The funny thing about the bill that the Senate just passed that lets presidents and the military lock you up without a charge or a trial — well, not funny ha ha but funny unusual — is that the basic bill to which that little monstrosity was attached is even worse. It’s a bill to dump over $650 billion into wars and aggressive weaponry, continue the slaughter in Afghanistan, ramp up the creation and use of drones, and expand U.S. military bases around the globe.

So in January, Obama basically said, “This is unconstitutional so don’t make it any worse or I’ll get cross,” and this amendment, which effectively sustains the status quo but doesn’t make it worse, gets pretty much the same response from the Administration.

I’m not trying to be too alarming but we don’t have much time to get repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell passed in the defense authorization bill. Things are looking very bleak for passage of the defense authorization bill, at least for this year. And who knows how many seats we’ll have next year? People have been sold a whole bunch of lies on this repeal bill, starting from the fact that it’s not repeal itself – it just allows repeal to happen if certain conditions are met and then three people sign off on it. Yet, we’ve heard the loud pronouncements that “DADT is dead” on certain leftist political blogs.