Anyone who believes in equality and also had to sit through John McCain rhapsodizing about heterosexual marriage and family values during the last election, cringes at the thought of Log Cabin Republicans.

They support a party that doesn't support their equal treatment under the law. Despite claims to work within the party for socially progressive change, lending any support to Republicans in this day and age simply undermines equal rights and constitutional protections in this country.

How interesting, then, that the very anti-equality group I just lambasted, has successfully brought a legal challenge to the arcane and offensive Don't Ask Don't Tell Policy. Not only did they win the case, they won the case as a facial challenge - a high legal standard that requires one demonstrate that, "no set of circumstances exist under which the act would be valid." (U.S. v. Salerno, [1987])

Can't have particular facts or one sympathetic plaintiff when you make this kind of challenge. Most importantly, all sorts of tricky issues about legislative history and motive come into play under this kind of challenge. It's hard to win.

Yet they won, on due process grounds, like in Lawrence v. Texas -- the idea that this Act threatens personal liberty -- and on First Amendment grounds -- DADT also limits freedom of speech because the speech in question is banned for its content.

The big question is, does this bold move save the Log Cabin Republicans?

Right now, the House has passed the repeal of DADT and is waiting for the Senate to get up and do the same. The only problem is, Republican opposition to the measure is permanently stalling all efforts. In response, the Log Cabin Republicans spend a lot of time on their website criticizing Obama for his broken promise to repeal DADT.

Excuse me? Did any of you Log Cabin Republicans vote for Obama?

Didn't think so. In fact, chances are, there are many gay Republicans who voted for representatives that served their economic interests and not their equality interests. Many of them likely voted for Republicans who opposed Obama in his push to repeal DADT. Your own website commits to electing Republicans for Congress.

So, if you wanted Obama to be more progressive on gay rights, you should have helped him win more support in Congress and the Senate. It's an easy equation. Obama is, by all accounts, gutless when it comes to equality measures, but he certainly is going to do more than any Republican candidate in office.

If you think this comment on Log Cabin Republicans is unfair, here is a challenge to you: get newly reformed hard right-wing Republican Senator Scott Brown to commit to voting for the repeal of DADT and I will withdraw all comments about your anti-equality effects. If you want to work within the party to change the party, we need to see some evidence of the effectiveness of that approach.

Otherwise, despite your legal win -- a well-deserved legal win -- you are still an affront to all equality seeking groups.

Time.com - President Obama's political machine, Organizing for America, is MIA after two years of neglect

The president is faulting Republicans for refusing to help him turn around the sluggish economy.

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The president is faulting Republicans for refusing to help him turn around the sluggish economy.

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Filed under: Bush Administration, Democrats, Taxes, Polls, Obama Administration, Poll Watch, 2010 Elections, Congress

While some Democrats are starting to separate themselves from President Obama's call to let Bush-era tax cuts expire for the wealthy, a plurality of Americans favor the idea and that number becomes a majority when those who believe all the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire are added, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted Aug. 27-30.

Obama wants the tax cuts to end for individuals making $200,000 or more and families earning over $250,000 a year while retaining the breaks for all other Americans. But as Politics Daily's Patricia Murphy has reported, a group of Democratic moderates, concerned about the still-stagnant economy with elections approaching, are pushing to extend all the tax cuts. They aren't a majority, but may have enough votes to scuttle Obama's plans.

Forty-four percent of those surveyed favor dropping the cuts for higher-income Americans and keeping them in place for everyone else, 37 percent want to keep the cuts in place for taxpayers at all income levels and 15 percent favor letting them expire altogether.

Despite resistance among some Democratic lawmakers, 60 percent of rank-and-file Democrats favor the option of ending the cuts for high-income earners and another 19 percent favor letting them all expire.

Fifty-four percent of Republicans want to keep the cuts in place for everyone. Independents are split with 41 percent favoring the idea of dropping the cuts for high-income taxpayers while 39 percent support keeping them intact for everyone.

Read Patricia Murphy's story: Bush Tax Cuts For Wealthy Gaining Ground With Worried Democrats

In contrast to the political calculations being made by some on Capitol Hill, Gallup says, "Democrats may not be putting themselves at great political risk by allowing the tax cuts to expire for wealthy Americans. In fact, the middle ground of extending tax cuts for low- and middle-income Americans but allowing them to expire for wealthy Americans -- the Democrats' most likely proposal -- is the specific option the public prefers most."

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AP - A team of federal safety experts is heading to California to investigate an explosion and fire that destroyed dozens of homes in the hills south of San Francisco.

The president prepares for a news conference. A new report warns of the threat of homegrown terrorists. And a judge knocks down the "don't ask, don't tell" policy barring gays from openly serving in the military.

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AP - Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says President Barack Obama should speak as bluntly to the Islamists planning a mosque near the Sept. 11 attack site as he has to the minister threatening to burn the Quran.

Politico - The Fox News host will give his speaking fee from the pricey event to charity, a spokesman said.

Politico - The governor takes a moment during his flight to Asia to poke fun at the former VP candidate.

Meghan McCain has been stirring up controversy with her new book, "Dirty Sexy Politics," which tells the story of the 2008 presidential campaign through the eyes of a nominee's daughter.

McCain made a visit to the "Daily Show" on Thursday, telling host Jon Stewart that she wanted her dad to pick Joe Lieberman as his running mate. Instead, GOP nominee John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

The younger McCain has already railed against Palin on TV this week, so this time she took aim at a fellow campaign daughter -- Bristol Palin. When Stewart suggested that McCain was hard on herself in the book, she replied:

"I was not on my best behavior the whole time. I wasn't always acting like I should. But when you're sent to an image consultant and it's said that you look like a stripper and you talk bad and you're hurting the campaign, when there's a pregnant teen there, it does a little bit to your self esteem."

It was revealed that Bristol Palin was pregnant shortly after her mom was picked to run for vice president.

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The Week - Last week Gallup had a record 10-point GOP lead in its generic party matchup; this week, the two parties are tied. Is the race for control of Congress really that fluid?

AP - Belgian commission report: Witnesses say widespread clergy sexual abuse over decades led to at least 13 suicides.

Amir Taheri, New York Post

Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post
The prospects are dim but the process is right. The Obama administration is to be commended for structuring the latest rounds of Middle East talks correctly. Finally, we're leaving behind interim agreements, of which the most lamentable were the Oslo accords of 1993.The logic then was that issues so complicated could only be addressed step by step in the expectation that things get easier over time. In fact, they got harder. Israel made concrete concessions -- bringing in Yasser Arafat to run the West Bank and Gaza -- in return for which Israel received growing threats, continuous...

Eugene Robinson, Indianapolis Star

At this bleak political moment, gaining congressional power for progressives might seem like pie in the sky. More and more desperate efforts are underway to stave off a Republican takeover of Congress. But the necessity of trying to prevent right-wing rule on Capitol Hill should not obscure the need to win more seats for genuine progressives.

Ever since early last year, the Obama administration has chipped away at the Democratic Party's base -- undermining its capacity to mobilize for the midterm election -- while sometimes courting Republican leaders to the point of absurdity. Consider this news account from the New York Times a few days ago: "Though liberal and labor groups have been agitating for public works spending, Mr. Obama and his advisers are emphasizing business tax cuts in hopes of drawing Republican support -- or, failing that, to show that Republicans are so determined to thwart Mr. Obama that they will oppose even ideas that they and most business groups, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, advocate."

Huh?

Or consider the Washington Post report Thursday on "Obama's proposal for $180 billion in fresh infrastructure spending and business tax breaks." The newspaper explained that "his plan would make permanent a corporate tax credit for research and allow companies to deduct from their taxes this year and next the entire cost of whatever they spend in new investments -- ideas pulled directly from GOP playbooks."

Progressives need to fight back -- today, tomorrow and every day. The electoral struggle is just one part of what's needed to build effective social movements, but it's an important part. And that effort should include primary battles to elect real progressives to Congress.

One such election is coming up Tuesday in Rhode Island, where progressive populist David Segal is running against corporate Democratic insiders to fill the seat of retiring Congressman Patrick Kennedy. For many years, Segal has been organizing to challenge banks and other corporate behemoths on behalf of working people and the poor. Although he's been in the state legislature for four years and on the Providence City Council before that, Segal isn't a politician nearly so much as a committed activist whose work has won him wide support from labor unions and many other progressive organizations in the current campaign.

"It's a slap in the face to American workers that our current trade agreements give corporations incentives to lay off U.S. workers and move jobs abroad where they can pay their workers sub-poverty wages and wreak havoc on the environment," David Segal said on Labor Day. "These job losses aren't an accident or the result of a force of nature: they are the direct result of the obscene power that corporations wield over our government. Corporations and the extremely wealthy spend tens of millions of dollars each year to ensure that our trade agreements guarantee their profits, even if it's at the expense of millions of our working families."

Of course Segal is being heavily outspent by the corporate opposition. He's a distinct underdog, but -- whatever the Sept. 14 election results -- the work behind his campaign is an inspiring model for grassroots, volunteer-driven approaches to fighting for electoral power.

More broadly, progressive populism is essential in the quest for economic and social justice -- a vast worldview away from the "populism" flaunted by Tea Bag boosters and the like.

"It's necessary to restate the solid principles of populism and reassert its true spirit, because both are now being severely perverted by corporate manipulators and a careless media establishment," Jim Hightower wrote early this summer. "To these debasers of the language, any politicos or pundits who tap into any level of popular anger (toward Barack Obama, liberals, the IRS, poor people, unions, gays, immigrants, Hollywood, community organizers, environmentalists et al.) get a peel-off 'populist' label slapped onto their lapels -- even when their populist pose is funded by and operates as a front for one or another corporate interest. That's not populism, it's rank hucksterism -- disguising plutocrats as champions of the people."

Hightower's assessment is true today, and it will be true the morning after Election Day: "Now is the time for progressives to reassert their populist beliefs and bona fides, for we're living in a teachable moment in which it's possible to reach most Americans with an aggressive and positive approach to achieving a higher level of economic and political democracy."

There's a viable -- and essential -- alternative to right-wing Republicans and corporate Democrats. Real progressive populism is grounded in humane values, solidarity, caring and organizing. We can put up a fight. And we can win.

The Rahm Emanuel strategy was to cut deals with power brokers in Washington and ignore what liberals wanted. This was best illustrated when he called liberals "fucking retarded" for trying to push for real change. His attitude was that you could ignore progressive demands because - where could they go?!

Well, it turns out that the answer to that question is - home. Now there are several polls out showing a 5 to 10% difference between registered Democratic voters and likely Democratic voters. Democrats are basically tied with the Republicans on registered voters. But they get clobbered on likely voters. Why? Because voters who are disillusioned aren't likely to vote.

Why are they disillusioned Rahm might ask when we gave them health care reform and financial reform? The answer is because they're not nearly as dumb as you think they are. You think you can just call something reform and people are going to buy it? That's not going to fly, especially in the new media age.

We all know that Obama struck the same exact deals with the big drug companies that Bush did. Obama had campaigned against those specific agreements, but once he got into office he was convinced that we couldn't upset those deals and that we just had to shoot for a tiny bit of change. That we couldn't change the way Washington ran, we could just play the old Washington game a little better. That is the essence of Rahm Emanuel.

And those games have now left the Democrats with a gigantic deficit in voter enthusiasm. Rahm was supposed to be some sort of political genius. But it has turned out to be the exact opposite. He blew it. He had no idea what he was talking about and it looks like his party is about to lose a massive amount of seats. Why? Because Rahm was wrong, completely and utterly wrong.

Will they learn the right lesson from this and actually try to deliver on change in the next two years after this election? Very likely not. Instead, they will get someone new to come and whisper in their ear that the president must play the same old Washington games again and that the election was a sign to go further right. That'll be another disaster and you can trace that back to the original Rahmism - the belief that power must be accommodated, real change is not possible and that your own voters should be ignored. That is what is 100% wrong and what got the Democrats into this mess in the first place.

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AP - President Barack Obama has chosen one of his longtime economic advisers, Austan Goolsbee, to be the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, a White House official said.

In the aftermath of the catastrophic BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Fox News commentator and 2012 GOP presidential wannabe Sarah Palin talked tough from the sanctity of her Facebook and Twitter accounts about playing "hardball" with BP executives. "[V]erify what BP reports," she proffered in a Facebook posting riddled with distortions of her own record with Big Oil in Alaska. "Demand answers."

Palin rattles off a good game about Big Oil and lobbyists. Yet government documents provided by both the Senate Office of Public Records and the Federal Elections Commission reveal that Randy Scheunemann -- Palin's most ardent supporter in the McCain camp during her disastrous performance in the 2008 presidential campaign -- not only remains on Palin's payroll as a well-paid foreign policy advisor, but that he served as a lobbyist for BP Amoco from 1999-2000, receiving payments through his former lobbying firm the Mercury Group.

Scheunemann later served BP's interests as an agent for the so-called Caspian Alliance -- a consortium of global oil interests pursuing petro-profits in the former Soviet republics (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan) that border the Caspian Sea.

According to sources close to the Palin camp, Scheunemann plays a major role in advising Palin on foreign policy issues as she positions herself for a run at the White House in 2012. As Ben Smith of Politico pointed out, it was Scheunemann who drafted Palin's first major foreign policy speech in Hong Kong a year ago. Scheunemann accompanied Palin overseas to that engagement.

FEC records indicate that Palin's political action committee, SarahPAC, is paying Scheunemann's Virginia-based Orion Strategies $10,000 per month and has expended $90,000 to date for his services.

As the media focus on Palin disintegrates into discussions about Spanx girdles, alleged remarks about her daughter Bristol's marriage plans and the mistaken identity of her infant son at a campaign event two years ago, Palin is readying herself for a major 9/11 rally this weekend with Glenn Beck in Anchorage (with a second one in her hometown of Wasilla) at which she will be shoring up her foreign policy credentials as the most vital mouthpiece of the conservative, evangelical wing of the Republican Party.

It was Scheunemann -- a major figure in Neo-Conservative foreign policy circles -- who was tasked with the schooling of Palin in foreign affairs after she was selected by John McCain as his running mate in August of 2008. And, perhaps most importantly, it was Scheunemann who rescued the stumbling candidate from a psychological tailspin following Palin's spectacular failure in her series of interviews with Katie Couric. During Palin's prep for her vice presidential debate, it was Scheunemann who served as Palin's "horse whisperer" (not Mark McKinnon as was widely reported) as he played Joe Biden's role at the McCain compound in the Arizona desert.

Scheunemann's lobbying efforts on behalf of several foreign governments during the Bush II years -- most notably Georgia, Macedonia and Taiwan -- have drawn criticism from across the political spectrum. Moreover, Scheunemann played a critical role in engineering the war in Iraq as director of the New American Century and as executive director of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He also served as a special advisor on Iraq to Bush II's discredited Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Former UN Weapons inspector Scott Ritter described Scheunemann as a "very dangerous figure" and a "classic behind-the-scenes player in the Neo-Conservative cabal."

Conservative political commentator and communications director for Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, was even more direct in his condemnation of Scheunemann:

He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter was equally dismissive. He described Scheunemann simply as a "second rater" in a special segment of Countdown with Keith Olbermann devoted to Scheunemann's role in Georgia.

Scheunemann's presence in the McCain campaign provided a constant source of bad press for the GOP nominee in his failed bid for the White House. Of particular embarrassment to McCain was a memorandum released during the campaign linking Scheunemann to war profiteering in Iraq. He was also implicated in a pay-for-access scheme involving the Bush Library.

According to New York Times reporters Elisabeth Bumiller and Larry Rohter, many members of the GOP's "realist" or "pragmatic" foreign policy wing of the party -- one that included Colin Powell, Brent Scowcroft, George Schultz, James Baker and even Henry Kissinger -- also expressed concerns about Scheunemann's role in the McCain campaign.

During the 1990s, Scheunemann served as a foreign policy advisor to Senator Bob Dole and later as a National Security Aide for former Senate Majority leader Trent Lott. It was through his work in the Senate, according to former senior advisors in the McCain campaign, that Scheunemann forged a relationship with McCain and McCain's chief-of-staff Mark Salter. He joined a plethora of controversial lobbyists -- most notably Rick Davis, Charlie Black, and Wayne Berman -- who served as senior advisors to the McCain campaign.

In addition to the lobbying controversies that trailed him, Scheunemann proved to be a highly divisive figure during the campaign. A search of McCain campaign emails by senior staff led to the discovery that it was Scheunemann who had leaked information to then-New York Times columnist (and Scheunemann's Neo-Con buddy) Bill Kristol critical of the inner-workings of the McCain campaign, and in particular, attacking senior advisors. There was a slapstick attempt to fire Scheunemann over the leaks--he bragged at the end of the campaign that he had his final pay stubs. Scheunemann then became enmeshed in a media battle with his McCain campaign nemesis Steve Schmidt following the election as Scheunemann defended Palin against charges levied against her in a celebrated Vanity Fair account of Palin by Todd Purdum.

While the tete-a-tete with Schmidt made for entertaining political theater, of far greater significance is the positioning of Palin's foreign policy views since the campaign. She is certainly the horse on whom the Neo-Cons are placing their bets in the 2012 GOP presidential sweepstakes. Palin has crafted a hard-line position in Afghanistan and the Middle East and has supported NATO going to war against Russia to protect international oil interests in the region. Scheunemann is clearly the architect of these policies.

Leave it to Pat Buchanan to make the compelling summation of Scheunemann's :

"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence...a free people ought to be constantly awake," Washington warned in his Farewell Address. Our Founding Father was warning against the Randy Scheunemanns among us, agents hired by foreign powers to deceive Americans into fighting their wars. And none dare call it treason.

Award-winning writer and filmmaker Geoffrey Dunn's book The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power will be published by St. Martin's Press.

Politico - Simon says the pastor, the media and the general are all all missing the most important point.

Politico - There are plenty of questions that Obama could face in his Friday news conference.