DCDL

Last night at DC Drinking Liberally Thursday we got Timberlake’s to turn on MSNBC so we could watch the debate in Connecticut between Bush’s best friend among Senate Democrats, Joe Lieberman, and his primary opponent, Ned Lamont. Yes, it cut into our time for socializing, but everyone was eager to see how the challenger stood up to the senator. I was worried about Lamont for the first few minutes, but he quickly got more comfortable and easily held his own even though Lieberman is much more experienced with debating and with being on television. And in this situation, holding his own is a win.

A few more observations:

• It seemed like Lieberman got a lot more rebuttals than Lamont.
• According to Lieberman, Lamont is (1) a wild-eyed leftist who’s also (2) a closet Republican and (3) has donated to Lieberman in the past and thus agrees with him on all issues other than the war.
• A bit of belated advice for Lieberman: If your opponent’s main point is that you’re too Republican, it’s probably not the best idea to repeatedly try a debating trick (“There you go again!”) stolen from Ronald Reagan.

For coverage of the race, I’ve been reading LamontBlog (currently featuring a disturbing shirtless Cheney, but that will pass), ConnecticutBlog, and the community site My Left Nutmeg, as well as the official Lamont campaign blog.

Yesterday was the deadline for candidates to file nominating petitions for DC’s September 12 primary. I was sort of hoping that a few of the long list of Ward 3 council candidates might not make it, and thus simplify my decision, but it looks like they all got theirs in. Of course things could be worse — I could be in Ward 5, where there are 14 candidates.

Everyone has the right to run, but if we’re going to have so many candidates we really need a system that handles it better. Since there’s no runoff, a winner in the primary could end up having the support of only a small fraction of the electorate. Besides, this is a Democratic primary election in a very liberal city, so the candidates don’t disagree on much. I feel much the same annoyance I do at having to choose between dozens of brands and types of toothpaste. No doubt that makes me a foe of both capitalism and democracy.

All of us who have ever missed a deadline should spare a little sympathy for one prospective candidate:

But Ward 6 Democratic hopeful Will Cobb forgot about yesterday’s deadline.

“Holy cow, I got them sitting in my house right now,” he told a reporter after getting a call.

Cobb’s campaign manager, Jessica Strieter, raced down to the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics but arrived at 5:45 p.m., 45 minutes after the deadline.

Cobb said he had collected 560 signatures during an aggressive door-to-door campaign to replace retiring incumbent Sharon Ambrose.

I don’t imagine he’s having a very good day today. Still, keeping track of details is part of the job.

Our friends at DC for Democracy are having a bunch of DC candidates at their monthly meeting on Wednesday, July 5, at 7pm at Ben’s Chili Bowl, 1213 U St NW (U Street Metro):

Join us after your holiday weekend to learn more about the D.C. primary elections coming up in September and to hear about DC for Democracy’s endorsement plans.

Here’s the current list of candidates attending, which I’ll update as I get more information:

• Mayor: Marie Johns (warning: audio)
• Council chair: Kathy Patterson
• Ward 3: Sam Brooks, Robert Gordon, Eric Goulet
• Ward 5: Ron Magnus, Bruce Marshall, Audrey Ray, Harry Thomas Jr, Raenell Zapata (websites don’t seem to be a Ward 5 thing)
• Ward 6: Tommy Wells

Show up, have a bowl of chili, and find out more about who’s running in the September primary.

The right-wing blogosphere has whipped itself into yet another delusion-based, spittle-flecked frenzy, this time over a puff piece the New York Times published in its travel section Friday about the vacation homes of Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Glenn Greenwald has the details. It’s reminiscent of last year’s secret Islamic messages in the Flight 93 memorial, only scarier because it feeds into the extremist rhetoric the right has been increasingly using against journalists in general and the Times in particular — calling for treason prosecutions, life imprisonment, and even death. Now they’re actually saying the Times is working to help Al Qaida kill the secretary of defense and the vice president of the United States.

Today, Glenn follows up with a post titled “What is left of Malkin, Hinderaker and Horowitz’s credibility?” in which he reveals that Rumsfeld himself gave permission for the supposedly security-threatening photos to be taken. Presumably the next step is for Malkin et al. to claim that Rumsfeld has been subjected to advanced brainwashing techniques to get him to cooperate in a plot to kill himself.

Alas, the answer to Glenn’s question is that they still have just as much credibility as they ever did, but that won’t stop them from appearing on television.

Update (8:50pm): Yikes! The Times piece includes a bit of quaint history about Rumsfeld’s place:

The houses have names. Mr. Rumsfeld’s is Mount Misery and is just across Rolles Creek from a house called Mount Pleasant. On four acres, with four bathrooms, five bedrooms and five fireplaces, built in 1804, the Rumsfeld house is just barely visible at the end of a gravel drive.

Thomas M. Crouch, a broker at the Coldwell Banker office in town, says one legend attributes the name to the original owner, said to have been a sad and doleful Englishman. His merrier brother then built a house, and to put him on, Mr. Crouch supposes, named it Mount Pleasant.

But there is some historical gravity to the name, too. By 1833, Mount Misery’s owner was Edward Covey, a farmer notorious for breaking unruly slaves for other farmers. One who wouldn’t be broken was Frederick Douglass, then 16 and later the abolitionist orator. Covey assaulted him, so Douglass beat him up and escaped. Today, where the drive begins, Mount Misery seems a congenial place, with a white mailbox with newspaper delivery sleeves attached, a big American flag fluttering from a post by a split-rail fence and a tall, one-hole birdhouse of the sort made for bluebirds — although the lens in the hole suggests another function.

So Rumsfeld’s vacation house is the home of a 19th-century torturer — one who tortured Frederick Douglass? Rumsfeld isn’t responsible for former owners, of course, but it’s a bit, um, coincidental.

In the spirit of recognizing nonlame behavior from Democrats, let me say that I happened to catch Barney Frank (D-MA) on CNN’s Late Edition yesterday when it was rebroadcast on C-Span Radio, and he did a good job defending free speech. Two passages stand out.

First, Frank highlighted the selectivity of the Republican outrage about the recent story by the New York Times about the administration’s tracking of international financial transactions and the resolution the House passed condemning such stories:

As far as that’s concerned, clearly, let me give an example of the partisanship. In the Republican resolution, which they put through the House, not allowing us to amend it, not allowing us the kind of democracy that we’re fighting for in Iraq and Afghanistan, they cited a 1998 leak of how we were tracking Osama bin Laden. A terribly damaging one.

They didn’t mention who did it. Apparently it was The Washington Times. Now here’s the story. When The Washington Times, a very conservative paper, during the Clinton administration leaked apparently information or printed leaked information about how we were tracking Osama bin Laden, I don’t remember a resolution. I don’t remember a demand for going after that. So, apparently, when a conservative paper does it under a Democratic administration, ho-hum. Now, six years later, when a more liberal paper does it in a Republican administration, you get this.

I honestly, at this point, don’t know how serious the leak was. But I will say this. I have heard for some time now that we have been bragging about how we were tracking the terrorists’ financing. And I find it hard to believe that the terrorists, having read that we were tracking the financing, didn’t understand that banks were involved. Did they think we were sneaking in their caves at night and going through their pockets?

Peter King (R-NY) was representing the anti-free-speech side and reiterated his belief that the Times reporters should be prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917 — a position Greg Sargent has so far found no other members of Congress willing to support.

Later, the subject turned to the recent attempt to pass a Flag Protection Amendment to the Constitution, and Frank was able to tie it to one of the right wing’s recent targets of hysterical overreaction:

I think it’s a great mistake. It’s a failure to understand a very important principle. Support for free speech means allowing obnoxious people to do despicable things. And I’ll tell you, I can’t think of a rationale for arresting people who burn a flag that doesn’t cover those Muslims who wanted to arrest the Danish newspaper for running a cartoon that defaced and abused Mohammed.

I mean, are we saying that, well, it’s OK to degrade important religious symbols, but not a flag? You know, by the way, it’s often when people who burn a flag illegally, it’s got to be your flag. In Massachusetts, you can’t burn leaves out in the open because of purity in the air. So you certainly can’t burn a flag.

But the fact that burning a flag, that we would make that criminal, well then what is the difference between that view and those Muslims who wanted to shut down Danish newspapers? I mean, this notion, people said, well, free speech has limitations. Yes, you can[’t] endanger the safety of others. You cannot impugn, specifically, someone’s reputation with lies. But speech being offensive, that’s what free speech means. It’s very easy to be for the free speech of people with whom you agree.

King’s defense of the amendment was half-hearted and included the sentences “Obviously it’s not the most important issue facing the country” and “The country’s not going to come to an end.”

Keep up the good work, Barney!