We are near our goal for the quarter $1500. We only need $65 to get there. If six people give $10.50 we are there.

Click here  to donate to Better Senators for Veterans.

This fund is about more than just donating, it's about raising awareness for an issue. It's also about letting the incumbent Republicans know that we will not allow them to say one thing about supporting Veterans, do another and then change their mind again because the public is unhappy.

Weeks ago 22 Republican Senators including John Cornyn, Lamar Alexander, Jeff Sessions and Mitch McConnell said that the Webb GI Bill would hurt retention rates and they could not support the bill in that form. We raised that issue and collectively said how can they say they support our troops. They said they voted for the GI Bill this week because it transfered benefits. What they really did was see polling and heard from constituents showing that they were wrong. Instead of admitting mistakes, we are getting spin.

Where have any of these been on the issue of the disparity in health care treatment for female veterans? Where are any of these in terms of bringing our troops home?

$65 and we will continue to fight and say that we delivered for Rick Noriega and a host of others. Veterans deserve better respect and treatment and should not get spin from Republicans that never served our country.

Again I ask you to click here and donate $5.01, $10.01 or whatever you can afford.

The House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena asking for Presidential documents and DOJ records related to many issues. The subpoena does not narrowly focus on the President's illegal efforts to retaliate against Valarie Wilson or her husband Ambassador Wilson for disclosing evidence there was no imminent threat of WMD, as required under the laws of war.

Jonathan Turley said Congress is in collusion with the President in covering up war crimes and other illegal activity. Members of Congress and legal counsel could individually be prosecuted for malfeasance.

Vincent Bugliosi suggests Congressional failure/refusal to impeach the President does prevent the States' prosecutors or attorney Generals from prosecuting the President for murder or war crimes.  Andover Law School is planning a September 2008 conference to organize efforts to prosecute the President outside Congress, outside impeachment.

The subpoena looks at more than the FBI home visits with the Wecht Jury Members, "Wecht Jury Tampering," but seeks evidence from all phases of the prosecution. As with the US Attorney firings and DoD Emails, we would expect to find which DoJ Staff spoke with which White House counsel and GOP-connected staff to coordinate the prosecution against Wecht.

Page 5 through 6 of 11 (Paras 13 through 21) specifically ask for the detailed Presidential, DOJ, and other US government documents related to the Wecht Prosecution. For information on Giglio mentioned at 19, see 405 US 150;  for information on Brady, requiring disclosure of government evidence favorable to the defense, see 373 US 83.

Para 14 expressly asks for all evidence from the Department of Justice, White House, local and state party officials, and communications with Members of Congress and staff on the Wecht Jury Tampering.

Wecht Jury Tampering is part of the larger GOP agenda of information warfare to impose an agenda, and thwart opposition. The DoD emails show the White House was involved with discussions to use military analysts to sell the war. Scott McClellan in What Happened discussed the President's close coordination with the White House staff, political offices, public affairs, and legal counsel.

Republican lawyers have provided affidavits to the House Judiciary Committee saying they overhead conversations of the White House putting pressure on the prosecutors. The FBI home visits relied on a list of sealed juror names which the government absurdly asks we believe they "derived" from the prospective jurors. The government knew the court sealed the names. Home visits are not permitted under the attorney standards of conduct when the court prohibits contact.  Attorneys are not permitted to direct others to do things not permitted under the law or standards of conduct.

The government absurdly argues the jury tampering is the same as a jury poll. This is incorrect and GOP information warfare propaganda. Jury polls are conducted during a trial, before the jury is released, to review whether the jury needs more time to agree. A jury poll has nothing to do with seeking information, after trial, from jurors on their reasons for voting for or against an acquittal, as was illegally done with the Wecht Jury.

Some of the questions the Committee seeks answers are:

Who in the White House spoke with the President and overhead conversations about the Wecht prosecution;

Which DOJ workflows were approved to coordinate the President's position on the Wecht Prosecution with the FBI agents;

How did the FBI agents know which questions to ask, and why did the FBI not ask questions of the President and US Attorney about the improper statements about the Wecht Jury conclusions;

When did the DOJ Staff counsel approve the messages Buchanan and other legal counsel provided;

How did the White House and GOP provide status to the President on the status of the FBI interviews with the Wecht jury members

What factors convinced the President to order the US attorney not to prosecute Wecht after the jury was unable to agree on a verdict, but the US Attorney said there wold be a second trial;

How were the US Attorney (incorrect) media messages on the juror's conclusions affected by the President's discussions with the GOP on the information warfare agenda

How did Mary Beth Buchanan's involvement with the US Attorney Firings as director of the Office of US Attorneys 2005-6 influence her conversations with the White House staff and other DOJ Officials on the Wecht Prosecution.

Keith Olbermann's defense against those who called him on his FISA flip-flop was that John Dean is "worth 25 Greenwalds", and he, Olbermann, simply took Dean's word as gospel.

But in a new interview with progressive blog Firedoglake, Dean clarifies:

I said that when I read the bill, and talked to the folks at the ACLU who had been following it, that it was not clear. I raised it when appearing on Countdown with the hope that someone might figure it out. But that is the nature of this badly drafted bill that it is not clear what it does and does not do, and the drafters are not saying.

But even if the bill is unclear there is no question the Bush Administration is not going to do anything to the telecoms, so the question is whether a future DOJ could -- and here there is case law protecting the telecoms. But there may be language buried in the bill that protects them as well but it can only be found by reading the bill with a half dozen other laws which I have not yet done.

I made no declarative statements rather I only raised questions that jumped at me when reading the 114 page monster.

The Italian War Crimes prosecutor continues their war crimes investigation into rendition and violations of the laws of war. If convicted of war crimes, US government officials, contractors, and legal counsel could be sentenced with the death penalty.

Today we received a curious message substantially violating the written no contact order.

Warning: Do not click on the embedded link contained in the next comment. It goes to the Federalist Society.

The information contained at the link has a problem: The link provided is not visible, nor is its content available on the search engine. The link shows the date of the PDF file is Feb 2008, yet three (3) months later, the information is not visible nor indexed.

Normally, people -- who are not attorneys, not affiliated with the Department of Justice, and have no connection with the legal community or any contractors providing outside legal counsel -- would not have access to non-indexed information. These are not normal times.

This raises a number of questions:

Why is someone posting information to content from the Federalist Society, but that information published in February is not available through the popular internet search engines?

How did someone get access to, and learn about a document on the Federalist Society website, but that information is not publicly indexed on the search engines?

Someone needs to explain what connection they have with the Federalist Society; and how they learned of the information not commonly known.

What makes the content at the link most absurd, is that this is content from someone -- having previously posted in violation of the no contact order -- who made the following assertions:

"is a sycophant"

"some crackpot"

"this bottom dweller"

They've claimed that someone wasn't able to engage in a coherent discussion, but are unable to explain why they've (a) changed their position; and (b) provided information to someone -- in their view -- would not be able to understand, much less comment on that information. The change defies reason.

Here's the evidence:

A. Acknowledgment, and failure to comply with the written no contact order with these inconsistent statements, raising substantial doubts about their credibilty;

B. An external site they've provided as a link, which they supposedly read;

C. A time-certain before which they supposedly accessed the URL, making it possible to confirm their identity, relationship with the Department of Justice legal contractors, status in the legal community, association with the President, and their associations with the Federalist Society.

One Federalist society-connected lawyer represents one of the Ambramoff people connected with Rove. The client is reported in the Rise and Fall of Karl Rove to have tampered with Rove's schedule to hide meeting with Ambramoff, prompting the President fire Rove. Counsel served in these capacities:

Vice-Chairman, Criminal Law & Procedure practice group

Chairman, White Collar Crime subcommittee

Discussion questions:

Here are some issues you may wish to raise with the Armed Services, Intelligence, and Judiciary committees; and with others at TPM:

A. What is the reason for continuing not comply with the written no contact order;

B. What is the specific reason for providing information to someone claimed to be incapable of understanding information;

C. Why the change in comments: Under who advice, counsel, or suggestion has there been a change in commenting style, tone from this to this;

D. What specific discussions occurred on which dates to review the progress to date on various disinformation efforts; and what decision was made on which date to use a different approach;

E. Does the conduct -- in using Federalist Society information, which has not been indexed -- sufficient to prove that they are being deceptive about their affiliation with the legal community; and would this satisfy the following criteria:

"impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent your affiliation with a person or entity"

Sen. John McCain’s new ad, entitled “Putting Country First,” relates the United States’ determination to put a man on the moon to his new plan to decrease dependence on foreign oil by lifting the moratorium on domestic drilling. Energy independence, we’re told, is our “next national purpose.”

Now, you might say the McCain camp is putting quite a glorified spin on the prospects of domestic drilling. Well, guess what? It doesn’t stop there! Once we implement McCain’s plan, gas is going to be deadlocked at $2.55 a gallon! Or at least that’s what we’re led to believe.

In the advertisement, we watch as a patriotic American fills up his gas tank at a price of around $2.55 a gallon. But wait, doesn’t gas cost $4.08 right now? Did the McCain camp use stock footage? Are his advisors, like McCain, unaware of the current price of gas?

WISCKOL: I’d like to ask you a couple questions suggested by voters here. They’re not reporter-type questions.

McCAIN: Sure. It’d be a pleasure.

WISCKOL: When was the last time you pumped your own gas and how much did it cost?

McCAIN: Oh, I don’t remember. Now there’s Secret Service protection. But I’ve done it for many, many years. I don’t recall and frankly, I don’t see how it matters. I’ve had hundreds and hundreds of town hall meetings, many as short a time ago as yesterday. I communicate with the people and they communicate with me very effectively.

The answer is, none of the above. They’re simply bluffing. A 2007 report by the Energy Information Administration states:

The projections in the OCS (Outer Continental Shelf) access case indicate that access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030.

All you need to remember is, when McCain puts country first, your automobile can run on dreams, which provide better mileage than fumes of vacuous hope.

From my article on The New Argument.

"Sources based in Iraq are suggesting the recent Maliki offensive against the city of Mosul, population 2.5 million and perhaps the last of the al-Qaeda strongholds in the country, has not been able to maintain they made during the battle. "--from ProteanPerspectives.blogspot.com

The above is a post from MyBlog, written by me.

If indeed the city of Mosul explodes into large-scale fighting, the MSM will be forced to covers the events, even if it means shipping a reporter or two back to Iraq.

Putting Iraq back on the front pages and TV screens redounds to the benefit of only one candidate: The Big O.

On January 30th, 2007, the always essential Arthur Silber lamented that we seem to have no contemporary equivalent to Robert La Follette in our current crop of elected representatives. The reference is a passing one, most of the way down the essay, which is yet another of Silbert's marvelously lucid, yet simultaneously utterly impassioned, pleas for the U.S. government, and, more important, the U.S. citizenry, to rethink U.S. international policy from an actually moral viewpoint, instead of using the calculated real-politiks embodied in our ongoing, century and a half old "Open Door" strategy.

Reality is reality, and the world has always pretty much sucked, and nations being comprised of men, it seems to me to be wildly idealistic and borderline delusional to expect anything except the most naked self interest from any group of humans, especially rich humans with lots and lots of mindless, gun totin' lackeys. Still, Silbert's reference to La Follette led me to another article on the former Senator, and what I found there reminded me yet again that however dark things may be now (and they undoubtedly are) on the world and U.S. national stages, and however poisoned and corrupted our current national dialogue between citizenry, media, and elected officials may seem, there really is nothing new under the sun. We've been here before; in fact, we've been here over and over again -- led into unnecessary war by the charismatic elected figureheads of shadowy corporate interests whose only interests in American military engagement abroad are strictly monetary.

Yet, when an entirely media manufactured 'war fever' swept over America in 1917, Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin stood up against it:

By the time he was elevated to the U.S. Senate in 1906, La Follette was already a national figure. He soon emerged as a leader of the Senate's burgeoning progressive camp and by 1912 was a serious contender for the Republican Party's Presidential nomination. The fight for the nomination exposed divisions within the progressive camp, however, as La Follette's more radical followers battled supporters of a more centrist reformer who also claimed the progressive mantle: former President Teddy Roosevelt.

The Roosevelt/La Follette split grew more pronounced five years later, as the nation prepared to enter World War I. While Roosevelt urged U.S. participation in the war-the position supported by the nation's political establishment-La Follette emerged as the leading foe of a war he described as a scheme to line the pockets of the corporations he had fought so bitterly as a governor and Senator.

La Follette personally held up the declaration of war for twenty-four hours by refusing unanimous consent to Senate resolutions. From the Senate floor, La Follette argued: "We should not seek [to] inflame the mind of our people by half truths into the frenzy of war." He painted the impending conflict as a war that would benefit the wealthy of the world but not the workers, who would have to fight it. And he warned: "The poor . . . who are always the ones called upon to rot in the trenches have no organized power.... But oh, Mr. President, at some time they will be heard.... There will come an awakening. They will have their day, and they will be heard."

Those words sounded treasonous to some, and La Follette's constant efforts to expose war profiteers only heightened the attacks upon him. He was targeted for censure by the Senate, portrayed in Life magazine as a stooge of the German Kaiser, and denounced by virtually the entire media establishment of the nation-including the Boston Evening Transcript, which announced, "Henceforth he is the Man without a Country."

As mounting domestic oppression sent more and more anti-war activists to jail, La Follette emerged as their defender, berating his colleagues with the charge that "Never in all my many years' experience in the House and in the Senate have I heard so much democracy preached and so little practiced as during the last few months."
His critics declared that La Follette would never again be a viable contender for public office.

And yet, less than four years after the Armistice, running on a platform that explicitly recounted his opposition to the war and his opposition to imperialism, La Follette won reelection with more than 70 percent of the vote in Wisconsin. And two years later, he earned one out of every six votes cast for the Presidency of the United States.The bolding is my own emphasis; to me, that paragraph more than any other brought home that, indeed, those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. For the past six years, we have seen our entrenched corporate media repeating the Administration's most jingoistic, pro-war lies without so much as a twitch of so called journalistic ethics, while simultaneously attacking anyone who dared to dissent from the party line like a pack of ink stained jackals.

And we have seen, to our even greater shame, that our current crop of elected representatives and national leaders responds to this propaganda bombardment with the most scurrilous and cowardly displays of fawning, lickspittle toadyism imaginable. The apparent fear that they might be accused of 'cutting and running', or failing to 'support the troops', has all but paralyzed our newly elected Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.

While it is clear that the American people want to see definitive action taken -- our troops recalled from Iraq immediately, our economic woes directly addressed, and our criminal executive and legislative leadership impeached, indicted, arrested, tried, and imprisoned for their crimes -- the representatives we have sent to Washington to carry out this mandate are far too terrified of what the Washington Post or the New York Times might say about them on their op-ed pages, and what impact this might have on the Presidential and general election  in '08, to stand up decisively and take the actions they know they should, and must, if they are to truly serve their electorates.

And, again, those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. From that same article on Fightin' Bob La Follette:

In March 25, 1921, at the age of sixty-five, Robert M. La Follette Sr. took the greatest risk of his long political career. Four years after he chose to lead the Congressional opposition to World War I, La Follette was still condemned in Washington and in his native state of Wisconsin as a traitor or - at best - an old man whose political instincts had finally failed him. But La Follette was not ready to surrender the U.S. Senate seat he had held since leaving Wisconsin's governorship in 1906. He wanted to return to Washington to do battle once more against what he perceived to be the twin evils of the still young century: corporate monopoly at home and imperialism abroad.

The reelection campaign that loomed just a year off would be difficult, he was told, perhaps even impossible. Old alliances had been strained by La Follette's lonely refusal to join in the war cries of 1917 and 1918. To rebuild them, the Senator's aides warned, he would have to abandon his continued calls for investigations of war profiteers and his passionate defense of socialist Eugene Victor Debs and others who had been jailed in the postwar Red Scare.

The place to backpedal, La Follette was told, would be in a speech before the crowded Wisconsin Assembly chamber in Madison. Moments before the white-haired Senator climbed to the podium on that cold March day, he was warned one last time by his aides to deliver a moderate address, to apply balm to the still-open wounds of the previous years, and, above all, to avoid mention of the war and his opposition to it.

La Follette began his speech with the formalities of the day, acknowledging old supporters and recognizing that this was a pivotal moment for him politically. Then, suddenly, La Follette pounded the lectern. "I am going to be a candidate for reelection to the United States Senate," he declared, as the room shook with the thunder of a mighty orator reaching full force. Stretching a clenched fist into the air, La Follette bellowed: "I do not want the vote of a single citizen under any misapprehension of where I stand: I would not change my record on the war for that of any man, living or dead."Where is the contemporary politician with this kind of guts today? Had Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton ever even whispered in some locked and shuttered back room that they were considering a similarly unequivocal public statement of their own personal political principles, and a thousand so called 'wise and knowledgeable' campaign operatives would have simultaneous aneurysms. This is not how we do it in politics today, such chin-strokers and hand-flutterers would caution. The presence of the modern electronic media, with its instantaneous capacity to communicate across the nation to members of every different type of special interest group, makes it impossible to get elected to a national office with such uncompromising statements. You will offend too many people, alienate too many powerful interests. You must swaddle yourself in comforting, non-specific aphorisms and emotionally powerful but semantically meaningless buzz phrases. You must always unite, never divide; you must continually reassure, and never, ever offend.

Well, Bob La Follette would have had two words for that sort of political advice, and those two words would not have been "Happy Birthday":
The crowd sat in stunned silence for a moment before erupting into thunderous applause. Even his critics could not resist the courage of the man; indeed, one of his bitterest foes stood at the back of the hall, with tears running down his cheeks, and told a reporter: "I hate the son of a bitch. But, my God, what guts he's got."

...It was this militant faith in the people that enabled him to win reelection to the Senate in 1922 by an overwhelming margin. And this faith guided the Midwestern populist as he embarked on the most successful left-wing Presidential campaign in American history.

Running with the support of the Socialist Party, African Americans, women, organized labor, and farmers, La Follette terrified the established economic, political, and media order, which warned that his election would bring chaos. And La Follette gave them reason to fear. His Progressive Party platform called for government takeover of the railroads, elimination of private utilities, easier credit for farmers, the outlawing of child labor, the right of workers to organize unions, increased protection of civil liberties, an end to U.S. imperialism in Latin America, and a plebiscite before any President could again lead the nation into war.

Campaigning for the Presidency on a pledge to "break the combined power of the private monopoly system over the political and economic life of the American people" and denouncing, in the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan's resurgence, "any discrimination between races, classes, and creeds," La Follette told his followers: "Free men of every generation must combat renewed efforts of organized force and greed to destroy liberty."
Obviously, La Follette did not win his Presidential campaign, and that is all the lesson that contemporary aspirants to the Oval Office like Clinton and Obama are willing, or, probably, able, to draw from his example.

But La Follette's ideas were not defeated. He laid an important foundation of Socialist/Progressive thinking that greatly influenced politics over the next two generations:
The 1924 campaign laid the groundwork for the resurgence of left-wing populist movements across the upper Midwest - the Non-Partisan League of North Dakota, the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota, and the Progressive Party of Wisconsin. It spurred labor-based independent political action by New York's American Labor Party and other groupings. And La Follette gave inspiration, as well, to those who swung the Democratic Party to the left in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Harold Ickes Sr., a key aide to La Follette's 1924 campaign, would become an architect of the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, in the words of historian Bernard Weisberger, "completed the elder La Follette's work."

Roosevelt acknowledged the inspiration of La Follette. But the Wisconsinite's truest heirs were of a more radical bent-people like his sons, Bob Jr. and Phil, who served respectively as U.S. Senator from Wisconsin and governor of the state; Minnesota's Floyd Olson, who was very possibly the most radical figure ever to govern an American state; author Upton Sinclair, whose 1934 foray into gubernatorial politics borrowed heavily from La Follette's 1924 platform and promised to "end poverty in California"; and New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a veteran La Follette partisan who nominated the Senator for President in 1924 with the announcement that "I speak for Avenue A and 116th Street, instead of Broad and Wall."
And times do change, and indeed, there are different conditions at work in our society right now than there were in 1924, when La Follette's Presidential campaign was defeated. How hungry do you think the American people are now, after decades of steadily increasing corporate corruption on every level of our government, for a candidate who would run on such a platform?

You may point to Ralph Nader's historic failure in 2000, which common (and incorrect) 'knowledge' dictates did nothing except deliver the nation and the world into an eight year long Dark Age that we as yet see only dim signs we may ever emerge from -- but Nader was a political outsider whom the media hated, who ran as a private citizen and who had no electoral base to build from.  (Nader and his followers are also not even remotely responsible for Bush's success; to lay appropriate blame there, you must look to either the 40 million or so idiots who voted for Bush, or the 4 Supreme Court justices who handed him an election he hadn't actually won.  Nader, and those who voted for him, aren't in the equation.) 

Imagine if Obama or Clinton, or one of the other serious Democratic contenders, was to actually stand up and declare ringingly their opposition to American foreign interventionalism, to corporate cronyism, to political corruption, to everything about our current entrenched political system and its bloated, plutocratic, war profiteer campaign contributors that every American knows on some level is deeply, deeply wrong... yet that none of our politicians ever seems to want to even mention, much less openly confront?

I don't know. Maybe their actual message wouldn't get any TV time, maybe the newspapers wouldn't cover it, maybe the people would never hear what they really had to say. Certainly, any such candidate would be denounced and derided from every political direction by every media outlet known to man.

But maybe... just maybe... the American electorate would respond to this kind of honesty and integrity in the same way as the people of Wisconsin did in 1922.

Of course, it may be that they simply can't do it... that the paranoids are correct, and that you cannot get elected to a national office anywhere in America these days without selling out, body and soul, to the powerful corporate interests that seem to control every facet of contemporary life.

It may be that no one who reaches Congress, or a State governor's mansion, really can take this kind of position, without immediately being shut down by the real powers of the world. Perhaps everyone who is allowed to hold a so called 'powerful position' of public trust is actually in someone else's pocket. Maybe there really ARE horribly compromising pictures and/or videotapes featuring every powerful man and woman currently alive (and many who are now dead, for that matter) sitting in some secret safe somewhere, just waiting to be leaked to the media if anyone sets so much as one toe off the reservation.

Paranoid though such speculations are, this hypothesis would certainly explain the absolute gutlessness of every politician we have.

In which case, you have to wonder what terrible sin against power Mark Foley must have committed, to reap the punishment handed down to him a few years back... but  I digress.

Still, I have to hope that not everyone is in the bag, and that somewhere out there, we have a modern day Robert La Follette lurking on the political horizon... and that this time, should such a man or woman stand up and pound their fist on the lecturn and declare such principles in so uncompromising a way, the end results would be different.

Can you imagine what the world might be like today, if LaFollette had actually won his Presidential campaign?

As a slightly bitter afterthought, let me say that I had allowed myself to think for a few months there that Senator Obama might indeed be a modern day reincarnation of Senator Robert LaFollette.  Alas, it would seem this isn't so; Senator Obama's recent vacillations and equivocations make it apparent that he's simply another Politician As Usual.

By the way, for those who can't read my new graphic, I apologize.  I had no idea it would end up so small.   You can see it in its full glory here.  And kudos to Sifu Tweety and The Editors. 

The following link is to an opinion article on the Bush Legacy from the 'Arab News.'

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&article=111305&d=28&m=6&y=2008

The Arab News describes itself thus:

"ArabNews Overview The First English Daily Newspaper in Saudi Arabia
Published simultaneously from Jeddah, Riyadh and Dhahran

In 1975 Saudi Research & Publishing Co. (SRPC) launched the first Saudi English-language daily newspaper, ArabNews. For more than a quarter of a century ArabNews has been breaking cultural barriers and unifying Arabs and non-Arabs alike in responding to their need for information. ArabNews has evolved successfully into the well respected, leading paper it is today.
From its initiation, the paper has been serving the interests of both the Saudis and a large expatriate community and in consequence introduced them to each other. The challenge which is successfully accomplished each morning is meeting the needs of the different cultural communities which make up the diverse population of the Kingdom. ArabNews offers regional news from Europe, America, India, Pakistan, Philippines and other Middle Eastern countries in English for the heterogeneous mix of its loyal readers. Local news, business news, sports and features are provided for all, unlike other newspapers which may be serving a homogeneous audience.
Circulation: 51.768 (ABC, January-June 1998)
Distribution: Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Near East, North Africa, Europe and USA
SPRC, established 1972, has become one of the most important publishing groups in the Arab world. Since then, the list of publications has grown to include 18 daily, weekly and monthly newspapers and magazines, all leaders in their respective fields in the Arab and non-Arab world.

Readership Profile   Average Issue Readership
General Public
PARC Media Index 1997, Saudi Arabia Sex Male 86% Female 14% Ethnic Groups 10% Saudi Nationals 10% Other Arabs 5% Non-Arabs 85% Occupation   Management 32% Employees 58% Housewife 5% Income SAR4,000-SAR7,000 24% SAR7,001-SAR12,500 5% Over SAR12,500 13% Education Secondary 34% University & Above 52% ArabNews Online

With technology opening the new doors of communication and the distribution of news and information, ArabNews Online is not bound by physical limitations. ArabNews Online is published by ArabNews from its offices located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and is now available to readers around the globe. It offers Arab and non-Arab readers news from an Arab perspective. What viewers can expect is in-depth regional information for those outside of Saudi Arabia, and a forum within which to interact with the sources of information. We hope to provide a glimpse into the daily life and activities within the Kingdom, from human interest stories to political events.
ArabNews is also proud of its Islam section and special Islamic features. The objective is enlightenment of Muslims and non-Muslims of a great faith by providing an arena in which to pose questions and receive answers. 
The news market has been changing dramatically in recent years. Around the world people have less free time and, as a result, are more discerning about how they spend it. ArabNews Online endeavors to reflect this changing lifestyle, by offering accuracy, selectivity, immediacy, and interactivity. The Internet allows for a more personal relationship between reporter and reader. And at ArabNews we value that relationship.

Please contact the Editor in Chief Mr. Khaled Al-Maeena in reference to our website via email at: almaeena@arabnews.com"

[I link to ArabNews on my Blog, but in now way is that an explicit or implicit endorsement of ArabNews or any of its content.]

MyBlog: httpProteanPerspectives.blogspot.com

Congressman Conyers subpoenaed AG Mukasey for transcripts of the President's responses to the Fitzgerald Grand Jury investigation into Valarie Wilson. Valarie Wilson is sometimes incorrectly referred to as Valarie Plame, and was a well-recognized covert operative working on highly classified activities for the American Central Intelligence Agency.

It is a war crime to intimidate witnesses to war crimes; or withhold evidence of illegal retalation against those with knowlege of war crimes.

Mukasey's position has been the President will not respond to any inquiry on the grounds that he is above the law, not subject to any Congressional review, and cannot be required to cooperate with fact finding. In short, Mukasey would ask that we (incorrectly) believe the President is above the law.

The President has a problem, as does AG Mukasey. It is illegal to hide evidence of war crimes, or evidence of retalation against Valarie Wilson on the grounds of "national security". The DoD emails show many were involved with mobilizing the nation for war on a dubious claim of WMD, without the Geneva required imminent threat.

The FBI 302 from Guantanamo FIle 265A-MM-C99102 sheds light on the problem the President and Mukasey have in refusing to respond to questions about the President retalation against Valaries Wilson. The FBI 302 is a form documenting POW comments.

The POW being intervered had reservations about responding to questions at Guantanamo. The FBI 302 documents the following information attempting to reassure the POW:

It was mentioned that if [the prisoner] was truly innocent, he should have no hestitation answering any questions posed by interviewers. If, on the other hand, [the prisoner] was guilty of some crime, [the prisoner] should admit his mistake(s) and move on with his life in the hopes of one day being released from custody.

The FBI 302 has been released, substantially violating the privacy of the prisoner. There is no reason this President or the Attorney General can justify witholding any information about the President's truthful responses.

As the prisoner was reassured, the innocent should have no hestitation in cooperating. We need to see the President's evidence of cooperation.

Many of you aren't going to like this post.  As such I feel the need to preface by saying that my support for Obama is unwavering.  I have contributed what I can, have an online fundraising page, will attend a fundraiser today and will be hosting one myself next month (house parties across America being organized by TPM readers Ghengis and California Paige).  My inclination is to just say fine to the FISA bill as it stands now because my candidate supports it as is if necessary.  I hear the progressive argument that this is a cave and it sets a bad precedent for our right to freedom from unwarranted searches.  So I've been holding off on deciding how I felt about it and looking a little further into what's involved.

I just want to put a little perspective on the retroactive immunity portion and why it scares the shit out of me.  We aren't talking here about Bush going to some telcos and saying "here is a list of 5,000 names, we think these people are suspicious and want their phone records without a warrant".  The wiretapping goes so way far beyond that.  It's astounding really. What we do know is that at least one large carrier, Verizon,  provided a MASSIVE circuit that was dedicated completely for the use of the NSA to indiscriminately listen on ANY call (and text messages and Internet activity) they felt necessary by ANY of their subscribers.  Doesn't that put at least a little chill in your freedom loving bones?

Here is a little info on what was discovered by whistleblowers.  From a Security Focus article

The consultant, Babak Pasdar, stated in an affidavit that during a job securing the network of a large, but unnamed, cellular telecommunications carrier in 2003, he came across evidence of a 45 Mbps network tap referred to as the "Quantico circuit" that had complete access to the company's network and on which the company did not want any monitoring. The third party, about whose identity Pasdar did not speculate, likely had access to the cellular providers fraud-detection system, text messaging system, Web applications and Internet communications coming from or going to any of the provider's mobile phones, Pasdar stated in the affidavit.

The unnamed carrier above is Verizon.

Here is some info on what AT&T provided:

These revelations mirror those of AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, who revealed that the super secretive National Security Agency had been given access by AT&T management to install "splitters" for the Agency hard-wired to an NSA "secure" room in the company's central office in San Francisco. According to Klein,

"In short, an exact copy of all internet traffic that flowed through critical AT&T cables--emails, documents, pictures, web browsing, Voice over-internet phone conservations, everything--was being diverted to equipment inside the secret room. In addition the documents reveal the technological gear used in their secret project, including a highly sophisticated search component capable of quickly sifting through huge amounts of digital data (including text, voice and images) in real time according to pre-programmed criteria.

It's important to understand that the internet links which were connected to the splitter contained not just foreign communications but vast amounts of domestic traffic, all mixed together. Furthermore, the splitter has no selective abilities--it's just a dumb device which copies everything to the secret room. And the links going through the splitter are AT&T's physical connections to many other internet providers (e.g., Sprint, Qwest, Global Crossing, Cable & Wireless, and the critical West Coast Internet Exchange Point known as Mae West). Since these networks are interconnected, the government surveillance affects not only AT&T customers but everyone else--millions of Americans.

I also discovered in my conversations with other technicians that other "secret rooms" were established in Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego. One of the documents I obtained also mentions Atlanta, and the clear inference in the logic of this setup, and the language of the documents, is that there are other such rooms across the country to complete the coverage--possibly 15 to 20 or more." (Mark Klein, "Reject Amnesty for Telecoms," Electronic Frontier Foundation)

I don't seem to be able to get out of blockquote mode here but the remainder are my words.  Just about everything goes over AT&T lines, regardless of the telco because AT&T built the national network back when it was a monopoly.  So even though Qwest refused to release records their subscriber's data was tapped in transit when traversing AT&T lines.

We will never know to what extent this was used without being able to sue for information.  We can't opt out of our contracts, even though the terms were violated, without paying the fine.  We can't request any refunds for the same reasons.  I'm not particularly concerned about refunds and fines but I do want to know what was gathered, how it was analyzed and what was done with the information.  I want the communications providers involved to know that it is illegal and there should be consequences.  I want the known entity.

I understand that we must not loose this election.  I understand that if Obama fought the immunity portion McCain will try to use that to portray him as soft on terror.  I'm not going to rail against him and his decision here but I'd like to point out that many who voted for the war did so primarily because they were concerned with being portrayed as soft on terror. 

Lets hope this is the last time that argument will work.

Grrrrrr - no edit ability ----Grrrrr

Cleaning up my previous post to make it readable

Ever since 9/11, this Administration has put forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. … Secrecy must not trump accountability. ... I share your commitment to this cause, and will stand with you in the fights to come.

Barack Obama, 08/01/2007

 

 

Which would you rather have …

 

A.)     President Obama without the new FISA bill

 

B.)      President Obama with the new FISA bill

 

C.)     President McCain without the new FISA bill

 

D.)     President McCain with the new FISA bill

 

 

If you honestly believe that our country is better off with A than B, then why on earth are you working so hard to tell everybody to shut up about FISA?

 

If your argument is that it’s a necessary evil in order to get Obama to the White house, you have accepted the false choice of FISA …

 

Obama must support FISA or the big bad Republicans will smear him as soft on terror and that will be insurmountable in terms of winning the election

 

That’s a position of fear, of handing power to your opponent, and finally it just plain doesn’t hold up.  Do you actually believe that if FISA passes as is, that the Republicans will not attack Obama as soft on terror.  Do you honestly believe that having taken a principled stand to oppose and defeat the FISA bill that this fact alone will sway an undecided voter that Obama is ‘soft on terror’?  Do you think that voter would have been untarnished by other false Republican smears and would have voted for Obama otherwise?  Sorry folks it just doesn’t add up.

 

Obama promised to ‘change the way things are done in Washington’.  He’s in Washington now.  He can demonstrate that change now, by standing up for the people and the Constitution.  People, if he’s afraid of the Republicans now, that isn’t going to change.  We’re going to get one capitulation after the next if we don’t forcefully demonstrate that we expect him to keep his word, to us, that I “will stand with you in the fights to come”.   Stand now Senator -  and stop kneeling in front of the Republican altar of security trumping liberty.

There is a new group on barackobama.com that was created with the intention of pressuring Mr. Obama to reconsider his stance on FISA Modernization H.R. 6304.

The group is over 1600+ members in just 2.5 days, and is on pace to be one of the largest by the beginning of next week. Please come and join the effort, post a letter to Mr. Obama in the group blog explaining your feelings on his dramatic and inexplicable reversal of position.

Hey look, we know it's a long shot, but Mr. Obama has claimed that he would have had the judgement and moral certitude to vote against authorizing force in Iraq. We see this as just such a moment, and he is not showing the leadership he promised, when he said he would filibuster any bill with telecom immunity, which is arguably the LEAST dangerous thing in this bill. The outright evisceration of the 4th amendment is another.

If you're interested in assisting this effort, you can find the group here: http://my.barackobama.com/page/group/SenatorObama-PleaseVoteAgainstFISA

Ask Senator Obama to make a principled stand NOW, while it still matters.

Protect the 4th Amendment this 4th of July and Preserve Independence.

Ever since 9/11, this Administration has put forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. … Secrecy must not trump accountability. ... I share your commitment to this cause, and will stand with you in the fights to come.

Barack Obama, 08/01/2007

<Br></BR>

<Br></BR>

 

Which would you rather have …

<Br></BR>

A.)     President Obama without the new FISA bill

<Br></BR>

B.)      President Obama with the new FISA bill

<Br></BR>

C.)     President McCain without the new FISA bill

<Br></BR>

D.)     President McCain with the new FISA bill

<Br></BR>

<Br></BR>

 

If you honestly believe that our country is better off with A than B, then why on earth are you working so hard to tell everybody to shut up about FISA?

<Br></BR>

If your argument is that it’s a necessary evil in order to get Obama to the White house, you have accepted the false choice of FISA …

<Br></BR>

Obama must support FISA or the big bad Republicans will smear him as soft on terror and that will be insurmountable in terms of winning the election

<Br></BR>

That’s a position of fear, of handing power to your opponent, and finally it just plain doesn’t hold up.  Do you actually believe that if FISA passes as is, that the Republicans will not attack Obama as soft on terror.  Do you honestly believe that having taken a principled stand to oppose and defeat the FISA bill that this fact alone will sway an undecided voter that Obama is ‘soft on terror’?  Do you think that voter would have been untarnished by other false Republican smears and would have voted for Obama otherwise?  Sorry folks it just doesn’t add up.

<Br></BR>

Obama promised to ‘change the way things are done in Washington’.  He’s in Washington now.  He can demonstrate that change now, by standing up for the people and the Constitution.  People, if he’s afraid of the Republicans now, that isn’t going to change.  We’re going to get one capitulation after the next if we don’t forcefully demonstrate that we expect him to keep his word, to us, that I “will stand with you in the fights to come”.   Stand now Senator -  and stop kneeling in front of the Republican altar of security trumping liberty.

I DID NOT receive this. Forwarded by an Obamacon

My Friends,

The Straight Talk Express bus has become a symbol of my campaign's openness, honesty and access - true democracy at work. Some of my favorite memories of the campaign so far are of riding on the Straight Talk Express across this great country, enjoying unscripted, spirited conversation about the issues with members of the press and other passengers.

I believe voters deserve a close examination of our presidential candidates. This give-and-take of ideas is a true example of democracy in action.

I'd like to take the opportunity today to invite you to join me on the Straight Talk Express for a day of conversation and campaigning.

Our last "Ride the Bus" contest was such a success, we've decided to launch it again. As a token of my appreciation for your financial support, with any donation you make between today and next Monday at midnight, will qualify you to win a seat aboard the Straight Talk Express. I hope you'll consider joining me by making a donation right away.

 . . . has lost her sheep

And doesn't know where to find them.

Just leave them alone, and they'll come home,

Wagging their tails behind them.

Baaa-aaah-ahhhh  (Omigod!  A big bright round warm thing just popped up over the horizon!).

Baaaaah (Ohmigod!  A clump of trees!). 

Baaahhhhhh (Ohmigod!  The fields are full of green stuff!).

Feel free to post your own.   

There are (at least) two big issues of justice that separate the liberals from the conservatives when it comes to The Global War On Terror™.

The first is impeachment. Many of us would like to see Bush and Cheney impeached for their actions over the last 7 years. Even so, most of us who feel that way don't believe this to be a realizable wish. We might applaud Kucinich acting as Don Quixote, but ultimately realize that it's just not going to happen. We are very eager to forgive Obama (and/or Clinton) for not pursuing this.

The second is telecom immunity. Remember that immunity is about forgiving past criminal actions and not about preventing future ones, although with all questions of justice, these are related. Again, most of us are against telecom immunity (both civil and criminal). However, many of us (myself included), aren't quite as eager to overlook Obama's differing stance on this one. Why is that?

I think that most of us who feel this way (i.e., with the contrasting opinions on impeachment vs. immunity), it really boils down to whether we think this was a necessary compromise. Most people who are defending Obama think that it was. Most of us who aren't so quick to defend don't think that it was. So, whether than it being so much a question of ethics (else, why would we be so ready to forgive his lack of support for impeachment?), it really boils down to a question of pragmatism. Was it really necessary, and how sure are you of it?

I don't think it was necessary, even on the civil side (as I understand it, criminal prosecution is still open), but I can't say I'm even 80% sure of it.

So, although I think he made the wrong call here, it's not the same crushing blow to my opinion of him that it seems to be for some people who also think he made the wrong call here. As usual, part of my purpose in posting this is to find a middle ground where we can at least agree to disagree without getting lost in hyperbole.

I'll admit it, I was thrown off the track by Obama's moves this week, but after better reflection, I'm rethinking my position.

That's exactly what threw me off--Obama's melding and changing line on several topics, most notably campaign finance and FISA. On the former, Obama came off looking arrogant, and on the latter he snubbed the liberal base by compromising on telecom immunity, a bete noir of the left.

Now I come to see his pragmatic and strategic moves to the center as smart and even principled. In terms of his campaign's overriding message this week, it has been "Obama can win." To put to rest, finally, Hillary's failed argument that only she could beat McCain. It's a step toward a robust fall campaign to come out saying "look at all the money and swing states we have."

Obama must be confident he has the party sewn up, and can go right at the general election campaign.

In an ever-increasing fit of Bush disgust, I wanted to go back and look up Hugo Chavez quote from the UN about Bush being the devil.  So, google Bush+satan -- lo and behold there are pages and pages of stuff about Bush and links to Satan -- and these folks are totally serious.  Here's a shocking story I found....

Dateline 1985 -- Brownsville, Tx

Several members of a Satanic cult were found murdered in a house they occupied for the express purpose of holding rituals, which included human sacrifice and the worst kinds of torture and abuse.  One lone survivor of this massacre turned out to be -- George W. Bush!

According to these reports he couldn't explain to police where he had been for 3 days, and the prosecutor was only throttled by intense pressure from very high levels to back off his investigation of W.  This article goes on to describe Bush's reaction to being asked about the incident, when running for President.

http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=39&contentid=1396&page=2

There are several sites with information on this story.  Granted they are conspiracy theory sites, so you have to consider that. 

There are plenty of other sites that openly acuse Bush of being a practicing Satanist.  In fact, a Christian evangelical group has openly called for his impeachment over the issue.

Okay, so could this be true?  Well, let's look at a few facts we know.  You can't argue with dead bodies -- somebody killed them.  That's a fact.  Not only did Bush not deny he had any involvement in the issue, he threatened the reporters for asking about it.  That's not exactly a display of righteous indignation.

It's also a fact that Bush gets together with some of the most powerful men in the world every July at Bohemian Grove in California.  Reports of activities there are hedonistic and decidedly X-rated.

The event ends every year with a mock human sacrifice ritual to the ancient Babylonian god Molech -- the same one they sacrificed their children to and God condemns utterly in Leviticus.

Ask yourself this question?  Why is your President (along with the world's most influential leaders) participating in a pagan sacrifice ritual (security paid for by us)?  Isn't that absolutely bizarre behavior for grown men?

Video of this event is available on Youtube.  Just punch up Bohemian Grove and you will see the participants, all garbed in ceremonial robes offering up their sacrifice to the God, including G W Bush -- or Satan -- whichever you prefer.

On the topic of patriotism, Barack Obama wrote the following for Time magazine:

"When I was a child, I lived overseas for a time with my mother. And one of my earliest memories is of her reading to me the first lines of the Declaration of Independence, explaining how its ideas applied to every American, black and white and brown alike. She taught me that those words, and the words of the United States Constitution, protected us from the brutal injustices we witnessed other people suffer during those years abroad."

I can't imagine what it's like to be physically identifiable as black, and have a white parent--particularly a mother; both of mine were black.  I was old enough to watch the height of the civil rights movement and my ambitious, striving parents were furious enough to ensure that the eyes through which I saw it were filled not with today's nostalgic pride at America's eventual move forward, but with the Movement's rage that we had to suffer death, beatings, jets from water hoses and white men and women's spittle to gain our rights as human beings. 

Like Obama's mother, they could have read the Declaration of Independence to me.  But it would have been with a rage and sadness that the ideas, in application, did not apply equally to those like us. 

Michelle Obama is attacked for saying she was proud of her country for the first time in her adult life.  Some white conservatives expressed outrage that anyone could harbor such a sentiment.  Some such critics are probably ignorant of history.  Some desperately seek to "disinvent" a history that is counter to their preferred American narrative.  All of them, in the immortal words of Jack Nicholson, "can't handle the truth."  They can't handle the truth of America's past.  They can't handle the truth of that past's continued existence in the African-American present. 

My father was a career Army officer.  In the 50s, black officers battled suspicions of communist sympathies.  It was quite a dance:  Whites treated them as second-class, and then dared them to seek an alternate path so that they could attack them for not loving the country that treated them with contempt. 

There's an updated dance for black politicians.  They have to go the extra mile to prove that they "love" America.  Conservative Republicanism is the surest route.  If you tolerate a party that owes its modern political good fortune to racial fear and hatred, then you must love America.  If you're willing to eat that much shit, you're one of the "safe" ones, one of the "good" ones.

Since I'm not a politician, I don't have to pretend.  I am not one of the "good" ones.  I cannot say that I "love" America.  I do not know what that means.  Raised as I was, when I was, and by the parents I inherited, America has always been an abstraction to me.  It certainly was not the "land of the free."  It was not the cradle of freedom and liberty.  It claimed to cherish those ideals, but it denied them to me.  America has always been where I live.  It is what I know.  I admire a great deal about it.  As my home, I would defend it. 

But I don't consider America's grandest actions to have been taken on my behalf, in my generational stead, or in my name. And so I do not take personal pride in them.  Love?  I love those things that I trust well.  I love those things that I know in my heart love me in return, and that I know in my heart would never knowingly harm me.  I can attest to none of that about America.

As black, the bulk of America's history is, to be blunt, a hundreds-year insult to me.  While black Americans have successfully battered our way into America's mainstream, I principally credit black Americans with that accomplishment, not "America."   If America wants thanks for "allowing" us our rights, look elsewhere.  Only the personality disordered narcissist insists on congratulations for not doing evil. 

Imagine you were born where you and your parents did not have the rights of most, in which you witnessed the majority laugh at coon-faced parodies of people like you, in which your young self knew that the majority of your countrymen did not consider you quite as human as they were, and felt justified in treating you accordingly.  It leaves a scar.  It's a scar many Americans don't want to see, so they attack those like Michelle Obama who draw attention to it.  They call it "grievance."  In fact, it's just history--yours and mine.  There are other scars in America's history, but few that are treated with such revulsion.   

Time magazine asked MIT neurobiology professor Matt Wilson, "Why do we remember unpleasant events better than ordinary ones?"

He replied, "We think of memory as a record of our experience. But the idea is not just to store information; it's to store relevant information. [The idea is] to use our experience to guide future behavior."

And there's the rub.  America is asking black politicians to prove that they will not use African-America's brutal and humiliating historical experience to guide their behavior. 

I guess they just want to make sure that black politicians don't treat America the way America treated blacks.  Ironic, isn't it?   So many Americans insist that blacks forget our history in America, but it obviously remains at the top of their minds. 

    Like all readers here, politics is my hobby and passion.  Unlike some, my political career lies before me rather than in the pages of a memoir. This mix of politics as both pleasure and profession is simultaneously one of the most detestable and encouraging phenomena taking place within the next generation of activists, politicians, and their advisers.
  
     Students and scholars of politics compose a unique community in American academia. While a member of it (currently a rising junior in Intl Pltcs and Intl Studies at Penn State Honors College), I’ve met young people with astounding work ethics and intelligent causes.

      More frequently, though, the students I’ve met are on a lust-filled chase for an image. A chase after the status and respect that comes with being Mr. Diplobasspresiminister without any of the commitment, sacrifice, or careful study that comes with it. These students seek the pleasure that a career in politics can bring without shouldering the burden that is its prerequisite.

     Politics has an air of grand romance about it that is absent in most other fields of study and, accordingly, draws a handful of romantics and adventurers. However arrogant it seems, it is rare that I meet a student who is more dedicated to becoming a statesman than he is to looking like one. Last week, I experienced a rarity.
      
      I attended the orientation and convocation for awardees of the National Security Education Program’s David L. Boren Scholarship that. This award, named after the Senator from Oklahoma with the longest tenure on the Intelligence Committee, funds overseas study for students seeking careers in international politics and security.

    I’ve been to conferences like these before and so have you. A bunch of students "networking" and half-heartedly making political jokes while hoping nobody asks them why it's funny. At least, that’s what I expected before I entered. In a crowded conference room whose lighting and microphone seemed to be running off the ambitions of the attendees, I met America’s best political students.

    This group was not on a quest for matters of image, status, or ego. Rather, each of them was dedicated to his or her own personal passion. Every student I spoke to articulated precisely why they wanted to study in Iran, Russia, China, and Singapore, to name a few.

     The real highlight came when Senator Boren addressed the audience. One part really resonated with me. He spoke of the mammoth funding of the military that he has both witnessed and sponsored at different times. While creating the scholarship program, a thought struck him: “America needs to create a ‘stockpile of human talent.’”

Meeting the Senator who penned the National Security Education Act by hand was great, but meeting the “stockpile” was even better.  After two years of study in a University not particularly renowned for political studies, I’ve met a lot of the image chasers I mentioned before. Maybe the situation is different at other universities, maybe not. Regardless, after meeting America’s best students in international politics and relations, I am re-energized by the knowledge that we aren’t heading into the future unarmed.

"Kerry with a Tan."


With those words, Grover Norquist became the most prominent figure in Republican politics to openly declare that the "Southern strategy" of the party continues and once again will be the key to another presidential victory in November.

It is also a re-affirmation that the "'Cold' War between the States" is alive and well in the 21st century.

With the end of the the Civil War in 1865 came the period of Reconstruction led by the victorious Republican party whose stated intent was the restoration and revitalization of the Southern economy but whose other goal was the full implementation of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation as the law of the land. For the South, already seething from the humiliation of their defeat, this was yet another act of aggression by the North.

The geographical dichotomy over the issue of slavery is as old as the nation itself. The author of our Constitution,Thomas Jefferson, himself a Southerner and slave-owner, truly believed that "All men are created equal" but that the the extension of that principle to the black man would result in the stillborn birth of a new nation. The seed of segregation had been sown and, more importantly, codified as a tenet of American law for decades to follow. And the concept of "States Rights" would become the slowly growing cancer on the American body politic that would eventually be excised by the secession of the South from the Union.

At the end of the Civil War, the Republican Party was anathema to Southerners. What would become the modern Democratic Party took root and, with few exceptions, became the party of choice of the new South.

But some wounds never heal. The concept of States Rights became the South's raison d'etre for continuing its policies and practices of segregation and discrimination. The rulings of the federal government in Washington took a back seat to the right of the individual state to govern and enact laws as it saw fit. And so, America's second "Cold War" waged on.

At the end of World War II, Harry Truman, by a stroke of the presidential pen, de-segregated America's armed forces. Suddenly, Southerners in the military were forced to live, work, and sleep along side the very people who in civilian life couldn't even drink from the same water fountain.

The South's reaction was swift. Strom Thurmond, then the Democratic governor of South Carolina, so incensed by this act of presidential hubris broke with the party and mounted a third party run for the presidency against Truman with "Segregation now" and States Rights as its rallying cries. The stage was set for the collapse of the Democratic Party in the South.

Seeing an enormous opportunity to seize control of the disaffected southern Democrats, the Republican party began to formulate a strategy for success. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was seen as the final act of betrayal by the Democrats. It was also the last piece of the puzzle the Republicans needed. What began as a disjointed and scatter-shot approach, the "Southern Strategy" was cohered and formulated in the 1970's by a rising political operative, Lee Atwater.

And the basis of the strategy was simplicity itself. Seize the anger of Southerners over the growth and success of the Civil Rights movement and turn it to their advantage. Draw upon the Southern traditions of segregation and discrimination. Using at times blatant racism, but more often couching it in code words and terms, the Republicans put themselves forward as the party that would defend and maintain those traditions and rights of the Southern states. And the phrase "States Rights" became the biggest code term of all.

The successful use of this strategy by Nixon in 1968 codified the "Southern strategy" as a basic tenet of the Republican party. It would eventually result in almost every single Southern U.S. senator and congressman being a Republican. The old cry of "The South shall rise again!" had finally come true. And the proof is in the pudding. As Hillary Clinton noted yesterday over the last forty years only two Democrats have been elected president, Carter and Bill Clinton.

And in every presidential election cycle since 1968, we have seen the hidden (and sometimes not) racist references insinuate themselves into the political campaigns. Usually it is subtle and confined to select audiences. But at other times, it has become the cornerstone of the national campaign as did the infamous Willie Horton ads used against Michael Dukakis in 1988.

And Karl Rove, the spiritual heir to the legacy of Lew Atwater, honed it and refined it from a blunt-edged sword into a delicate stiletto.

Now in 2008, America is witness to a unique moment in its history. A black man, Barack Obama, has become the first person of color to be a major party's nominee for president of the United States. For most Americans, it is the fulfillment of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech in 1968. And in a delicious irony of fate, Barack Obama will deliver his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in Denver exactly forty years to the day of King's speech.

But for some Americans, it is yet another symbol of the North's on-going humiliation and oppression of the South which began over 140 years ago.

Which brings us back to Grover Norquist and his non-too subtle comment. It was the signal to those who still fight this cold war that the Republicans have their back and won't let them suffer the ultimate defeat, a black American president.

Test time!

Check out this video.

Give me your psychological, sociological and philosophical interpretations.

If you can’t do that, then at least share your favorite videos and riff about whatever’s in your noggin’.

This is the way to real change.

This is the way to real enlightenmen

This is the way to Alabama --- the sweet home 

Through Russia.

And Finland.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks5CgSv_nCc

Today, I was at the Unity Rally with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, in Unity, New Hampshire. It was quite an experience, I must say. I was originally going to write a long, boring, redundant post about how my day went and what exactly I did. Rather than bore you with that, I'm going to just write about my feelings now, in the aftermath. The aftermath of the rally, which ended in Claremont, NH in a total and complete downpour (ironic considering Obama and Clinton walked on stage to U2's 'Beautiful Day'. To be fair, it was hot, bright and sunny throughout the entire rally itself). In a way, though, it's also the aftermath of the many months past... And the aftermath of the most immediate past.

Being there, at the rally, among so many other enthusiastic people... listening, in person, in the midst of the moment, the energy, and the excitement, to Hillary and Barack speak... Speak about unity and coming together, beating John McCain... In person, in front of them, not more than maybe 20 feet from me...

I realized, there are so many freaking crucial things. So many freaking important issues. So much that really, truly is at stake. And because of that, I'm giving up on the negativity. I am absolutely tired of all the pointless, useless, spiteful, arrogant, irrational, idiotic, disgusting, trivial, derogatory, disparaging, petty and foolish fighting amongst ourselves.

After so much bitching, moaning, arguing, justisying, attacking, excusing, bashing, supporting, and explaining, I realize that I know pretty much every single view on the god foresaken FISA issue. After having spoken to some of my friends outside of TPM about it, I could anticipate every single point and argument they made, on every angle of the issue.

And after all that, after so much time, effort and energy spent on this one single fucking issue, the end point is still the same: John McCain cannot get elected.

People, do what you want. Attack each other, bash each other, insult each other, demoralize each other. Don't tell me it's just friendly debate, because it's not. Believe me, after the shit that I've seen thrown not only at myself, but at others, I can quite truthfully say it's not just friendly debate.

But go for it. Do it if you really want to. What will it accomplish, exactly? No clue. I doubt anything of importance except to make yourselves feel better for being able to whine over the internetz.

I'm done with it, though. I'm done with the negativity. As I have concluded numerous other times previous in my life, negativity solves nothing.

Being at that rally today and watching the crowds go wild... being a part of the enthusiasm and pure positive energy; being a part of that undiluted feeling of hope for the future, I realized that I can no longer take part in the negativity that has infested itself here. No, I'm not leaving TPM. Just the negative part of it. The one that feeds off of criticizing, bashing and attacking. I want no part of it.

I'm going to focus on the future, and abandon the pessimistic in exchange for the optimistic. There's no day like today, and I refuse to lose sight of that.

I'll leave you loyal few readers with a small, almost miniscule happening that took place. I had snuck onto the press bleachers, to get a better view of the Candidates when they arrived, and, of course, during their speeches. As Obama and Clinton stepped onto the stage, they waved and pointed at the crowd. As the waving died down, and Clinton took to the podium, I waved my arm high and strong at Obama. To my surprise, he smiled and waved back. Despite their speeches, which were good; despite the crowd, which was enthused; despite the energy, which was momentous... It was this tiny gesture that I remember the most. A simple friendly wave from Barack Obama.

It's nothing extremely special, but I uploaded the 309 photos I took at the Unity Rally to a Photobucket album. Some of the pictures are useless and pointless, I know. I haven't, as of yet, gotten around to cleaning up the good from the bad. I honestly just wanted to save every picture. I can be OCD like that.

I got a good seat by sneaking onto the press bleachers, so some of the pictures are quite nice, I think. I hope you all enjoy!

If you have any favorites, it might be cool to share them. Good luck finding them, though. Heh.

On June 20th, the First Presidency (the president and counselors) of the LDS (Mormon) church issued a letter to California's LDS church leadership that asks the Mormons in the state to do "all they can" and donate their "means and time" to promoting passage of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

The Mormon leadership intended the letter be read from the pulpit to Mormon congregations across the state on June 29th.  They were no doubt dismayed by news that, within a day of issuing the letter, it had already found its way to WikiLeaks and has now been widely promulgated (e.g., here and here).

Reading the responses of Mormon bloggers, it would seem that many of the LDS faithful are also dismayed - not that the letter was leaked, but that it was ever issued in the first place.  A comment by Oregon Republican (and Mormon) Sen. Gordon Smith, made ten days prior to the letter's unintended public release, during a discussion at the Center for American Progress, suggests one aspect of why getting rank-and-file Mormons onboard with anti-gay marriage actions might not be such an easy sell:

"Part of what I fear, as you start defining marriage - we have a long history of doing that in this country, and my Mormon pioneer ancestors were the victims of that. They were literally driven from the United States in the dead of winter for following their religious beliefs.  I don't want that coming back, but there are some on the front pages of your newspapers who are trying to now."

Yes, a sad history is repeating itself in the pages of our newspapers, Senator Smith.  And now it looks set to repeat from the pulpits of your own church.  For those who understand and value the worthy lessons of Mormon history, this letter is a betrayal, and its reading from Mormon pulpits amounts to a provocation of Mormonism's worthiest believers and defenders.  Considering your June 11th remarks, I count you among those able and equipped to comprehend the decided lack of enthusiasm among Mormon bloggers for the sad task that their church leaders intend to set before them this Sunday.

It is also a provocation of those outside your faith, Senator Smith.  The instructions to read the letter on June 29th, of all days, is an obvious challenge to the GLBT community and its supporters - a quiet riot of anti-Stonewall sentiment dressed up in Sunday best - and what follows are some thoughts and suggestions re what a useful response - what an appropriate action in response to this provocation - might look like.

But before jumping into considering what to do about these darn Mormons, I'd invite any reader who's made it this far to first take a gander at this discussion:  Same-sex marriage and hypocrisy?

And I'm making that invitation for two reasons:

1.  As an introduction to what's called The Bloggernacle (Blogger + Tabernacle ... clever, no?).  Entering the 'nacle is probably the quickest route to getting a handle on how Mormons themselves are reacting to the news of this letter (e.g., here, here, here and here).  

2.  As evidence that Mormons don't belong to some mindless monolithic religious and political monoculture.  There are plenty of Obama voters attending LDS services on any given Sunday.  So, please don't come around here talkin' trash about the Morg* ... OK?  My view is that any actions against this letter would be a waste of time if they're undertaken by activists incapable of leaving their pet anti-Mormon pejoratives at home.  *Morg:  Borg + Mormon (more mean-spirited than clever, no?)

Prior to posting here, I've taken the time to shop this question around to some Mormon bloggers:

If, as with Prop. 22, LDS church members in California are again asked to canvass their neighbors in support of the church's position against gay marriage, what view would you take of activists on the other side of this issue who might deem it fair play to mobilize and park themselves outside LDS chapels on June 29th in a show of disagreement with your church's position?

And they were cool with it.  In fact, some of them even came up with their own suggestions for protesting.

So, I hope it's understood that this is not about hating on Mormons.

It's about fashioning a response to a harmful and hypocritical move by the LDS leadership.  

If you don't think it's harmful, please go spend a little time here.

If you don't think it's hypocritical, well, I've tried to explain elsewhere why I think it is.

But regardless of how you personally view this move, I'm sure we can agree that coordinating a response looks to be quite simple at this point:  the letter is scheduled to be read on a specific date, at specific times, in specific locations.

So, if you live in California, this Sunday, June 29th, you've now been given a golden opportunity to express your opinion in a way that reaches a critical California constituency, all gathered under one steeple, and on a day when many of them may not be feeling all that pleased with what they've just heard come down from the pulpit.  

It's as easy as finding the location and meeting times of your nearest LDS chapel.  And if you're in California, trust me, there's an LDS chapel near you.  Start with LDS.org or your phonebook.  

Or, maybe, you're already a member?  If you are, I think I'll start with you, and share some of the suggestions I've seen floating around the bloggernacle:

* Don't attend church on the 29th

* Attend and wear a rainbow ribbon pin

* Stand up and walk out during the reading of the letter

I'm sure the title of my post has already given you some clue as to which suggestion I favor.  So, yup, this is me extending my sincere invitation to you to get up and walk out this Sunday once that letter starts being read.  When you get outside, if you happen to see anyone in the vicinity that looks like they might be there protesting as well, I'd hope you'd head over and say hello.  If you don't see anyone, I suppose you might just wanna head back inside.  It's pretty boring standing outside by yourself, and that short letter's gonna be a quick read, and I don't want you to think that I'm asking you to do too much.  In fact, if you're terribly conflicted about peeling yourself away from your pew, why not just conveniently schedule a bathroom break for around about the time that letter comes out?

If you're not a member, I'd planned on listing all sorts of suggested actions for you for this coming Sunday, all based on the idea of you showing up in, at or near an LDS chapel.  Rather than go that route, I think I'll list one here, and then save the rest for comments below (if you've got a good idea, please weigh in).  Here's one that impressed me, submitted by a faithful Mormon blogger:

However, if, on the first Sunday of July, gay people would organize so a few gay families with children would show up to every ward in Cali, and then, during testimony time, one would get up and briefly say: "Hi. I'm not a member of your church, but I am impressed with what nice people you all are, and what beautiful families you have. That's why I cannot understand why your leaders would encourage you to vote for a measure that would hurt MY family. I hope you don't," and then sit down, or leave with their children, then they would-I think-make both a powerful protest and a very good argument. It would change some minds.

The genius of this suggestion is that it recognizes how Mormons absolutely worship family.  It's why so many Mormons feel ill about what their leadership is doing (again) with this letter.

Obviously, it's not the job of gay Americans with families to go parading themselves around for the benefit and enlightenment of Mormons who oughta know better in the first place than to support what this letter is calling for.  I understand that.  If you're offended by what's being suggested here, please take it out on me in comments.

So, I'll be looking forward to either your criticism or your suggestions for how to take advantage of the opening that the leaking of this letter has provided.  

I'm gonna close out with some comments by Mormons gleaned from random Mormon blogs ...

From mormon matters:

An unpopular minority - Mormons - trying to limit the rights of another unpopular minority - Gays - on an issue - Marriage - which Mormonism has a somewhat vexed (and very very famous) history, reminds all and sundry about said vexed history, is on the wrong side of history ..., hurts the reputation of the church in society at large, does nothing to lessen the distrust of the church felt by the Evangelicals who are the main supporters of the amendment, and ... is the exact opposite of what the church should be doing.

From Feminist Mormon Housewives:

If I had the choice to spend $5 million on political lobbying efforts against same-sex marriage versus $5 million on food and medical supplies, I'd choose to feed hungry children.

The Church is free to send out press releases and publicize its position against same-sex marriage. But asking members to spend their time and money lobbying against same sex marriage when they could be volunteering at a local school teaching children to read, or working in a homeless shelter is an unfortunate allocation of resources.

Furthermore, I don't understand why the Church chooses to engage in a high-profile fight in California, while it remained silent and did not join in the coalition of organized efforts to stop gay marriage in Massachusetts. If gay marriage is such a dangerous threat to our social institutions, the Church should be fighting it whereever it rears its ugly head.

Thanks for considering my invitation.

Peace, Love, and Understanding this Sunday.  

The task of any religion is to teach us whom we're required to love, not whom we're entitled to hate.

x-posted at Daily Kos

*This is the last time I'll clutter the Reader Posts list with this topic, and I promise it's also the absolute last time I'll ever invite any of you to church ... (more than anything, I'm just curious to see how successfully I can retain formatting when x-posting from dKos).

We've seen accusations of racism and sexism thrown back and forth in the battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  Lurking not far behind are charges of ageism made against some criticisms of John McCain.

But are not concerns about McCain's cognitive health valid, whether disease- or age-related?  Isn't it about McCain himself, rather than his general age group?

McCain has indeed lost a noticeable amount of mental acuity over the last four years.  I became convinced of that recently.

No, not because of his mandatory-voluntary emissions-cap gaffe.  He could slip that noose with something like, "No, caps are not mandatory.  If you buy carbon credits, you can exceed the cap."  The MSM wouldn't blink an eye.

Rather, it was the social-security bamboozlement video that Josh put together for TPMtv.  It contrasted McCain's current repudiation of SS privatization with his 2004 boosterism for exactly that.

Take a look at McCain's 2004 performance.  The clip occurs about 3:35 into the vid.

Doesn't McCain seem hugely more animated, alert, and mentally sharp than he does today?

I didn't form this conjecture and go looking for evidence.  It caught me by surprise.  The degree of difference between the McCains of four years ago and today is so striking that it kinda jolted me.

If you see it the same way as I did, you might wonder if McCain's senescence could really become an issue.  One factor to consider is the the strength of the P-C strictures that rule in many places.  (Others might phrase that less cynically.)

I'm inclined to recall the NY Senate race of 1980.  Alfonse D'Amato beat incumbent Jacob Javits in the Republican primary, due in large measure to Javits's affliction with Lou Gherig's disease -- a neurological disease that severely compromises cognitive function.  (Javits ran anyway on the Liberal Party line and split the liberal vote with Democrat Liz Holtzman, handing Senator Pothole the plurality win.)

Now, Javits's impairment was much greater than McCain's current rash of senior moments.  But it is a relevant precedent.

Dunno how all this is gonna play out.  (Duh!)  I think I'll keep watching.

It's good to see that there are still some people who think straight...Obama is selling us out and it annoys me that a lot of people don't see that (especially, the short-sighted hypocrites who populate this site). Obama can do no wrong...disagree with him and you'd be called derogatory names on this site...even MSNBC is crossing the line now. It is not being fair...they cannot even criticize Obama...not even for something like FISA. Where is the vetting? Where is the journalistic ethic? If Fox embarks on a blind defense of Bush (like they've done for the past 8 years), everyone on this site will be screaming and kicking.

We all know that Obama doesn't even believe in FISA, he's doing it to position himself against attacks from GOP this fall...that tells you the kind of "ball-less" president he'll make.

The Huffington Post reports the follow exchange between Jon Ralston of the Las Vegas Sun and McCain regarding the selection of the lieutenant governor rather than the Governor to the Nevada Campaign chair.

McCain: I appreciate his support. As you know, the lieutenant governor is our chairman.

Q: Why snub the governor?

McCain: I didn't mean to snub him. I've known the lieutenant governor for 15 years and we've been good friends....I didn't intend to snub him. There are other states where the governor is not the chairman.

Q: Maybe it's the governor's approval rating and you are running from him like you are from the president?

McCain: (Chuckling) And I stopped beating my wife just a couple of weeks ago . . .

This is, of course, in reference to the famous loaded question conundrum "When did you stop beating your wife."  Given the problems that the Governor of Nevada has been having with wives and girlfriends and cocktail waitresses, it was not really the best go to punchline.

But McCain has bigger comedic problems...

In this particular case, the punchline is obscure enough that, even the nervous "I'm just kidding" laugh doesn't really sell it.  McCain’s punchlines are often obscure, derivative or too mean for their audience.  He end’s up having to explain them.  And if you have to explain the joke….

McCain seems to find violent, sexist imagery funny:

"You know that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran? Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran."

"At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt."

“Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.”

I guess he sees himself as an insult comic and given his age, I’m guessing Don Rickles rather than Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, but he doesn’t even rate comparisons to the likes of Andrew Dice Clay.  Insult comedy requires more than just repressed rage which he clearly has plenty of.  It needs impeccable timing and a take no prisoners fortitude to push ahead no matter how ugly the mob gets.  Ultimately, insult comedy needs to be inclusive and cathartic.  A good insult comic eventually wins over the audience.  McCain comes off self-absorbed and lonely.

It has taken me awhile to see the obvious but now it is apparent for I have given the Republicans too much credit OR they continue to give the American electorate too little due. Either way it appears the inevitable is upon them. Essentially the Republican mindset is all about "branding" the selling of the idea, (remember the "marketplace of ideas" credo), but as the pundits who are mislabeled as strategists continue to state that the Republican brand is very poor I have come to realize what they did and what they are still trying to do.

Yesterday Norquist came up with a bad metaphor calling out that Obama is simply "John Kerry with a tan". How crass, how utterly insulting, how utterly shallow and stupid---actually in his own circles some might have laughed for the Republican mind is always about making serious fun about any political opponent. But it was an attempt to brand Obama, a failed on like how used car dealers brand their competitors---without much thought.

Rove the other day tried another tack saying that Obama was the guy in the "country club who hangs back and drinks a martini, smoking a cigarette and making snide remarks about everyone." REALLY...Obama in what country club and where? I recall how Michael Jordan in Chicago during is championship runs couldn't join one of the North Shore elite (white) clubs but was always a guest of someone. Anyway what he was trying to do was brand Obama as a Dukakis elite, as Barack is not like regular voters----like Rove or Bush is?

The trouble is the Republicans still believe in their spin, their branding of Guns, God and Gays as their magical wedge issues, now loosing their effect. California and Massachusetts have actual gay marriages, while New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Oregon and New Jersey  now have civil unions with Iowa working through its courts also recognizing same-sex marriage.. The wrath of God has not befallen on any of these locations nor has their societies fallen into moral disasters. And now that the Republicans now have their cold dead hands rightfully around their pistols in a 5-4 dissenting opinion they have lost another wedge issue.

The obvious is that there is a rational reason why every Republican seat is now at risk as one senior party official openly admitted as a 3rd incumbent seat in what seemed to be a super safe Congressional district lost. Maybe it is is the math, no not the Democratic Delegat Math , the real electorate math that branding tricks will not whitewash over.  It is this math: 7  1/2 years of the Bush Administration TIMES 5 years in the Iraq War PLUS the eye-opening incompetence of the Katrina  Response MINUS the equities in America's homes PLUS the price of gasoline (squared) TIMES the price of food by how it has DIVIDED our nation in witnessing Abu Ghraib TIMES  torture TIMES rendition TIMES Gitmo TIMES PLAMEGATE PLUS the  new Terrorists it has created and the opportunity to train in Iraq,  MINUS  Wall Streets manipulations, PLUS Executive Pay & parachute's  TIMES the perpetual unemployment and finally all it SQUARED by the lack of healthcare reform TIMES the cost of basic healthcare------That math, the math that determines whether government is relevant to its citizen's lives. This is the Republican Brand my friends,  and when I was  a junior corporate exec I would have said this kind of brand is classic bankruptcy. 

And yet they are going to try to brand Obama like they did Dukakis (the east-coast elite), Bill Clinton (the womanizing Bubba) , Al Gore, (the story exaggerator) and John Kerry  (the fake war hero and elitist). The reason that worked was America was not paying attention but because the Republicans have bankrupted us so bad with all that above it is not going to work. 

I'll have to takes me a break, but have to take time to admire the master. I chose a diary to elaborate the details about Hillary's 5%, but what I'm really doing is saying Drudge rocks my world, and probably yours too. I know, we hate to admit it - we're fans of Bob Somersby or Keith Olbermann or whoever the jammin' female reporter off in Iraq doing an admirable job of anti-press release reporting, sorry Google is failing me right now, or a host of indie bloggers. But Drudge is the master. Because we've all accepted his terms. Right now people are seriously upset that a campaign in debt has not paid some people. I mean, it'd be a pretty piss poor "greatest campaign debt ever" if they'd paid everybody, wouldn't it? I mean, if you think about - what does debt mean? "Didn't pay someone". But the Drudge effect is insidious - we take the most mundane things and get highly irritated by them. Admit it - it rules your world as much as mine. Here's another great headline: "Obama acts like politician, cites need to win". I keep waiting to write my upstart "Sun rises in east, spurning western states. North and south ambivalent". But I'm only halfway there - as much as I try, I can't match the spitefulness, such as the class warfare that Drudge can get with "Hillary campaign leaves small vendors out in cold; tosses wet puppy out for company". It's one thing to be Maureen Dowd writing banal acid socialite filler, but it's another to be Matt Drudge making a bereaved and offended policy wonk out of each and every one of us, however post-political we might think we are. So your assignment, since I have to step out a bit, is to produce the most surprising stunningly amoral character in movies and somehow tie it to a horribly misunderstood and forgotten director. In this case, I'm obviously referring to Marlon Brando in Arthur Penn's classic "Missouri Breaks". But it doesn't have to be high brow - it could be Richard Gere (oh how I usually hate him) in Mike Figgis' "Internal Affairs". Or Robert Mitchum in Charles Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter". Maybe Yves Montand in Clouzot's "Wages of Fear" if you want to go international. Anyway, you have the idea - efficiently evil role combined with genius director no one can remember. Oh, last bit - I've given you a break with Salo - instead of 120 days of Salome, you need only 8. But that's 8 days of heavy lifting, Sisyphus up the mountain with boulder type effort. THIS THREAD MAY NOT DIE!!! You have been warned. And if you think this is tough, imagine if I'd given you "Think in a post-FISA sellout world, what will Obama healthcare look like?" Yep, now that boulder doesn't look so tough, does it? Go for the easy movie question, we need some light summer fun around here. The heavy stuff can wait for September. Surf's up.

Be one of the first to see the response. I just got it from Noriega's campaign manager. It's quite clever.

Click here to go see the video.

After you watch the video, click here to donate to Better Senators for Veterans and help us reach our goal tonight. We are only $140 away from that goal.

This video does make issue of the veterans issue but also talks about how Noriega will be better for the energy crisis, gas prices and generally more effective. (Cornyn is the 81st most effective Senator)

June 26, 2008 (LPAC)--With the global banking crisis far worse than the bankers will admit publicly, elements of the British Empire are pushing a plan for the extreme deregulation of the banking system by allowing the giant private equity funds to take over the banks.

http://www.larouchepac.com/news/2008/06/26/brits-call-financial-restructuring-larouche-says-fascism.html

June 26, 2008 (LPAC)--The political violence in Zimbabwe that the international press dominated by the London-based Anglo-Dutch financial cartel is using to work the world into a frenzy about Zimbabwe is being carried out by networks controlled by London.

http://www.larouchepac.com/news/2008/06/26/mdc-working-rhodesian-selous-scout-networks-spread-violence-.html

My personal political ideals fall somewhat to the left of Dennis Kucinich and to the right of Karl Marx.  In contrast to many caricatures of my posts at TPM, my understanding of Obama's stance on FISA has zero to do with whether or not I agree with said legislation or with continued abuse of the Constitution. 

Of course, I think it is a travesty that we have been raping the Constitution since before the ink was dry on the Preamble. 

However, Barack has explained, more than once, that based on his classified briefings on national security, the amended FISA bill is a compromise he thinks is necessary to watch our back. He believes that it provides the tools needed to keep

Here are the top stories in criminal justice reform, taken from the Justice Newsladder.

Ron Taylor, who was exonerated by DNA evidence after spending 15 years of a 60 year sentence for a rape conviction, was pardoned by Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Taylor suffered the brunt of a double whammy of inaccuracy that led to his conviction: faulty eyewitness identification that was "corroborated" by results from Houston's since discredited crime lab. Misconduct in the HPD crime lab has led to 3 exonerations. (gritsforbreakfast.com)

HPD announced that the crime lab, which has been shut down twice because of shoddy work, inadequate training and poor management, will be reopening soon under the management of Laura Gahn, who was worked in private DNA labs for 12 years. Gahn faces the challenge not only of getting DNA testing back online at the lab, but of restoring the lab's badly damaged credibility. (click2houston.com)

The public defender representing former death row inmate Paul House claims that the run-up to his second trial has already been riddled with conflict of interest problems and that House's rights have been violated. House was convicted of murder in 1986, but the Supreme Court ruled that DNA evidence that surfaced after his conviction could've caused a jury to find reasonable doubt in the case. in December, a judge ruled that the DA's office had 180 days to release him or give him a new trial; they have chosen to retry him. (www.tennessean.com)

The Nashville Scene also weighed in with an overview of House’s case in a story headlined, "Dead Wrong: The Story of Paul House." (www.nashvillescene.com)

Budget problems in Maine are causing the state to put off paying many of its public defenders, and lawyers like Aaron Fethke (80% of his clients are court appointed) are feeling the financial strain. (bangornews.com)

The Justice Project, an organization which works to increase fairness and accuracy in the American criminal justice system, is proud to sponsor the Justice Newsladder, a new tool to find the top news and articles about criminal justice reform.

Simple fact-The Bible does not prohibit Blood transfusions.If you are bleeding to death it is more dangerous to refuse a blood transfusions than to take one.
Bloodless surgeries are great if they can be elective.1/3rd of all trauma deaths are from blood loss.   Jehovah's Witnesses elders will investigate and disfellowship any Jehovah Witness who takes a blood transfusion,to say the issue is a 'personal conscience matter' is subterfuge to keep the Watchtower out of lawsuits..   Jehovah's Witnesses children die every year worldwide due to blood transfusion ban.Rank & file Jehovah's Witness are indoctrinated to be scared to death of blood FYI 1) JW's DO USE many parts aka 'fractions' aka components of blood,so if it's 'sacred' to God why the hypocritical contradiction flip-flop?   2) They USE blood collections that are donated by Red Cross and others but don't donate back,more hypocrisy.   3) The Watchtower promotes and praises bloodless elective surgeries,this is a great advancement indeed.BUT it's no good to me if I am bleeding to death from a car crash and lose much of my blood volume and need EMERGENCY blood transfusion.
Remember this, the Jehovah's Witnesses use thousands and thousands of pints of blood donated by others.They use 60% of the blood volume as broken down "fractions" then go on Bible thumping rants about how dangerous and sinful blood transfusions are.   ( JW do allow organ transplants which has more risk than  whole blood transfusions so their arguments of disease transmission is bogus)   Know this,the reason that JW refuse blood is because of their spin on the 3000 year old Biblical old testament,modern medicine will eventually make blood donations and transfusions a thing of the past.When this technology happens it won't vindicate the Jehovah's Witnesses and all the deaths that have occurred so far.   The Watchtower's rules against blood transfusions will eventually be abolished (very gradually to reduce wrongful death lawsuit liability) even now most of the blood 'components' are allowed.   They are such hypocrites!   http://www.ajwrb.org/ Jehovah Witness blood policy reform site    Will you die for a lie?
http://www.towertotruth.net/Articles/blood_transfusions.htm  

I see the specter of the GOP bogeyman remains prominent in the "strategic" thinking of many Dems. Rather than fighting for one's principles, the apparent priority is to make sure the Big Meanies don't sock it to us later. We might just wilt if they do, given how supine we already are.

Politicians are universally by nature malleable creatures, with only a few hints of core conviction. It's perilous to give any candidate a free ride, including those we favor, as they'll sure as shit start paying vastly more attention to those who actually are yelling at them (as well as the obvious fundraising pipelines).

Obama's position on FISA is objectionable and he needs to hear about it. He (and many of his colleagues) should be raked over the coals by the left side of the political spectrum. The alternative is to see him shift further to the erroneous right, whose activists -- brickheaded as they may be -- are willing to throw down the gauntlet for their beliefs.

Al Gore's campaign strategy was to avoid potential GOP attacks. John Kerry's strategy was to avoid potential GOP attacks. Anyone who still endorses this brilliant method of achieving victory needs psychiatric assistance. Get out there and fight or get out of the way.

It's not about Obama. He's an ideal vehicle for progressive policy change, nothing more. Don't forget that. Make him work for us to the extent of our viable influence, and stop being so goddamned reactionary. It's no longer 2002, my traumatized friends. Note the shift in the winds and make use of them. 

[reposting this after TPM ate the body of my post. Josh/Greg: Preview would be nice!]

The piece that I find unconvincing in arguments defending (or choosing not to critique) Obama's support for the FISA bill is the supposition that he needed to do this to win the election. For supporting this bill Obama is now being attacked as a flip-flopper by the GOP. So if the situation was a damned-if-he-does, damned-if-he-doesn't, then why not stand on principle and be damned for defending the Constitution (and the Obama "brand" of not poitics as usual)? And did he really gain anything by doing this? Most people support the idea of requiring the goverment to get warrants for wiretapping international calls and emails [pdf link]:

Sixty-one percent (61%) of voters favor requiring the government to get a warrant from a court before wiretapping the conversations U.S. citizens have with people in other countries, with an outright majority of voters (51%) “strongly” supporting the requirement for warrants.

Obama has certainly run a strategically savvy primary campaign, so seeing him make an allegedly calculated and expedient choice that doesn't obviously gain anything is puzzling at best. Seeing him do this at the expense of defending the Constitution is definitely troubling and none of the "get over it" arguments have convinced me that we shouldn't critique our leaders when they stray from ideals that they had previously professed to uphold. And none of this is to say I’m taking my ball and going home. I’m still voting for Obama and still donating money (after giving some to Greenwald’s Act Blue fund for FISA issues); I really think that using a polarized, with-us-or-against-us frame for this discussion is a counter-productive approach that short changes what should be a worthwhile discussion. So I’d like to avoid attacks on people’s patriotism and love for the Constitution in exchange for not being dismissed as a whiner or someone who can’t see the big picture.

The House Judiciary committee met yesterday to revisit the infamous "Torture Memos" written by John Yoo and David Addington. I was lucky enough to be there, so I must write about it.

These are the memos are the one with the quote about how it's okay up until pain "equivalent to organ failure." (I don't know how they quite figure that one. When you torture a subject, do you regularly check in: "so, do you feel like one of your organs is failing?")
Yoo is a U.C. Berkeley law professor who works for the Department of Justice - here's his swanky faculty page. (I can only hope that the Bears are protesting him on a regular basis.) David Addington is the Department of Defense's homeboy in the White House. Here he is. According to Wikipedia, he's an Aquarius.
 
Kurt Vonnegut's great masterpiece Slaughterhouse Five is about how the human mind shuts down when confronted by things too horrible to understand. The main character in the novel is Billy Pilgrim, an American who survives the firebombing of Dresden. Dresden was the most concentrated massacre in World War II, in which American incendiary bombs burned 30,000 people to death in two days, and most of the buildings in the city. 
 
The text of Slaughterhouse Five isn't about war, or loss, or grief. Most of the book is about Pilgrim's incredibly complicated mental disassociation that results from Dresden: he imagines himself kidnapped by aliens and going on episodic time travel. It's one of the best books ever written about 20th-century industrial war - because it's not about 20th-century industrial war. We have not figured out how to write about 20th-century industrial war, because we have no idea yet how to explain things that are so horrible, and so vast, that they defy comprehension, let alone description. We intellectualize them. We speak of them in soft tones, or not at all. Or we get kidnapped by aliens, and go off into outer space.
 
It was hard not to feel this type of disassociation today in the hearing. From 10 a.m. onwards, the committee questioned Yoo and Addington about their role in designing standards for interrogation that completely violate the Geneva Convention. It was a smooth. It was a polished and quiet hearing. It was a formal procedure about whether our President had authorized the ripping out of fingernails.
 
It was a legal proceeding, conducted with no more weight than a particularly contentious local zoning hearing. Although the committeemembers did get occasionally argumentative, the witnesses refused to divulge any information that could be later used against them. Outside, Codepink lined up in the hallway in Abu Ghraib orange jumpsuits spelling out NO TORTURE, and the mainstream Dems walking by on their way to the Rayburn deli got annoyed.   But to be quite frank, the Pinkers were the only people there who responded to the matter as any human being would who has blood pumping through their veins. Torturing people is an atrocity, it is wrong, it is illegal. If they wrote that memo, and people were tortured - they should go to jail. End of story.
  This was an episode of the Nuremberg trials. And all through it, staffers in the hearing were lounging around and checking their Blackberries. Or time travelling. I suppose. So it goes.

Mr Nadler asked him whether he would bear some responsibility if the CIA interrogation program, which included simulation of drowning called waterboarding, was found by a court to be illegal.

Addington: "No, I wouldn't be responsible."

Small problem for Addington: Nuremberg precedents, and Addington's visit to Guantnanamo with the CIA General Counsel in 2002.

The SASC25 data show Addington attended a meeting, knew about the dual-track interrogations, but asked no questions. Clearly, Addington was well aware of what was going on, but failed to ensure Geneva was fully applied to the United States as a detaining power, regardless the status of the prisoners.

The two tracks were an intelligence gathering track, where prisoners, tainted by coercive interrogations, would not be brought to trial; and a second track where prisoners, not abused, would be tried. See 35-6 of 63

33 of 63 Shows a legal analyis summary referring to a White House staff study, clearly showing Geneva was reviewed, but (illegally) rejected as a legal constraint on the United States as a detaining power.

Addington's problem with respect to the CIA interrogations and tape destruction was that at 32 of 63 the government expressly discussed foreseeable litigation, known subpoenas, and the attached requirement to retain data.

Addingto's problem with respect to the CIA tape destruction is simple: 12 of 63 shows Addington traveled to Guantanamo, but asked no question because he was well aware of what was going on. CIA Acting GC Rizzo was there as well, meaning Addington and Rizzo had the opportuntiy to review the foreeable risk of litigation, and develop a tape-retention plan.

Yet, the CIA would have us believe nobody imagined there would be a need to retain the data.

Addington's problem is the Nuremberg Justice trial: Lawyers, who failed to ensure the laws of war were fully enforced, were adjudicated with war crimes.

Addington is a former CIA General Counsel, and would have known what was going on inside the CIA. If he didn't he should have discussed this with Rizzo. Either way, he has a very big problem.

The piece that I find unconvincing in arguments defending (or choosing not to critique) Obama's support for the FISA bill is the supposition that he needed to do this to win the election.

The House Judiciary committee met yesterday to revisit the infamous "Torture Memos" written by John Yoo and David Addington. I was lucky enough to be there, so I must write about it.

These are the memos are the one with the quote about how it's okay up until pain "equivalent to organ failure." (I don't know how they quite figure that one. When you torture a subject, do you regularly check in: "so, do you feel like one of your organs is failing?")
Yoo is a U.C. Berkeley law professor who works for the Department of Justice - here's his swanky faculty page. (I can only hope that the Bears are protesting him on a regular basis.) David Addington is the Department of Defense's homeboy in the White House. Here he is. According to Wikipedia, he's an Aquarius.
 
Kurt Vonnegut's great masterpiece Slaughterhouse Five is about how the human mind shuts down when confronted by things too horrible to understand. The main character in the novel is Billy Pilgrim, an American who survives the firebombing of Dresden. Dresden was the most concentrated massacre in World War II, in which American incendiary bombs burned 30,000 people to death in two days, and most of the buildings in the city. 
 
The text of Slaughterhouse Five isn't about war, or loss, or grief. Most of the book is about Pilgrim's incredibly complicated mental disassociation that results from Dresden: he imagines himself kidnapped by aliens and going on episodic time travel. It's one of the best books ever written about 20th-century industrial war - because it's not about 20th-century industrial war. We have not figured out how to write about 20th-century industrial war, because we have no idea yet how to explain things that are so horrible, and so vast, that they defy comprehension, let alone description. We intellectualize them. We speak of them in soft tones, or not at all. Or we get kidnapped by aliens, and go off into outer space.
 
It was hard not to feel this type of disassociation today in the hearing. From 10 a.m. onwards, the committee questioned Yoo and Addington about their role in designing standards for interrogation that completely violate the Geneva Convention. It was a smooth. It was a polished and quiet hearing. It was a formal procedure about whether our President had authorized the ripping out of fingernails.
 
It was a legal proceeding, conducted with no more weight than a particularly contentious local zoning hearing. Although the committeemembers did get occasionally argumentative, the witnesses refused to divulge any information that could be later used against them. Outside, Codepink lined up in the hallway in Abu Ghraib orange jumpsuits spelling out NO TORTURE, and the mainstream Dems walking by on their way to the Rayburn deli got annoyed.   But to be quite frank, the Pinkers were the only people there who responded to the matter as any human being would who has blood pumping through their veins. Torturing people is an atrocity, it is wrong, it is illegal. If they wrote that memo, and people were tortured - they should go to jail. End of story.
  This was an episode of the Nuremberg trials. And all through it, staffers in the hearing were lounging around and checking their Blackberries. Or time travelling. I suppose. So it goes.

You learn stuff.

Everywhere you go, if you keep your brain even partially wedged open, you learn stuff.

Some of what you learn is pleasant, and much of it unfortunately isn't, but that, as they say, is life in the big city.

Here, I've learned that if I write a lengthy expansion of a classic conservative email parable, I'll get 40+ recommendations and lots of positive comments and everyone will love me and say "Yay Doc Nebula you de man!"  And then I will be happy. 

For a bit.

If, on the other hand, I write of my disappointment when a leading political candidate specifically breaks an important, even vital, campaign promise, I'll still get lots of comments, but only single digit approvals, and most of those comments will be from people shrieking and wailing and throwing their ball gowns over their heads at the very thought of anyone anywhere ever saying anything even remotely unpleasant about their favorite Magical Negro.

And that will make me sad.

For a bit.

As with life, then, posting here at TPM is a crap shoot.  If I post the truth as it appears to me, I will be rewarded either with veneration and adulation, or, on the other hand,  excoriation and vituperation.  It seems to depend, as the nameless comic in ALL THAT JAZZ once opined, on the shit you're smokin'. 

All I can do, then, is all I can do. 

Let me tell you a bit about myself, so you will understand why I say the terrible, terrible things that I say.  Politically, I have long considered myself to be an independent minded, free thinking, leftward leaning progressive sort, with a current both deep and wide of truculent libertarianism lurking just below the surface. 

It came as something of a surprise to me, then, to learn, back in March of 2007, that I was, in fact, a left wing extremist.

So, let's set the Wayback Machine for March of 2007.  In that long ago month, Time Magazine columnist Joe Klein kindly provided me with a working definition of a "left wing extremist" --

A left-wing extremist exhibits many, but not necessarily all, of the following attributes:

--believes the United States is a fundamentally negative force in the world.

Ummm... hmmm.  Let's see.  Have I ever stated anywhere that I believe the United States is a 'fundamentally negative force in the world'... well... there was that previous blog post where I called the U.S. an 'evil empire'... yeah, yeah... okay, that's a big ten-four, good buddy.

--believes that American imperialism is the primary cause of Islamic radicalism. 

Hmmmm.  Well, there was that whole thing where Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State encouraged the radicalization of Afghani Muslems so they would fight the Soviet Union as our proxies... gee, where did I see that...

* * * *

Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski
Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76*
 
Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention.  In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter.  You therefore played a role in this affair.  Is that correct?

Brzezinski:  Yes.  According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979.  But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.  And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action.  But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn't quite that.  We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them.  However, there was a basis of truth.  You don't regret anything today?

B: Regret what?  That secret operation was an excellent idea.  It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?  The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.  Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [intégrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world?  The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire?  Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

* * * *

Oh, yeah, that's where.  Okay.  Let's put a check mark on that one and move on to...

--believes that the decision to go to war in Iraq was not an individual case of monumental stupidity, but a consequence of America’s fundamental imperialistic nature.

It... I... well, gee, where do I start with this one?  The Louisiana Purchase, the systematic campaign of terror and genocide against the indigenous races of the North American continent, the annexation by force of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Phillippines, 700 U.S. military bases all across the globe, the World Bank being pretty much entirely U.S. controlled... yeah... sounds like we're pretty imperialist to me.  Is that the major reason behind the invasion of Iraq? Well, that and making sure the price of oil stays high by keeping the Iraqi oil fields largely unexploited, yeah.  So sign me up for this one, too.

--tends to blame America for the failures of others—i.e. the failure of our NATO allies to fulfill their responsibilities in Afghanistan.

I... don't know what this means.  I think it requires translation.  I suspect it means "tends to blame America for the consequences of its own actions", and if so, well, yeah, I'm climbing in that boat, too.

--doesn’t believe that capitalism, carefully regulated and progressively taxed, is the best liberal idea in human history.

Show me an example of capitalism, carefully regulated and progressively taxed, and I'll advise as to  how I feel about it.  We sure as shit don't have anything remotely fitting that description here in the good ol' U.S.A.

--believes American society is fundamentally unfair (as opposed to having unfair aspects that need improvement).

American society is perfectly fair to the 1-2% of the American population that currently controls something like 92% of American wealth.  For the rest of us, not so much.

Okay, let me expand on that a little bit.  American society has never been about being 'fair', not in economic terms, nor, for that matter, in any other.  The United States was founded by a group of rich white guys who came to North America because they were sick and tired of being fucked with by the Church and the State back home.  They believed in (among other things) private property, gun ownership, chattel slavery, and the utter immorality of the very notion of an income tax.

They kicked Britain off the continent and set up their own government and that government was never about being 'fair', whatever the hell 'fair' means.  The government they set up was about common defense and interstate commerce, and the governing documents they wrote denoted a very long list of things that the government could never, never do to United States citizens... by which, our Founding Fathers meant, white landowning males, and their property, which included by definition, all the non-white, non-landowning males and pretty much all females.  

None of this is 'fair'.  You could pulverize all of human history and sift through it like bread crumbs for the rest of your life and you would never find a bigger, more arrogant bunch of snobby class-centric elitist pricks than the American Founding Fathers.  They had no desire for, nor intention of setting up, a 'fair' society; they wanted a government and an economic system that would support, protect, and defend the already entrenched and wealthy land owning interests.  And that's what they (and the rest of us) got.

So, yeah, I guess I can put my initials next to this one, too.

--believes that eternal problems like crime and poverty are the primarily the fault of society.

Well, I'd say they are the fault of the entrenched and wealthy property owning interests, which enjoy living in a world of enormous economic class distinctions, because it allows them to live very very well off the labor of others, and feel snotty about it, too.  But if you want to boil all that down to 'society', well, sure, what the hell.  I'll buy that for a dollar.

--believes that America isn’t really a democracy.

Shenanigans!  When even an asshat like Rush Limbaugh knows full well that the U.S. is a representative republic rather than a pure democracy, I have to assume that someone like Joe Klein is aware of it as well.  (If he's not, he should be fired and TIME magazine should give his job to me.) 

Which is to say, we are a representative republic, in theory.  That theory these days is largely obsolete; in actual practice, we are currently pretty much a tyranny.  Some may disagree simply because Homeland Security hasn't shown up at their door and sent them off to some secret prison to be interrogated for being an enemy combatant... yet... but it could happen in the next five minutes, and there is nothing  you or me or anyone else can do about it once it has.  That smells like tyranny to me.  Those who disagree are cordially invited to take a big whiff of Jose Padilla next time he shuffles by in leg irons and tell me what it smells like to them.  Boneheads.

--believes that corporations are fundamentally evil.

I like John Brunner's definition of evil, which is basically, anything that treats human beings as chattel, is evil.  This is essentially what corporations are all about -- treating everything in the world, including human beings, as marketable, fungible assets.  To me, that seems pretty evil, yeah.  And it is an incontrovertible part of corporate existence, so, yes, corporations are evil. 

--believes in a corporate conspiracy that controls the world.

Well, I believe the sonsofbitches do their best, but on my good days, I hope to jesus they aren't quite all the way there yet.

--is intolerant of good ideas when they come from conservative sources.

Um... you're going to have to give me an example so I know which kind of 'conservative sources' you're referencing.  Conservative sources who believe in small government and taxes on consumption instead of income and a non-fiat economy I'm willing to listen to. 

On the other hand, if you're using 'conservative' to mean "AAARRRGGGHHHHH FAGGOTS AND NEGRAS AND LIBRULS AND WETBACKS AND GODDAM FURRINERS ALL SUCK AND SHOULD BE DEPORTED AND KILLED AND LOCKED UP AND TORTURED YEEEEEAAAARRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!"  and all that other hateful white power shit, then yeah, all those turd monkeys can kiss my ass, backwards, forwards, and upside down.

--dismissively mocks people of faith, especially those who are opposed to abortion and gay marriage.

Hey, I mock nearly any one of faith, if one of their articles of faith is "There's an invisible Scoutmaster In The Sky who loves me unconditionally despite the fact that I want to have everyone who disagrees with me locked up, tortured, deported, and/or killed".  

Now, if you add in there that these 'people of faith' use their 'faith' to justify  denying other people the right to (a) decide which medical procedures they will and won't have, and (b) get married to whomever they choose, then, you know, I say they're asparagus and I say the hell with them.  And if that's dismissive mockery, well, juck 'em if they can't take a foke.  Or something. 

--regularly uses harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to attack moderates or conservatives.

I don't know if I regularly use harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to attack moderates or conservatives, but I sure as fuck will break into some serious cocksucking vulgarity in response to idiotic horseshit like, I dunno, a fucking drug addict like Rush Limbaugh demanding that that all drug addicts but him be immediately executed, or a she-troll like Anne Coulter calling a Democratic candidate for President a faggot at a major conservative gathering and getting a for the love of Christ standing ovation for it. 

Show me pictures of Iraqi kids with no arms or legs or newlywed Marines with melted faces and I'll get positively goddam abusive with the fuckheads responsible for that shit, too.

Those who do not like this; I have an ass, I presume they have lips; apply as necessary to resolve the issue.

Oh.  Um... yeah, yeah, I guess I qualify for this one, too.

This is a partial list, off the top of my head--additions and subtractions will be carefully considered.

No, no, I think this is a fabulous list.  Honestly.  I had no idea I was such a nutjob, but I'm delirious at the validation.

If readers would like, I'll give you my definition of right-wing extremism next week.

No need, I've done that for you.  Where was it... oh, yeah.  Anyone who thinks that people who disagree with them should be (a) locked up, (b) tortured, (c) beaten in public, (d) executed, or (e) any/all of the above, are extreme right wing nutballs.  You can tell them from the extreme left wing nutballs, because while we believe many things that are actually true regardless of how offensive you find that actuality, we do not advocate anyone being locked up for refusing to subscribe to our belief system, much less such people being beaten, tortured, deported, or executed.  

P.S. It would be wildly stupid for me to get into a pissing match by naming names.

One man's 'wildly stupid' is another's courageous honesty, but, y'know, WTF, Joe,  you're a dipshit anyway.

I won't go there...And bear in mind, the characteristics above should be regarded as tendencies, not cast-in-stone beliefs.

In other words, you don't need to REALLY believe any of these things all that strongly for the Joe Kleins of this world to dismiss you completely (but not harshly or with vulgar language, cuz he's too cool for all that shit, yeah buddy); he'll dismiss you completely if you only kinda-sorta believe one of them.  Sweet!

Correction:: Sean Hannity is a ideological extremist and a bully.

He's an effing jack ass, too.  Thanks for playing our game.

 Atrios may or may not be an ideological extremist--I was wrong to say he was, since I don't know enough about him--but he sure is a purveyor of extreme and terminally smug rhetoric.

I don't know if Atrios is an ideological extremist, either, but 'smug' is endemic to the blogosphere and the pundit class in general.  'Terminal' is a thoughtless, kneejerk misuse of the language in this context; a great many people writing and voicing their views on a great many subjects are smug, but none of them (perhaps unfortunately) are going to die of it.  And from what I've read, if anyone was going to die of terminal smugness, Joe Klein would be in Cheyne-Stokes respiration right now... and probably so would I, smug, supercilious asshat that I am.

Readers' Bottom Line: There are no lefties left.

I am King!

 There are no socialists left.

I hear there are a few in Sweden,  Norway, and the Netherlands.  Maybe a couple down in Cuba, too, I dunno.

No one has ever assumed that "corporate" equals "evil."

It's like that old Trident chewing gum commercial, where the hot former Olympic figure skater says "Who wants gum?" and all the kids starting waving their hands frantically.  Which is to say, when Joe Klein advises that "no one has ever assumed that 'corporate' equals 'evil', I immediately start waving my hand vehemently while screaming "I do!  I do!"

No one has ever said that America was an aggressive, imperialistic power in the world.

Joe Klein clearly needs to get out more.  This blog, and this one, and this one, and this one over here all say that America is an aggressive, imperialistic power all the time.  Honest.  

No one has ever accused anyone of "blaming the victim" when it comes to crime or poverty.

I... ::staring into space, mumbling to myself:: No, I can't understand this one, either.  I'm moving on.

No one--certainly no one in the blogosphere--has ever mocked Roman Catholics.

Well, I've mocked Roman Catholics when I felt they deserved it, but I'll mock anyone, including myself, so I most likely don't count.

Jeez, that's a relief.

Happy to help.  Any time, really.

Anyway, while I have always suspected I must be an extremist of some sort or another, I had no idea I was this extreme.  I am deeply grateful for the information.  Does the position have a salary?  Or is it merely titular?  Either way, I am proud and honored, and I humbly pledge to never let my constituency down.

Howie Kurtz is screaming about news outlets not calling Obama a flip-flopper on the D.C. gun ban.  As Howie presents it, news outlets are irresponsible not to parrot this Repub talking point and to do so focused solely on the statement issued by Obama's campaign in November 2007.  Evidentally Howie thinks it isn't important for him, in pointing out the potential conflict, to readily note statements directly from Obama both in a speech and in a debate in February 2007 that are entirely consistent with his present position.  Which would, of course, undercut the Republican fantasy that Obama is changing his position now that the primaries are over.  So lets take a look at the three most readily available statements from Obama on this issue to see for ourselves just what a stooge role Howie is playing.  

1) The statement "HIS CAMPAIGN" gave the Chicago Tribune in November 2007.  

"Senator Obama.believes that we can recognize and respect the rights of law-abiding gun owners and the right of local communities to enact common sense laws to combat violence and save lives. Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional."
So, having read the majority Supreme Court opinion I can say with confidence that the first sentence is fully in line with the five justices in the majority.  It notes the "rights of law-abiding gun owners" and the "right of local communities to enact common sense laws."  The second sentence is the one Kurtz hangs his hat on, ignoring the first, and ignoring that it isn't an embrace of the D.C. gun ban, but a statement from his campaign that Obama thinks it is constitutional. So there is no real conflict, unless Kurtz thinks it disqualifies a candidate not to be able to predict what the Court will do.

2)  The ABC debate in April. 

Gibson: Is that [the D.C. Gun ban] a law consistent with an individual's right to bear arms?

OBAMA: Well, Charlie, I confess I obviously haven't listened to the briefs and looked at all the evidence. As a general principle, I believe that the Constitution confers an individual right to bear arms. But just because you have an individual right does not mean that the state or local government can't constrain the exercise of that right, and, you know, in the same way that we have a right to private property but local governments can establish zoning ordinances that determine how you can use it.

And I think that it is going to be important for us to reconcile what are two realities in this country. There's the reality of gun ownership and the tradition of gun ownership that's passed on from generation to generation. You know, when you listen to people who have hunted, and they talk about the fact that they went hunting with their fathers or their mothers, then that is something that is deeply important to them and, culturally, they care about deeply. But you also have the reality of what's happening here in Philadelphia and what's happening in Chicago.

....GIBSON: But do you still favor the registration of guns? Do you still favor the licensing of guns? And in 1996, your campaign issued a questionnaire, and your writing was on the questionnaire that said you favored a ban on handguns.

OBAMA: No, my writing wasn't on that particular questionnaire, Charlie. As I said, I have never favored an all-out ban on handguns.  

Again, these prior statements from Obama are consistent with his recent statements and also with the rationale of the majority of the Supremes.  With one exception, after studying the ordinance, and all the briefing, they came to the conclusion that the D.C. gun ban was effectively an all-out ban on handguns and ruled D.C. could do a lot, but it couldn't prevent people from having registered handguns in their home in an assembled condition.

3)  Finally, Obama's recent statements are entirely consistent with those he made in February 2008, while the Democratic nomination race was in full bloom.  As reported by ABC news here http://blogs.abcnews.com/legalities/2008/02/obama-and-guns.html 
"A day after the tragic shootings at NIU, Barack Obama has revealed that he thinks the 2nd Amendment protects an individual’s right to own a gun. ...
By embracing the individual rights approach, Obama is bucking gun control groups and states like New York, which have taken the more orthodox position that the 2nd Amendment only protects a state’s right—and that cities like Washington, D.C. can therefore ban all guns if they choose. ...
Obama is actually straddling the issue somewhat like the Bush Administration did when it filed a brief in the case last month. He does support individual rights, but says—and this is the qualifier--the government can impose reasonable restrictions on gun ownership. And he then suggests that pretty much any existing laws are reasonable.  “There's been a long standing argument among constitutional scholars about whether the 2nd Amendment referred simply to militias or whether it spoke to an individual right to possess arms,” Obama said. “I think the latter is the better argument. There is an individual right to bear arms, but it is subject to common-sense regulation just like most of our rights are subject to common-sense regulation.”  ...
He declined, just as the Bush Administration did, to take a position on whether the DC gun ban violates the 2nd Amendment. He said instead that states and cities should have broad latitude to regulate guns—even if the Constitution guarantees an individual right to own them. ...
 “I think there's a lot of room before you (start) bumping against a constitutional barrier for us to institute some of the common-sense gun laws that I just spoke about.”

---
So Howie, where exactly is the conflict?  And how can you falsely report that Obama is switching positions now when there is tape of him and news reports of him making essentially the same points he is now back in the midst of the February campaign?  Oh that's right.  It's too hard for you to google something when you can instead simply be a Republican stooge on an issue and regurgitate their press releases.

There's some fallout from the Supreme Court's Guantanamo ruling on Habeas you should know about. It relates to the President's domestic propaganda program. The DoD emails showed military analysts were discussing in 2006 the partican goal of winning the White House in 2008.

As background, there is a Congressional option to enforce the law against Addington and others working for the President. Earlier this week, despite the GOP partisan effort to keep the President above the law, we suggested an option for Congress: Write rules, using the Constitutional provision granting to Congress the exclusive power to make rules related to cases in the District,  expressly regulate all US federal workers. This suggestion was promptely met with claims it was an unworkable, incoherent, and kee jerk reaction.

Yet, look what the GOP propagandists, through the military analyst program, appear to be doing to do just that: But with a GOP twist: Induce Congress to make rules requring you to prove, during a Habeas rule, proving you're innocent before being released from jail.

While some claimed the Constitutional leverag Congress had to make rules regulating the President was "a knee jerk" reaction, the otherside of the coin is the silence on Congress regulating you.

From The Week:

Congress can still step in an minimize the dmage from this reckless ruling, said Andrew McCarthy in National Review Online. The SUpreme Court may have handed the fate of the detainees to federal courts, but "it is Congress than enacts rules of procedure and evidence."

Building on existing law governing pretrial detention in criminal cases, Congress can order Federal judges to grant the government a presumption in favor of detention, unless a detainee can prove "beyond a reasonable doubt that he was not an enemy combatant."

The GOP would use the very thing we were told was unworkable and a knee jerk reaction: Making rules forcing you to prove you are innocent. That turns the Constitution upside down. Of course it's outrageous, and the GOP propaganda continues.

The justification for enhanced security and the extra limits on civil liberties is not primarily to prevent physical attacks, but to defend our "way of life". As George Bush said, "they hate us for our freedoms".

One can debate the best methods to prevent physical attacks, but these are usually similar to defending against any form of lawlessness. Some combination of policing, intelligence gathering and observation. Any police official will explain that the goal of preventing, say, all armed robberies is impossible, the best one can do is to keep the level as low as possible. To expect otherwise in the case of politically motivated violence is unrealistic.

So to defend "our freedoms" the first thing that a society should do, one would think, was to maintain those freedoms that already exist. Otherwise the "terrorists have won". How has the record been in the US so far? I'll list just a handful of disturbing examples where the infringements on civil liberties have led us towards a society just like the ones we claim to oppose.

The main rule for a free society is that it be open and trusting. One always hears stories such as "when I was growing up we didn't even lock our front door". Has the incidence of housebreaking increased? No. What has happened is people no longer trust their neighbors.

We now have intrusive searches on airlines, trains and buses. Has the number of violent attacks on these services increased? No, yet every passenger is now viewed with suspicion, "if you see something, say something". Every forgotten briefcase by a harried businessman now becomes a potential terrorist threat. In the past 30 years there has been exactly one attack on the Long Island Railroad, by a paranoid schizophrenic. We lived with this risk of one incident out of millions of trips. The default was everyone was just trying to get where they were going, the same as you. Now everyone needs to be "watched".

When the British surveillance services were told to intercept mail of suspected German spies, they reacted with "gentleman don't read other people's mail". Now the government (and private companies) see nothing wrong with reading everybody's mail, and phone calls as well. The default is to suspect everyone, not to just leave people alone until there is some specific justification for action. This is the way East Germany worked, everyone was spied on, everyone had a file maintained by the STASI. Calumny, jealousy, revenge could lead to being reported and having your life turned upside down. Further since everyone knew that no one could be trusted, social interactions were all guarded and the cultural life of the state dried up.

Just two more, both currently in the news:

The willingness by congress to provide retroactive immunity to telecoms engaged in illegal spying is not just about the loss of privacy, but it sets a precedent for ex post facto legislation. When laws can be created retroactively then democracy is over. Tomorrow we will create a law that anyone buying a coffee at Starbucks last week is a support of state "terrorism" (by Juan Valdez) and subject to punishment. How can you have a free society where things get forbidden after they are done? Even adhering to the government's directives at this moment is no guarantee as the show trials in China under Mao and the USSR under Stalin have shown. You cannot change the rules of a game once it has started, but the US is trying.

Lastly there is the Supreme Court gun ruling. The key element in this is not the conclusion, but the premise. The majority thinks that vigilantism is an appropriate model for a civilized society. One needs a gun in the home to protect against everyone else, those who can't be trusted, those that need to be searched at airports, those that need to have their email read, those who might have done something wrong in the past when it seemed OK. An open society doesn't need self-protection, that's why we have a police force.

This ruling wasn't about guns, it was about trust. The terrorists have won, we have given up our freedoms and civil liberties and become as paranoid and autocratic as the states we claim to be defending against.

The rhetoric I've heard during the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision to overturn the DC ban on handguns makes me feel like discussing the topic of gun control. I don't mean to be insensitive to anyone's feeling on the matter but I felt like this title would get a pretty heated discussion rolling...

Guns don't kill people. People kill people!

Sometimes they use guns, sometimes they use knives, sometimes they use poison, sometimes they use bare hands, sometimes they use explosives, sometimes they use sticks and stones, sometimes they push others over cliffs, sometimes they use water to drown them, and a whole host of other ways.

The bottom line is if the goal is reducing violent crime you need to look at the root causes of that crime and address them, not just the means to carry out the crime.

why?

Because if you keep taking away various means to carry out the crime but the reason for the crime existing in the first place still exists, then those carrying out the crime will simply find another way to do so.

Perfect example: the DC ban on handguns was NOT effective at its stated goal of reducing violent crime which used guns.

During the time period that the ban was in effect the District consistently ranked amongst the top areas in the country for incidents of violent gun related crime and murder. Also during most of that time the rate was higher than it was before the ban. This is particularly interesting because the District is surrounded by counties from two states (MD and VA) which had much lower rates of gun crime despite having significantly less restrictive gun control laws.

The reason is oft-noted by gun control critics and very valid regardless of where it comes from: by definition, criminals don't obey the law!

This means that the very population the ban is targeting is the exact population least likely to be effected by the ban. If someone was interested in purchasing a gun and then realized or learned the gun they intended to purchase is illegal or banned and as a result they didn't purchase it that person is very likely not someone who is going to be committing a violent crime with a gun. People who intend to use a gun in a criminal manner are going to do so whether it's illegal or not. Making the gun itself illegal is pointless and ineffective.

Determining and targeting the actual causes of violent crime including violent crime which uses guns is a much tougher task but likely to produce much better results than simply banning guns.

I'm sure there are some vastly differing opinions on the topic. I would love to have a rational and non-emotionally charged discussion on the merits (or lack thereof) of gun control laws. Even more importantly the actual causes of violent crime and how to prevent it in the first place!  Let me know what you think!

The Center for American Progress has issued a report on McCain's tax plan [sic] and it is as scandalous as McCain said Bush's tax cuts were back in 2000.

Largest 200 corporations (which already earn more than $500 billion a year in PROFITS) would get $45 Billion a year in tax breaks. Wal-Mart, Exxon/Mobile, Conoco/Phillips, Bank of America, AT&T, Berkshire Hathaway, JP Morgan Chase & Co, and Microsoft would each get $1 Billion a year. Tax breaks would total $175 Billion a year, slash the corporate tax rate from 35% to 25% and allow corporations to write off corporate equipment and technology investments.

To get the full details click here (pdf)

Corporate pandering at it's worst and disrespectful of the plight of the average American family who is strugling.

I guess when McCain says 'Putting America First' he means 'Putting Corporate America First'.

Thanks McBush, for nothing. And I really mean it.

Keith Olberman has a piece on dailykos today that helps to put Obama's position on FISA into perspective. After consulting with John Dean, whom, he extensively argues, is one of our nation's most brilliant people, he writes,

<blockquote>John said his reading of the revised FISA stature suggested it was so poorly constructed (or maybe so sublimely constructed) that it clearly did not preclude future criminal prosecution of the telecoms - it only stopped civil suits.</blockquote>

Keith thinks that Obama is crazy like a fox in this situation. Perhaps the harsh critics of Obama should work harder at making the distinction between pursuing one's values crazy like a fox and capitulating.

In "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish," the late always-to-be-lamented Douglas Adams did a scene in which Arthur Dent sensed the world as it was experienced by all the different lifeforms that inhabited it. He said this about sheep:

From another direction he felt the sensation of being a sheep startled by a flying saucer, but it was virtually indistinguishable from the feeling of being a sheep startled by anything else it ever encountered, for they were creatures who learned very little on their journey through life, and would be startled to see the sun rising in the morning, and astonished by all the green stuff in the fields.

He was surprised to find he could feel the sheep being startled by the sun that morning, and the morning before, and being startled by a clump of trees the day before that. He could go further and further back, but it got dull because all it consisted of was sheep being startled by things they'd been startled by the day before.

Doug might as well been refering to the U.S. political press. Election after election after election, the Republicans run the same game plan. Between the time the Democratic candidate clinches the nomination and the convention, they begin a full court press to portray the presumptive nominee as a flip-flopper. The day after the Democratic convention, they shift over do demonizing him as that most dreadful political creature, a liberal.

It's remarkably silly. Opportunistic flip-flopper who changes positions at the slightest change in prevailing political winds or most liberal politician since Eugene Debs, a rigid doctrinaire ideologue who votes the liberal position every single time, without fail. Those are seemingly mutually exclusive categories. Unless, of course you're a political reporter covering the Democratic candidate in a U.S. presidential election year. Then the candidate is a flip flopper before the convntion and a liberal after, every time.

Baaaaaahhhh.

This strategy was invented by those cut-ups who worked for Ronnie in '84. They used on Mondale that year. Then they used it on Dukakis in '88, and on Bill in '92, and on Gore in '00, and on Kerry in '04. It is as predicable as the sun rising in the morning and clumps of trees in pastures. Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn't. in '92, Poppy went out and ate some waffles to make his point that Bill was a "waffler," and there was much giggling, then, after the convention, he dutifully declared Bill a "tax and spend liberal," but he still got handed his ass in November.

In 1988, 2000 and 2004, it went like clockwork and worked like a charm. Duke? Waffler. Can't pin him down on anything. Until the convention, of course, after which the MSM was astonished to discover that Dukakis was a card carrying memeber of the ACLU who opposed the pledge of allegience and freed murderous negros to prey on white women. And look at him in that tank, trying to pretend he won't sell us out to the Soviets the minute he and his flag burning wife are in office.

Gore? Big fat lying liar who'll say whatever he has to say to get votes. Until the Convention, after which he was the ozone man, a dangerous environmental dogmatist who had the most liberal record in the Senate in his day.

Kerry? He voted for the 80 billion before he voted against it, yuck, yuck, yuck. Until the convention when, to their horror, the MSM discovered he was the most liberal senator ever. Voted liberal every time, regardless of what his constituients thought about it.

The predictability should have reduced it to an eye-rolling banality for our MSM. They should, indeed, have done a number eye-rolling stories  about it by now to show us how slick and sophisticated and savvy they are.  Instead, every time the Republicans roll it out, the political press acts like they've crested a hill and discovered some brilliant, fresh and delicious insight. Touched along by the Republican's shepherd's crook, they are giddily startled to discovery that the presumptive Democratic nominee is a flip-flopping waffler. And then, after the convention, they are astonished to discover he's a liberal.

Baaaaaaahhhhh. Flippppp - flopppppper. Baaaahhhhhh.

Baaaahhhhhh. Librullllllll. Baaaaaaaah.

And so it begins again. Now McCain is screaming that Obama has "changed" his position on gun control and the death penalty and public financing and FISA and NAFTA and Iraq. And, once again, the MSM plays along, nodding approvingly (for now) at his very conventional move from the left to the center.

The problem is that he's changed his position on some of those things, but not all of them.  Doesn't matter.  It's June and he's the Democratic nominee, so one frame fits all facts. 

Obama said, in his last book, published two years ago, that his study of the issue as a Con law professor had led him to the conclusion that the Second Amendment does protect an individual right to own guns and that campaigning in rural areas and talking to people there had led him to an appreciation of the importance of gun ownership to rural voters--not just that it was important to them, but why it was important to them.  He said he thought a constructive dialog was needed, and could be had, about why what was appropriate gun regulation on a rural area was different from what was appropriate in a densly populated city. He later opined that the DC handgun ban was constitutional, i.e. not inconsistent with an individual right to own guns subject to sensible regulation. He was one Justice off from being right. No change in position. Just an incorrect prediction how how the Supreme Court would apply a position he had already indicated he shared.

However, it's June, so Obama must be a flip-flopper. He said he thought the DC gun ban was constitutional therefore he must have been saying there was no individual right to own guns of any kind, therefore pointing out that he had always said there was an individual right to own guns means he's a flip flopper.

Obama has not changed his position on Iraq. One to two brigades a month, out in sixteen months. He's been rock solid on that, month after month, since this time last year. However, it's June so Obama must be a flip flopper. Thus, if al-Maliki says he talked to Obama and is satisfied that Obama won't withdraw the troops precipitiously, that must be totally inconsistent with "one to two brigades a month, out in sixteen." Because he's a flip flopper, ya see. Ergo, ipso facto baby. Baaaaaahhhhhh.

Public financing? Obama said, he'd try to make a deal with the Republican nominee if they could reach some agreement about getting 527's under control so he didn't get Swift Boated. Obama got the Democratic 527's under control unilaterally. Turned out to be pretty easy: he went to the party fat-cats and said: "please don't donate to 527's" and, amazingly, they didn't. The Democratic 527's that had already been set up dried up and blew away in a matter of weeks. McCain said "golly, there's just nothing I can do to keep those guys from doing whatever they want with their money.  They're totally beyond my control." And, amazingly, next thing you know the Republican 527's are bloating up like ticks on a deer. Obama says, fine. No deal. What's all that mean? It means Obama's a flip-flopper. It's June, ergo ipso facto, plain as the nose on your face.

Baaahhhhh.

Dealth penalty? Obama has always said he's for it under narrow circumstances, assuming there are apprpriate safeguards. Supreme say, 5-4, it is not proper in cases of child rape. Obama says, as a father, I can't be objective about this--I'd be for it under those circumstances. You can be with him on that or against him, but it isn't a flip flop. Unless it's June and you're in the MSM.

Baa-aaa-ahaa-ahhhhh.

NAFTA? Okay, that's looking pretty flippy to me. Remains to be seen whether it's a flop.

FISA? Sorry, just too many angles, and too many moving parts to characterize it in such a manichean fashion. The "compromise" bill is different than the one being peddled by the Senate Intelligence Committee and he says he's still against telecom immunity. He said he was willing to filibuster the old bill, but says he's not willing to filibuster this one. There's lot's of room for disappointment and anger from our side of the field about it, and plenty of things to get upset about if you are so-inclined. No question about that. But a "flip flop?"  That shoe doesn't fit. 

Unless, of course, you're in the MSM and it's June. Baaaahhhh.

And, coming in August--Did you know Obama is the most liberal senator ever?

Baaaaahhhh.

This has been an unsettling week for many of the most “progressive” followers of Senator Obama. They have listened to the right condemn him for his refusal to join in public campaign finance, they have been horrified by his support of the FISA bill, he ruffled the feathers of the Congressional Black Caucus and reportedly told a former Clinton supporter that other Clinton supporter’s need to “get over it”. Now they wonder if he’s “really who they thought he was” or “he’s just a typical politician”. If you had envisioned him as some sort of left-wing Messiah come to drive Cheny, Rove & Co. into the seven rings of Dante’s hell at the point of a fiery sword….you’re probably not nearly as disappointed now as you are going to be. If you have always seen him as a practical politician with a realistic vision of where our country needs to go and how we can realistically get there…you may be gaining some real HOPE! Senator Obama shows a real understanding that he is running for an office that represents more than any single branch of the Democratic Party. A mayor represents his city, the Congressman his district, the Senator his state…but the President represents our country in all its multi-cultural beauty. The variety of interests inherent in the U.S. means that compromise is essential to our survival as a nation. His change of view on the FISA bill is a great example. Which is more important? Punishing the companies who followed the government’s request after the attacks of 9/11 or ensuring that the Presidency CANNOT wiretap without over-site in the future? Which is more important? Do we want the ability to continue to protect our country from attacks in the future or is our desire to financially punish the corporate entities who failed our trust more important? (Keep in mind that if you have a 401K, you probably have stock in those same companies & it’s your retirement that is going to be hurt by a multi-billion dollar class action suit.) We should also remember that the same bill every progressive is upset about DOES NOT grant criminal liability. (Which means that the corporate executives, who decided on their own to violate our rights are still CRIMINALLY LIABLE) Where do we turn for guidance to what is really important? Perhaps we should look to the Preamble to the Constitution. Fifty two words that sum up the whole of our political system. It is the introduction to and an outline of one of the most remarkable political documents the world has ever seen. And yet its importance is often overlooked. But not, I think; by the Junior Senator from Illinois, a former Constitutional Law Professor. “WE THE PEOPLE (Not We the liberals or we the conservatives or we the African-Americans or we the evangelicals or we the upper-middle class. But we the people, who are greater as a sum of the whole than as our individual parts) OF THE UNITED STATES, IN ORDER TO FORM A MORE PERFECT UNION (Maybe not perfect, but at least a little better than it was before we got it), ESTABLISH JUSTICE (Not necessarily fairness), INSURE DOMESTIC TRANQUILITY (bottom line, security of our country is the primary goal), PROVIDE FOR THE COMMON DEFENSE (Not just the rich or the well connected), PROMOTE THE GENERAL WELFARE (It is more important to look after the welfare of the group than of any single segment of the group), AND SECURE THE BLESSINGS OF LIBERTY TO OURSELVES AND OUR POSTERITY (We must look not just to what is good for us today but is good for our children tomorrow), DO ORDAIN AND ESTABLISH THIS CONSTITUTION FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.” It has been said that “Politics is the art of the POSSIBLE”. Or as Senator Obama has said, “I know you want to go to the moon, but we only have enough gas to go “this” far”. You will never agree completely with a candidate and if you do….he or she is probably not going to be the best candidate for the country as a whole. We as a people need to remember the importance of compromise. Those who refuse to compromise hold a higher moral ground but seldom political office. One out of four female Clinton supporters insist that they will vote for John McCain. Why? Even if you agree that she should be the nominee and the prize was stolen by the media and gender bias….will you (and our country) be better off in four years under a McCain presidency? How will you explain to your granddaughters that you voted for the man who appointed Supreme Court Judges who will roll back every advancement women have made in the last 50 years? Remember, in 2000 three percent of Democrats voted for Nader BECAUSE AL GORE WASN’T GREEN ENOUGH!!!! Duh. With all due respect to your beliefs, feelings and political goals….now is the time to “get over it” because the stakes are even higher than they were in 2000.

With the screams of recession looming in our midst the Federal Reserve Bank has decided to cut interest rates in the attempts at stablizing our economy.
For those of you who don't know what the Federal Reserve is, They are the privatly run central bank of America, which, create our money and regulate the value there of.

But wait...
Our Constitution States that Congress has the vested powers;

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States

as well as;

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures

I'm Confused...

Why have we taken a power, from Congress and the People, and given it to a Private organization?  
Why do we allow a private bank to make our money for us, and then sell it to us, for a profit?
Why is a private bank regulating our economy, limiting our free market?
Why is it, that, not even the President can sit in on a board meeting of the Federal Reserve while they determine Americas financial future?  
Why is the Federal Reserve allowed to ignore the demands of Congress?
Why are we allowing our Constitution to be trampled on?

These are just a few questions i think we should start asking ourselves.

I'm sorry.  I just do.  I wish I could explain all the things I know and you don't and how I found them out, but I just can't.  I have what's called esoteric knowledge.  We who have it keep it hidden.  That's the whole point.

If I told you what I knew and how I found it out, it wouldn't be hidden knowledge anymore, and it wouldn't be as useful.  For one thing, you might go checking up on it and finding out some of it was wrong or that it came from an unreliable source, or that I just made it up.

So you are just going to have to trust me and give me some room to operate here.  It's hard to convince people and the other side is arguing against me, and the most important thing in the world is that I win this argument.  So if I say I know things you don't know, back me up.  And if anybody says I'm wrong or I don't know something or dares to ask me how I found it out, you go after them with anonymous insults and shut them up.  Because those people are either the people I'm arguing with, or they are just plain stupid.  I know things they don't know and I want them to shut up.

Now you take this Feingold guy for example.  He's what I call a dangerous politician.  He even admits there are things he doesn't know and wants to find out.  How dumb is that?  Who wants a Senator that admits nobody gave him the hidden knowledge?  Not me.  I want my politicians in on the hidden knowledge loop, even if they can't share that info with me.

I know some of you are going to object to this argument and bring up the invasion and intelligence briefings and reports and UN speeches and State of the Union uranium and just that whole Bush thing, but that's because you don't have the knowledge I have about how the situation is different this time.   People like me can be trusted never to tell you I know something I don't know, even if Bush did that a couple of times.  Okay.  Even if he did it a lot.

And maybe Bush did lie some to get elected, but that was before he got the hidden knowledge.  Because the thing is, having hidden knowledge means you never have to admit you were wrong or that you've changed your mind.  So you can never really lie, can you?

Someone like me can't anyway.  Someone like you might be going back on a promise or lying if you said you would do something and didn't.  But someone like me has the hidden knowledge card to play.  I just say oh I learned a lot since then, so I get a change your mind for free card.

I can use the compromise card, too, because my mom was a Republican and my dad was a Democrat, so compromise is in my DNA.  So to speak.

The best thing is to combine the compromise card with the hidden knowledge card.  Then you get to change your mind and compromise at the same time. 

I wish I could tell you where and how I learned all this, but then you'd know as much as I do and you might not trust me anymore.

Please don't recommend this post.  I don't want those other people to find out about the hidden knowledge and how to use it.

While monitoring the fascinating discussion about whether Obama's palpable rightward list represents duplicitous ideological betrayal or pragmatic political calculation, it occurs to me that many here at TPM seem to be overlooking an important aspect of the current situation.

Regardless of where you fall on the issue, it seems to taken as a given that Obama's putative pandering/strategizing is aimed squarely at the American electorate - that he believes that he needs to tack right in order to better appeal to the Appalachian Bubbas or the Reagan Democrats or the Independents or some other low information voter.

Well, this just seems wrong to me. Given the campaign that he has run so far, given the truly astonishing weaknesses of his opponent, given his actual legislative record - I actually rather suspect that Obama believes (as I do) that the mood of the country as a whole reflects a real rejection of with the Right Wing memes and frames that he seems to be of late lending some legitimacy. That certainly was the gambit that he played in the Primary, and, lest we forget, he won, against some pretty formidable opponents and spectacular odds. I just don't see him waking up one day and saying to himself "Golly, maybe I really have been giving short shrift to this whole "Terrorists are gonna GIT YA" mindset that Republicans seem to love so much".

In fact it wouldn't surprise me in the least to learn that Obama really thinks that his centrist gambit actually diminishes his electoral prospects in the general. And I'm quite certain that he really does understand the risk that he is taking by appearing to undercut the message that he sold to his most energized supporters; those who have been animated by the message of transformational change and the end of Politics As Usual.

So why the shift, then?

Seems to me that perhaps it's better understood within the context of the power structure of the Democratic Party itself. Don't forget, this is "Unity Month" for the Democrats, where we are supposed to heal the wounds left by the bitter Primary season, link arms and sing "We are the World", then buy the world a Coke and teach it Harmony. And, joking aside, it's important to keep in mind why Unity Month is necessary in the first place - what happened in the Primary was nothing less than a bitter struggle for the control and direction of the Democratic Party itself.  It was very much a manifestation of an existential struggle between the Old Guard (the Clintons, DLC, Reid, Pelosi, Blue Dogs) vs. the New Turks (Obama, Dean, Dodd, Feingold, etc.) - and the Old Guard never goes quietly. Some of Obama's campaign rhetoric was undoubtedly just as appalling to the leadership wing of the Democratic Party as it was to the movement Conservatives - these guys are frankly terrified of the Republicans at this point (understandable, since they've lost their lunch money on the playground nearly every day for 8 freaking years), but they still pretty much buy into the Republican frames - and they don't really buy into the whole notion of "transformational change" anyway (previously, I've likened it to a form of Stockholm Syndrome, where you end up identifying with your oppressor, and even loving them a little bit). When Obama was drawing distinctions between himself and Sen. Clinton, he was also aiming squarely at many of the Dems in Congress.

In short, I certainly think that Obama, of late, has been triangulating (or, if you prefer, pandering). But I don't think that he's pandering to Bubba in West Virginia, or your grandmother in Boca Raton. Rather, I think that he's pandering to the power structure of the Democratic Party. They lost in the primary, but it was close enough that they retained their power, and they are gonna make damn sure that they aren't put out to pasture just yet. Obama abso-freaking-lutely needs these people, not be to elected necessarily, but to govern once he's in office.

So this is the real tension - he needs the old school Democratic party power players in order to govern effectively, but he also needs the voice of the flock, the re-enfranchised and (especially) the newly enfranchised who, in the Obama world-view, really provide the power to keep the engine running, and actually get things done. His real task is to avoid pissing off either side to the point where they won't be willing to sing out of the same hymnal come inauguration day. Quite a balancing act, but I remain faithful that he's up to the challenge. He's given me no real reason to doubt him yet.

Most importantly - if this is correct, then it suggests a course of action for us, the actual constituents. While it's OK to express disappointment about Obama's seeming backslide towards the center, and while it is always appropriate to hold him or any politician accountable (please keep this in mind, ye internet scolds who bristle at any criticism of Our Leader) - if we really want to lift up the Obama candidacy and give it wings, we need to put pressure on the Democratic leadership. Make Hoyer, Rockefeller, et. al. pay for their FISA treason - after all, it was they who put our guy in such an untenable position in the first place. Shout down any Democrat who looks fondly to the Clinton years as the pinnacle of progressive/liberal governance (sorry, he did some good things, and maybe he had no real choices, but he was absolutely complicit in turning the word "liberal" into a profanity). Tie the Blue Dogs to a stout tree with a short leash. Recognize triangulation as a tactic to be used sparingly, not as some sort of world-view or cool super-weapon that gives you magical powers (abuse it, and it merely keeps you weak). Allow yourself to be taken in, just a little, by the Obama message of Hope and Change. Don't fear the Republicans, or the low information voters - you really are better than them, and stronger too if you allow yourself to be.

Look beyond the election, to the administration - tell your leaders in Congress that you will hold them accountable if they exhibit the same milquetoast weeny limp-wristed ineffective tactics that have, sadly, characterized the Party for far too long.

That's what Obama wants us to do. Vote him in, and then make him govern.

For all those Hillary Clinton supporters looking for someone to blame for her loss, you need look no further than Bill Clinton's pecker.

If Bill had only been able to keep it in his pants...

- The Republicans would never have been able to impeach him on bogus charges.
- Al Gore, who lost by just a few hundred votes in Florida, would've easily been elected the 44th president.
- 9/11 may have been thwarted because President Gore would've paid much closer attention to the warnings.
- If 9/11 had been thwarted, there would've been no need for a war in Afghanistan or Iraq. (The war in Iraq would probably never have happened even after 9/11.)
- President Gore would've continued the successful Clinton policies of the 90's, leading us through 8 years of peace and prosperity (not to mention a big head start on addressing global warming).
- Hillary Clinton would have run for the 2008 Democratic nomination against Vice-President Lieberman and won easily, Lieberman having been exposed for the weenie that he is.
- Hillary Clinton would have easily beaten the Republican nominee, John McCain, and gone on to eight years of a successful presidency.

So to all you PUMA's out there...ponder that the next time you feel like sliming Barack Obama.

Yesterday's Supreme Court decision is both a rational interpretation of the Second Amendment and a victory for civil rights.

When the Founding Fathers spoke of a militia, they spoke of ordinary citizens who answered a call to arms during the Revolution.  They were not trained as soldiers and they were given little if any training before being sent into battle -- there was no time to train them in marksmanship.  Their effectiveness depended upon their ability to fire their muskets and hit the enemy.  The Founding Fathers clearly recognized that they could not have raised a militia if the population had not only owned muskets and pistols, but also had developed skill in using firearms safely and effectively.

Despite the fact that we have a National Guard and Reserve today as well as the time and resources to train the soldiers who volunteer to serve in those forces, the effectiveness of the men and women we call into service is enhanced by their prior training.  Training is much easier and the skills developed in training are much higher when the soldiers come into the training with civilian backgrounds that enhance their ability to develop higher skill levels quickly.  Just as experience in driving cars and playing video games helps soldiers learn to control drones and robots and drive trucks more quickly, experience in firearm safety and usage helps the soldiers to improve their firearm safety and marksmanship skills.

The role of firearm ownership in recruiting an effective militia from the general population to resist a foreign invader remains essentially the same as it was at the time the Second Amendment was written and as it was in 1812.  We certainly feel more secure within our borders today but we know that a foreign invasion, though unlikely, remains possible.  In the event of a foreign invasion today, we would have no more time to train citizens for service in a milita than we did during the Revolution.

The Court wisely left open the question of the scope of appropriate regulation of our right to own and use firearms.  Clearly regulation is appropriate.  We must never forget that firearms are tools for killing.  They make killing easier, quicker, more efficient and sadly more remote.  We must drive out the romantic notion of firearm ownership that prevails in the media today and replace it with the sober acknowledgement that a citizen who owns a firearm must be held responsible and accountable for the safe and appropriate storage and use of a lethal weapon.  We must also acknowledge that the right to own, keep and use firearms comes with a terrible price in murder, suicide and fatal accident.  We cannot afford the romantic notion of gun ownerhip that prevails today.

Now that our Supreme Court has wisely settled the basic question, we need to move on to the more important and urgent issues of education and appropriate regulation.

As we contemplate declining stocks and record oil prices, here is an informative audio of an interview with  Jeffrey Brown, who goes by westexas on The Oil Drum blog. Westexas and khebab developed the Export Land Model, predicting how much oil exporting countries would limit exports in the face of declining production.

The Reality Report interviews Jeffrey J. Brown, an oil exploration geoscientist, primarily in Texas. We discuss the rapid rise in the price of oil, how this is being covered by media, political reactions, and the need to transform from an economy of mass global consumers to one of local producers. Jeff Brown’s website is: http://graphoilogy.blogspot.com/

I just wanted to point out and put it in writing that Senator Barack Obama is doing quite well in the national and state wide polls, even before the first rally in New Hampshire today with Obama and Hillary on the stage together.

While I'm sure Obama appreciates any help she and Bill can give him, be mindful that he was doing very well before they stepped into the campaign to assist him.

In other words, the Clintons or their supporters can't claim to have 'given' or 'put' Barack Obama over the top - standing by his side in his campaign.  They have a right to claim they 'helped'; but so far, things look like he will win with or without their 'direct' support.

Democrats were coming 'home' before the Clintons came on board.  That's a fact now.

Latest Polls:

MINNESOTA -17
WISCONSIN-13
MICHIGAN-6
COLORADO-5
CALIFORNIA-28
NEW MEXICO-3
PENNSYLVANIA-4
INDIANA-1
OREGON-6
OHIO-5
VIRGINIA-2
FLORIDA-4 (in one poll)
MISSOURI-1 (in one poll)
NEVADA-TIED
IOWA-6
NEW JERSEY-11
NEW YORK-14

Some of you will say I'm worrying over nothing - just so long as he wins.  I disagree, from what I've seen so far, Barack Obama will win this election on his own merit and campaign strategy (even if, God forbid, the Clintons dropped off the face of the earth today).  I want this fact to be part of his legacy.  I refuse to accept that he couldn't have done it without 'them'.

Just to clarify - I'm not saying he can do it without Clinton's supports, just the Clinton's themselves.  I just happen to think Democrats will come home in November with or without them.

I just came from I'm Bored. Thrill Me, Ya Bastids. and it seems the entire point of the blog (with an impressive comment count besides) was lost in the musical orgy of YouTube clips and non sequiters to follow.

This blog addresses each of his five points in turn and invite the rest of the TPM crew to do the same in the comments section.  I think Quinn poses interesting questions, and I am tired of writing the acronym FISA.

I would like to hear your opinions on Senator Barack Obama nominating Representative Robert Wexler from Florida as his Vice President.

Wexler has worked tirelessly for Obama these past few months.  He spoke for him at the DNC when discussing Florida and Michigan voters.

He campaigns with and for Obama constantly.

He's recently written a book call "Fire-Breathing Liberal: How I Learned to Survive (and Thrive) in the Contact Sport of Congress"
 
He's sponsored bills to Impeached the president and vice president.

I'm not sure if any House of Representatives have ever won a presidential or vp race before - anyone know?

Yes he's a liberal and proud of it;  But he is popular in Florida, a state that could help Obama win the election in November.

Opinions?

A few weeks ago after Barack Obama officially clinched the Democratic nomination, John Dickerson asked on Slate how, as the nominee, Obama would replace the Clintonian “triangulation” he ran against. 

Since Dickerson asked the question, Obama has (1) given a hawkish speech before AIPAC, (2) announced his support for the FISA “compromise” that looks awfully similar to previous versions he had opposed, and (3) expressed his disagreement with the Supreme Court decision rejecting the death penalty in cases of child rape.    

Obama’s moves have sparked a lively discussion on these boards as his supporters try to reconcile these moves with their expectations of the candidate shaped during the nominating contest.  Is Obama turning right or is this where he stood all along?  Has he taken these positions out of conviction or expedience?  Is he a progressive or centrist?  Reformer or ‘typical pol’?

I believe there is an element of truth in all of these.  But the answer to Dickerson’s question seems pretty clear.  At least for now, triangulation is alive and well.  The promised transformation will have to wait.    

Ah, triangulation.  During the primary season, the term was tossed around haphazardly as an insult, shorthand for appeasement, spinelessness, selling out, the absence of principles, a stand-in for “everything we hate about the Clintons.”  As a candidate for the nomination, Obama criticized triangulation.  "We've had enough of ... triangulation and poll-driven politics," he said on one occasion. "That's not what we need right now.”    

Lost amid the invective was the origin and meaning of the term.  Triangulation is a strategic choice, not a political philosophy.  The term was coined by the justly reviled Dick Morris during the 1996 election.  After the Republican takeover of the House and Senate in the midterm elections, Clinton “triangulated” as a matter of survival, pre-empting wedge issues the Republicans had used to bludgeon the Democrats and addressing them through more progressive policies.  Morris described it as using your tools to fix their car, the most notable example being the issue of welfare reform, long a wedge issue exploited by Republicans.  Clinton took the issue from Republicans while promoting higher funding for child care and stronger financial support for working families.  An imperfect solution, to be sure, but far better than the alternatives.  Most important, Clinton was able to appropriate the terrain that Republicans had successfully controlled to that point. 

Despite his anti-triangulation rhetoric, his promises to transform politics as we know it, Obama’s campaign has adopted this tactic from the start.  On health care, Obama attacked the Clinton and Edwards plans from the right arguing against coverage mandates that “force every American to buy health care,” a talking point that could easily have come from a Republican playbook.  On Social Security, Obama repeated the mantra of the privatizers that the system is in “crisis” and urgent solutions are required.  Rather than laying the blame for many of the nation’s problems at the feet of the last eight years of Republican rule, Obama blamed the corrupt system, casting blame on both parties. 

Seen in this light, Obama’s recent positions should come as no surprise.  Lest anyone get any ideas about Obama’s sympathies, Obama’s speech to AIPAC placed him squarely within the mainstream of foreign policy thought.  Faced with an imperfect FISA “compromise,” Obama made a smart political choice, emphasizing that the need to provide tools for fighting terrorism over holding the telecoms accountable and the constitutional concerns with the bill, depriving the Republicans of an issue on which to hammer him this Fall.  Obama’s statement on the Supreme Court decision reminded voters of his crime fighting bona fides. 

Yes, Obama ran as a different kind of Democrat, one who would transcend partisanship and politics as usual, who would face hard truths honestly, who would assemble a new, bipartisan coalition. 

It’s easier to promise to end partisanship than to actually do so, however.  Governing an enormous and fractious country is rough business.  It requires compromises and choices among less than ideal alternatives.  I realize we are at an early stage, yet despite the soaring rhetoric, I fail to see how Obama’s politics rise above the triangulation he so forcefully denounced.  Maybe that’s not such a bad thing, but those who believed Obama would somehow rise above the fray are either naïve in the extreme or deluded. 

It should be apparent to everyone by now that Barack Obama's presidential campaign is unlike any other campaign that has preceded it. This not like any in the previous century nor even the first of this new century. And there is one and only one element that has created this fundamental evolution in the art of politics....the Internet.

I saw a statistic a few weeks ago that said that on average there are 1 million nine hundred thousand new posts every day. Got that? 1,900,000 new posts every day. The world we live in is either hard-wired or Wi-Fi'ed everywhere. Breaking news travels the globe in a microsecond as quickly even as the event is occurring. The World Wide Web as we used to call it is no longer the exclusive domain of techno-geeks and the cognoscenti. It is now belongs to Everyman. But it has truly taken hold only in the last five years or so.

Where do we shop? Where do we look for news? Where do we find the latest political, social, or international development? Where do we look for information on the latest movies? Where do we go to instantly communicate with our friends or family across the street or across the globe? The Internet. It is as much a part of daily lives as TV, electricity, water or any other basic element of life in the 21st century. And it is trans-generational.

And Barack Obama and his campaign staff have taken hold of this unique tool and made it their own. And here's the reason we will win this year. The Republicans don't get it. They are still hidebound in their decades old practices and traditions of political campaigning. Their attempts at using this phenomenon have been laughable at best. But Obama and company have mastered the art of 21st century communication. Not only have they used it to raise tens of millions of dollars in amounts of twenty or fifty dollars, but also they have capitalized on its ability to smack down any lie, smear, attack, or deception that the Repubs and their minions throw at them.

And so... Brothers and sisters, today we are not turning the page in the history of our country. No, we are closing the book. We are beginning a new volume with fresh new blank pages waiting to record the return of greatness to America. It is a new volume for a new millennium to be written by a new generation.

One of the things that drew me to Obama was the fact that neither he or his wife are shy about voicing their support for the movement to bring about gay equality and instead have a knack for voicing that opinion where and when it is most effective.  They always take a matter of fact approach and lay out their positions without apology.  And while they certainly have their detractors in the gay community, i.e., those who think he needs to distance himself from (and denounce) anyone who isn't gay inclusive and those who think our dem nominee should throw the election away by supporting federalized marriage equality for gays, my observation has been that most in the real world gay community strongly support his positions and also strongly support the fact that he is clear and open about where he stands.  Michelle Obama's talk yesterday reminded me of this. 

As reported by the AP and the Huffington post:
"Michelle Obama also drew a connection between the struggles for gay rights and civil rights.

'We are all only here because of those who marched and bled and died, from Selma to Stonewall, in the pursuit of a more perfect union,' she said at the event, held days before the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots between gays and New York police, and the city's annual gay pride parade.

...  Touting her husband's record pushing for workplace discrimination legislation as an Illinois state senator and his support of civil unions, Obama noted her husband also had brought a call for equality to conservative groups, telling churchgoers they need to combat homophobia in the black community.

The Illinois senator opposes a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and says states should make their own decisions on the matter. He has said he's interested in ensuring that same-sex couples in civil unions get federal benefits.'

... McCain supports the military's 'don't ask, don't tel' policy, while Obama has called it 'counterproductive.'"

I'm confident, as a citizen who is gay, that the first term of an Obama presidency will result in enormous strides towards equality for all of our citizens, regardless of sexual orientation.  And hopeful, that during the second term, we will get there.

As is evident in a letter Obama recently wrote to President Bush, his policy toward Palestine-Israel is now worse than that of the Bush administration.

Read about it here.

I posted this notice at the bottom of LisB's love-fest post, which will be expiring shortly ... so it occurs to me that, perhaps, it deserves a post of it's own.

Please feel free to drop by the new TPM-aholics chat room anytime.  I can't guarantee the discussion will always be about politics, or even that there will be a discussion... You people are beyond my control.  But so far, topics of conversation have ranged from from NY vs. CA to Ralph Nader (and covered much in between).

This may be a Bad Idea(tm), but I happened to stumble across a free web-based chat app today, so I set up a "TPM-aholics" room. Don't know if we need this sort of thing any more (or ever did), but I figured, "why not try it?"

Anyway, it's a persistent link; you don't have to create an account, you can use whatever name you like, and it's supposed to work with all browsers: http://www.lingr.com/room/TPM-aholics

Enjoy!

This has been a historic week for the Bill of Rights.  First the 4th amendment was eviscerated by Congress.  Then the 2nd amendment was misinterpreted by the US Supreme Court.  All that is left is for the remaining branch of the government to mangle another of those ten amendments.  Never fear, we have two more days left in the week.

The 4th amendment states, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."  It would be difficult, even today, to express this any more clearly.  A search warrant is needed before the government can perform a search of anyone's property, including their electronic communications, and that search warrant must describe what is to be searched and what will be taken.

The FISA law has always been at least somewhat out of the bounds of what the 4th amendment permits, by allowing the searches to take place before the warrant is obtained.  This week's events have still further weakened our protection from illegal searches.  This is one of the amendments that has protected us from despotic governments.

The 2nd amendment says, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."  This amendment is considerably less clear, but it clearly does give the states the ability to maintain a state militia, made up of citizens who keep the guns they need for their militia duties at home.  Nothing in that amendment is about hunting or self protection.

But, the Supreme Court is now dominated by "conservatives" who are convinced that every person's safety is dependent on them being armed to the teeth.  So, this week's ruling turns the 2nd amendment on its head, and converts it to a hunting and individual self protection amendment.

Since it is the 4th amendment that is so crucial to protecting us from a despotic government, one would expect there would be a nationwide outcry against the FISA modifications which will be passed this week.  And, since a very small percentage of us need guns for either hunting or for self protection, one would expect that there would be at least a shrug of the shoulders at obtaining the right to keep a gun in our homes.   But, one's expectations would be completely in error.

Senator Obama is running on a promise to change the way we do business in Washington.  He has lectured us about the need for more civility in public life, and about the need for more responsible parenting.  So, of course he would oppose the FISA modifications and be upset about the Supreme Court ruling.    But, again common sense loses - Obama favors both of those actions.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed, waiting to see which of the first ten amendments the executive branch of our government will demolish in the last two days of the week.  To avoid being wrong again I won't predict which it will be.

Dreams...real or imagined?

The following link will take you to an apolitical article from one of my favorite websites, which I link to from my personal Blog.

No Obama, no McCain, no Bush, no Clinton, no Iraq, no Iran, no FISA, no....

http://www.physorg.com/news133696958.html

MyBlog: http://ProteanPerspectives.blogspot.com

While I respect and at one point, cared a great deal about President Bill Clinton (I still have two of his pictures hanging in my office), I resent what he and Hillary are doing with respects to Senator Barack Obama and his campaign.

They played ‘chicken’ and it appears they may have won.

Hillary held back enthusiastic actions toward Obama’s campaign and Bill refused to even speak to Obama.  They said to Obama, you ‘come to us’ and ask for help – WE are the leaders of this Party, not YOU.  They want Party members to see Obama ‘come to them’.  Kneeling before them like a great admirer.

It’s like having a fight with a loved one.  One always backs down.  One stands their ground.  Hillary and Bill made sure that Barack Obama was the one backing down.

The Clintons seem to think that Barack Obama owes them an apology for winning the Democratic Party’s primary. 

They don’t like it one bit.  They along with their supporters, think the Obama team cheated in some way.  They feel like they’ve been mistreated and that Obama needs to say he’s sorry and that he ‘owes’ them big time.

May I ask, what about Obama, his team and his supporters?  They too feel like they were stepped on and abused during this campaign.  Why shouldn’t we be demanding Hillary and Bill apologize to us for ‘their’ actions during their campaign? 

Barack Obama, a relatively unknown Senator, along with his team and supporters, were able to manage their campaign in such a way to have outsmarted the two well established, well connected, experienced candidates and their campaign advisors;  Simple fact.
 
Both teams did things they shouldn’t have; but the last thing Barack Obama should be ask to do is ‘beg’ for anything.  He WON!  And just like any other campaign, the winner takes all.  Losers don’t go demanding apologies and money to pay off their debts for having mishandled their financial affairs.

While I would have been just as sadden and angry for awhile, if Hillary had won, in the end, I would have ended up voting for her because I believe 'more' in the Democrat’s principles then any Republican ones.

I would not have ‘used’my vote as a ‘payback’, as some are saying they will now do.  Anyone that does that, are thinking about themselves and not the country as a whole.

It’s just been announced that Barack Obama ended up calling Bill Clinton today.   For that, I am one Democrat that will never trust or respect Bill or Hillary Clinton ever again.  They've gone beyond that wall for me.

Salon's top progressive blogger Glen Greenwald reminds us that back on January 31st, Keith Olbermann had this to say about FISA and telecom immunity:

There is not a choice of protecting the telecoms from prosecution or protecting the people from terrorism, Sir. This is a choice of protecting the telecoms from prosecution or pretending to protect the people from terrorists. Sorry, Mr. Bush, the eavesdropping provisions of FISA have obviously had no impact on counter-terrorism, and there is no current or perceived terrorist threat the thwarting of which could hinge on an email or phone call that is going through Room 641 of AT&T in San Francisco.

Olbermann went on to call telecoms immunity "fascist", and compare the practice to Nazi Germany's policies.

But now that Barack Obama--Olbermann's candidate--has supported a compromise that all but grants telecomnunication companies imunity for having spied on Americans without a warrant, Keith Olbermann has suddenly praised the compromise, noting that Obama "didn't cower to the left". That's right. Taking Olbermann's January position would have been tantamount to "cowering".

That makes soo much sense, doesn't it?

Read Greenwald's piece.

This is something that annoys me whenever it comes up in political dialogue, but when that dialogue involves a BBC correspondent deferring to a Politico.com analyst, it drives me up the wall.

In a discussion of today's Supreme Court ruling, someone at Politico commented (and I'm paraphrasing), "the only Americans likely to have any interest in gun control are those living in Urban areas... but that's a relatively small minority." The reporter didn't call him out on this slight inaccuracy. 

Just for future reference, those of us living in urban areas account for about 75% of the population. That's some minority. 

I posted this about a month ago, and it went over like a fart in church, but given Charlie Black's latest blurt of the truth, it seemed on-topic.  Please forgive the blatant re-post and give it a read.

President Bush and John McCain do have a relationship with Osama Bin Laden.  They are each others' Secretary of Fear.

I do not think that we captured or killed Bin Laden years ago and the administration releases tapes when it is politically useful.  This is silly, and I think most people know it.  When we Democrats suggest it, we sound like idiots. 

Bin Laden is still on the loose and acting of his own free will.  The reason that nearly every one of his released messages reinforces McBush talking points is very simple:  THEY HAVE IDENTICAL POLITICAL INTERESTS. 

Mr. Bush is nothing without the threat of Bin Laden, there is no way he could have gotten away with ignoring the constitution, let alone win re-election, without him as a bogeyman.  Similarly, Bin Laden is nothing without the threat of Mr. Bush as a recruiting tool and rallying cry. This is a classic symbiotic relationship.  Bin Laden's greatest fear is that our next president will dramatically change foreign policy, engage our enemies, and show the world that Americans are not all trigger-happy bullies.  This is the simple reason why he always says "Boo" at a politically convenient time for the Bush. 

Lets get past the conspiracy theories, and address the real issue, so that when the Bin Laden video comes this October, people might see it in the right context.

One thing the GOP and the Clintons have always had in common is that they know the power of saying the same thing incessantly - that if you say it loudly and long enough it'll become a truth in enough voting minds, regardless of evidence.

I was so encouraged when Wes Clark came out on MSNBC and socked it to them - John McCain does NOT have foreign policy/international relations experience  - what he has is limited millitary experience.

I hoped the rest of the party and especially the Obama campaign and surrogates would pick up the theme and really run with it.   Instead, it's disappeared into the ether.

We had Harry Reid coming out and saying that McCain doesn't have the temperament needed for C-in-C.   Does everyone else keep running with it?  Nope.

You only have to keep reading the Jed Report to have seen endless examples of McCain flip-flopping or contradicting himself and, crucially, clearly not knowing the facts.

Obama himself has said sometimes that McCain's oil policies were gimmicks.

He's told rallies that  McCain's policies are for Wall Street, not Main Street.  He knows damned well that McCain has nothing for education.

So playing a word association game this morning on Fox Business Channel,  asked for a word to describe McCain what did he come up with?

neocon...  bomb...  militarist... right wing...  war...  confused...  all over the place... filthy temper...   Bush...

Add to the list..    take your pick...

No.    He chose `honorable`

Pathetic.  Simply pathetic.   Actually, it's tragic.

I've seen it mentioned by many that the WAR (among many other issues) is a far more important issue than FISA.  So, out of curiosity, I thought it would be interesting to have Obama supporters share their *specific* opinion on what Obama will do re: the War.  No one knows until he actually does it, but everyone has to have a personal opinion on what the War will look like once he's been in office for a year.  That is:

(a) Will there be more than 100,000 troops in Iraq?
(b) Will he work for permanent bases in Iraq?
(c) Will he assert the War must be continued for our national security, or will he assert we've done our job and its time to get out?
(d) Will he take a hawk-like position with Iran?
(e) Odds we'll end up in a war with Iran due to our "national security interests", or because they're "supplying weapons to the insurgents", etc.?
(f) Or, I don't know, whatever he does will be right, cause thats all the guy does.

There may have been a post like this I've missed, but those of you that trust him, how do you see him handling the war?

My opinion - it will be almost identical to the Bush Admin's handling of the war. 

Like I said, no one can be right; I could be incredibly wrong.  I'm just wondering what the general belief is.

[Below is taken from an article on Breitbart.com, via TheDrudgeReport.com]

'US Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama played a word association game when interviewed on Fox Business channel on Thursday, responding in a rapid-fire manner to words thrown at him.

Obama used the game to express respect for his Republican rival, John McCain, and underline his stances on some issues.

"I'm going to give you a couple of words," the Fox TV journalist said. "And then you just tell me what you're thinking about."

"I will do my best," Obama answered.

NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement): "Mixed bag."

Wall Street: "Money."

Sovereign Wealth Funds: "Caution."

Iran: "Threat."

Exxon Mobil: "Profitable," said Obama, laughing.

OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries): "One word, for OPEC I would say it is independence. The association I have there is we've got to free ourselves from dependence on OPEC.

Senator McCain: "Honorable." '

In this writer's opinion, that's as good as it gets. Grace and Intelligence under fire. [With thanks to the Oakland Raiders.]

MyBlog: http://ProteanPerspectives.blogspot.com

With one trading day left to go, the stock market, as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), is set to have its worst June since 1930! The Great Depression era.

Today alone, the DJIA lost over 3% of its value, bring June's loss to just under 10%. In 1930 the June loss was over 17%.

If that's not enough excitement for you, consider these other financial events of the day:

Oil hits $140/barrel for the first time.

And Goldman Sachs, the most influential and financial solid firm on The Street, issues a few pronouncements. They recommended the sale of shares of General Motors, sending that stock to its lowest price in 50 years; they recommended not only the sale of Citigroup shares, but went further and recommended selling those shares SHORT!

Why is this happening? The market "analysts" have rounded up the usual suspects to blame, including my namesake at the Fed, consumer retrenchment, runaway oil prices, possible runaway inflation and on and on.

Why post this here at TPM?

Because the Democrats should be able to win the election even if they decide to nominate the San Diego Chicken (in full costume) and run him instead of Obama.

The House of Cards came tumbling down in foreign affairs a long time ago; now we're witnessing the Homeland House of Cards doing the same.


MyBlog: http://ProteanPerspectives.blogspot.com

The most important thing Obama can do is win the White House.

It isn't filibustering FISA.
It isn't standing on principle and poking holes in the air with his index finger.
It isn't singlehandedly wiping out the Hanta virus.
It isn't acceding to tester's pathetic crusade to impeach Bush.
It isn't stopping to walk an old lady across a street.
It isn't making Billy Glad a fully informed and comforted McCain activist.
It isn't displaying seamless consistency of thought in accordance with the wishes of some TPM readers.
It isn't challenging John McCain to a game of beanbag.

This isn't beanbag. It's a fight for everything you care about and everything the rest of us care about even if you don't.

This battle will determine the fate of every civil liberty that has suffered in the last eight years of GOP rule and every civil liberty still under attack, including your pet civil liberty of the month.

I've had enough of the anti-Obama bullshit here. I was publishing underground newspapers in high school while most of you weren't even a gleam in your daddy's eye. I was fighting for some rights many of you now take for granted. And I've been fighting that good fight at every election and in between them, too.

So don't come pissing into the sandbox because Obama failed you. He hasn't. Principle is meaningless without the power to exercise it. Worthless without the office to wield it.

You have principles, right? So how's that working out for you? You say your government doesn't live by your principles? Well, bust my buttons and welcome to Oz.

Obama is trying to win the White House from a party that is showing you, by the very nature of its candidate, it intends to make national security the central issue of this election. If you don't remember what that means, have a look at the tactics used in the last election and the ones we've seen so far in this one: Fear of terrorism. Along with it comes xenophobia, religious intolerance, racism and disdain for rational thought and discourse. Topping it off come the ads that smear and the surprise events that can steer the election to the SAME FUCKERS THAT HAVE RULED US SINCE THE LAST MILLENIUM.

So let me ask you ONE simple question: Are you happy with the president we have now?

If you are, keep bashing Obama and keep expressing your "concern" that he's placing a mere election win over principle.

If Bush/Cheney/Condi/Rummy/Brownie, et al, doesn't make you happy, then quit your carping and donate a few bucks to Obama.

And if you just can't quit carping, then leave your name and address so I can send you a postcard when McCain bombs Iran; drills off the California, Jersey and Florida coasts; puts a DEA tap on your phone; and sends your nephew back to Iraq on his sixth rotation.

THIS is Obama: Great president.
THIS is Obama on FISA: Good senator.
Any more questions?

As I have blogged before, I came into this election season as a supporter of Hillary Clinton.  I supported her, even though I had reservations about her, because I felt she probably had the best chance among the Democratic candidates to win a general election.

My research on Barack Obama didn't really start until January 2008.  The more I saw him win, the more I was intrigued by him. 

When I researched Obama, I went to the place that I felt would be best to find information:  the Chicago papers.  I quickly learned much of what the national press only came to find out months later.  After reading their years of information on Obama, I came to the conclusion that he would make a very viable candidate.

However, I did not come to the conclusion that he was a staunch progressive, or someone who would step daintily up the ladder.  I came to see him as someone who believes in using power for the greater good - and someone who places top priority on acquiring power, as that is the way you get to use it.

If that procedure sounds familiar, it may be that you are familiar with the works of Saul Alinsky.  Alinsky was a longtime radical activist in Chicago, who essentially believed that the ends (doing civic good) justified the means (whatever you need to do, do it!) when it came to obtaining power. 

Alinsky asserted that he was more concerned with the acquisition of power than anything else: "My aim here is to suggest how to organize for power: how to get it and how to use it."  And another telling quote: "[E]ven if all the low-income parts of our population were organized ... it would not be powerful enough to get significant, basic, needed changes." (quotes from Rules for Radicals, Alinsky's famous book)

Obama took the Rules to heart, but modified them slightly to accommodate today's shrinking middle class.  Obama's work as a community organizer gave him powerful insight on how to get lower-class voters and potential voters involved - and supporting him.

As for Alinsky's bare-knuckle approach to acquiring power?  Recall how he obtained his seat in the Illinois state senate in 1996.  For those who don't know, he essentially forced the incumbent, Alice Palmer, off the ballot by challenging the legality of her petition signatures. 

What Obama did was completely legal - but it was definitely hardball, and probably not something of which he's very proud. (Notice that he doesn't talk much about that election.)  There are still hard feelings on the South Side about how he went about clearing the ballot for that election.  Want proof?  Palmer actively campaigned in the Democratic primary - for Hillary Clinton.

Obama wasted little time making influential friends in Springfield.  One of them was Emil Jones, the Senate majority leader in Illinois who is probably the biggest back-room politician in the state.  Jones got Obama high-profile committee and legislative assignments - irking some of Obama's more senior colleagues in the process. 

Once Obama got into those positions, the record shows that he worked hard and made a lot of legislative progress for those eight years.  Along the way, he compromised or changed his views on more than one issue.  Sometimes, as with the gas tax holiday, he changed his mind from previous experience.  Other times, as with gun control, he changed his mind due to political expediency. 

When he ran for the U.S. Senate, Obama had the good fortune to have one of his primary challengers, Blair Hull, have a messy divorce come into the public eye.  He then had the good fortune to have his main Republican challenger, Jack Ryan, withdraw due to a sex scandal.  This eventually put the Republicans in the position of having Alan Keyes move from Maryland to run against Obama.  Epic fail.

(I'm not saying Obama had anything to do directly with either of those situations.  But I spent the first 28 years of my life in Illinois, and much of my time after the age of 14 living near Chicago.  If you know nothing else of Chicago politics, know this:  Nothing happens by accident there.)

Obama's also compromised more than once since coming into the Senate.  He generally supports the party line for Democrats, but he did allow some relaxation in his campaign finance reform legislation, and he backed the Bush-Cheney energy bill.  And, now there is his stated support for the FISA compromise - even if retroactive telecom immunity is in the final version.

So, is he an idealist or a typical pol?  I don't think of him as either.  I think he has ideals, but I think he sees politics as a means to accomplishing greater good.  The bigger the stage, the more good you can do.  I think that's why Obama has tried to step so quickly up the ladder. 

More to the point of this discussion, I think it's why he backed Bush-Cheney.  Yes, he knew there were tax breaks for the oil companies.  But he also knew there were provisions that would force those companies to invest more than they were getting from the tax breaks in alternative fuels and renewable energy.  He also knew that Bush wouldn't sign a tougher bill.  So, he says, "This is the best we can get for now.  Let's get it, then we can push for more later."

FISA was, really, an even easier decision, if you subscribe to my theory.  Obama's now the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee, facing an opponent whose only serious talking points are national security and experience.  Obama sees FISA coming, and has to make a decision when the House passes its compromise. 

Behind door number one:  Support the compromise, make it clear that the compromise did address a number of your previous concerns, state that you still want telecom immunity gone, and take away a talking point from the GOP.

Behind door number two:  Denounce the compromise, make it clear that you will oppose it every step of the way unless you get everything you want, and hand the GOP a way to cement the CW of you as being weak on national security.

Me?  I'm an idealist.  I'd have spent my capital opposing the compromise.  Obama?  He's a realist.  He has time to work on FISA - especially once he's elected President.  But he can't do jack until he gets elected - and the bare fact is, you get elected by appealing to the middle. 

Obama's position on FISA does that perfectly.  I don't agree with it, but given his history, I'm sure not going to stop supporting him because of it.  I think he'd be the most likely of the three major remaining candidates to work against its worst provisions once elected.  As for the political wisdom of his move, notice the polls in the last week - Obama's gone up in nearly every one since his FISA statement.

When you look at the totality of Obama's political career, what he's doing on FISA is the very thing that Alinsky would have done, if it facilitated winning the Presidency.  And, despite the fact that progressives like me don't like it, it's probably that same approach that will get him elected. 

This strikes me because, as I talk to older politicos, they tell me that the last candidate who combined ruthlessness and conscience was JFK. 

I support Barack Obama because I believe he has the ideals and that will make this country stronger - and the firm resolve to do whatever he has to do to implement those ideals.  Such a politician is rarely seen - and almost never successfully labeled.

It's why he won't allow himself to be swift-boated.  It's why he's moving more to the middle now as the general election approaches.  It's why the GOP is in knots trying to figure out how to paint him with something that will stick. And it's why I believe he'll be inaugurated next January.

Bush is not just clueless about structural racism, he is personally racist.  He managed to insult the President of the Phillipines this week by unforgivable off hand comments about the Phillipine-Americans cooks in the White House kitchen.  President Gloria Macapagal Arroya was there on a sad and serious mission to seek US aid for help with the terrible tragedies that the country had suffered recently.

Then there is this photo of him this week with some kids who have been forced out of their homes by flooding in Iowa in which he is rubbing the head of a young black boy (bushkids.jpg) that you have to see to fully appreciate.  Who does not know that this is considered a racial insult and is deeply offensive to black people, especially for a white person to do it to a child.  Just imagine Po' ol' Massah Bush trying to do that to Obama at the Inaugural.  At least Obama is tall, but I recommend that he wear a hat.

Dow Jones Industrial Average:

Oct 1, 1999:         11497

June 26, 2008:      11453

Thank you, pro-business, Republican-controlled administration.

Hope this isn't a pain, and I know many of you probably already signed this, but there is one last, serious effort underway to stop the Bush Library and Think Tank from coming to fruition.  We really could stop it.  There is a plan.

http://protectsmu.org/index.html

I went to SMU, and it's a great school.  But it's run by people eager to railroad this horrible idea into reality.  So, do it out of spite if you must, or whatever, but please sign the petition and help us stop this.

http://protectsmu.org/index.html

For those who don't know, this isn't any regular Presidential Library.  Rove and Co. have attached a right-wing think tank to the facility that will work to actively rewrite the history of the Iraq War and the Bush Presidency.  It will push for and build a neo-con agenda for generations to come, under the guise of a respectability.  These are its objectives.  And yes, it's that bad.

So, sorry to bug ya with a petition.  I know it's a drag to dwell on Bush when there's so much to look forward to.

Thanks...

Yep. I'm bored. Here's why. As I wander the tables in this fine TPM establishment, coyotes in tow, I see & hear some wonderful things. Witty (even Des got in a good one the other night.) Insightful & Historical (See: y'all on FISA.) I get to be surprised by people's (oft well-cloaked) humanity (that's you, Vlad, you ole Draco you.) I get offered drinks & music & riddles (you know who you are.) Plus, I get to watch some great scraps - TV got nothin' that can compete with our own Itchy & Scratchy.

And with all that, how could I be bored? Well. Boredom's a funny thing - it's relative. Y'see, it's often them waggly li'l lines of conversation, the ones that tangent over toward that border on the right (damn that border) & the ones plunked down at the bottom, late at night, that I like best. Now, some of you will say, "Oh. But quinn esq, that's life." Well, shut up, you lot. You're scum, and disruptive.

It NEEDN'T be that way, life on the margins. (And yes, I go all CAPS when I lean on a word, 'cos damned if I know how to work this incredibly complex, nuanced software.) Anyway... What I'd most like is if some of the comments raised off on that right-hand edge were followed up. Direct-like. In posts that started where it was important. That way, we could start with something that made our brains work, and our wits tingle. At their ends. (Wits. End. Ahhh screw it.) And then, as we worked at it, we'd find new tangents. Which became even more interesting & more fun. And yes, your marriage would suffer & your income plummet. Get over it.  

And love 'im or loathe 'im, that's why Billy G plays here. Cos he's got a big bad brain. Multiple brains (and perhaps, voices.) Cool, says I. The day I'm outgunned in a battle of wits is the day I.... ummmm... yeah. (Piss off, I'm thinking. Witty riposte to follow.) What I was saying is that I suspect Billy - like a batch of you (no, not you Genghis) - are bloody brilliant people. Or thoughtful. Or deep. Or good for free drinks. What are we afraid of?

We all agree already, that we're part of a culture that's dumbed us down. But JC-On-A-Spoon, why not imagine Colbert & Stewart as our starting point? Let's create something THEY'D enjoy.

I'll start with my fellow Obama-backers. We won, so we can most afford a kick in the 'nauts, right? Hello? WTF is it with us anyway? Here's Barack, out there for months, saying, "Ummmm.... This isn't about me. It's about ALL of us." Makin' speeches about having DIFFERENT kinds of conversations, he is. About how the old lines & divisions have to be ERASED. Well (quiet for a minute Des, no cheap shots), how about we PAY A LI'L BLOODY ATTENTION to the dude? Cos when he says, "It's about ALL of us," this does not mean, "Shut up, I'm the only one that gets to talk/think/breathe til November." You wanna BE the change? Well then, ACT it. Neither is it a "different" conversation to say, "Rove is a berry berry bad mans." Nor will old lines get erased with ever-so-winning remarks like "Get over it."

We need to raise our game. We know it, Obama says it. And the world, the times & our children demand it. (Hey... I like that! Except for that "children" bit. Friggin' kids, they demand too much as it is. Li'l bastards. Let 'em screw up their OWN world, then they can talk.) 

We need to raise our game. I said it before, and I was mad. But tonight, I'm sayin' it again. Because I mean it. Now. I'm gonna go out on a limb, knowing damn well Billy (and/or rabbit-dude) is snickering back there with his saw - and offer up some suggested topics. Mock on, mock on, but here's what interests ME. What I do not find boring. How I think we can raise our game. My starting 5. Add your own. Or else.

1. How to BREAK OPEN a culture of fear, division, selfishness, hyper-nationalism. No, I did not say shout at it. Imagine that the next 4 months saw a cultural opening, a blossoming, with a political edge. What would that look like? Because a politician, no matter how good, cannot do much more than signal that things might be different. So what's it to be... A simultaneous, nation-wide set of concerts, where everyone ends up singing "One?" A million dada'ist moments, pasted on the supermarket walls? Handmade billboards on a million lawns, each with their own message of what change looks like to you? If the culture does not change, neither BO nor HRC is gonna be able to do more than hold our worst fears at bay.

2. Obama and the Democrats are gonna be BROKE come next January. Take my word for it. I'm a shit-hot economist in real-life.  And they won't be just a little broke either. Oh. And so will the American economy. And you and me. Now. How's that gonna be dealt with? Start by imagining that yes, we have no money. None of us. Not the guvmint, not you and me. Be creative. We've got trillions tied up in wasted real estate and floorspace, horsepower that we can't feed. Fix it. GIT GOIN'!

3. Assume the Republicans do not gently go down to this 40 years a'comin' defeat. Imagine an October Surprise. Look past the smears of the campaign unfolding. Now, INOCULATE the population against that. Some of you think this is far fetched. I think we can set up a play area somewhere in here to keep you amused while the demented few (with a goddamn clue) ponder this.

4. A generational story. Only this time, a story that doesn't start with totally bogus "labels" like Boomer and X etc. Let's start somewhere sensible. With a myth (which means "big story," not a "bald lie" for those of you not paying attention in Theology class.) Billy likes the Greek story. Obamanauts. But I'm gonna float another, cos I was raised Baptist - The Exodus. (And no, please don't bring Israel post-'48 issues into this. I'm talking MYTH, ok?) The children of Egypt, enslaved, rebel & make a run for it. Face 40 years in the wilderness. There were sacrifices & whole new dreams back there in '68. But these wilderness years.... well, they've thrown up a lotta grumbling. A lot of people turned back to the fleshpots, or over to the Golden Calf. Too damned AFRAID to enter into anywhere new. And so a whole new generation of children had to be born, and raised up under new conditions, to get rid of the fear that blocked us from "entering in." But as a people, they learned to reject the old idols, old models of "Kings." They made up new agreements, new understandings. A dozen "tribes" formed, movements, engaging with other slaves, exiles, wanderers... even women! Tis a grand story (and let's not bother with Leviticus fights, ok?) Argue.

5. Tell me why choosing Hillary as VP, overcoming all bitterness, would do more to PROVE to America that BO means what he says about overcoming old divisions, show what "Change We Can Believe In" looks like and prove himself worthy of trust, than anything else he can tangibly DO in 4 months. (And yes, I have heard some of you don't like her. Me neither. I don't "like" her. But bugger off. Hating is boring. "Big Change" may not look like you think.)

That's yer assignment. And I WILL throw your ass outta here if you revert. And if you don't like it & wanna go postal on me, I'll send you my address & you can come threaten me. (Disclosure: I grew up on a  farm with 16 boys. I look forward to opening some Yes We Can on yer sorry ass. I'm frightening. And that's just the hair.)

So come on. Bring it, TPM'ers. Thrill me, damn you. Mess with my head. And bring music, willya? 

The SCOTUS decision might well turn out to be bad for the GOP and good for gun control efforts.

It is bad for the GOP in the same way that Roe vs Wade has benefited them: it takes the issue off the table as far as most of their supporters are concerned.

With gun ownership rights for hunters and handgun owners protected by SCOTUS decree it is going to be rather harder for the hard core gun nuts to play the gun grabber card.

I don't know if this has been proposed in blogs in the past, but here we go...

Much has been said about the challenge of retiring Senator Clinton's primary debt, which is around $22 million.  Hillary is justifably proud of the fact that she was able to amass 18 million votes during the primary.

My proposal - every person who voted for Clinton during the primary should give her campaign $1.  Some group of her staffers could launch the effort and come up with some clever slogan.

Clearly, not all of her supporters will contribute a dollar.  But:

-some will give more than $1;
-the "buy in" will be so low that some others - even (gasp!) some Obama supporters may throw in their 100 cents.

Yes, even if all of her voters gave a clam, there would still be $4 million to make up.  (HRC should show Mark Penn some tough love and force him to cut his fee.)  Obama "fat cat" donors can help with this smaller amount, and 4 million is an easier amount of personal debt for Clinton to absorb.

Do you think this plan makes any sense?  I am bracing myself for some ridicule by drinking an (elitist) martini.

Or two.

Is it time to change?

Thank you Arnie for being a voice of reason in the Republican party. Go you!

The "Terminator" star helped wrap up the second annual Florida Summit on Global Climate Change Thursday by challenging Florida to continue in California's footsteps by pushing renewable energy, vehicle efficiency and create a "consistent long-term energy policy that gives consumers more choices."

Schwarzenegger wasn't all praise though. Departing from prepared remarks, he indirectly criticized Crist's announcement last week in support of oil drilling off Florida's coast.

"America is so addicted to oil that it will take years to ween ourselves from it," Schwarzenegger said. "To look for new ways to feed our addiction is not the answer."

"Anyone who tells you this would bring down gas prices anytime soon is blowing smoke," he added.

Read the full story here: http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20080626/BREAKING/860449016/1661

Cross-Posted at Daily Kos.

One of the advantages of having attended law school is that when I read judicial opinions interpreting the Constitution I almost understand them.  Not entirely, mind you, but enough at least to seem like I do in casual conversation.  Of course, one of the disadvantages of a legal education is holding more debt than some small countries; I’m probably running about neck-and-neck with Lichtenstein.  I should hang a digital debt counter, like the one in Times Square, in my living room. 

That aside, even without a legal education, I have a reasonable amount of common sense and a pretty good nose for hypocrisy.  And the Supreme Court’s ruling today in District of Columbia v. Heller; holding that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to bear arms, is practically dripping with it.  

Justice Scalia, writing for a 5/4 majority, stated: "there seems to us no doubt" that this individual right does, in fact, exist.  I guess that’s true if "no doubt" means that for 200-plus years such a right has never been held to exist.  Its true if "no doubt" means a split among legal scholars as to whether the right conferred by the Second Amendment is an individual or collective right.  

Mind you, I don’t disagree with the Court’s decision, which is probably an unpopular decision on dkos.  However, stripped of the high-minded legal language, what’s left is the naked politicization of the Court.  The conservative majority found a right that had never been Held by the Court to exist, to strike down a local law that had been in place for over thirty years; a law that was passed in order to deal with a uniquely urban, modern problem.  A problem the Framers could have never contemplated.  It is no coincidence the majority’s conclusion closely tracked the political viewpoints of the Republican presidents that appointed them.

It has been a longstanding Republican Party maxim that the role of the judiciary is to interpret the Constitution in the manner the Framers intended.  Of course, the devil is always in the details, and discerning the original intent of the Framers as it existed in their late-eighteenth century agrarian world, and then applying that intent in interpreting modern laws is usually tricky at best.  Therefore, most people hold a general belief in the doctrine of judicial restraint.  Judicial restraint provides that judges should limit the exercise of their own power; and not strike down laws made by the elected legislature, unless those laws are obviously unconstitutional.  The idea is that the legislature is best situated to solve uniquely local problems and should properly be given deference in dealing with those problems whenever possible.

The Republican Party has made quite a bit of hay railing against "judicial activism".  The phrase "activist judges" has been a stump speech staple in political campaigns by republican candidates throughout my lifetime; a consistent applause line to rev up the base.  In turn, republicans were supposed to appoint judges that reflected this core belief in judicial restraint.  

However, a funny thing happened on the way to strict-constructionist intellectual purity.  Turns out, judicial restraint doesn’t actually mean judicial restraint.  What was good for the goose is decidedly less so for the gander.  And the red-state blue-state politicization of the Supreme Court seems sadly complete.  

I don’t know whether or not the handgun ban struck down yesterday was an effective law.  I don’t live in the District of Columbia.  However, I do know that the folks there were attempting to solve a critical problem; high crime and handgun violence that we, in Idaho, luckily don’t confront as often.  But we have our own uniquely local problems.  And, for the people that will hail this decision as a victory for Second Amendment rights, remember that when nine unelected individuals strike down a local law where you live, passed by its citizens to confront its own local problems.  

Probably won’t seem like much of a milestone then. 

...but I intend to post here a lot, and I'm determined to get it right.


Is this thing on?

Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

By Erin Ferns

Despite growing political interest among Americans, this November millions of people who "live, work and raise families in our communities" will be denied the right to elect our next president  as a result of a past felony conviction. Felon disenfranchisement has raised concerns among advocates and legislators that such laws further perpetuate disparities not only in the electorate, but also in society.

"Voting is a fundamental right, not a privilege for the virtuous," the Boston Globe editorialized Tuesday. Currently, 25 states deny the voting rights of parolees while 10 states permanently restrict voting rights of some or all felons.

The Globe cited a report by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law. The non-partisan public policy and law institute is "also touting federal legislation that would guarantee 4 million released prisoners the right to vote at least in federal elections," according to the Globe.

"Felony disenfranchisement serves no legitimate purpose," the Brennan Center notes in Restoring the Right to Vote. "More disconcerting," adds the report, is that "these laws are rooted in the Jim Crow era and were designed to lock freed slaves out of the voting process. It is time to remove this last barrier to the franchise."

The Globe addressed the issue of former felons - particularly minorities - being disconnected from political and economic life, which in effect "dampens the voting power" for their communities. According to the Brennan Center, 13% of Black men have lost the right to vote at a rate "that is seven times the national average."

"These statistics mirror stark racial disparities in the criminal justice system," the Brennan Center reported. "Nearly half of U.S. prison inmates are African-American, even though African Americans make up just 13 percent of the national population."

Furthermore, "the long-term disenfranchisement of ex-cons creates opportunities for mischief," the Globe editorialized. "In 2000, Florida denied the vote to innocent people with names similar to those in a national database of felons."

Today, "legislators and voters are realizing that most prisoners eventually get out, and need to find a place in society. Restoring their right to vote can only help," the Globe wrote.

A 2006 survey found 60 percent of Americans "think the right to vote is an important factor in a person's successful reintegration into society after incarceration," according to the Brennan Center.  Picking up on this trend, 12 states introduced bills to extend voting rights to felons this year, including the recently adjourned state of Louisiana, which sent a bill to the governor requiring the Department of Public Safety and Corrections to provide former felons with information on how to register and reinstate voting rights. To monitor this bill as well as those in several other states, visit www.ElectionLegislation.org.

Although the state of Virginia did not introduce such bills during the 2008 legislative session, Governor Tim Kaine recently expressed interest in extending voting rights to non-violent former felons, according to Washington D.C. talk radio station WTOP. Currently, the state permanently disenfranchises convicted felons.

"When somebody wants to participate, I think we ought to have procedures that enable them to once they've shown that can do fine in civil society," said Kaine.

Quick Links:

Wood, Erika. "Restoring the Right to Vote." Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. February 2008.

"Restoring Voting Rights to Former Felons." Project Vote. January 2007.

"Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States." The Sentencing Project. March 2008.

ElectionLegislation.org

In Other News:

Lawmaker wants to lower voting age - Associated Press
SACRAMENTO - Assemblyman Gene Mullin wants to lower the voting age in hopes of boosting participation at the polls among young adults.

New Secretary of State unit dedicated to stop voter fraud - The Clanton Advertiser [Ala.]
MONTGOMERY - Secretary of State Beth Chapman has announced a new Voter Fraud Unit within the Secretary of State's office dedicated to dealing with reports of voter fraud.

Carcieri proposes photo ID requirement for voters - Associated Press
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) - Gov. Don Carcieri is calling for election reform in Rhode Island.

Erin Ferns is a Research and Policy Analyst with Project Vote’s Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD).

Bush/ Cheney won the 2000 election on a promise of a new direction.  Well, they were awarded the win, but they ran on a platform of ‘Compassionate Conservatism,’ offering a different kind of politics and smaller government.  No one really believed them, but who woulda thunk it?

2004 brought the sequel of Bush/ Cheney.  Funny thing, given the destruction they caused, the duo was able to win re-election on a ‘Same Sh!t, Different Day’ Platform.

2004 also brought us the motion picture “Mean Girls,” a story about a girl who moves to Washington a new town, unknowing of the culture and habits of its creatures, and finds herself in the middle of an unnecessary partisan battle where ruthless means are justified by corporate success and a thirst for never ending power (or getting the cute boyfriend).

Okay, the movie is about the life of a high school-aged girl who is overwhelmed by the ‘click’ phenomenon she encounters when adjusting to a new school, but the parallels are there!

Bush/ Cheney, advised by masterminded Karl Rove, have been able to control the senior class government by using a series of lies, smears, leaks, the propagandizing and sensationalism of information tailored to fit an argument and plain old high school bullying.  

The problem is, once the Mean Girls have been exposed for who they are – they lose their power.  Karl Rove may be the newest member of the punditry and journalist crowd, but he has been exposed as the ‘Meanest’ Girl, has left government and has lost his power.

I wonder what he has on Murdoch?

We are the American people, strong and proud.   White and black, brown and yellow, man and woman, adult and youngster.  Brother, sister, father, mother, uncle, aunt, grandparent, grandchild.   We are Irish and Scottish and German and French, we are gentile and Jew, African and Asian, Dane and Swede. We are the end product of history's greatest ethnic smelting process. 

We are Catholic and Protestant, believer and agnostic, Christian and Muslim and Buddhist and Wiccan and six thousand other religions and creeds and belief systems as well.  We have faith, or we have no faith; we are idealists and cynics, we are Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, Libertarians, independents, progressives, socialists, communists, objectivists, everything and nothing. 

We believe in a day's work for a day's pay, an  honest job for an honest man, in hard work and clean living.  And we believe in something for nothing, that it's better to be lucky than smart, and that you never give a sucker an even break. 

In God we trust, all others pay cash.

We are the rich white men who first declared independence from the imperial yoke, and we are the poor black men and women they owned.  We are the red men who were pushed off their land to make way for the railroads, and the yellow men who built the railroads at gunpoint and in chains, and the white men who slaughtered and enslaved in pursuit of, and then sold tickets for and rode on, those railroads. 

We are the soldiers who slaughtered in trumped up wars to increase American territory, and we are the brown people of Mexico and Hawaii who were murdered in those wars, and we are the poor men who bought the cheap beans and pineapples that resulted from those wars and the rich men who profited from those sales. 

We are the labor leaders whose skulls were broken on picket lines, and the Irish cops who swung the night sticks.   We are the flower people who burned their draft cards while chanting "Hell no, we won't go" and we are the riot shielded peace officers who lobbed tear gas in response.  We are protesting college students, and the National Guardsmen who gunned them down.   We are the Quakers who refused to be sent off to combat, and the MPs who locked them up in Leavenworth.   We are the men and women of color who refused to sit in the back of the bus any more, and the thousands of others who marched along side them, and we are the racist crackers who turned firehoses and loosed vicious dogs in response.   We are the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers, the Weathermen and the FBI.

However much we may hate the Illinois Nazis, we are the Illinois Nazis.

 We are not Iraqi, or Iranian, but someday we may be, and then, we may be ashamed at what we once did to ourselves, but for now, those people aren’t our people, and thus aren’t really people at all, so we really don't care all that much.

We are the American government, which is by the people, for the people, and of the people.  We are the voters and the voted on, the successful and the also-ran, the incumbent and the challenger, the winners and losers, the high and the low.

We are those who know the secrets, and those who are ignorant of their very existence.  We are those who vote to go to war, and those who actually go.  We are the people in charge of our children’s safety, who prey on those children in Internet chat rooms while sitting on the floor of Congress.  We are those who pay bribes, and those who take them, those who peddle influence and those who purchase it, those who break laws, and those who decline to prosecute.   We are the activist judiciary, the unitary executive, the mostly supine legislature.   We are those who impeach over acts of adultery, and refuse to impeach over crimes against humanity. 

We did not have sex with that woman, but we believe strongly in the rule of law.

We triangulate and count the cost, we hoard our political capital and choose our battles.  We stand on principle when it won’t cost us votes, we stall investigations and classify reports.  We rig the vote, we cage the polling lists, we demand ID to prevent vote fraud. 

We believe in old time religion and San Francisco values, we support the troops and we stay the course, we swear to uphold and defend the Constitution, and then we vote to get rid of habeus corpus.

All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of justice.

And the beatings will continue until morale improves.

We are mostly unaware of the ironies implicit in every action of our political system. 

We believe in change, and we should, because we are seeing change right now.  Change That We Can Believe In is all around us; it is the change from “I will filibuster any bill that contains retroactive immunity for the telecoms” to “National security trumps immunity and I will vote for this bill even if it contains immunity”.  And we can like it, or lump it, because in November, we can vote for the liar we like a little less than the liar we like a little more, or we can vote for the liar we like a little more than the liar we like a little less.

We, The People, the American people, the Great Unwashed, are being bent over the table and greased up for another major screwing, and what is the prescription for our ailment, the solution to our problem, the new direction forward?

We can bite the pillow and take it like grown ups.

Yes.  Yes, We Can.

Because, you know, doing anything else might actually cause us some serious discomfort. 

At least we're used to being screwed by politicians and their promises.

Hell, some of us seem to have learned to like it.

 

 

 

I can't use html in a post, right?<br/><br/>And if I try to put two returns in, that doesn't work either.
And I sincerely doubt I'm supposed to use \n.\n
So, how do I get two line breaks in a post?

Undoubtedly, some of these views will get me in trouble.  I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.  As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them.
-"The Audacity of Hope" by Barack Obama

There is no clearer insight into Senator Obama's political and personal views than his two books.  While "The Audacity of Hope" is most definitely a political book, it also has a level of honesty that speaks to the reader.  The question is, did people listen?  

Obama's not a left winger, centrist, liberal Democrat, conservative Democrat, progressive or any of the other generalizations that we try to use to group us together in defiance of "them."  He has always rejected such ideological rigidity in favor of a more pragmatic politics.  This is just reality.

For me, that's exactly what I want in a leader.  I don't want a president who tries to do everything and does nothing, nor one who appeals only to my views, for I know there are few others out there who would agree with all of them.  Instead, I want a leader who I think is smart enough to know what he can do and what he can't.  Often times this will mean he goes against my views, perhaps even some of my more fundamental precepts, in which case I will tell him.  

But that doesn't mean I'll stop doing what I can to help him get elected, and then to be a successful president, because it's not about me or him.  It's about getting our country moving forward again in a variety of areas.  If I see him treading water on FISA or even pushing us further into the depths of constitutional crisis, I will tell him, but I will still help him move us forward on a whole host of other issues that are equally important to our country.  

To listen to the commentary recently on Obama's position on FISA and even his position on capital punishment, you would think Benedict Arnold had just tried to surrender West Point.  I believe this level of fervor betrays a lack of perspective towards our problems and what he can do to fix them.  Here's a news flash: the Bush administration has screwed up our government in countless ways; even as president, Obama won't be able to fix them all, and he surely can't as a candidate and junior senator from Illinois.  

In addition though, he's also a politician who has to work within the political climate created by the Bush administration's politics of fear.  While many here may see through the lies and innuendo this administration has lived by, the majority of Americans have a less informed view, mostly owing to a media that does nothing to help broaden citizens' perspectives.  

Politics sucks; that's just a reality.  No one likes to see our leaders sacrifice principles in favor of political expediency, but that's what politics brings out in all but the few who either don't care about reelection or are so safe in their positions they don't need to worry about "pandering."  Running for president never gives you that opportunity.  For every great president or even legitimate presidential candidate you come up with, we can find numerous times they have acted this way.  

What has surprised me is not that Obama has acted against my views, but how rarely he has.  He stood up to the pressure to take a hard line on negotiating with "rogue" regimes.  He stood up against gas tax pandering.  He has continuously been called naive, inexperienced, an unknown quantity, different and on and on.  And yet, on the whole, he has trusted that if he explained his position to the American people, they will either agree with him or trust his judgment.  To be frank, on some issues, he has not felt that the nuances of his perspective could be adequately presented to the public at large, especially given the current mediums available to talk to the people, ie cable news, talking heads, self important newspaper columnists and editorial boards.  I think the FISA issue is an example of this.  

This is going to happen again.  Sometimes it will happen because he genuinely disagrees with you or me, and other times, like now, because he believe political expediency is necessary for short, medium and long term gain.  That's how politics works, always has, likely always will.  Obama isn't going to change how politics works in this country in one election, nor should he try.  He should try to win, because right now that's what matters most.  

In closing, I'll leave you with one other quote from his book that I think is relevant at this moment:

I am angry about policies that consistently favor the wealthy and powerful over average Americans, and insist that government has an important role in opening up opportunity to all.  I believe in evolution, scientific inquiry, and global warming; I believe in free speech, whether politically correct or politically incorrect, and I am suspicious of using government to impose anybody's religious beliefs -- including my own -- on non-believers...But that is not all that I am.  I also think my party can be smug, detached and dogmatic at times.  

Theda Skocpol is correct that McCain is driving the agenda. But the way to get it is to go after McCain on the one issue he leads- foreign policy.

The recipe is simple: Neocon, Neocon, Neocon

Obama needs to remind us that McCain was an architect of "regime change" at least as far back as 1999. And (thanks to lobbyists such as Charlie Black welomced charlatan Ahmed Chalabi to Washington and pressured the administration to give him money.

So Obama can kill two birds with one stone- McCain embraced a disastrous foreign policy because he was getting his advice from Washington lobbyists.

After Charlie Black's comments in Fortune that a terrorist attack would benefit McCain, STRIKE WHILE THE IRON IS HOT!!

Okay, it's one thing to say something asinine- IT is a completely different thing to be an ASS.

On the Situation Room, Tool in Command Mitt Romney was asked how he felt Obama was not a bipartisan politician with the Lugar-Obama proliferation act and the improving fuel efficiences with act with Sen. Smith from Oregon- he basically said well, those are all LIBERAL issues. Por favor, senor. Securing nuclear threats is a liberal issue- there goes the Veep.

Link http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/06/26/roberts-those-liberal-non-proliferationists/#comment-1301437

Now that Senator Obama has  come out in favor of the FISA "compromise", there seems to be a major effort underway to convince us that the bill isn't really that bad, after all -- or at least that it's not very important, and not worth pestering the poor candidate about.  To compare this effort to the American communist  embrace of Hitler after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact would be bombastic excess, and would risk the invocation of Godwin's law; so I won't do that.  Nor will I spend a lot of time arguing that the bill really is that bad.  It is, and I think we all know it is; but those arguments are already out there, and there's no reason to repeat them.  Instead, I'm going to assert that it doesn't really matter how bad this specific bill is:  what matters is that the "compromise" is part of an eight-year effort to implement a governing philosophy that assumes we, the American people, are frightened children, and that people like Dick Cheney should to be given all the power they need to protect us, and that what we have to do is shut up, get out of the way, and let them get on with it.  This philosophy -- call it the Cheney doctrine --is the central issue in this election, because it's the root of all the other issues we're debating.  The Cheney doctrine gave us the Iraq debacle.  It gave us unprecedented domestic spying, and the politicization of the Justice department, the corporate control of government, the rejection of science, and the mishandling of hurricane Katrina.  This -- this world we're living in, right here -- is an example of what happens when our government decides that we are subjects, rather than citizens.  And we -- the Democratic party, the only viable opposition we have -- cannot capitulate to the Cheney doctrine, and then expect to fix all the problems that come with it after we've won.
Since the beginning of this campaign, what's impressed me most about Senator Obama has been his determination to talk to the American people as if they were actual, functioning adults.  When the Reverend Wright's intemperate remarks began circulating, it was assumed that the Senator would call a presser, announce that he was shocked to find that his minister was a bad, bad man, and be done with it.  Instead, he took the opportunity to give a speech which did something almost unprecedented in modern presidential politics:  instead of patting us on the back for being such lovely, wonderful, generous people, he actually talked to us like grownups, and asked us to think about our assumptions.  Likewise, when gas prices started to hurt, he refused to join Senators Clinton and McCain in the ritual distribution of lollipops.  Throughout the primary season, he's assumed a certain level of intelligence in his listeners.  I liked that, and I'm sorry to see that he's now being advised that he can't win without pandering.  It's wrong, yes -- but I also think it's politically unwise.  It's giving in to the Cheney doctrine; and the voters already have a candidate who support the Cheney doctrine.  
All that said, I fully support Senator Obama, and will continue to give him money and time, as well as my vote in November.  He's still our only hope of undoing the damage of the last eight years.  Like Carthage,  the Republican Party delenda est.   I'd like to see us, however, do it without adopting the weapons of the enemy.

Here's John McCain's record on gun control, and it's anything but consistent: In 1993, John McCain voted against the Brady Bill and the Assault Weapons Ban. In 1999, John McCain voted against closing the gun show loophole -- only a year later to cut a commercial supporting the Colorado ballot initiative to close the gun show loophole. In 2004, John McCain voted against the Feinstein amendment extending the assault weapons ban another 10 years. That's the McCain record. Flip-flop.

Muckraker Kate Klonick profiled Esther Slater McDonald in this recent post, where among other things she reveals that Ms. McDonald was hired by none other than the infamous Monica Goodling. Which leads to the question, who hired Monica?

The answer is Mary Beth Buchanan, a Bush appointee and the United States Attorney for the western district of Pennsylvania. And if you read her Wikipedia entry you'll see that she could well be the unsung Queen of the Loyal Bushies.

Buchanan is a perfect example of what Paul Krugman was talking about in March of last year in connection with the then-emerging Prosecutors' Purge scandal.

Mr. Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee, under oath, that he “would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney for political reasons.” But it’s already clear that he did indeed dismiss all eight prosecutors for political reasons — some because they wouldn’t use their offices to provide electoral help to the G.O.P., and the others probably because they refused to soft-pedal investigations of corrupt Republicans.

In the last few days we’ve also learned that Republican members of Congress called prosecutors to pressure them on politically charged cases, even though doing so seems unethical and possibly illegal.

The bigger scandal, however, almost surely involves prosecutors still in office. The Gonzales Eight were fired because they wouldn’t go along with the Bush administration’s politicization of justice. But statistical evidence suggests that many other prosecutors decided to protect their jobs or further their careers by doing what the administration wanted them to do: harass Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republican malfeasance.

Ms. Buchanan has been the driving force behind the harrassment of a number of prominent Democrats in Pennsylvania, most notably against Coroner Dr. Cyril H. Wecht. There's more on that in this TPM Cafe post from testing. The rest of my overview of Mary Beth Buchanan can be found HERE.

It's a dramatic story.

In Gloucester, Mass., out of a class of 1,200, 17 girls are pregnant or had children this year. Time magazine reported that some of the girls even joined a "pregnancy pact."

What went wrong? What would drive teen girls to make a pact to get pregnant? Who's to blame?

The right-wing punditry has, not unexpectedly, rushed to judgment. Some say that the immaturity of these girls underscores their inability to decide what's right for their bodies. Others say Hollywood, Jamie Lynn Spears, and the glamorization of sex are at fault.

But is it possible that Gloucester High School's policy of denying students access to contraception played a role?

The truth is that nobody knows the answers and rushing to any judgment, from either side of the ideological divide, is premature at best.

But here's what we do know: The abstinence-only policy pushed so hard by the Bush administration and the right-wing for years doesn't work.

In 2006, the teen pregnancy rate increased by 3 percent, after steadily declining for the previous 14 years. This increase directly correlates with the increase in abstinence-only education. The teen pregnancy rate had started its decline in the early nineties, and during this time period, an increase in condom use was also reported. But since George W. Bush took office and revamped funding for abstinence-only education, the decline has slowed and recently reversed. What's more, a study earlier this year found that one in four teenage girls has contracted a sexually-transmitted infection (STI).

A growing number of state leaders have seen the light. The Hartford Courant reports: "A federal tally shows that participation in the [Bush abstinence] program is down 40 percent over two years, with 28 states still in. Arizona and Iowa have announced their intention to forgo their share of the federal grant at the start of the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1."

Bureaucratic inconsistencies are driving some states out of the program. But so are poor results, including those in Idaho, where pregnancies among kids aged 15 to 19 rose from 2,396 in 2004 to 2,543 in 2006.

Congress needs to catch up with these state leaders. Despite the program's failure, the House Appropriations Committee recently approved funding for the Bush administration's abstinence-only effort.

For the sake of our kids, it's time for more state leaders to take off their ideological blinders. If abstinence-only education doesn't help prevent teen pregnancies, shouldn't we try programs that do? It's time to move in a new direction. It's time to call on the remaining states to listen to the facts, and reject abstinence-only funding. Sign our petition to theses states' governors, asking them to do what's best for America's youth.

The Second Amendment reads as follows:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

If, as the court said today, the right to bear arms is an "individual" right, then why did the founders bother with that whole spiel about "A well regulated militia being necessary to the securtiy of a free state?"

Why wouldn't they have just written "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"?

If that had been in the constitution, the i would agree with the court's ruling. However, that's not what the amendment says.

Can someone explain this to me. This seems an awful lot like "judicial activism" to me.  I mean, the supreme court just erased 13 words from the constitution.

TPMM has this exchange, which deserves parsing:

Conyers: "Do you feel that the Unitary Theory of the Executive allows the President to do things over and above the stated law of the land?"

Addington: "The Constitution binds all of us, Congressman, the President, all the U.S. members of Congress, all of the federal judges. We all take an oath to support and defend it. I frankly don't know what you mean by the Unitary Theory of Government"

Let's put aside, for the moment, Addington's claim he doesn't know what the Unitary Theory of Government means.

I. Reviewing the Question

Here's the question:

Do you feel that the Unitary Theory of the Executive allows the President to do things over and above the stated law of the land?

II. Reconsider separately what Conyers was asking, and break down the question into separate elements. Conyers is raising multiple issues, and his comment has two simple issues: Whether the President is above the law; and what legal theory would explain why the President views himself above the law.

First, Conyers is asking

A. Whether the President is above the law (He is not);
B. Whether the President can do things outside the law (He cannot);
C. Whether the law does or does not control Presidential programs, powers, activities, and orders (It does, per Article I Section 8)

AI S8:

"To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof."

Recall, the Supreme Court said this President's use of power was not, as the Constitution requires, appropriate: "Inappropriate".

Conyers is not asking whether someone took an oath to the Constitution; or whether anyone is supposed to follow the law.

Second, Conyers is then asking whether the Unitary Theory of Government would explain why the President views himself as above the law. Conyers is not asking for a diversion from the President's conduct, nor an explanation why illegal conduct is justified, merely asking what legal theory might explain why this President views his actions as above the law.

III. Considering What A Reasonable Response Should Be

Let's develop a standard or benchmark to evaluate Addington's response. A reasonable response to this question,

Conyers: "Do you feel that the Unitary Theory of the Executive allows the President to do things over and above the stated law of the land?"

Would be:

"The President has willfully violated the Supreme law and Geneva Conventions with full legal consultation with government lawyers. The President views himself as being above the law for various reasons. One of those reasons is the legal theory that the President may direct his personnel to do things outside the law. However, this only partially explains why the President (incorrectly) views his actions as being outside legal review.

"The President incorrectly and illegally views his power as being something Article I Section 8 does not apply; and strictly views all legal requirements as something that do not apply on the President's assertion alone. This claim to unreviewable power is not consistent with the Framer's intent to have overlapping jurisdictions with separate, but equal government branches."

IV. Reconsidering Addington's Response

Let's consider the problems with Addington's response:

Addinton: "The Constitution binds all of us, Congressman, the President, all the U.S. members of Congress, all of the federal judges. We all take an oath to support and defend it. I frankly don't know what you mean by the Unitary Theory of Government"

Addington has not answered why this President's activity is linked with DOJ OLC memoranda saying the President's actions are unreviable, nor bound by FISA or Geneva.

Whether the Constitution binds us to something is unrelated to whether the President agrees his actions must fall under the Article I Section 8 rules or Geneva Convntions. This President agrees he took an oath; he does not (lawfully) agree that he is bound by Geneva or Article I Section 8-sourced rules. The President and his legal counsel do not, by their actions, respect the Constitution; they only say they took an oath. Their real loyalty is not to the Constitution, but to the President's agenda of unchecked Executive Power.

V. What Addington Missed

Let's compare (a) what Conyers is really asking, at II; with (b) the above benchmark, at III; and (c) with what Addington said:

Addington: "The Constitution binds all of us, Congressman, the President, all the U.S. members of Congress, all of the federal judges. We all take an oath to support and defend it. I frankly don't know what you mean by the Unitary Theory of Government"

Addington's response does not address any Constitutional questions, but misdirects the question by asserting a requirement. That standard or requirement has no relationship with:

A. The President's actions;

B. The President's views of the law;

C. The President's policies, programs, and orders which violate the law or intent of Article I Section 8; or

D. The legal theory the President is using to put himself above the law

Addington defected attention from the illegal activity, did not address the questions about compliance with the Constitution, and merely asserted -- as if it were proof -- that the President and others took an oath to the Constitution. Addington's assertion is irrelevant, and unrelated to Conyers question.

Addington's comment about the oath is meaningless. An assertion of a legal requirement is unrelated to the question, not connected with a reasonable answer, and does not address:

A. Whether the law has or has not been followed (the law was violated);

B. Whether there is or isn't evidence of illegal activity (There is);

C. What legal memoranda or lawyer-related work product the President used to "justify" ignoring FISA, Geneva (They exist) ;

D. The President's  clearly promulgated legal obligations under the laws of war and Nuremberg precedents (These were illegally explained away).

Addington is appealing to confusion, creating a smokescreen, and has not adequately discussed any information which might be expected of a reasonable response to Chairman Conyers' question. Whether the Senate or House agree or disagree with the above conclusions in no way explains the House refusal to investigate these war crimes. The House can only credibly justify they made "the right decision" after they investigate this President's war crimes.

Nobody has completed any study like this reviewing any data to justify thwarting an impeachment investigation.

Muckrakers need data to rake. Muckrakers can only do their job when the House starts a public impeachment investigation, and gives muckrakers facts and data to evaluate.

There is no data, nor has there been any study demonstrating "an investigation will cause a backlash." The genesis of this urban myth is worthy of a separate comment thread.

Immediate Requirement For House To Investigate This President's Geneva Convention Violations

The legal duty under the laws of war is for the House to conduct an investigation. Once there is an investigation, the House can discuss how to proceed. Nuremberg establishes that when prosecutions have not occurred, the leadership must use impeachment, otherwise that country is not civilized:

"Under any civilized judicial system he could have been impeached and removed from office or convicted of malfeasance"

MajGen Antonio M. Taguba said,

"There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current Administration has committed war crimes."

Teguba's assertion requires the voters to consider why any American should treat this government as civilized. It is not. It is arrogant, it defies reason, and it refuses to fully enforce its Geneva obligations to enforce the laws of war.

These myths are unrelated to the Member of Congress legal obligations:

The myth is that the Senate might not convict as a pretext to not start an investigation. The myth is the start of an investigation "will" cause a problem. The myth is that what did or didn't happen with the Clinton impeachment is a template for what will happen after a Bush-Cheney impeachment investigation.

Legal Duties Distinguished From Polls

Our opinion on impeachment is unrelated to the House duty to investigate war crimes. Even if voter opinion were relevant to the House legal duties (which it is not), we need information to provide an informed opinion on an impeachment. 

The polls on impeachment cannot credibly expect anyone to answer, "In the absence of information, do you think the best action is (a) inaction; (b) no investigation; or (c) something else."  We need an investigation. 

The evidence will provide the information the House needs to justify their decision, rather than their inaction. There is no reliable polling data showing the voters "will" retaliate against anyone for finding facts. That defies reason, and would ask that American voters are mobilized mob, not an informed citizenry.

It defies reason for anyone to continue to argue -- without having an investigation -- that there "will" be a backlash. The only way to know whether we should or should not start an investigation is to look at the oath of office, the legal obligations, and the duties of Members of Congress. 

Lesson of Ir