two election cycles chose to support mortgage lenders over people that are losing their homes. That shows how much progress we've made through our activism since 2004. In fact, let's look at the rest of the caucus. If we do not include the four appointed senators (Gillibrand, Bennet, Kaufman, and Burris) or the 16 members of the classes of '06 and '08, there were 39 Democrats that could have voted yesterday. Kennedy and Rockefeller were not there to vote, so the true number is thirty-seven. Of those 37 Democrats, ten of them voted against cramdown. Let's look at it this way:

Democrats elected before 2006: Yes= 27, No= 10, Not Voting= 2 (Percent Yes: 72.9%)
Democrats Elected in 2006 or 2008: Yes= 15, No= 1 (Percent Yes: 93.7%)
Appointed Democrats: Yes= 3, No= 1 (Percent Yes: 75.0%)

The future of the Democratic Party looks a lot better than the present, don't you think?

Earlier this week I was informed by a young woman I've come to know and like over the last few years that she had just gotten married this past weekend. It came as a pleasant surprise to me. I hadn't even known she was engaged. She hadn't mentioned her impending nuptials to me in the weeks and months leading up to her big event, hadn't displayed a gaudy engagement ring on her ring finger (or even any ring really, gaudy or not) and never mentioned that she had a fiancé.

I immediately congratulated her, of course. I'm a big fan of marriage, having been down the altar three times myself. I think I mentioned I was surprised or hadn't known she was getting married (or something along those lines) but that I was very happy for her. She replied that she been keeping her engagement quiet, that she and her new spouse had just come back from Connecticut where the ceremony had been performed. Since we don't live all that close to Connecticut I said something about that being a long trip to make. Knowing she had family in town, I asked why'd she gone so far away?

That was when she did a very brave thing. She told me she'd had to go to Connecticut because the love of her life, the person she married, was another woman.

(cont.)

On days like this, I join my friend Chris Bowers in feeling a certain sense of despondency about how much can be accomplished just by electing more and better Democrats. We didn't just do poorly on the Cramdown Amendment, we got our clock cleaned. We could see this coming in last night's press conference when Obama said he had been most humbled so far in the White House by his inability to control the banks.

OBAMA: Humbled by the -- humbled by the fact that the presidency is extraordinarily powerful but we are just part of a much broader tapestry of American life. And there are a lot of different power centers, and so I can't just press a button and suddenly have the bankers do exactly what I want, or turn on a switch and suddenly Congress falls in line. And so what you do is to make your best arguments, listen hard to what other people have to say, and coax folks in the right direction.

On the campaign trail, Obama said he wanted Cramdown. In the Oval Office, he has to deal with twelve Democrats that put campaign contributions from the mortgage lending industry ahead of their own struggling constituents who are losing their homes.

I was concerned that I didn't see more visible effort from the White House to fight for Cramdown, but now I know why. No Republicans supported it. Even a united Democratic Caucus could not have passed the amendment. So, the administration let members vote however they wanted to. And now we know who the real cowards are.

But we shouldn't allow ourselves to get discouraged. These were votes taken by senators that knew the amendment couldn't pass. If the amendment had had the support of even one Republican, every Democratic vote against would have been the decisive vote against. In that case, the White House might have whipped this vote. Even without any Republican support, if Al Franken had been seated as a U.S. Senator, every Democratic vote against would have been the decisive vote against. While it's true that some Democrats actually enjoy putting on kneepads and bowing down to do the mortgage lenders favors, most of them are simply acting out of fear and a desire not to needlessly alienate powerful potential adversaries.

We can still turn these defeats into victories as long as we increase our numbers and we have the support of the President of the United States.

Do not watch this unless you've taken your blood pressure medication.

Maybe this will help restore hope.

Maybe not.

In the most demoralizing vote since the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, eleven twelve worthless Democrats just earned my undying enmity by voting against cramdown.

Max Baucus (D-MT)
Michael Bennet (D-CO)
Robert Byrd (D-WV)
Tom Carper (D-DE)
Byron Dorgan (D-ND)
Tim Johnson (D-SD)
Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
Blanche Lincoln (D-AR)
Ben Nelson (D-NE)
Mark Pryor (D-AR)
Arlen Specter (D-PA)
Jon Tester (D-MT)

Honorable mention: Evan Bayh (D-IN)- who did all he could to kill cramdown in committee and then thought he could be cute and vote for it on the floor.

I am especially pissed off at Dorgan and Tester who are both normally much better than this. This is one of the most disgraceful least defensible votes I have ever seen.

Or what Senator Specter really meant to say to his former GOP colleagues at his press conference the other day:

Who knew atheists had higher morals than fundamental Christians? Uh, a lot of us, actually, and now we have more poll results to prove it:

Churchgoers more likely to back torture, survey finds

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new analysis. [...]

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than 6 in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only 4 in 10 of them did.

I'm not shocked by that result. It fits with what I've heard from people who claim they are Real Christians, and that punishing or killing "evil doers" is perfectly acceptable behavior according to their interpretation of the Bible. The same folks who promote the idea of a "Christian Warrior" at their Jesus Camps. The Pastors who publicly proclaimed at Republican rallies last Fall that "Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists around the world are praying for an Obama victory that if Obama wins, they'll think "their god is bigger" than the Christian god." The US General and self proclaimed evangelical Christian, William Boykin who claimed he led an "Army of God" in Iraq, and who helped Gitmo-ize Abu Ghraib vastly expanding the Bush administration's use of torture and abuse to thousands of Iraqi detainees many of whom were swept up in mass arrests by American soldiers merely for the "crime" of living in a Sunni neighborhood.

So, no I'm not surprised that the people who most loudly proclaim their "Christian values" have no moral qualms when it comes to killing and torturing people who don't share their faith or have the exact same beliefs that they do. I've known for many years that many, many of these so-called "Christians" are hypocrites when it comes to issues of morality and human rights. You know what does surprise me? That CNN had the guts to actually use the word torture in their article. But then maybe the details of the survey conducted by Pew Forum of Religion & Public Life made it impossible for them to avoid the word that must not be named. At least by the US media, anyway.

How much do you want to bet this survey result is prominently reported by the traditional "liberal media" over the next few weeks rather than buried or ignored as soon as possible? No takers, eh? Don't blame you. Don't blame you one bit.

It's been pointed out by many — including the president himself — how absurd it is to Obama's success in cleaning up messes that were decades in the making, based on his first 100 days in office. It's equally absurd to expect that 100 days in the administration of our first African American president to even begin to address 390 years of racial history in this country. But it's at least an opportunity to assess where we really are, where we're headed, and how far we've yet to go.

The defection of Arlen Specter has predictably started a conversation on the future of the Republican Party, but I haven't seen anyone hit the nail on the head, yet. Most talk revolves around relaxing their positions on abortion, immigration, and gay rights. None of those issues are their core problem. Their core problem is their anti-government stance, particularly as it concerns the federal government. In a time when people are looking for big government solutions to health care, climate change, energy dependence, and education quality and costs, it is simply untenable to take a position against government action. The Republicans look fondly back on the presidency of Ronald Reagan and his philosophy that government is too often the problem rather than the solution for our national concerns. That philosophy is inappropriate in our current political climate because the people are clamoring for government-provided solutions.

More than the shift in cultural attitudes, the GOP's refusal to articulate a rival positive theory of government is what is leaving them helpless in their bid to attract voters. George W. Bush at least attempted to offer a positive alternative with his 'Ownership Society' platform. Privatizing Social Security proved to be a bust (and it looks much worse in retrospect) but it did represent a political view where government was seen as a partner, not an innate evil. I don't think the Republicans should revert to Bush's plans for entitlement reform, but they need to decide on a vision for what government should do and stop this nonsense about how the government is doing too much. Hurricane Katrina and Credit Default Swaps killed off the viability of Reagan's creed quite thoroughly. Until the GOP realizes this, no amount of tinkering about the edges of social mores will help them sufficiently to allow for a comeback.

Village idiots like Stu Rothenberg have great difficulty understanding President Obama because they only hear what they want to hear. Obama says he wants to 'look forward and not back' when it comes to the Bush administration, and Rothenberg thinks Obama has lost control when it turns out that the Attorney General and Congress might not be looking forward. But Obama also said that 'no one is above the law' and that 'waterboarding is torture'. He also said that the Department of Justice has to make independent legal determinations.

When you hear two seemingly contradictory sets of statements, maybe they aren't contradictory at all. Maybe you can figure out what is meant by looking at what is actually being done. Obama doesn't want to talk about the Bush administration's crimes, but he says that they committed them. Maybe he calls their crimes 'mistakes' but he doesn't tell his Attorney General to treat them that way. After all, a refusal to prosecute torture creates international jurisdiction. It is not possible to sweep this under the rug. That's another thing that Rothenberg simply doesn't understand. Look at how he describes accountability:

The president made it clear initially that he wanted to avoid looking “backward” at the previous administration’s policies, reiterating that view on Thursday at a meeting with Congressional leaders.

But for a couple of days, and in the face of a firestorm of protest from his party’s ideological left, Obama backed off from that position, seemingly handing the issue off to Congress, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and other Democrats are far more inclined to rake Bush administration officials over the coals in the Congressional version of a show trial, and, quite possibly, to go even further.

Notice that he defines accountability as a 'raking over of the coals' and 'a show trial.' Check this next part out:

But in the case of Bush interrogation tactics, deferring to Congressional Democrats and to the party’s political left only drew Obama back into the very fray he was trying to avoid and put at risk his agenda for the next year and a half.

Obama actually was deferring to the law, which makes it the responsibility of the Attorney General (not the president) to determine if crimes were committed and what to do about it if they were. He was also deferring to the separation of powers which gives Congress the independence to provide oversight and make autonomous decisions about what to investigate and what to ignore. He might want to concentrate on his agenda, but facts are stubborn things. Obama is acting like the reluctant warrior precisely because he doesn't want to put his agenda at risk, but he isn't pretending that he has the authority to wipe history's slate clean.

You can see how uninterested Rothenberg is in the crimes of the Bush administration and the reputation of this country.

There are many compelling reasons to avoid a “truth commission” or Congressional show trial, but purely from a political point of view, a full-scale witch hunt into alleged Bush administration abuses, including the possibility of prosecution of some, is nothing short of nuts.

Nuts!!

First, a truth commission such as the one called for by Pelosi and others would soon become the only story, making it all but impossible for Obama to accomplish his policy agenda. If you are looking for something comparable, think Monica Lewinsky plus the Clinton impeachment, and you’ll start to get a sense about the train wreck we’d be heading for.

The Republicans could defend torture as vigorously as the Democrats defended blow jobs but, somehow, I don't think that they will. Insofar as they do, their brand will be tarnished ever further than it has been already. By 2011, the Democrats will have well over sixty seats in the Senate, as Rothenberg knows better than most. How, then, will Obama's agenda be sidetracked? The point of a Commission, after all, would be to have a final triumph over the torture-apologists, reducing the dead-enders to a condition reminiscent of the last of the segregationists. How could that possibly be bad for the nation or the Democrats?

Second, Democrats already are divided over how to handle the matter. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) wants to go much more slowly on investigating Bush interrogation procedures, and you can be sure that there are plenty of Democrats from the South and from rural areas who think that a partisan Democratic show trial of Bush officials would amount to something close to political suicide.

I think Rotherberg fails to understand how history will treat the torture-apoligists. He's probably right that there are plenty of rural and Southern Democrats that would rather not have a Commission, but political expediency is not the way to deal with war crimes. This next part really gets me.

Don’t Pelosi, Sen. Patrick Leahy (Vt.) and others on the left remember what happened to Republicans when they tried to take their pound of flesh from President Bill Clinton?

Here, again, we have a Village Idiot equating lying about fellatio with ordering the savage treatment of human beings in our custody. And...what happened to the Republicans when they went after Bill Clinton? Oh yes, I forgot, they chipped away enough at the Democrats' credibility to sneak George W. Bush into the White House on a promise to 'restore honor and dignity to the office'.

Third, Democratic efforts to publicly destroy former Bush officials surely would run counter to the mood that Obama has tried to create since his election.

Notice how Rothenberg frames this as an effort to 'destroy Bush officials'. It is as if there are no public interests involved here and any accountability or justice is driven by mere vindictiveness. But the object is to redeem our reputation in the world and avoid a situation where former high officials in our government are indicted for war crimes in foreign courts because we abdicated our treaty responsibilities. Keep that in mind when you consider this next objection.

Fourth, Democrats could find along the way that there isn’t a bright line of responsibility, and some of them could end up being implicated. Democratic leaders were briefed about the interrogation tactics and failed to complain loudly, complicating the issue and making party leaders appear hypocritical.

Rothenberg thinks the Democrats should back off in order to cover their own asses!! That's a remarkable moral judgment, don't you think? It'd be one thing to predict that they will make that decision out of a misguided self-interest, but to recommend that course as the correct one really demonstrates a twisted sense of propriety that is probably only possible inside the Beltway.

And if a misguided self-interest doesn't convince the Democrats to back off, maybe polling data will do it.

Finally, ABC News polling director Gary Langer’s April 23 column, “Obama, Cheney and the Politics of Torture,” points out that the public’s reaction to what Langer calls “types of coercion” and even to “torture” under certain circumstances is complicated. Democrats could unintentionally hand their political opponents an opportunity to paint them as insufficiently committed to take steps to prevent another terrorist attack.

If doing the right thing under the law is political dangerous, it shouldn't be done. That's Rothenberg's assessment. But Rothenberg doesn't respect the law.

Recently, spokesman [Robert] Gibbs said that it is up to the Justice Department, not the White House, to determine how to proceed on the matter of those who formulated and carried out Bush administration interrogation policy — passing the buck.

It's not passing the buck. It's an abuse of office to tell your Attorney General to prosecute or not prosecute for political reasons. Rothenberg is criticizing Obama for not abusing his office in the way that Bush and Alberto Gonzales abused theirs.

Sometimes, even presidents who don’t want to make enemies need to draw a line, take control of a situation and tell their party loyalists not to cross it, if only for their own sake. Hopefully, the president has learned that lesson.

If Obama wants to grant clemency, he can do so after the fact. It might even be appropriate. But the law requires that those that order torture are prosecuted. To fail to do so for political reasons would be morally wrong.

Conservatives are enraged that we still are blaming Bush (well, really Cheney since W was just the front man) for the mess the country is in after 100 days of Obama's first term. I don't know why. They milked the "Blame Clinton" card for eight years and counting, after all. I think Democrats and liberals are entitled to blame Bush for at least as long. The vast majority of Americans agree with us, after all. Not to mention a few Nobel prize winning economists. Well, except for the one who just blames Republicans, in general.

You know, this might change now that Arlen Specter has defected to the Democrats, but have you ever wondered why Ben Nelson (D-NE) gets so little grief from the liberal side of the Democratic Party even though he has a Progressive Punch lifetime score of 43.7% on siding with the Democrats on crucial votes? Why aren't liberals constantly braying about Nelson's betrayal? Why don't you see post after post in the blogosphere inviting Nelson to leave the party?

The simplest answer is that Ben Nelson keeps a low profile and he rarely badmouths his own party or the party's leadership. He votes how he votes and he leaves the talking to others. But the other reason is that liberals are pragmatic. At least, they're a hell of a lot more pragmatic than their counterparts on the right. We have deep political and moral differences with Ben Nelson, but he doesn't make false promises and he doesn't grandstand and he doesn't badmouth us. We know that he represents a deeply conservative state and that he votes with us almost half the time. He didn't vote for Obama's budget tonight but I doubt you'll find any blogs that are ripping him for it. No one is trying to push him out of the party.

We reserve our wrath for Democrats that make a habit out of criticizing liberals (like Evan Bayh, Harold Ford Jr., and Joe Lieberman). Even conservative Democrats from fairly liberal states, like Tom Carper of Delaware, are seldom criticized in harsh tones as long as they avoid providing talking points for FOX News.

It's hard to believe that the conservative purists on the other side are so much less forgiving of their centrists than we are of ours. It's totally self-defeating. Specter's case is a good example. The reason he couldn't win a primary in Pennsylvania is because independents and Democrats are not allowed to vote in Republican primaries in this state and, because all the moderate Republicans have already re-registered as either independents or Democrats, only conservative Republicans remain on the voter rolls. This gives the conservatives a chance to control who their candidate will be, but it also means that their candidate will only appeal to the little rump that is left of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania.

They seem convinced that their failure was brought about by the watering down of their core message by weak-kneed moderate Republicans. But their core message was plain to see to everyone at the Sarah Palin rallies during the 2008 campaign. It's fucking frightening. Katrina and Iraq were bad enough, but unbridled, nativist, racism is not something appealing to people of color, young people, or people with a shred of decency. It the Pat Buchanification of the Grand Old Party, and more Republicans are going to defect the more 'pure' it becomes. At this point, I would advise Yankee Republicans to form their own party and have it funded by Wall Street, not Mega Churches.

Larry Kudlow:

"Strange as it may seem, the best GOP spokesman right now appears to be former Vice President Dick Cheney. He has taken the Obama administration to task over its declassification of CIA torture memos. He says Team Obama has made America less safe. He’s right. Perhaps he can rally the party?"