No Shame, No Sense Of Irony

BooMan points out today that 47 years after Dr. King gave his famous "I Have A Dream" speech in 1963 of non-violent cooperation and racial harmony, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin have kidnapped the day to spout their crap at an NRA rally on August 28 at the Lincoln Memorial.

The National Rifle Association, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are using the anniversary and site of Dr. Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington for what they are calling a "Restoring Honor Rally."

Calling the date of this rally "divine providence," Beck, the talk show host, has partnered with the NRA and Palin to help him generate interest in the August 28 event. The NRA placed a four-page advertisement for the event outside its monthly magazine, First Freedom. The ad is at www.bradycampaign.org/xshare/bcam/gunlobby/nra/NRA-1st-Freedom-Beck-Palin.pdf.

In a blog just posted, Brady Campaign President Paul Helmke today wrote:

"this is the same Glenn Beck, a life-member of the NRA, who has insulted the Anti-Defamation League; challenged Keith Ellison, a Muslim who had just been elected to Congress to ‘prove to me you are not working with our enemies;' repeatedly called President Obama ‘a racist' and accused him of having ‘ a deep-seated hatred for white people.' 

Glenn Beck is welcome to hold his little "We hate President Hussein" rally wherever he wants because it's Constitutional right to do so, but invoking the name of Dr. King  to justify his hateful rhetoric is an insult not only to people of color but every American and every human being who believes in equality.

But of course, he has an agenda to sell.

Fancy Farm Fracas

Kentucky's biggest political event -- Fancy Farm -- was over the weekend and after last year's Jack Conway swearing incident (technically Fancy Farm is the St. Jerome Catholic Church picnic event in Graves County) you'd figure Conway would have kept a low profile.

Not this guy.  He came out swinging.

"There seems to be an emerging theme for Rand Paul and the Republicans this year," Conway said. "And that theme is, 'accidents happen.'"

So began a call-and-response routine with the crowd at the event that called for them to repeat the phrase, which came from Paul's infamous explanation for the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Conway has already suggested that Paul is too extreme for Kentucky. Now he's focusing, his campaign says, on the times Paul has been forced to move toward the establishment Republican view on an issue since he handily won his primary running against the mainstream Kentucky GOP, led of course by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Though McConnell stood with Paul all day today and offered strong praise for him both at Fancy Farm and the Republican breakfast Saturday morning, Conway tried to reopen the wounds from the primary, when Paul defeated the man McConnell wanted to win the Republican nomination. Democrats hope that residual anger at the primary among more moderate Republicans could turn them into Conway voters.

"What did Mitch McConnell tell the Republican Party the day after the primary?" Conway quipped in his speech. "Accidents happen!" the crowd dutifully replied. 

Now there's a bumper sticker.  "Accidents Happen!"

Good for Conway to stick it to Paul.  He just might pull this off after all.  Lord knows we need him to, because the thought of Rand Paul in the Senate causes bits of my soul to scream in protest.

Good ol' Yellow Dog has a great report from Fancy Farm too.

Mid-morning Saturday, the drive along Highway 80 to Fancy Farm foreshadowed the afternoon's speeches. Along the eight-mile stretch of two-lane between drought-stressed fields of brown corn and stunted soybeans, Jack Conway for Senate signs dominated. I counted more than 100 Conway signs to zero Ron Paul signs between I-24 and St. Jerome's Catholic Church.

Conway's speech was strong, on target, passionate and real. It came as a relief after his passive and false-sounding performances at the Marshall County Bean Supper Friday night and the Graves County Democratic Breakfast that morning. I'd crossed my fingers that he was saving the fire for Fancy Farm, and I was right. 

And Hillbilly Report's Jim Pence completely WTFPWNED some teabagger puke.  Here's his video of Conway's speech:



Good stuff from both of them.  Dems were out in force this weekend and they definitely showed Rand Paul a thing or two.

The Kroog Versus The State Of The States

Paul Krugman argues that the refusal of Republicans and ConservaDems to provide more help to state governments is wiping out the effects of the stimulus and the results are getting truly ugly now.

It’s crucial to keep state and local government in mind when you hear people ranting about runaway government spending under President Obama. Yes, the federal government is spending more, although not as much as you might think. But state and local governments are cutting back. And if you add them together, it turns out that the only big spending increases have been in safety-net programs like unemployment insurance, which have soared in cost thanks to the severity of the slump.

That is, for all the talk of a failed stimulus, if you look at government spending as a whole you see hardly any stimulus at all. And with federal spending now trailing off, while big state and local cutbacks continue, we’re going into reverse.

But isn’t keeping taxes for the affluent low also a form of stimulus? Not so you’d notice. When we save a schoolteacher’s job, that unambiguously aids employment; when we give millionaires more money instead, there’s a good chance that most of that money will just sit idle.

And what about the economy’s future? Everything we know about economic growth says that a well-educated population and high-quality infrastructure are crucial. Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their ports and their schools. Yet in America we’re going backward.

How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.

The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere. 

That's true.  We are going in reverse now.  Increased federal spending is being canceled out by sharply decreased state spending, and remember: Republicans apparently want as many states to go bankrupt as possible to "teach them a lesson" or something, particularly the biggest blue state of them all, California.

Thirty years after Reagan said "Government is the problem" and then promptly expanded the national debt by cutting taxes on the rich and boosting government spending, Republicans have become increasingly blind to government providing any useful service at all.  We don't need schools, we have home schooling.  We don't need police, we have the Second Amendment.  We don't need social services, we have church charities.  We don't need public transportation, we have SUVs.  We don't need regulatory agencies or oversight, we have the free markets.  We don't need roads, streetlights or sanitation because those cuts happen to those people who live in urban hellholes, not in our neighborhood.

Sharron Angle knows exactly who she's talking to when she said that she considered government to be a false God.  Millions of Americans feel the same way.  "Why should I pay taxes?" has become the central question of the last quarter-century even though taxes now are the lowest they've been in generations.  They're plugging their ears are yelling like babies.

And we continue to rocket down the path of oblivion.

StupidiNews!

• Landslides in the Chinese province of Zhouqu County have left 127 dead an a rescue effort underway.
• The Grey Wolf is back on the endangered species list, but Idaho officials plan to appeal saying wolf populations there are too high.
• Voters from all political walks of life have a bone to pick with their local members of Congress over the summer recess.
• Central Russia continues to scorch under the country's worst heat wave ever as residents flee Moscow.
• Not all the health fears about electromagnetic fields caused by hybrid vehicle batteries have been put to rest.

Last Call

If even the happy face CNBC guye Mark Haines are noticing that the Tea Party kool-aid is spiked, maybe there's a slim hope after all.

The strange inconsistency of the Tea Partiers reached new depths recently when Nevada's Sharron Angle, running against Harry Reid for the US Senate, sat for an interview with Fox News on Monday. She told her interviewer, when asked about her relationship with the press, "We needed the press to be our friend. We wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer, so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported."

In his defense, the interviewer laughed and appeared incredulous, but never challenged her bizarre view of the press' role in a free society.

The Tea Partiers love to claim that they represent the "Real America." Yet, here is their favorite candidate in the Nevada Senate race advocating for some sort of docile, captive press. What would a "real American" like Thomas Jefferson think? Fortunately, Jefferson was a prolific letter writer, so we know. 

In a letter to Elbridge Gerry in 1799, he wrote: "I am ... for freedom of the press, and against all violations of the Constitution to silence by force and not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents." 

Jefferson himself was the subject of much hostile press coverage that consisted largely of lies and gossip. He could legitimately complain about biased media coverage. But, for a real American, the principle was much more important than his own comfort. In a letter to Edward Carrington in 1787, Jefferson wrote, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." And in Jefferson's day, many newspapers were just mouthpieces for political factions.

So, how do these people, who claim to revere the Founding Fathers and American values, so strongly support a candidate whose views about the press are so anti-American? Jefferson would find Sharron Angle appalling. 

Tea Partiers, if true to American values, should, too.

Of course, the TP will dismiss this as "more liberal media whining" but the fact of the matter is while yelling about "smaller government" people like Sharron Angle want that government to control as much as possible:  to control what we are allowed to say, to control where and how we worship, to control who we can or cannot marry, to control how we reproduce, to control when the Constitution applies.

You have "freedom" and "liberty" only as long as you agree with the Tea Party.  If you don't, well then to them you no longer count as American.  Your rights can and should be taken away from you and they reserve the right to do it.

Anyone who tells you they are giving you freedom hasn't mentioned the price tag.

We've Been Here Before

When the going gets tough, the not-so-tough get to scapegoating immigrants.

As Republican members of Congress press for changes to the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, preventing automatic citizenship for babies born to illegal immigrants, opponents insist the debate is not really about babies. 

Instead, they say it is about politics and votes – not fixing the immigration system.

Still, the debate could resonate in Texas, where not only 1.5 million illegal immigrants are estimated to reside but at least 60,000 babies are added to their households annually.

Parkland Memorial Hospital delivers more of those babies than any other hospital in the state. Last year at Parkland, 11,071 babies were born to women who were noncitizens, about 74 percent of total deliveries. Most of these women are believed to be in the country illegally.

State Rep. Rafael Anchía, D-Dallas, accused Republicans of using the births to generate an explosive election issue.

"They're pulling the pin on the immigration grenade," he said. "It's all about the November elections and continuing to use the immigration issue as a wedge to win votes this fall."

But to Republicans, the emerging national debate is long overdue, considering that millions of immigrants have been living illegally in this country for years.

"They're violating our law, and we're giving their children the benefit of U.S. citizenship," said state Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, whose 2009 bill in the Legislature would have challenged the birthright of immigrant children.

That bill died in committee, although Berman has vowed to file another version next year that would prohibit the state from issuing birth certificates to the children of "illegal aliens."

"I've checked the Congressional Record for when the 14th Amendment was written, and the author was quoted as saying that it did not apply to foreigners," he said. "There's no question in my mind about it."  

The Constitution doesn't apply to whom Republicans don't want it to apply to.  That's what they have been about for years:  Limiting rights as much as possible and saying "screw you" to those they don't like.  The Republicans have become the party of defending the white, moneyed, Christian people in this county.  The Constitution doesn't apply to "terrorists", Muslims, gays, and now Latinos.


Pretty soon it's not going to apply to any of us.  What's the GOP plan to fix the economy?  Blame brown people.


It's literally all they have.

Everything's Fine, We're Fine Here, How Are You?

I'm beginning to honestly think the Democrats' plan is to lose on purpose and put the Republicans in charge of Congress just in time for our economy to collapse.

The U.S. economy will improve slowly and another round of fiscal stimulus probably wouldn’t be effective, former Treasury secretaries Paul O’Neill and Robert Rubin said.

Rubin, who served under Democratic President Bill Clinton, said the U.S. is “going to have slow and bumpy growth,” during a taped interview on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” aired today. A “major second stimulus” might create more uncertainty and undermine confidence, he said.

Companies concerned about demand won’t expand facilities or hire new employees until sales have improved, said O’Neill, who was Treasury secretary under Republican President George W. Bush. “We are moving forward at a pretty gradual pace,” he said. “But I don’t think things are terrible.”

The world’s largest economy may be cooling in the second half of the year as a scarcity of jobs limits consumer spending. At the same time, concern about the surging fiscal deficit has prompted President Barack Obama to urge lawmakers to let the Bush administration tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire this year.

While Rubin backed Obama’s stance, O’Neill reiterated that he strongly opposed the Bush tax cuts of 2003 and said the president and U.S. lawmakers need to focus on overhauling the entire tax system rather than on the expiring cuts. 

Atrios sums it up:

Oh, wait, demand is a problem. So the solution is to...do nothing to help demand.

Got it.

Playing to lose is all I can think of.  9.5% unemployment and 16 million Americans out of work is just fine with O'Neill apparently.  Another stimulus will ruin "confidence" while continued deflation will...what?  Make people want to buy more?

We're done, folks.  Enjoy the ride down, because the elevator cable just got cut.

Broken Plan

Frank Rich points out that Obama Trumanizing the election and breaking it down to a rational choice between Bush policies and Obama policies may not be the best idea when you're counting on the American public to vote with cool logic over hot rhetoric.

Betting on amnesia is almost always a winning, not a losing, wager in America. Angry demonstrators at health care town-hall meetings didn’t remember that Medicare is a government program, and fewer and fewer voters of both parties recall that the widely loathed TARP was a Bush administration creation supported by the G.O.P. Congressional leadership. So many Republicans don’t know Obama is a natural citizen — 41 percent in a poll last week — that we must (charitably) assume some of them have forgotten that Hawaii was granted statehood. The G.O.P. chairman is sufficiently afflicted with amnesia that he matter-of-factly regaled an audience with the counterfactual observation that the war in Afghanistan, Bush’s immediate response to 9/11, began under Obama.

The president is also wrong when he says that every single current G.O.P. idea is a Bush idea. Many are not. And those that are not are far more radical.

A political campaign built on Obama’s faulty premises cannot stand — or win. The polls remain as intractable as the 9.5 percent unemployment rate no matter how insistently the Democrats pummel Bush. To add to Democratic panic, there’s their “enthusiasm gap” with the Tea-Party-infused G.O.P., and the Rangel-Waters double bill coming this fall to a cable channel near you. Some Democrats took solace in one recent poll finding that if Republican economic ideas were branded as “Bush” ideas, the pendulum would swing a whopping 49 percentage points in their favor. But even in that feel-good survey, only a quarter of the respondents were worried that a G.O.P. Congress would actually bring back Bush policies.

Not only is Rich right, he hits upon the only real solution to the election conundrum.

Given this spectacle, Obama and the Democrats are, if anything, flattering the current G.O.P. by accusing it of being a carbon copy of Bush. But even if the Democrats sharpen their attack, they are doomed to fall short if they don’t address the cancer in the American heart — joblessness. This requires stunning emergency action right now, August recess be damned. Instead we get the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, offering the thin statistical gruel that job growth has returned “at an earlier stage of this recovery than in the last two recoveries.”

The tragically tone-deaf Geithner is on his latest happy-days-are-almost-here-again tour. He made that point in multiple television appearances as well as in a Times Op-Ed page article in which he vowed to “do more” to give workers “the skills they need to re-enter the 21st-century economy.” On the same day his essay appeared last week, The Times ran a front-page report on “99ers,” the growing band of desperate jobless Americans who have exhausted their 99 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits. The 99er featured in Michael Luo’s article, a 49-year-old unemployed corporate worker named Alexandra Jarrin, is a late-in-life college graduate and onetime business school student who owes $92,000, as she put it, “for an education which is basically worthless.” She’s on the verge of homelessness not because she lacks the skills she needs to re-enter the 21st-century economy. She and countless others like her, skilled and unskilled, lack jobs, period.

The Democrats have already retreated from immigration and energy reform. If they can’t make the case to Americans like Alexandra Jarrin that they offer more hope for a job than a radical conservative movement poised to tear down what remains of the safety net, they deserve to lose.

And there it is. Unless Obama and the Democrats take strong action over the recess to fix jobs now, the GOP will win. It really is a simple as that.

The Mask Slips Again

John Cole flags this Rep. Peter King quote confirming why Republicans are ignoring the Prop 8 ruling:

King, the Long Island congressman, said that in terms of social issues, the raging controversy over the Arizona border laws is providing more than enough ammunition for Republicans in key districts.

“The Arizona immigration law is there, there’s no reason to be raising an issue of gay rights” as a wedge, he said.

Hating the gay helped get Bush re-elected in 2004 but 2006 and 2008 were disasters for the Republicans as a result.  Now hating the brown is more than enough, it covers what they need to win in 2010.  2012 and onwards will be a disaster for them, but all Republicans care about now is making Americans hate people enough now so they can get back in power.

The rest is just frosting.

The Kroog Versus Rep. Paul Ryan Yet Again

Pro Tip:  if you're going to publicly pick a fight with a Nobel laureate economist about economics, bring your A game.  GOP Rep. Paul Ryan fails this simple test as he calls Paul Krugman out, only to get smacked down a second time in a few paragraphs.

Notice that Ryan does not address the issue of the zero nominal growth assumption, and how that assumption — not entitlement reforms — is the key to his alleged spending cuts by 2020.

I also see that Ryan is perpetuating the runaround on revenue estimates. If you read either this article or his original response to the Tax Policy Center, you could easily get the impression that nobody would do a revenue estimate, that CBO said it was JCT’s job, and JCT balked. Even Nate Silver has fallen for this. But read the original response carefully:

The Tax Policy Center analysis covers a 10-year period, but the Roadmap is a long-term plan with spending and revenue projections covering 75 years. As such, the analysis is not consistent with the long-term horizon of the plan. Staff originally asked CBO to do a long-term analysis of both the tax and spending provisions in the Roadmap. However, CBO declined to do a revenue analysis of the tax plan, citing that it did not want to infringe on the traditional jurisdiction of the JCT. JCT, however, does not have the capability at this time to provide longer-term revenue estimates (i.e. beyond 10 years) [my emphasis]. Given these functional constraints for an official analysis, staff relied on its original work with the Treasury Department and other tax experts to formulate a reasonable expected path for long-term revenues given the tax policies in the Roadmap combined with the economic growth projections available at the time.

In other words, Ryan could have gotten JCT to do a 10-year estimate; it just wouldn’t go beyond that. And he chose not to get that 10-year estimate. So it was Ryan’s choice not to have any independent estimate of the 10-year revenue effects.

And bear in mind that the Tax Policy Center critique was five months ago. If Ryan disagreed with the center’s estimates, he could have gone back to the JCT to get a different set of estimates. He never did.

By the way, if you look at the artful way his excuses are constructed — giving the false impression that he couldn’t get a revenue score for love nor money — how is that not flimflam?

Finally, why is Ryan denying that he proposes dismantling Medicare as we know it? Replacing the system with vouchers surely fits that description.

Ooooops.  Maybe Krugman's  characterization of Ryan as a "flimflam man" was impolitic, but it was accurate as hell.  Ryan then makes the classic mistake of doubling down on his own erroneous assumptions and expecting the Wingers/Reasonoids/McMegan to back him up on this.  The fact that it only takes Krugman about 300 words to completely win his argument shows you just how weak Ryan's position was.

Like most Republican policy positions, if you dig under the surface you find the same moldering Reaganomics idiocy from 30 years ago where tax cuts "fix" everything and only add to the deficit while transferring wealth up the ladder.  We need to have a serious debate about the economic direction of this country, but if Paul Ryan is considered a leading light when he's so wrong that even Paul Krugman has to come up to the guy and call him out, then one side -- the Republicans -- has nothing to say in that debate other than "no no no no no no" like a petulant child.

We need better.

Last Call

The latest Winger Poutrage?

"How DARE Michelle Obama go on vacation to Spain when there's 9.5% unemployment!?!?  How dare she take a vacation outside the United States like an America-hating liberal!  Where does she get the idea that she's allowed to pay for her own vacation when everyone knows the First Lady is just an opinion-free adjunct to the President?  The nerve of women like her!  You should hate her!  Are YOU getting to go to Spain?  No?  Why should she?  She works for US!"

Not all Obama Derangement Syndrome is directed at Barack, folks.  And this is mild compared to what's coming.

Warren Peace

Seems that Sen. Chris Dodd has gone from saying that Elizabeth Warren can't be confirmed to "It's not worth the fight" to get her confirmed.

When it first looked like Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren might stand a serious chance of getting appointed at the first director of the newly-created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — a regulatory agency which she was the first to suggest — Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) poo-pooed the notion, saying there’s a “serious question” about whether Warren is “confirmable.”

The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber wrote that “after surveying a dozen insiders over the last few days — congressional aides, industry officials, progressive activists, and a few administration officials — I’ve concluded that the odds are good that Warren would be confirmed if nominated by the White House.” And Dodd now seems to have shifted his rhetoric, saying that even if Warren is confirmable, it’s not worth a potential fight to get her the job:

What you don’t need to have is an eight-month battle for who the director or the head or chairperson of this new consumer financial protection bureau will be.

Interesting there. Almost like Dodd is doing what he can to avoid actually having Warren run the new agency. Wonder why that is.

TIP O' The Hat

Nice to see after 20 years since I was there, Duke University's TIP program -- the ultimate summer geek camp -- is still going strong.

"Being labeled as 'gifted' as a middle school student is a social kiss of death," said Dr. Alison Stuebe, an alumna of the Duke TIP program, which had its largest season ever in 2010 with more than 3,100 students. "To go to a place where, rather than that being a liability, was actually a reason you got to go at all, was just a transforming experience," she said.

There is a misperception that talented youths get what they need in school. In fact, regular school classes don't always allow these kids to reach their full potential, said Brian Cooper, TIP's director of domestic educational programs. Summer sessions like TIP's are needed more and more because in tough economic times, schools are cutting programs for gifted students, he said.

TIP provides an environment where they can feed their passions for the subjects they love without having to worry about grades and competition, he said.

But first, kids have to prove themselves by taking the SAT in about seventh grade, and they need to score as well as or better than 50 percent of the college-bound juniors and seniors taking the SAT or ACT (you can retest later). Summer Institute for the Gifted, another program, also accepts letters of recommendation and participation in a gifted program as credentials. These camps have programs at various colleges in the U.S., and some in other countries, too.

And yeah, once my parents saw this (I had a pretty good guidance counselor back in the day) they bought me some test prep software and I knocked down a good enough score to get into TIP's science and math track all four years.  Not everyone's going to be the next Lady Gaga or Mark Zuckerberg, but hey, I turned out OK and learned a hell of a lot of stuff.  I still use my econ and programming class skills from there on a nearly daily basis and yeah, I turned out to be a pretty fearsome Ultimate Frisbee player too.

Even if I am a D-list political blogger.

Well, maybe C-list these days...

The Maine Event In Tea Party Paranoia

Maine's Tea Party community is ripping itself apart, apparently.  TPM has the story to the state's largest Tea Party group, the Maine Patriots, as the group falls to pieces:

On Tuesday night, Amy Hale -- one of the leaders of the Patriots group -- posted an odd message to the group's website, suggesting that she'd been forced to give up control of the site, according to media reports (the post has since been removed):

I was cornered in the parking lot by 10+ people and told that bad things would happen to me if I did not give them the password and hand over Maine Patriots. Therefore, I no longer have control of Maine Patriots. Amy

Hale reported the incident to the police. Last night, she refused to comment on the matter because, she told me, "the investigation is ongoing." Details beyond what she wrote that first night are sketchy.

Piecing together posts from tea party websites in the past couple of days, however, paints a picture of a state tea party in disarray -- and a look at tea party paranoia.

Since Tuesday, other tea party sites in Maine have been hotbeds of conspiracy theories and accusations, with some claiming that Hale was undermining the movement and others suggesting that those who allegedly removed her from the Maine Patriots site are anti-tea party plants.

"You're the evil liberal who is undermining our glorious cause!"

"No I'm not...YOU ARE!"   *scuffle breaks out*

As long as the Tea Party guys are locked in their little high school cliques fighting each other, I'm not terribly worried about them taking over the country this fall, you know?

Arnold And Jerry Do The Right Thing

On the heels of the Prop 8 ruling in California, Gov. Schwarzenegger and AG (and Dem candidate for Arnold's job) Jerry Brown are working together to convince Judge Walker to lift his stay next week and allow the state to resume gay marriages.

In an extraordinary court filing, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked Friday that gay marriages be allowed to resume immediately in California after a federal ruling that the state's voter-approved ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional.

The Republican governor filed his brief with U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn R. Walker before a Friday deadline to submit arguments on whether to continue a stay of Walker's decision against Proposition 8.

"The Administration believes the public interest is best served by permitting the Court's judgment to go into effect, thereby restoring the right of same-sex couples to marry in California," wrote Kenneth C. Mennemeier, an attorney representing Schwarzenegger, in the brief. "Doing so is consistent with California's long history of treating all people and their relationships with equal dignity and respect." 

And that's really the basis of it.  Jerry Brown also filed a similar motion on Friday.  The state hasn't even bothered to try to defend the case, actually.  James Joyner at OTB disagrees however.

This is indeed extraordinary. Schwarzenegger is the representative of the people of California, a majority of whom voted to amend their constitution to reserve marriage to opposite sex couples.  So, it’s rather absurd to argue that “there is no public interest”   in upholding their decision.   Indeed, it’s his duty to stand up for their wishes here until the appeals have been exhausted.

Now, Schwarzenegger is sworn to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California,” so one could argue that this is a higher duty if he feels strongly that the amendment violates the U.S. Constitution (by definition, it can’t violate California’s Constitution, since it’s an amendment to it).   But, if he thinks that, he should have joined the suit on the other side rather than remaining neutral.

That's a weak argument at best.  He's the Governor.  Who is he supposed to pass the buck to on this?  Again, if it's clearly a violation of the US Constitution, then Arnold is indeed well within his rights to do exactly what he did.

The Legislative, Executive, and Judicial in California have all come out for treating marriage as a fundamental right that cannot be abridged by any power, even a referendum.  That's in the Constitution, and it wins the argument.  Period.