Daily News Roundup, 12/13/07: Playing Nice For The Holidays

Remembering that Iowa voters have a history of being turned off by negative, direct, rhetorical fist-on-face contact, the Republican field (now with more Alan Keyes!) debated for the final time before the Iowa caucus yesterday afternoon and took it nice and easy on each other.

And why not? Here in the last dying days of 2007, the daggers on the GOP side are being reserved now for ads and push polls. That cars will be flyered and mailboxes will be filled with negative, anonymous information about any candidate doing well in the polls is almost a certainty. So, out in front of everyone and under the hot lights of broadcast, the candidates can smile and make jokes and come out looking like a nicer bunch of guys than everyone thought they were.

The one positive thing about the debate seems to be that actual issues were discussed. This is always a welcome change in presidential politics on either side — it doesn't sell tickets or ads and it probably doesn't bring in as many voters as performing the Character Attack Bodyslam™ but it does give the candidates the chance to hold forth on issues they know about and to explain how they would handle issues they don't know about, and I always like to see that. This does not in any way mean that everything the candidates said was true, or that everything they promised is possible, but such is presidential politics.

In these days of almost continual bad news for Republicans, you might wonder how they themselves feel about the whole situation. Are they looking at it with rose-colored glasses? Do they think the exile to the minority status wilderness is just a temporary thing and that not all is lost, or as bad as it seems?

Polls show the public holds congressional Republicans in low esteem. Boehner’s effort to craft a new agenda for Republicans remains under wraps. And in the minority leader’s own words, their fundraising “sucks.”

“Now the money sucks for two reasons,” Boehner said in a Politico interview. “People are mad at the president; they are mad at the party. And then [there is] this whole immigration fight. People just turned off the spigot.”

And there you have it. If not exactly eloquent, Minority Leader John Boehner is at least capable of describing the true trouble the Republican Party is in. I can't help but think that this isn't the kind of message control the rest of the GOP leadership is used to practicing, and that this kind of thing might lead to an even more pronounced schism at the top of the Republican Party.

Al Gore rolled into the UN Climate Conference in Bali earlier today and had a plain statement to make: the United States is currently and actively holding up the train on getting an agreement in the can. Which is true. Now things are getting a little more complicated. In response to US reticence over greenhouse gas emissions limits, Europe has stated their intention to boycott the United States' own conference on climate change if a compromise can't be engineered. I would think there would be some room to maneuver on both sides, but it also doesn't look anyone is ready to make major concessions.

In news that directly applies to me (and other bloggers), some legal happenings are bolstering support for blogging as an expression of free speech that is constitutionally protected:

The Sixth Court of Appeals in Texarkana ruled that the operator of The-Paris-site blog has a First Amendment right to anonymity in a defamation lawsuit unless the company that owns the Paris hospital can prove it has suffered actual financial losses due to his blog postings.

Having to prove damages doesn't automatically create an overarching, all-protecting safety shield for bloggers, but it is an important step because the real meat of the ruling is that the internet is just like any other medium, and that free speech on the internet is protected just like free speech in public, or anywhere.

Lastly today, I wanted to mention the 2007 Texas Progressive Alliance Gold Stars for Wednesday and Thursday. Wednesday's Gold Star is Molly Ivins. Every time I read something of hers, I am blown away and humbled. Her voice and insight into the "How" of things from her years as a reporter and her wit and candor about the "Why" of things is something that I imagine every political writer aspires to. Thus far, we all fail to find it; she is missed.

Thursday's Gold Star is progressive hero (and friend of the show) State Senator Mario Gallegos, who, in short, literally risked his life to block Voter ID. If you don't know the story, Vince's Charles Kuffner's accounting of it is concise, and we also discussed it when he was on Who's Blue. I think Gallegos is the kind of legislator we all hope to send to represent us.