Last week ANSWER LA received a permit for the upcoming March 19 protest from the Police Commission. On Tuesday, they denied us the already granted permit, something they’d never done before, because business interests in the area said, heck, this would be just too inconvenient. Funny, I don’t recall them saying that during the recent Academy Awards when parts of Hollywood were locked down for days with multiple streets and a major subway station closed. Nor should the constitutional right of free speech be derailed by business interests because they find our political views bothersome.

We fought back and won.

From the ANSWER LA listserv.

The LA Police Commission today reversed its unlawful denial and granted the permit to march. This was after the National Lawyers Guild promised to file a lawsuit against the Police Commission and  the ANSWER Coalition called a press conference in front of LAPD headquarters.

Jim Lafferty, Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild,  Los Angeles, said, “The Police Commission’s reasons for yesterday’s permit denial amounted to nothing more than pandering to commercial interests at the expense of the First Amendment right to free  expression. Every year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and  Sciences, Disney and other private commercial entities are given  free and full permission to close and use the same area sought to  be used by the ANSWER Coalition. The streets are closed for a much  longer period of time than requested for this Saturday’s anti-war  march and rally.”

Big business interests want to take away the right of the anti-war movement and the people to demonstrate in Hollywood. The people  won’t stand for this. We fought for and won the right to protest  on March 19 and we’ll continue fighting for our rights against right-wing attacks and corporate greed.

All the more reason to get in the streets of Hollywood on Saturday, rain or shine.

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Under Social Security privatization, same-sex partners “could receive survivor benefits or dependent benefits.”

If gays “are to make the best of the situation, they should support private accounts, forming alliances with Republicans who support limited government.”

Gay activists have little to lose from such support of Social Security privatization.”

Sure they do. We all do. Privatization is almost guaranteed to provide us all substantially less benefits. Do you want your retirement money managed by Wall Street? Do you trust Wall Street to do the right thing? Well of course you don’t.

Nor should gays trust Bush to do the right thing for them. It’s a given that he won’t. Moreover, this is triangulation.

If I asked you what the worst thing in American politics was today, I would get a variety of answers. Some of you might say “dishonesty”, others recoil from the “negativity” and I’m sure there are plenty of Americans fed up with the “petty partisanship” we’re confronted with at ever turn. But me? I’d point to Dick Morris’ Frankenstein monster, triangulation.

Triangulation is the art of trying to be all things to all voters, or at least getting as close as possible. What you want to do is support things that will fire up your base without alienating the voters in the middle. Then when your opponent comes up with an idea that may allow him to pull away some of your support, you don’t fight him, you adopt his idea, whether you agree with it or not. Doing this allows you to pull in the moderates who along with your base which will make it likely that you’ll win at the ballot box. In short, triangulation is political akido that allows you to defeat your opponent by replacing your principles and ideology with polling data.

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“This blog sets forth the personal views of the Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law on national events. Occasionally, the responses to his views or other interesting articles are also posted.”

Literate, intelligent, with currents threads on Larry Summers, opposition to torture, education. Do other deans of law schools have blogs?

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