My health is weird lately (I blacked out out from coughing this afternoon and found myself on the floor with a spilled cup of tea next to me!) so when I get back I may not post with the frequency of recent times. :(
Snowing here in Portland...it is so beautiful!
The Republicans are all supposed to be authoritarian types who just love a leader to follow lockstep. We are anything but normally.
The progressives can't bolt the Party because of Warren or Geithner or FISA II or any other cause de jour. If we do, it will fatally weaken the Party's attempt to survive the Republicans attempt to destroy it.
]]>LisB is not now nor has ever been an abusive poster, so the STFU remark kind of caught me by surprise and I didn't tell her not to do it again, just that I didn't think it helped.
Still feel that way, unfortunately cause I hate to be out of harmony with people I like.
Including you, Bwakfat.
Lox
]]>Gays don't have to worry about housing discrimination or employment discrimination, or education discrimination, or a two-tier legal system, or voting disenfranchisement, or not being able to eat, drink, ride, or poop in the same facilities the majority group uses. Their experience of being an out-group is in most ways milder.
But even though the injustice is milder now it is still injustice.
Thus the comparison I guess.
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I think this Warren issue is about politics and power and friendships and triangulation as you so lucidly express it above.
But here at TPM its been about dissent and reaction to dissent.
I think its way over the line to attack posters personally like was done against LisB above, but LisB, it also doesn't help to tell people to STFU! I think the people reacting negatively to the Warren decision do so out of principle and to me thats always been the hallmark of the Democratic Party: high principles that we try to meet. The day when speaking from conscience is banned from our party, or worse, ridiculed, is a dark day.
We really need to be able to dialogue here without ridiculing the people we disagree with.
I highly respect Destor and Loki and Dij and DebbieDN and the other good and integrity-laden folks who have spoken up against this choice. Same way I respected Tankard's position on FISA II. That kind of dissent is an old and honored aspect of the Democratic Party that for me makes the Party worth honoring and following. Discrimination against gays is a civil rights issue and the day when the Democratic Party ignores any group's civil rights as not worthy of protection is never going to come.
]]>There is very good reason to think that it will be difficult, due to the administration's careful, lawyerly approach to covering its behind, to even bringing the so-called Principals Group people to justice.
Please, if you have the leisure read this link from the legal blog Balkinization. The comments are interesting in themselves. I know almost all the participants and can vouch they know the topic thoroughly.
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2008/12/armed-serivices-committee-states.html
]]>If you think the NYT is the only one that has condemned torture's illegality you are mistaken.
Please, if you have the leisure, read some of the articles in the Washington Monthly's famous No Torture No Exceptions issue of March 2008.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2008/0801.torture.html
You will find people such as
Bob Barr
Richard Lugar
Chuck Hagel
Ken Duberstein
Richard Armitage
Rand Beers
etc. etc.
weighing in against it. Hardly a liberal crowd.
This issue is a classic of its sort and well worth all of our reading.
]]>We beseech the breath of the divine one.
His life-giving breath
His breath of wisdom
His breath of waters flowing
His breath of seeds flourishing
His breath of riches given to all
His breath of fecundity of the causes of good
His breath of power to achieve the virtuous
His breath of all good fortune.
Asking for His breath
to fill the brave young Man
Adding our breaths to His
to see the Noble Son through the night
Now Morning Star, breath of the divine one,
Take the tribe forward.
http://www.dol.gov/ecab/decisions/2006/Oct/06-1523.htm
and here:
http://www.dol.gov/ecab/decisions/2006/Oct/06-1709.htm
Now, the DOL is a huge place--an enormous bureaucracy, but what they do is so vital to the work environment in which many of us find ourselves. I believe, after Justice, they are the key agency for both promoting and blocking a lot of the progressive agenda.
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