Frank Luntz, celebrated spinmeister, has taken on a new task, it seems. He'll be in charge of figuring out a way to convince the public that a blatantly racist major sports team's name is really nothing to get upset about.

There is a strange disconnect in American sports when it comes to portrayals of Native Americans. While college sports have managed to modernize and throw off the ugliness of their racially-insensitive team names, logos, and mascots, sadly professional sports have dug in their heels and refused to do the same. Chief Wahoo still maniacally grins out at the baseball fans of Cleveland, Atlanta fans still love to perform their "tomahawk chop" chant, and the owner of the Washington football team is pushing back against any suggestion that the name "Redskins" might actually be considered offensive by anyone.

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The Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Carl Levin, has just voted down an amendment championed by Kirsten Gillibrand which would have stripped from the chain of command the decisions on prosecuting sexual assaults in the military. Although the amendment had 28 co-sponsors (including four Republicans), Levin voted against it and the measure will not be part of the military bill they're currently working on. Gillibrand can still bring it back up when the bill gets to the floor (or the House could pass it in their version), but its chances for passage at this point seem somewhat diminished. Levin offered his own way to tackle the problem which does not take the prosecution decision out of the hands of the commanders but does achieve several other positive reforms, including removing the power to overturn a jury's verdict in such cases from the commanding officers.

This news comes as a disappointment to many (including many in Congress) who are downright fed up with the military continually promising to fix this problem, only to then do next to nothing about it. The big Pentagon brass all swear before a congressional committee every year, like clockwork, that they'll just get right on the problem... and then a year goes by and the dog-and-pony show is run again, with exactly the same things said and exactly the same lack of any progress. Refresh my memory: when did the Tailhook scandal happen? Wasn't that when Bush was president? No, no... not that Bush... his father. That's how long the military's had to clean up its act -- since 1991. And yet here we are.

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No column today, sorry. Columns will resume tomorrow, but for the next two weeks columns may be infrequent, as the Netroots Nation blogger conference will be taking up a lot of my time. Watch this space for further details as I figure them out, and sorry for the interruptions in service in advance.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

June is "Supreme Court Decision Month" in the nation's capital, and the two cases which may have more political impact than any others are the ones dealing with gay marriage. In both the Proposition 8 case and the Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA) case, many are hoping for sweeping rulings which put the subject to rest for all time. Personally, I don't think that's what's going to happen -- I think the rulings will be more limited, and that the fight for marriage equality will have to go on for a little longer before such a sweeping ruling happens. But, at the same time, I am optimistic that that day will indeed come, and that it's not that far in the future.

The Supremes could surprise me, of course -- they've certainly done so in the past, on many occasions. It's a lot tougher to pick outcomes on the Supreme Court than it is to, say, pick who is likely to win an election. Only nine people get to vote, after all, and they don't answer public opinion polls in the meantime. But I have a strong suspicion that the Supreme Court is going to try to kick the political can down the road a bit.

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Every so often as I sit down to write these Friday columns, the spirit of the rant overtakes me. Instead of our usual Talking Points section this week, I offer up such a rant, on the death of the Fourth Amendment. You have all been warned. I did consider calling this rant an "Ode To Dianne Feinstein," but then I thought that was too limiting -- she certainly isn't the only one out there singing from the same hymnbook. And I certainly wouldn't want to have anyone feel left out.

What this means is there's a lot to cover here in the introductory summary of the week's events. So forgive me if this all seems a little jumbled-together and in shorthand.

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I realize that the news Glenn Greenwald just broke on the National Security Agency glomming onto the records of everyone who made a phone call through Verizon is what I really should be commenting on today, but then I realized I had written an article a long time ago which is germane to this debate. Back in August of 2007, I wrote the following piece on warrantless wiretapping, which poses a few questions that have not only never been answered but indeed never even really discussed. Now, I realize that the situations between now and what I was commenting on then are not clearly parallel, since actual wiretapping (recording or analyzing the content of phone calls) is different (and much more intrusive) than merely accessing the records of who called what phone (which is what apparently happened with Verizon). But the wider picture brings up the same basic question this article asks: should vacuuming up all available data and then weeding it out with computers be legally-admissible evidence in a court of law? So I thought it was worth re-running this column today to examine an aspect of governmental communications intercepts that never seems to get talked about.

Originally published August 3, 2007

What if the core issue in the warrantless wiretapping arguments currently raging is one that nobody has mentioned? What if the real secret that has yet to be exposed is a logical next step in technological wiretapping capabilities, but one that our legal system has never been faced with before? What if -- in essence -- computers are the ones deciding which calls to tap, rather than NSA agents or judges?

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President Obama should really stop fighting against the idea of making the morning-after pill available to anyone who needs to buy it. He really should instruct Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Attorney General Eric Holder to admit defeat on the issue, and to just move on. Because what he's fighting for, ultimately, is his own political hypocrisy. Politically, this should be reason enough to throw in the towel on this fight.

The reason this is in the news today is that an appellate court just ruled on a motion in the court case over "Plan B" (and all the other brands of the morning-after pill). Previously, a federal judge had ruled that all such pills would be available over-the-counter, with no age limits. The Obama administration is in the process of appealing this ruling, and had filed a motion to continue the current restrictions until the appeal makes its way through the courts. The appellate court ruled against them, which will mean the two-pill version of the morning-after pill (which was referenced in the original lawsuit) will soon be available without any restrictions, across the land. They also ruled that the one-pill version can continue to have restrictions, since it wasn't technically a part of the lawsuit.

This is a rather momentous ruling, because in many cases appellate courts rule in favor of such "stays" (to continue whatever law currently exists) while the appeal is heard. Courts tend to defer to the status quo, knowing that if they change the current legal conditions before the appeal is ruled on, they may undermine any eventual ruling which returns conditions to some previous state. They tend to shy away from "letting the cat out of the bag," to put it another way. This time they refused to do so. They ruled that while the appeal grinds its way forward, the status quo will change.

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The death of Senator Frank Lautenberg has given New Jersey's governor an interesting choice. Who will Chris Christie appoint to fill the vacancy, and what will it mean for his own political future?

Christie has already announced that there will be a special election this October for the seat, no matter who he picks to fill the seat in the meantime. This is nothing short of sheer political opportunism on his part, because if he weren't scared that this race might impact his own re-election bid for governor, he could quite easily have put this race on the ballot which takes place a bare few weeks after the special election. New Jersey voters will go to the polls mid-October, and then in early November -- costing the state over ten million dollars. That's a dandy point of attack for his Democratic opponent, one would think. But that choice has now been made, and it's kind of beside the point here.

Christie remains popular in New Jersey, one of the rare Republicans who can keep a blue state happy. Which is why he's got to be assessing his chances of a run for the White House in 2016. Seen through this lens, Christie's got three basic choices to fill the empty Senate seat before October, and it will indeed be interesting to see which one of these he picks.

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Pre-storm calm?

Barack Obama had a pretty bad month inside the Beltway, with Republicans on the warpath over multiple scandals. Outside Washington, Obama didn't have too bad a month at all, as his job approval ratings barely budged. While this calm may seem to indicate that the public has a much higher tolerance for what constitutes a "scandal" than congressional Republicans, there were indications at the end of the month that this may just be a calm before much stormier poll numbers for the president. But first, let's look back on last month. Here's the chart:

[Click on graph to see larger-scale version.]

May, 2013

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If that title drew you in, I have to warn you up front that the ranting contest suggestion is at the very bottom of this article, so feel free to just scroll down to it if that's all you're here for. Full disclosure, and all of that -- I just didn't have any better title for this weekly wrapup, sorry. Enough navel-gazing, though, let's get on with it.

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper signed into law this week the first regulations setting up a legal recreational marijuana market since the Drug War began. This marks a historic milestone (legal weed won't actually become reality until next year), but even though it is now seven months from when the state's voters approved the idea, there is still no word from the Justice Department on how the disparity between the state's new laws and federal laws will be handled by the feds. I guess Eric Holder's got other things to do, or something. Maybe he just "spaced out" on the whole thing, who knows?

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