Tom Watson

We Did Overcome: Hillary's Landmark Speech

Lyndon Johnson's journey from the political precincts of segregated rural Texas to the moment in 1965 when he told the American nation "we shall overcome" was a long one, yet the great moments of advances in freedom are best seen in the changes, in the evolution of thinking. The long struggle for equality in sexual orientation doesn't hold the same century-long existential question for the country as a whole, but it has nonetheless been an accelerating freight train of social change in the last decade, a welcome success in the process of smoothing of the rougher, unfair, immoral edges of our society. And the fragrant, flowering success of the gay and lesbian rights movement has given us all proof in dark challenging times that there still exists a willingness in the American spirit to rethink ourselves, to stride into the future with purpose, and to pursue a more perfect union.

And last week, the Obama Administration provided its LBJ speech in that long struggle - and signaled its evolving commitment to linking gay rights to its wider human rights agenda. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, herself a non-supporter (yet) of full gay marriage and a one-time supporter of the Clinton White House Defense of Marriage Act, threw both her not inconsiderable personal international stardom and the full weight of U.S. foreign policy behind supporting equality for homosexuals - and more importantly, condemning those nations who turn a blind eye to anti-gay violence.

Against the backdrop of the ongoing Republican reality show mess that passes for that sad, obstructionist party's nomination process, the speech didn't get the domestic media play it deserved. Yet it marked a high point of the Obama Administration, and showed the keen coordination that has become the extraordinary relationship between President Obama and Secretary Clinton, formerly bitter rivals. Speaking at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Clinton formally declared the fight against discrimination against homosexuals a key priority of U.S. foreign policy.

"Today, I want to talk about the work we have left to do to protect one group of people whose human rights are still denied in too many parts of the world today," she said. "In many ways, they are an invisible minority."

Then she took dead aim:

“Gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights. It is a violation of human rights when people are beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation, or because they do not conform to cultural norms about how men and women should look or behave. It is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay, or allow those who harm gay people to go unpunished.”

In a word: bravo! It's hard to beat the reaction of Dan Savage (with his implicit political message) in HuffPo: "The check I was planning to write to Obama's reelection campaign just acquired another zero."

At Feministing, Easha Pandit praised the speech, especially its muscular and clear-eyed culture message.

I particularly value the connection of social justice issues to human rights language. It’s a powerful statement. This language and the leverage of American diplomatic efforts are vitally important, they give the issue visibility and legitimacy. I particularly appreciated Secretary Clinton’s call for the freedom of expression. She said,

“It is violation of human rights when people are beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation, or because they do not conform to cultural norms about how men and women should look or behave.”'

Pandit rightly pointed out that U.S. domestic policy still has a ways to go before both anti-gay violence and discrimination disappear from these shores, politely emphasizing the Obama Administration's own slow boat evolution. Yet radio host and gay rights activist Sandip Roy saw a clear lack of hypocritical nagging in Secretary Clinton's landmark speech.

But the most interesting (and un-American) part of the speech was that she didn't use her speech to set up the United States as any kind of beacon for human rights or get on a moral high horse. She acknowledged that the American record was "far from perfect." She didn't use her bully pulpit to just trumpet the Obama administration's own record -- for example, the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

She actually looked abroad for inspiration -- to South Africa, Colombia, Mongolia, and India:

"To highlight one example, the Delhi High Court decriminalised homosexuality in India two years ago, writing, and I quote, 'If there is one tenet that can be said to be an underlying theme of the Indian constitution, it is inclusiveness.'"

That's noteworthy. When foreign leaders decide they need to acknowledge inspiration from India in a speech, they don't usually look to the Delhi High Court. Their speechwriters do a quick search on "Famous Quotes from Mahatma Gandhi" instead.

Secretary Clinton's address in Geneva was strong, dramatic and historic. But it was also given more import with the release of a White House memorandum over President Obama's signature that explicitly ties the U.S. emphasis on human rights to gay rights in our foreign policy. While American foreign policy in general in far from a perfect expression of freedom and civil rights, this is a time for applause and good feeling. Compare Secretary Clinton's address and the sickening, gay-baiting pseudo-Christian political ad released this week by former GOP frontrunner Rick Perry and you'll glimpse the vast contrast between the team we have - and their potential successors. As Leslie Gabel-Brett of Lambda Legal said: "A vision of equality and human rights for LGBT people has taken hold, and the number and power of those who promote that vision is growing. It may be a heavy boulder up a steep hill, but many people are pushing history toward the full recognition of LGBT human rights under the law at home and around the world."

Is there a more noble goal for a superpower's foreign policy?

Counterproductive and Stupid

"What is being done to Bradley Manning is ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid on the part of the Department of Defense."
- P.J. Crowley

To pure open government advocates and many anti-war progressives, Private Bradley Manning is a prisoner of conscience, held without trial in solitary confinement in the Quantico brig for allegedly providing a vast store of secret U.S. government documents to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. To the right (and much of the military), he's a traitor, pure and simple - the supplier of secrets to American enemies all too happy to use them against the nation.

I think Manning was legitimately sickened by what he saw in America's endless, grinding war policy, but wildly misguided in his methods. The massive leak of secret gigabytes wasn't a whistleblower's case against the state's wrong-doing - an argument against crime or policy; it was vast spray-painted vandalism, devoid of a message or a real goal. And Manning's alleged choice of a partner could not have been more disastrous for the 23-year-old Army private. Assange has turned a promising new form of journalism and distribution that may have eventually promoted more open government into a widely-loathed platform of preening, anarchistic nonsense, tarred by anti-Semitism, sex abuse charges, and an increasingly insular and paranoid cult of personality. While the brave-but-misguided Manning wastes away in the brig, the posing WikiLeaks czar reworks images of himself as Che Guevara into T-shirts for sale.

This does not excuse the American government, nor its Democratic President, from responsibility in the Manning case. Reading the accounts of Manning's confinement leaves little doubt that he is the target of some rather special incarceration tactics designed to break him down emotionally, and cause him to assist the Obama Administration in its apparently still-active movement toward prosecuting WikiLeaks. Both the treatment of Manning and the pursuit of Federal charges against WikiLeaks and Assange are grave political mistakes - and the former is a serious ethical failing.

The treatment of Private Manning is well-documented. He is confined to his spartan cell 23 hours each day. He is not allowed to exercise. His contacts with the outside world are severely limited. Much of his treatment is attributed to suicide prevention, yet a United Nations anti-torture investigator has submitted an inquiry about Manning to the  State Department, as did Amnesty International to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Last week, Manning's lawyer released a letter from the prisoner in which he describes how he has been "left to languish under the unduly harsh conditions of max [security] custody" ever since he was brought from Kuwait to Virginia in July last year. From The Guardian's coverage:

The most graphic passage of the letter is Manning's description of how he was placed on suicide watch for three days from 18 January. "I was stripped of all clothing with the exception of my underwear. My prescription eyeglasses were taken away from me and I was forced to sit in essential blindness."

Manning writes that he believes the suicide watch was imposed not because he was a danger to himself but as retribution for a protest about his treatment held outside Quantico the day before. Immediately before the suicide watch started, he said guards verbally harassed him, taunting him with conflicting orders.

When he was told he was being put on suicide watch, he writes, "I became upset. Out of frustration, I clenched my hair with my fingers and yelled: 'Why are you doing this to me? Why am I being punished? I have done nothing wrong.'"

He also describes the experience of being stripped naked at night and made to stand for parade in the nude, a condition that continues to this day. "The guard told me to stand at parade rest, with my hands behind my back and my legs spaced shoulder-width apart. I stood at parade rest for about three minutes … The [brig supervisor] and the other guards walked past my cell. He looked at me, paused for a moment, then continued to the next cell. I was incredibly embarrassed at having all these people stare at me naked."

Too often since 2001, our government had made decisions in which security transcends our humanity. These decisions are, in effect, our decisions - from the disastrous and immoral Iraq invasion to the abandonment of our deeply-held judicial principles at Guantanamo Bay. I am generally a defender of President Obama and - in the main - fairly positive about his tenure in office thus far. Hell, I've been flayed as an abject apologist by lefty friends. I admire the President. But in no area am I more disappointed with the candidate I voted for rather proudly in 2008 than in the realm of civil liberties. I thought Barack Obama would lift the moral fog of the 9/11's fear-tinged national security hangover. He has not yet chosen to do so, preserving - and in some cases, extending - the security-driven abuses of the Bush era, punishing whistleblowers, and simply ignoring several of his most prominent campaign promises.

Yesterday, the White House fired State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley for saying out loud at an MIT forum on Friday what most on the diplomacy side of the Federal government's foreign policy apparatus believe: that the treatment of Bradley Manning is "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid." It's not as if Crowley, an Air Force veteran, is a huge fan of Manning's actions or WikiLeaks; indeed he also told the panel "nonetheless, Bradley Manning is in the right place," and "there is sometimes a need for secrets ... for diplomatic progress to be made."

Yet Crowley's remarks - ironically transmitted by a blogger in these more open days of government communications - prompted a question about Manning's treatment at the President's press conference. As CNN's Ed Henry reported, "Sources close to the matter said the resignation, first reported by CNN, came under pressure from the White House, where officials were furious about his suggestion that the Obama administration is mistreating Manning, the Army private who is being held in solitary confinement in Quantico."

 In a single ill-timed move, President Obama has squelched even polite, mild public dissent in his Administration, appearing both in thrall of the security hawks who have governed too much of U.S. policy since 2001 and thin-skinned about being asked a semi-tough question at a press briefing.

That the White House would make such a move on the very eve of Secretary of State Hillary's Clinton's crucial trip to the Middle East to meet with transitional leadership in Egypt and Tunisia, and with the Libyan revolutionaries, frankly reveals just how much stock the President himself puts in message cohesion on his Bush era national security stance.

John Cole, not exactly a political enemy of the President's, may have put it most colorfully (and correctly):

You don’t screw with the national security state. They do what they want, and if you speak up, you just gotta go. So much for that team of rivals shit.

And if you are wondering why we will stay in Afghanistan for as long as Obama is President, wonder no more. The mildest disagreement with the national security state and the war pig is cause for immediate dismissal.

I am no fan of WikiLeaks and its naked political ambition, but it's impossible to justify the Obama Administration's reaction to what is a minor threat and a major opportunity to pivot U.S. policy and practice on a new axis and seize the high ground. The firing of P.J. Crowley will, I think, have repercussions well beyond a single spokesperson's tenure. And Bradley Manning just became a prisoner of conscience for many more Americans - including me.

Giving It Away on Seventh Avenue

From my column in Tina Brown's Daily Beast today on the annual Clinton Global Initiative philanthrofest at the Sheraton - turns out Mick Jagger was wrong: you can give it away on Seventh Avenue:

Six years after unveiling his Clinton Global Initiative in midtown Manhattan, Bill Clinton is happy to reel off the numbers: 1,946 commitments to social change in the world valued at $63 billion “which have already improved nearly 300 million lives.” That's almost 5  percent of the Earth's population. And those numbers will go up this year, as the usual pilgrims for social change make their way to the cool and cavernous Sheraton on Seventh Avenue to announce philanthropic deals, forge alliances, and tweet the latest star sighting.

At the center is an ex-president almost entirely unbound. In setting up CGI, gathering the world's leaders from the corporate, NGO and government spheres, and pressing for a diverse series of philanthropic commitments around the world, Bill Clinton has created a potent alternative to the cloistered, poll-driven, media-obsessed, 24-hour cycle of the 10th circle of hell known as the American Presidency.

To read the rest, dip your piggies in Da Beast.

I Love This Video

Debuted today at the Clinton Global Initiative - created by The Girl Effect, which works toward the "powerful social and economic change brought about when girls have the opportunity to participate in their society."

Midnight in Honduras

The leader of the coup in Honduras is having second thoughts, even as violence and repression continues to wrack the troubled Central American nation - and the Obama Administration struggles to find a middle path, and a new outlook for the hemisphere.

The AP reports that de facto president Roberto Micheletti, who led the military coup that packed off his elected predecessor in his pajamas at gun-point, is now open to ceding office back to the man he ousted, Manuel Zelaya. According to the report: "Zelaya left the Nicaraguan town of Ocotal, where he had settled his government-in-exile, to meet in the Nicaraguan capital with U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens, according to Kathleen Boyle, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Nicaragua. She had no information on the content of the discussions. It was unclear whether Zelaya planned to return to Ocotal, where hundreds of his supporters are camped out in shelters."

This is a good sign for settling the crisis, and restoring democracy to Honduras, where big business interests and land-owners backed the illegal, violent coup. And it's also a decent sign that the Obama Administration may be starting to eat its own cooking - putting more meat behind its condemnation of the month-old coup. Its initial plan for mediation led by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias - along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's criticism of Zelaya's Nicaraguan gambit (which appeared to work in putting pressure on the rump regime) - seemed tepid, designed to balance traditionally reactionary U.S. policy toward leftist politicians in the hemisphere with a new willingness to talk about changing the old rules.

The Administration's bi-partisan instincts are being tested as well by the latest from Senator Richard Lugar, a Republican foreign policy veteran who wrote to Secretary Clinton this week asking for a clarification of the Administration's policy in Honduras - and threatening to "delay a Senate vote on the nomination of Arturo Valenzuela to be assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, the senior diplomat in charge of Latin America at the State Department."

But another Senator, former Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry, strongly endorsed the Obama mediation route - aimed at restoring President Zelaya to power through ongoing negotiations. Meanwhile, another protester was shot in Honduras today. And the path of President Obama's first major test in this hemisphere continued to wind.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, as the Obama Administration negotiates to restore the rule of law, the foolish Heritage Foundation called the violent coup a "conservative awakening." [h/t Jeff McMahon]

Have You Ever Seen a Hangman Tie a Hangknot?

If there's one blog post you take the time to read today, it should be this one by Ezekiel Edwards on the DMIblog. Here's how it begins, but please read the whole thing. It's a stunner.

I am going to tell a brief story. Tell me whether you think it takes place in 1957 or 2007.

There is a small town of under 3,000 people. There is a high school in the town. There is a tree at the school known as the "white tree", because only white kids sit under it.

A black student asks school officials for permission to sit under the "white tree".  The student receives permission.

A group of black students then sit under the "white tree."

The next day, three nooses, in school colors, are hanging from the "white tree."

Read it all.

I'm the King of Torture (No I'm the King of Torture)

Last night in South Carolina, eight middle-aged white men - including a couple of Jesus-loving Bible-thumpers - fell over each other trying to let Republicans know that they've got that true 24 mentality.

You know, they'd go pretty darned far like that handsome, gritty Jack Bauer character, if American citizens ever found themselves in a far-fetched comic book scenario obviously dreamed up between refills from Roger Ailes' Scotch decanter high above Sixth Avenue.

The sneering curl that is Brit Hume's upper lip was wet with some kind of spook-driven desire for action when he laid things out: simultaneous attacks on three U.S. shopping malls (oh, please spare Build-A-Bear, Mr.Terrorist) rock the nation as a coordinated caravan of munitions-laden Mercedes GL-450s infiltrates underground parking garages, piloted by terrorists disguised as JC Penney shoppers (I may be misremembering a detail or two). A terrorist with detailed knowledge of another imminent and deadlier attack had been captured and taken to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. OK, Republican old men - how far would you go?

Not one of them pointed out that this Foxy scenario was awfully close to the 2002 epic Collateral Damage, starring the nation's most prominent and popular Republican who cannot be President. But most of them responded with some version of the movie's hooky tagline: "The Act Itself Wasn't Personal...HIS VENGEANCE WILL BE."

Mitt Romney: Close Gitmo?! Hell, I'll double Gitmo!

Rudy Giuliani: "Every method" that can possibly be construed as not being the T-word.

The Other Guys Nobody Knows: "I as President will authorize extreme measures." [Roughly paraphrased].

With two notable exceptions, they all did the manly-man dance of faux toughness. Tom Tancredo, the immigrant-bashing fencing contractor, actually said he was "looking for a Jack Bauer."

The exceptions to the torture bandwagon were the actual torture victim and the actual conservative. Andrew Sullivan:

Some issues really are paramount moral ones. Two candidates opposed it clearly and honorably: McCain and Paul. All the others gleefully supported it - including Brownback. He's a born-again Christian for torture. Giuliani revealed himself as someone we already know. He would have no qualms in exercising executive power brutally, no scruples or restraints. Romney would double the size and scope of Gitmo, to ensure that none of the detainees have lawyers, regardless of their innocence or guilt. That is in itself a disqualification for the presidency of the United States. A man who has open contempt for the most basic rules of Western justice has no business being president.

Then there was Mike Huckabee's canned one-liner about John Edwards and his expenses at the "beauty parlor." How subtle. Edwards is not a manly Republican type because he spends money on his coif. Say effete elitist. Whisper "gay." This as his obviously beloved wife is dying. So much for Mike Huckabee's aw-shucks nice guy conservative pose.

The Republicans with their failed national leader, their deadly pointless war, their domestic incompetence, and their endless scandals don't have much to grapple on to. The insightful Digby:

It was quite interesting watching the Republicans debate down in South Carolina tonight. I think it's clear that this group has come to fully understand that winning the GOP nomination is all about the codpiece. These guys have just spent the last fifteen minutes of the debate trying to top each other on just how much torture they are willing to inflict. They sound like a bunch of psychotic 12 year olds, although considering the puerile nature of the "24" question it's not entirely their fault.

This debate is a window into what really drives the GOP id. The biggest applause lines were for faux tough guy Giuliani demanding Ron Paul take back his assertion that the terrorists don't hate us for our freedom, macho man Huckabee talking about Edwards in a beauty parlor and the manly hunk Romney saying that he wants to double the number of prisoners in Guantanamo "where they can't get lawyers." There's very little energy for that girly talk about Jesus or "the culture of life" or any of that BS that the pansy Bush ran ran on.

See, there's nothing there to run on - so it's all slogans about slogans about 9-11 about slogans. As Jim Wolcott said (while inching his thumb toward the channel marker on the remote):

"Some of these candidates are convinced that the US can stay indefinitely in Iraq (retreat equals defeat) and confront Iran and reduce the price of gas for the average American family on their Sunday drive to the church or synagogue of their choice."

Maybe next time, the moderators will invent a better scenario - one that requires more thought. I liked the what-if dreamed up by Britt Peterson over at The Plank:

I keep imagining an alternate scenario: Chris Wallace asking, "So, if your plane had crashed on a remote island that might or might not be purgatory and/or a big science experiment and/or a figment of your imagination, and on this island, along with a lot of improbably beautiful women, some polar bears, a smoke monster, and an army of natives who are constantly trying to kidnap your women and children, was a former member of the Iraqi Army who (let's just say) knew how to use 'enhanced techniques' to get information -- and if also on that island was a conman who had stashed all the medicine that was on your plane and was refusing to give it up to a girl having an asthma attack -- and if you were a world-class surgeon with daddy issues who really, really wanted to save the day -- would you sic the Iraqi torturer on the conman in order to get the girl's inhaler? Now would you, sir?"

That's almost better than a rerun of Gilligan's Island. Almost.

Where's New Orleans?

Easter Weekend 2007, originally uploaded by codyaya.

Two long debates, 18 candidates, four hours of naked ambition. No discussion of the great domestic failure of our times - the ongoing tragedy of the official national abandonment of New Orleans.

You would expect this from the Republicans; they posed as if angling for the mantle of Reagan at his tacky and Disneyesque "library" - all that's missing is the gruesome Leninesque attraction at the center - but they're really jockeying for the legacy of George W. Bush. They want the nomination of a failed political party, one that will have to be rebuilt from scratch after its fully disgraced leader finally leaves office.

The posed as "conservatives" but more or less spewed the same tired talking points that didn't seem conservative at all (excepting Ron Paul) and aimed their manly goodness at the mythical "Daddy Party" primary voters of clueless Beltway Bubble Babushkas like Maureen Dowd.

You might expect the cold Republicans to pass on an issue that their fearless leader has actually handled less competently than the war; after all, its religious right wing reacted to the destruction with statements like this one from Repent America director Michael Marcavage [tip Americablog]:

Although the loss of lives is deeply saddening, this act of God destroyed a wicked city. From 'Girls Gone Wild' to 'Southern Decadence,' New Orleans was a city that had its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin. From the devastation may a city full of righteousness emerge.

Sure, they wouldn't actually say it, but the GOP candidates (four of whom bragged that they don't believe in evolution) embrace people like this because they know exactly how they'll vote if lied to in just the right tone.

Malign neglect is to be expected from the modern Republican Party, but where were the Democrats?

Why wasn't New Orleans front and center for the Democrats; why isn't a central issue on the campaign trail? Why don't all the candidate websites contain a plan, a proposal, the account of some working being done on behalf a great American city that is being allowed to die.

Here's a sad truth: American Idol did a better job in its recent fundraising campaign of highlighting the ongoing horror of southern Louisiana than did Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Joe Biden Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, and that talkative guy from Alaska in their nationally-televised first debate.

You know - Iraq is easy. The war is lost; it could never have been won in the first place. The troops will be coming home, and the chapter has basically be written. Iraq is a softball for the Democrats, even those who voted for authorization of force. It's an international calamity that will be felt for a generation, and we need a serious grown-up to clean up the mess. That's a quick story to tell voters.

New Orleans is much more difficult to campaign on. Yeah, the performance of the Bush Administration was criminal - but in this race, criticism on the left also demands solutions, demands results, demands collaboration and a plan. No progressive Democrat can merely run on Bush's failure in Louisiana - the base incompetence and the images of death and political abandonment have no shelf life; and Bush is not running.

Americans expect...check that...hope that Democrats can provide solutions, especially on a domestic issue. This is what we say we're good at.

My point is this: prove it.

New Orleans is failing, stagnant, dying. The do-gooders have left, the news crews have long-since packed the choppers and camera trucks. FEMA is auctioning off the trailers, some of which were never occupied. It's yesterday's news. New Orleans has half the population it did before Katrina. The drug trade has returned stronger than ever, and murders are surging. Basic health care is faltering, breaking down. the city's education system is being redrawn from the bottom up (this may be a good thing). Thousands of buildings remain abandoned. They're still pushing tourism and music (you can take a Katrina bus tour), but as RJ Eskow said this week: "It's a theme park in the middle of apocalypse." The media has moved on. The only time it shows up in a New York paper is when the Mets option a player to their Triple-A affiliate there.

If you're a top tier candidate for the Democratic nomination, you've got a big platform. You're allowed to parachute in and make some noise. You're allowed to call people out, to make bold proposals, to drag the sleepy, hung-over press corps with you.

My message to Senators Clinton, Obama, and Edwards (and you can throw in Biden and Dodd, if you'd like) is simple - this ain't the Senate. Go out and smack some people around on New Orleans. Blow off the inevitable photo opps, and start a few political fires. If a talented and deep pool of Democratic candidates for President cannot summon the political will to change the course of that wonderful city, who can?

Further, if the Democrats who want the Oval Office more than oxygen or water or sunlight can't expend their well-financed political capital to help save a dying city, to hell with 'em - for to hell, they certainly will belong.

Oxford - Turl Street

Oxford - Turl Street, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

This was the view last evening as I took a short stroll after the opening session of the Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship here in Oxford. I'm blogging the conference at onPhilanthropy, where I'm the publisher. Some tremendous ideas and personalities, so please tune in.

Meet Matthew Shepard's Mom

Over at the day job, I interviewed Judy Shepard, mother of murdered gay student Matthew Shepard, whose killing became a leading cause in the gay rights movement - check that - the civil rights movement. Here's a key quote from Judy, who mourned her son's death on a Wyoming road and then started a major foundation with her husband in his name:

 The world has changed and for the better I think.  Unfortunately, that is not what we read in the press.  At the grassroots level there is a greater understanding and a desire to make things right - especially among young people.  If I were to say more tolerant, I would be conceding that tolerance is all we are looking for.  It is acceptance that is needed.

The article discusses how Judy Shepard built the foundation, raised money and consciousness, and where she intends to take it from here. A very strong, committed woman - another modern times everyday hero.