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John McCain Admits DADT Likely to be Repealed

Click here to view this media While it appears DADT is going to finally be repealed, that didn’t stop John McCain from doing plenty of grumbling just before the filibuster was finally broken in the Senate. ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Repeal Faces Senate Vote Today : Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says the Senate will take a final vote Saturday afternoon on legislation that would overturn the military ban on openly gay troops. The vote on ending the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is set for 3 p.m. before senators turn to a nuclear arms treaty with Russia. Passage would send the military measure to the White House. Senators cleared the way for final action with a 63-33 vote earlier Saturday to move the bill ahead. The House passed an identical version of the bill this week. Repeal would mean that, for the first time in American history, gays would be openly accepted by the military and could acknowledge their sexual orientation without fear of being kicked out. The 63-33 test vote all but guarantees the legislation will pass the Senate, possibly by day’s end, and reach the president’s desk before the new year. Sen. John McCain, Obama’s GOP rival in 2008, led the opposition. Speaking on the Senate floor minutes before the vote, the Arizona Republican acknowledged he didn’t have the votes to stop the bill. He blamed elite liberals with no military experience for pushing their social agenda on troops during wartime. “They will do what is asked of them,” McCain said of service members. “But don’t think there won’t be a great cost.”

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‘Inside Washington’ Host: Why is it Constitutional to Force People to Buy Car Insurance But Not Health Insurance?

Gordon Peterson on Friday asked either a staggeringly ignorant or intentionally provocative question. On the most recent installment of PBS's “Inside Washington,” the host queried his guests,

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BoA Cuts off WikiLeaks

The digital war of position between WikLeaks and those who have something to hide got a bit more barbed as Bank of America, a likely character in the next WikiLeak drama, announced it will refuse to process payments to the site. Bank of America has joined with MasterCard, Visa and PayPal to deny funds to the open government organization. WikiLeaks has said its next big leak will be about the banking meltdown and the financial sector.

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Good news, bad news. First, the good news: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the Senate will take a final vote Saturday afternoon on legislation that would overturn the U.S. military’s ban on openly gay troops. The vote on ending the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is set for 3 p.m. (2000 GMT) before senators turn to a nuclear arms treaty with Russia. Passage would send the military measure to the White House. Senators cleared the way for final action with a 63-33 vote earlier Saturday to move the bill ahead. Now, the really crappy news : A measure that would have offered provisional legal status to some adults who came to America illegally as children failed to advance in a Senate vote Saturday. Democratic backers of the legislation fell short of the 60 votes to move the DREAM Act legislation forward. Democratic Sens. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Jon Tester of Montana, Max Baucus of Montana, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, and Ben Nelson of Nebraska voted against bringing the bill to the floor; Republican Sens. Richard Lugar, Lisa Murkowski, and Robert Bennett voted for it. The vote was 55-41. It’s a sad world when Lisa Murkowski has more political courage than Jon Tester. Well, at least progressives can start whittling down their list of which Democrats they will support in 2012.

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The Dream Act is Dead

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The Dream Act is Dead

The U.S. Senate has failed us again. In a 55-41 vote, the Dream Act, an immigration reform measure aimed to grant citizenship to undocumented youth who attend college, has effectively been killed. The “yea” votes failed to surpass the 60 that would topple a Republican filibuster. Keep in mind that many Democrats also broke rank to voted against the bill, including Senator Max Baucus and Senator Kay Hagan. Proponents of the bill suggest that the Dream Act will be a key campaign issue in the 2012 election. The New York Times: The Senate on Saturday blocked a bill that would create a path to citizenship for certain illegal immigrant students who came to the United States as children, completed two years of college or military service and met other requirements including passing a criminal background check. The vote, 55-41 in favor of the bill, effectively kills the measure for this year, and its fate beyond that is uncertain. Most immediately, the measure would have helped grant legal status to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant students and recent graduates whose lives are severely restricted because they are illegal residents, though many have lived in the United States for nearly their entire lives. Young Hispanic men and women filled the spectator galleries of the Senate, many of them wore graduation caps and tassels in a symbol of their support for the bill. And they held hands in a prayerful gesture as the clerk called the roll. Read more Related Entries December 17, 2010 Tales From the Clink With Julian Assange December 17, 2010 Facebook Finds Your Face

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Today the Senate tries to get much work done, as the lame duck session comes to a close — which includes Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the DREAM Act and the START Treaty. I wonder if the media will hold the GOP up to the same bipartisan standards as they do the Democratic party? I know Villagers were very happy that millionaires got their tax cuts, thereby raising the national debt which happens to be the Tea Party Holy Grail with no real visible resistance. Now after getting their unpaid tax cuts the GOP then torpedoed the trillion dollar appropriations bill that Republicans helped craft and which contained a food safety bill because it had earmarks that they negotiated into it. Andrea Mitchell was quite giddy on Friday as she discussed how Harry Reid got played at the game of ‘chess” after he had already secured the votes from the Republican side, before they were against the bill. Doesn’t that sound like bipartisan sabotage? I expect if Democrats don’t bow down to the GOP because they won the House after the midterms, even after the huge tax bill compromise, the media will attack Dems for not being bipartisan. Or when Republicans destroy legislation it’s because they are principled, but Democrats are just Dirty F*&king Hippies. Digby adds: Meanwhile, here’s a little preview for you about how the implementation of the health care bill is going to go: A confluence of facts and events helped McConnell convince senior appropriators in his own party — people who, like he, don’t fundamentally oppose the earmarking process — to back off the omnibus, according to a Republican leadership aide. Part of it was that, though bipartisan, the bill itself included funding for key Democratic priorities that in the current political environment no Republican supports, or wants to be accused of supporting. The omnibus included $1 billion in spending to implement the health care law — a provision no Republican wanted to de facto support. “Health care money helped a lot….it added on to the urgency,” the aide said. So, will they shut down the government over health care? I don’t see why not. After all, deficits are the most serious threat to the nation since Hitler and the only weapon we have to fight them are cuts in “entitlements”. And while I think the President wants more than anything to preserve his signature accomplishment, they have every reason to believe he won’t fight to the death for it. In any case, they can certainly use it as leverage. I don’t know what they want more than to force Obama to dismantle his own legacy, but dismantling Roosevelt’s might do in a pinch. And what will happen when the debt ceiling fight comes up? What will Republicans want President Obama to give up in that fight? I shudder at the thought.

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Matthews and Guests Laugh at Michele Bachmann Being Named to House Intelligence Committee

Chris Matthews and four liberal male guests had a nice laugh Friday over the announcement that Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) has been named to serve on the House Intelligence committee. Viewers are advised to prepare themselves for a truly disgraceful level of sexism displayed on MSNBC's “Hardball” (video follows with transcript and commentary): read more

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By Asgard’s Hammer! Far-righty whities mighty uptighty about black actor playing Norse god

enlarge Hey, fellow white guys — don’t these characters make you feel proud ? After all, that’s what they’re supposedly about — “white pride”: A US white supremacist group has called for a boycott of the Kenneth Branagh-directed superhero movie Thor on the grounds that a black actor has been cast in the role of a Norse god. The Council of Conservative Citizens is upset that London-born Idris Elba, star of The Wire and BBC detective series Luther as well as a number of Hollywood films, is to play deity Heimdall in the Marvel Studios feature. The group, which opposes inter-racial marriage and gay rights, has set up a website, boycott-thor.com to set out its opposition to what it sees as an example of leftwing social engineering. “It [is] well known that Marvel is a company that advocates for leftwing ideologies and causes,” the site reads. “Marvel frontman Stan ‘Lee’ Lieber boasts of being a major financier of leftwing political candidates. Marvel has viciously attacked the Tea Party movement, conservatives and European heritage. “Now they have taken it one further, casting a black man as a Norse deity in their new movie Thor. Marvel has now inserted social engineering into European mythology.” The CofCC post [warning: hate site] goes on in this vein: It’s not enough that Marvel attacks conservative values and promotes the left-wing, now mythological Gods must be re-invented with black skin. It seems that Marvel Studios believes that white people should have nothing that is unique to themselves. Considering that a number of outright neo-Nazi organizations have adopted Asatru and other “Nordic” neo-paganisms as their official religions (most famously, perhaps, The Order among them), it’s not surprising, perhaps, that they would get all worked up at the prospect of a black face spoiling their long-awaited screen rendition of the Lords of Asgard. Especially since Heimdall is known as the “white god” and “whitest of the aesir” . It’s enough to make one rend their Klan robes. You all may recall that the CofCC was at one time a favorite cause of Trent Lott’s , and was a big supporter of Haley Barbour’s run to the Mississippi governorship . Then there was Ann Coulter, claiming in her latest screed that the CofCC had been unfairly defamed and mischaracterized: In her latest foaming-mouth tome — Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America, released on Jan. 6 — Coulter spends the better part of three pages defending a group called the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), which The New York Times had described as a “thinly veiled white supremacist organization.” Coulter begs to differ. The CCC, Coulter opines, is “a conservative group” that has unfairly been branded as racist “because some of the directors of the CCC had, decades earlier, been leaders of a segregationist group.” “There is no evidence on its Web page that the modern incarnation of the CCC supports segregation,” she says. “Apart from some aggressive reporting on black-on-white crimes — the very crimes that are aggressively hidden by the establishment media — there is little on the CCC website suggesting” that the group is racist. Indeed, its main failing is “containing members who had belonged to a segregationist group thirty years earlier.” … [T]o Ann Coulter, there is “no evidence” on its website that the CCC “supports segregation.” Mostly, she says, the group — which was formed from the debris of the White Citizens Councils that Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall once called “the uptown Klan” — is about “a strong national defense, the right to keep and bear arms, the traditional family, and an ‘America First’ trade policy.” Indeed, she says, The New York Times and other critics of the CCC are simply liberals “who have no principles.” In reality, this is only the most recent confirming example of the CofCC’s naked white-supremacist ideology: The CCC’s columnists have written that black people are “a retrograde species of humanity,” and that non-white immigration is turning the U.S. population into a “slimy brown mass of glop.” Its website has run photographic comparisons of pop singer Michael Jackson and a chimpanzee. It opposes “forced integration” and decries racial intermarriage. It has lambasted black people as “genetically inferior,” complained about “Jewish power brokers,” called gay people “perverted sodomites,” and even named the late Lester Maddox, the baseball bat-wielding, arch-segregationist former governor of Georgia, “Patriot of the Century.” One day, the CCC ran photos on its home page of accused Beltway snipers John Muhammad and John Malvo, 9/11 conspirator Zacharias Moussaoui and accused shoe-bomber Richard Reed. “Notice a Pattern Here?” asked a caption underneath the four photos. “Is the face of death black after all?” On another occasion, its website featured a photo of Daniel Pearl, the “Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter” who had just been decapitated by Islamic terrorists. In the photo, Pearl was shown with his “mixed-race wife, Marianne.” The headline above the couple’s picture was stunning even for the CCC: “Death by Multiculturalism?” The CCC Arkansas chapter ran an essay waxing nostalgic for the days “when racial separation was the norm.” And we wax nostalgic for the days when apologizing for white supremacists meant the death of your mainstream career.

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Fur Flies As Canadian Politician Drapes Family In Coyote Skins And Fur Blankets

Liberal MP Justin Trudeau’s Christmas Card. The blanket is a bit much… Up-and-coming politician and son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau Justin Trudeau says “it’s just a Christmas card.” That’s like former Governor General Michaelle Jean downing her bite of seal heart and calling it “just a snack.” It’s not just a card, it’s a statement. The Montreal Gazette … Read the full story on TreeHugger

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GOP threatens to hold START hostage over ‘don’t ask’ repeal

Click here to view this media As the repeal of the military’s gay ban edges closer, Republicans are finding more ways to derail the effort. Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) announced on the Senate floor Friday that many of his Republican colleagues may vote against the new START nuclear treaty with Russia if Democrats move forward with a plan to vote on “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal Saturday. “I want to say to our presiding officer that what’s happened over the course of the last 12 hours is by filing cloture last night on ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ and on the DREAM Act during a lame duck session in the middle of a START treaty, what it says is that Republicans — and I don’t even like to use partisan labels here — but Republicans, ‘y’all need to rise up above partisanship and deal with foreign policy in a bipartisan way, but in the midst of that, we’re going to throw some partisan issues in here that our campaign promises we made over the course of this last year as we ran for election.’” Corker said. “I have to tell you what this has done. I’ve been in three meetings this morning. What’s happening is it poisons the well on this debate on something that’s very, very important. I don’t want to see that happen. I’m not someone who comes down here and says fiery things to terrorize and divide. But I’m hoping that saner minds will prevail,” he said. “These issues that have been brought forth are absolutely partisan political issues, brought forth to basically accommodate activist groups around this country,” he continued. “I’m hoping that those will be taken down or I don’t think the future of the START treaty over the next several days is going to be successful… I’m hoping that’s going to change.” The Washington Post ‘s Greg Sargent noted that he has heard rumors for days that Republicans would use “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal as an excuse not to pass START. “This isn’t really a threat on Corker’s part,” Sargent wrote. “Rather, he’s saying — in a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger way — that his GOP colleagues will be less likely to support START unless Reid drops his plan for DADT and DREAM votes right away.”

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