Slobber And Spittle (Archive)

Image credit: National Cancer Institute/Wikimedia

This little gem arrived this morning:

From: Democrats 2014
To: Abfxvrhxdue
Subject: this is CRAZY
Date: May 29, 2013 9:14 AM

BREAKING NEWS: Michele Bachmann Quits!

Friends --

Late last night, Michele Bachmann released a crazy web video announcing that she's leaving Congress next year.

THIS IS HUGE! Now that the Tea Party's ringleader has called it quits, Boehner has to be wondering who's next to go. If we can sweep up 17 Republican seats, we can take Boehner's Speaker's gavel and win a Democratic House for President Obama!

In 48 hours, our FEC fundraising deadline hits and we'll report how many supporters we have standing behind us. Will you help us reach 500,000 strong standing behind our campaign to kick out the Tea Party House?

Name: Not Confirmed Abfxvrhxdue
Supporter record: XXXXXXXXX
Suggested Support: $8.00

As you can see, they've modestly suggested I send them $8.00 to help celebrate Ms. Bachmann's departure from the House of Representatives. They haven't picked a better pseudonym for me than "Abfxvrhxdue", but they think I should send them $8.00. I think there's a better way to celebrate, which is to give them no money at all.

After all, what does it matter to me if the Democrats are the ones who cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid? What's more, why would I pay them to screw me and every other working class American? Supreme Court Justices? Are you kidding me? As Robert Reich noted today:

Now the President is nominating judges to fill all three of these crucial D.C. court of appeals vacancies at once. He’s also looking ahead at the strong probability that at least one Supreme Court justice, most likely Ruth Bader Ginsburg, will retire within the next two years, and he’ll need to get a replacement through the Senate.

Senate Republicans under the cynical direction of Mitch McConnell have abused the filibuster system, preventing votes on almost everything the President has wanted.

A Time for Harry Reid’s Backbone

Once again, as that title implies, Dr. Reich has given us the wrong diagnosis. Harry Reid's title isn't Majority Leader For Life. It's just Majority Leader. That's a post he could be voted out of. Yet even after failing to deal with the filibuster issue for three Senate terms, he still has his job.

It's pretty clear that he's doing his job well enough to satisfy Senate Democrats.

Ironically, if there's one thing that Michelle Bachmann was good at, it was at least attempting to do what her supporters wanted. Granted, what they want her to do is insane, but they insist on it, and Bachmann's work is, at least in part, a product of that insistence. I respect her more than I do the average congressional Democrat these days, despite her bigotry and bone-headed rhetoric (see NOTE 1). At least she had enough integrity to not take a dump on her supporters every chance she could.

This is yet another reason I'm going to make support for any political party contingent on its actually exercising the power we've given them on our behalf. The Democrats haven't done that. In fact, they seem to have gone out of their way to be useless. When we reward failure, all we will get is more failure.

Maybe when we progressives find our backbones, Harry Reid will remember he has one, too.

NOTE 1 In keeping with modern website design methods, users of Javascript filters like NoScript won't be able to see the photos on this page until they allow the buzzfeed.com and buzzfed.com domains to execute Javascript.

If I find a better collection of Bachmannisms that doesn't require this nonsense, I'll change the link. Lousy website design shouldn't be rewarded, either.

These days, it seems to take sixty U.S. Senators to agree on legislation before it can be passed. Over at a site called Newsbound, someone has put together an explanation of why that is true. I learned a couple of things, like that cloture wasn't even added to the Senate rules until roughly 95 years ago. I've embedded it here, since there was a link at the site that tells you how to do it:

It's worth looking at, even if you think you're familiar with the issue.

For those using Javascript filtering software like NoScript, I'll just add that at a minimum you will need to enable these domains:

• newsbound.org
• typekit.net

It's also possible that you will have to approve using an encryption certificate that Firefox doesn't like. That happened to me in preview mode, but not when I just looked at the published version of this article.

In addition, I had to reduce the size of the slide show so that it would fit in this blog format. If you're having trouble seeing it here, go to the link for the slide show and watch it there. I didn't have the certificate problem there.

Here's an example of why I was interested that Chris Hayes now has his own prime time show on MSNBC:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In it, Hayes interviews Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein and three people you've probably never heard of about how the sequestration is affecting Americans who don't live in DC. In addition to the extraordinary step of interviewing people who have some local knowledge of how it's affecting them, he also got some intelligent commentary out of Ezra Klein.

What struck me most about this conversation is mostly contained in the second segment, where Hayes mentions that one of the things Congress is complaining about is that the White House has cut back on tours. Of all the things we don't need. Then, one of his guests, Heather McGhee, stated what is probably obvious to most of us who don't live or work in the vicinity of DC:

"The issue behind this is the donor class in Washington, and that little goody [the White House tours] is what goes to donors."

And later:

Hayes: "Is there a point where the effects of austerity go from being invisible to being visible, where the folks in DC wake up?"

McGhee: "It becoming visible to people out in communities is one thing. It becoming visible, beyond White House tours, to the people who are decision makers is a completely different thing. What more visibility do you need than 20 million people who are un- or underemployed?"

[Those are my attempts at transcription, by the way, not MSNBC's.]

It really is, as she concluded, a democracy question, as in how much longer can our country go on when the needs of its citizens are so clearly beyond the attention span of the people who run it? At Corrente, Lambert Strether refers to DC as Versailles, the isolated and largely dysfunctional seat of the French government at the time of the revolution. That isolation has been a subject of discussion here a time or two, as well.

And no, I don't know the answer to my question. I hope that when change happens it won't be of the sort that obviated Versailles, but at this point I'm not optimistic. Too many people need to learn too many things for that to happen.

Over at Corrente, letsgetitdone (A.K.A. Joe Firestone) had this to say today about the Senate Democrats' refusal to amend filibuster rules after they've been abused for three terms running by the Republicans:

[I]t's clear that part of the reason for the dysfunction we see is the existence of the filibuster and various procedures related to it, that now prevent the Senate from passing legislation unless 60 Senators will support a cloture vote. In itself, the maintenance of this rule has nothing to do with partisan commitments and much more to do with the individual wish of every Senator to be able to block legislation they are opposed to.

The power to say no, is a very important one for each Senator, allowing them to get special concessions when their vote is needed to get legislation through. Senators fear being in the minority and not having the power to say no. When they are in the majority they worry that some day, perhaps soon, they will be in the minority, and will need that ability to say no to extract concessions. They also worry that removal of the filibuster, would give campaign contributors much less reason to donate to the campaigns of individual Senators and even more reason then they have now to focus donations on Congressional leaders.

Is It Really About “Dysfunctional” Partisanship?

This is entirely correct, and from what I've seen, it is news to most progressives. Whenever I'm unfortunate enough to be involved in a conversation about politics with progressives these days, one of the things I almost inevitably have to tell them is that there is one thing that all politicians, whether good ones or bad, no matter what the system they work in, need in order to be effective at their jobs. That something is this:

Power.

They need to have the ability to get people to do the things they need those people to do in order to accomplish what they want. Whether that power is for the betterment of society, or just the betterment of themselves, they need that ability or they won't succeed. That power can be in the form of persuasion, intimidation, money, or favors traded, or a combination, but they have to be able to exercise it better than their rivals.

To me, this is the fundamental rule of politics. Yet it seems to be a mystery to most progressives. When they label voting for alternative parties or otherwise withholding support from errant Democrats "making a point", they clearly don't understand that it's the only point that matters, at least if you as a progressive voter have any hope of getting what you want. Unless Democratic politicians understand that they will lose their power if they fail to do what we want, then they will continue to fail to do what we want. The power they will work to maintain is the power that will go elsewhere if it's not satisfied.

If there's another way of making that point, then tell me. However, if that solution involves the word "primary", then your next words need to be an explanation of where the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to mount credible primary challenges in enough places to matter are going to come from. What we've seen in the past is that the current crop of Democratic politicians will happily use the money of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and its Senate counterpart, the DSCC, to finance incumbents facing progressive challengers. We learned that in Bill Halter's campaign, and in Ned Lamont's. "We'll out-organize them" isn't an answer, either. You need money for polls, television, and other advertising. Being better organized and attracting volunteers just makes the money required somewhat smaller. Don't tell me just the act of challenging an incumbent in a primary will change his behavior, either. It won't.

Nor is "reforming the party from within" an answer. You don't reform an organization you work for. You do what the bosses tell you. The bosses need to be given motivation to do the right thing. That will not come from their underlings. It will come from outside. Only when the bosses believe that their success, or the success of their organizations, depends on changing course will they do so.

Conservatives understand this. That's why their politicians will do just about anything they demand, even if they risk their chance of being elected. Republican politicians know which side will withdraw its support should they fail to do what's expected, and it's not progressives.

Until progressives grasp the basic concept that their undying support of the Democratic Party will only bring them more of the same, more of the same is all we'll get. There's really no point in discussing how to change things until that concept sinks in.

Image credit: One Billion Rising

It's that day again, when many of us are hoping to spend some time with a special someone:

Image credit: Cujo359

For many of us, though, romance is the last thing on our minds. Today is also the day when a group called V Day is holding an event called One Billion Rising to protest violence against women around the world:

ONE BILLION RISING IS:

A global strike

An invitation to dance

A call to men and women to refuse to participate in the status quo until rape and rape culture ends

An act of solidarity, demonstrating to women the commonality of their struggles and their power in numbers

A refusal to accept violence against women and girls as a given

A new time and a new way of being

About One Billion Rising

That's their logo at the top of this article. Their name comes from the claim, substantiated nowhere that I can see, that one billion women in the world today will be raped in their lifetimes. I don't know where they get that number, but there is plenty of violence against women, both here and around the world. It doesn't have to be that way.

There's even a search page to find an event near you.

While we're on that subject, the Violence Against Women Act was allowed to expire last session of Congress. The Senate has voted to reauthorize with bipartisan support. The House, which is controlled by the Republican Party and Speaker John Boehner, has so far been reluctant to do the same:

Republican leaders are again facing pressure from within their ranks to act. A letter sent Monday night and signed by 17 House GOP lawmakers nudges Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) in the Senate’s direction, twice calling for a bipartisan bill. The House GOP’s version last year passed on a party-line vote.

“Now is the time to seek bipartisan compromise on the reauthorization of these programs. … We believe a bipartisan plan to reauthorize VAWA is more important than ever,” wrote Republican Reps. Rodney Davis (IL), Charlie Dent (PA), Rodney Frelinghuysen (NJ), Mike Fitzpatrick (PA), Jim Gerlach (PA), Chris Gibson (NY), Michael Grimm (NY), Richard Hanna (NY), David Joyce (OH), Leonard Lance (NJ), Frank LoBiondo (NJ), Patrick Meehan (PA), Shelly Moore-Capito (WV), Tom Reed (NY), Dave Reichert (WA), Jon Runyan (NJ) and Lee Terry (NE).

...

Although House Republicans dislike provisions covering LGBT and illegal-immigrant victims, their primary area of discomfort with the Senate bill is the tribal lands provision. Senior House GOP aides declined to comment, but top Republicans, led by Cantor, are leaning toward a middle path that provides legal recourse for those charged with domestic abuse in Native American courts by allowing them to appeal to U.S. courts.

Senate Passes Expanded Violence Against Women Act

If your U.S. Representative is a Republican, telling him that his party's stance on this issue isn't OK with you might be a good way to celebrate Valentine's Day.

Caption: Think this was going to happen? Think again. This is 21st Century America.

Image credit: public domain/Wikimedia

Remember how, last December, the Democrats in the Senate were going to "cowboy up" and maybe change it so that the minority would have to actually show up for a filibuster?

Well, brace yourselves - it turned out that was just too radical an idea:

The final agreement reached by leaders Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell and passed overwhelmingly by the Senate Thursday evening did not weaken the filibuster. It essentially served to move uncontroversial Senate business more quickly. Democratic senators roundly backed it — even the ones who were eager to end silent filibusters. Republicans didn’t object either.

How did it all fall apart?

According to conversations with pro-reform Democratic aides, party leadership sources and outside opponents of the filibuster, Reid’s main goal was ultimately not to weaken the 60-vote threshold that reformers desperately wanted to change. Instead his objective was to eliminate mandatory gaps between votes in order to move legislation and nominees that have cleared a filibuster more quickly — which he achieved.

Filibuster Reform Ends With A Whimper: How It Fell Apart

Wow, I bet none of you saw that coming, huh?

I felt so negative at the time for writing this:

To break a filibuster, the majority party needs to have at least 60 Senators ready to vote for it at the next opportunity. The minority party only needs to have the one speaking, and a couple of relief Senators at any time. As things stand now, that still gives the Republicans an advantage.

And that, I think, is the point. They still don't want to honk off their benefactors by doing what their supporters want.

As long as that's true, real change is worth about as much as a filibustering Senator's words.

Senate Democrats Might Do Something About The Filibuster, Kinda...

It turns out that I was too optimistic. Things may go a little more smoothly in the Senate, assuming there's no contention over at least a few things, but most of the legislation and appointments will move as slowly as they ever did. What the end result will be, of course, is that the Republicans, and conservatives generally, will get even more of what they want, and progressives won't. Why? Because they'll get what everyone agrees on, which was at least endangered now, and they're still going to obstruct everything else, because they can and their base expects them to actually accomplish something.

Folks have taken to blaming Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader for this, but it sure looks like he still has his job. If Democrats were upset over his failure, they could have removed him. They didn't. As far as I'm concerned, that makes this the Democrats' problem, not just Harry Reid's. At some point, you really have to blame the electorate for the people they vote for.

Maybe progressives will figure that out some day... Nah!

The next time some idiot of a "progressive" asks me why I'm so negative..., well, I already had lots of reasons. Now, I just have one more.

So, perhaps someone is wondering what I think of our government's solution to its "fiscal cliff" problem?

Well, let's see. Yes, we got screwed. We all got screwed a lot. And there are plenty of folks ready to make excuses for it or try to shame the critics.

For me, it comes down to the same thing I keep telling progressives - if you like this, keep voting for it.

No, none of them will pay attention this time, either. Some things really don't change. Perhaps some day I'll learn to take comfort from that thought.

Image credit: public domain/Wikimedia

Frustrated by years of "obstructionism", in which the Republicans have used the power of filibuster to block measures that the Democratic Senate caucus probably didn't want to pass anyway, the Democrats have finally focused their righteous anger and are, maybe, willing to so something thoroughly underwhelming about it. Yesterday, Talking Points Memo's Sahil Kapur writes:

Currently the minority party can mount “silent” filibusters, so long as the majority can’t muster 60 supportive votes. That means they can block a bill from moving to debate or to a final vote without necessarily occupying the floor and speaking, just like the iconic scene in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. If even a single member of the minority objects quietly to a simple-majority vote on a piece of legislation or a nominee, the majority must muster 60 votes to end debate.

The Democrats want to alter these incentives by implementing a “talking” filibuster that shifts some of the burden to the filibustering minority. The reforms under consideration would take away obstructing senators’ shortcuts in scuttling a bill, forcing them to occupy the floor and speak ceaselessly until one party or the other loses its will and gives up.

How Democrats’ Main Filibuster Reform Would Work

Don't get me wrong - this is not nothing. It does at least make the minority party earn its filibuster, making it somewhat more costly for them to block legislation, including making some poor schlub stand up and waste the Senate's time in a visible and very public manner. Sad to say, it does nothing to make it more costly for the majority party to counter.

To break a filibuster, the majority party needs to have at least 60 Senators ready to vote for it at the next opportunity. The minority party only needs to have the one speaking, and a couple of relief Senators at any time. As things stand now, that still gives the Republicans an advantage.

And that, I think, is the point. They still don't want to honk off their benefactors by doing what their supporters want.

As long as that's true, real change is worth about as much as a filibustering Senator's words.

Caption: Artist's conception of me after seeing yet another debate between our "leaders" on foreign policy. Wake me up when they start to make sense.

Image credit: derbon/Flickr

Via Taylor Marsh, comes this little gem of a report describing how an enlightened democracy discusses foreign policy:

Senate Republicans signaled stiffening resistance Tuesday to the Obama administration's possible nomination of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of State.

GOP strategists said lawmakers would use such a nomination as an opening for an extended examination of how the administration handled the Sept. 11 militant attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador. Although the Senate rarely rejects a president's Cabinet picks, the strategists said, the process could be so painful and lengthy that Obama might come to regret his choice.

...

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), the No. 2 Senate Republican, told reporters he considered Rice "tainted" by her role in the administration's handling of Benghazi, and recommended that the White House instead choose Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whom administration officials have also been considering for the diplomatic post.

GOP Senators Cool To Idea Of Susan Rice As Secretary of State

Don't get me wrong. Susan Rice was colossally wrong about what happened at Benghazi. Why she said all that, I don't know. Supposedly, that's what the CIA told her. But, that's the CIA that has been run until early this week by David Patraeus, whose long career of telling his bosses what they wanted to hear has led to two costly and useless "surges" in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But that's the real point here. If being colossally wrong about foreign policy issues was a barrier to having authority over them, not only would Rice not have her job, but neither would most of the rest of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy team, nor Senator Kyl, nor John McCain or many of the members of his committee.

The debates conducted on foreign policy in DC these days usually would be justifiably subtitled “Which stupid nonsense do you want to believe?” Iran is a threat? Give me a break. Israel has the right to exist, and this means it can wall off and shell anyone it sees as a threat? Pretty obviously absurd, when you put it that way. But this is what we debate nowadays, as in “what should we do about the terrible danger posed by Iran?”, or “how awful are the Palestinians, and do they deserve to live?”

Meanwhile, in order, Europe, China, and India are likely to become bigger economies than ours in the foreseeable future. We don’t talk about the implications of these things, and what they mean to our security. We don’t talk much about climate change, and the obvious effect that is going to have.

Alright, I’m making myself depressed again. I’ll stop now.

Caption: Senator George McGovern during his run for President, June 30, 1972.

Image credit: Warren K. Leffler/Wikimedia Commons

George McGovern, whose presidential run in 1972 may have been the beginning of the end of liberalism in America, died yesterday:

He was an outspoken critic of one war, but a hero in another. He was a leading Democrat who came from Republican roots. He was a politician who cared more about being on the right side of an issue than on the popular side. George Stanley McGovern -- a staunch liberal who served South Dakota in the U.S. Senate and House for more than two decades and who ran unsuccessfully as the Democratic Party nominee for president in 1972 -- died Sunday at the age of 90, his family said.

George McGovern, an unabashed liberal voice, is dead

One of the things that is interesting is that many of the articles that I've read today about him use the word "dead", or the verb "died", to describe his passing. Too many times, people use words like "passed away" when describing someone's death, but not for George McGovern. I think that's appropriate, because if there was one thing George McGovern knew how to do, it was speak the truth plainly.

Maybe the greatest example of that was his speech in the Senate in 1970, during the Vietnam War, as described by Wikipedia:

During the floor debate McGovern criticized his colleagues opposing the [McGovern-Hatfield Amendment]:

Every Senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land—young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes. There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor or courage. It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes. And if we do not end this damnable war those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us.

The Senate reacted in startled, stunned silence, and some faces showed anger and fury;[100] when one member told McGovern he had been personally offended by the speech, McGovern said, "That's what I meant to do."

Wikipedia: George McGovern

Some famous people's lives have taught me things. Frederick Douglass taught me about oppression and dealing with the powerful. George McGovern, by telling us uncomfortable truths and being pilloried for it, taught me something else that's equally important. He taught me that many people, when confronted with an uncomfortable truth that is clearly supported by the facts, or a comforting lie that isn't supported at all, will usually choose to believe the latter. As Taylor Marsh put it today:

The other part of this truth is McGovern also represented the ... inability of good men in the Democratic Party to market the principles and policies on which they stood.

It doesn’t matter if you’re right. You have to be able to sell it.

George McGovern Told the Truth About Nixon and Still Lost

Why should you have to sell the truth? It was certainly clear by 1970 that Vietnam was a disaster, and a disaster that was not only costing us lives and money, but was endangering our security as well. The Army was being asked to do the impossible, and like all armies in such situations, was having discipline problems. We had real enemies, both in Eastern Europe and Asia, who were more than happy to watch us expend our blood there.

Yet McGovern failed to "sell" us on this basic truth. Unfortunately, another thing he taught me was that it's a whole lot less important to understand the truth than it is to sell one's opinion. McGovern was a bona fide war hero, yet people like Nixon, who managed to avoid combat during the same war McGovern fought in, and Nixon's minions, many of whom also managed to avoided combat, got away with calling him and other congressmen who opposed the war "apostles of retreat and defeat". But leaving Vietnam would have meant admitting McGovern and other critics were right, and far too many Americans would have none of that.

McGovern could have used his war record as a bludgeon against Nixon and the other cowards and lunatics of the time, but he chose not to. As he put it:

I think it was a political error, but I always felt kind of foolish talking about my war record—what a hero I was. How do you do that? ... [I]t was not in my nature to turn the campaign into a constant exercise in self-congratulatory autobiography.

Come Home America (see NOTE 1)

He taught me that there are no points in American politics for being modest.

The sad irony of George McGovern's political fortunes is that he was actually the kind of politician we Americans say we want to vote for - an honest politician who will tell the truth, however unpleasant, and try to make his country a better place. Instead, America chose to vote for a liar who clearly wasn't interested in ending a war he had already been elected to end. It's a habit we still haven't gotten over decades later.

NOTE 1: While the Wikipedia mentions an article at the American Conservative by Bill Kauffman, that link no longer works. I remember McGovern saying this, though, so I'll forgo searching for the new location of the article.

Over at Naked Capitalism, Lambert Strether has written a strong rebuttal to one of the central excuses for the Obama Administration's and the Democrats' failure to do what we sent them to do back in 2009:

The bottom line is that “Republican obstructionism” is entirely of the Democrat’s making. What Reid (and Obama) want — or say they want — to do in 2013, and butchered doing in 2010, could and should have done in 2009, immediately after Obama’s inauguration. Republicans would have had no ability to obstruct had Obama and the Democrats not deliberately given them the power to do so. The gridlock is a gridlock of choice.

The Obama Enabler’s Big Lie: “We Never Had the Votes”

As Lambert notes, anyone who remembers the "nuclear option" back in 2005, when then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist threatened to use Senate procedures to eliminate the filibuster if the Bush Administration's Supreme Court nominees were blocked by filibuster, knows that there are ways around filibusters for politicians willing to employ them. Yet this remains a big lie of Democratic politics - that it was those nasty Republicans who spoiled it all. The truth is that things were much better for Harry Reid and President Obama if the insurance companies and other masters of the universe got what they wanted, and we didn't.

This is why no progressive with the least bit of sense thinks that merely electing more Democrats to Congress is going to fix what ails America. They clearly aren't motivated to do what they know they can, and most progressives seem perfectly willing to let them get away with it.

As an update to this article about Darcy Burner last week, I received an e-mail response yesterdayTuesday, which I'm going to print in its entirety minus valid e-mail addresses:

From: Alex Hendrickson <xxxx.xxxx@darcyburner.com.invalid>
To: Cujo359 <nom-de-ordinateur@a-big-isp.net.invalid>
Subject: Re: Send a nerd to Congress
Date: Dec 27, 2011 11:18 AM
Hi Cujo359,

Thank you for sharing your blog,

Darcy has some very strong feelings about the NDAA 2012 bill, as follows is her statement:

"I remain strongly opposed to this bill.

Many members of the media and of Congress have tried to assure us that the ‘improved’ language in the NDAA 2012 renders Americans ‘safe’ from the draconian provisions which lie within it. But regardless of how this President says he would interpret the language, I am opposed to any erosion of our Constitutional rights-especially when we are asked to rely on the goodwill of whomever the President might be in the future.

Due process was given extensive protection in the Bill of Rights for good reason. I wholeheartedly believe our modern world requires greater due process protection, not lesser.

We can not continue the illegal and immoral Bush era policies of rendition and torture of any person, regardless of their nation of birth. Simply sweeping suspected terrorists off to indefinite detention, without due process, representation or basic human rights is unacceptable, and un-American."

Please let me know, if I can provide you with any further information!


Alex Hendrickson

Darcy Burner for Congress

I tried to do an Internet search for any mention of this online, and have not found anything. Ms. Burner's issues page still does not mention this issue specifically. I'm sure that the Burner campaign assumed I might publish this e-mail, since it is from a public official discussing a publicly accessible Internet site (mine).

Interesting, only one congressman from the Washington delegation voted against the NDAA. That congressman was Jim McDermott:

“I have heard from nearly a thousand of my constituents in opposition to the appalling language in the Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act, which contains sweeping provisions that allow the President to indefinitely lock up American citizens without charge or trial. History shows that acting on fear has dangerous and irreparable consequences on our nation – the illegal internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II is a prime example. I also reject the language in the bill that would severely restrict the transfer of detainees in Guantánamo Bay for any purpose, including trial in federal court. The Senate bill is un-American, unconstitutional and unnecessary. I urge my colleagues on the Senate and House Armed Services committees to strike out these abhorrent provisions in the final defense budget bill.”

McDermott Statement On Defense Bill’s Indefinite Detention Provision

The Stranger has has an article containing his speech on the floor of the House that day.

What I find appalling is that no other of the state's Democrats joined in rejecting that bill. This is why I don't take statements like Darcy Burner's at face value anymore, at least when it comes to figuring out whom to support.

UPDATE: I actually put this on a timed release two days ago, so the e-mail in question arrived the day before that, Tuesday.

In a followup e-mail, Burner campaign representative Alex Hendrickson mentioned that he expected there would be some updates to the issues page of the website, and that Darcy Burner has mentioned this issue in some of her campaign speeches recently.

I'll keep an eye out to see what's going on both with the Burner campaign and other local congressional campaigns.

Caption: The Constitution. Safely hidden from prying eyes in the Library of Congress.

Image credit: National Archives

The progressive "blogosphere" is all a-twitter (and a-blogspotter, one supposes) about the latest Republican congressional travesty:

Republicans in the U.S. Senate today blocked the nomination of Richard Cordray as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The vote, on a motion to end debate, was 53-45, with 60 votes required to move the nomination ahead.

U.S. Senate Republicans Block Cordray for Consumer Bureau

Certainly, the Republicans deserve blame for this. No one made them vote to filibuster this nomination. The sad fact is, though, that the Democrats had an opportunity to change this at the start of the Senate session last January, and they demurred:

Senate Democrats had an opportunity to get together and make the Senate a working, majority-rule-based chamber. They could have recently used the “Constitutional Option” at the start of this new Congress to rewrite the Senate rules to either eliminate the filibuster outright or at least make staging a filibuster more difficult. Yet, due to a combination of a greedy refusal to give up any individual power, and a pitiful cowardice about a potential future in which the voters reject them, Senate Democrats collectively chose to throw away this opportunity. By doing nothing, they effectively voted to give Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell total veto power over everything.

After Failing to Change Senate Rules, Democrats Lose Right to Blame Mitch McConnell

[link from original article]

The "Constitutional Option" he's referring to is that the Constitution says in Article I, Section 5 that Congress can decide what rules it will work by. Generally, each new congress agrees to use the same rules as the previous one did, but there's no reason that can't change.

Why did they refuse to do this? Two possible reasons come to mind:

First, they are politicians, and politicians never give up power willingly. You might find that a cynical statement, but it is not. Politicians need power to do their jobs effectively. Whether they define "doing their jobs" as building a better society or plundering it, they need power to do it. In my opinion, this is the most fundamental rule of politics. To not understand it is to discuss politics at the level of a babbling idiot. In fact, babbling idiots would probably find such a discussion boring, too.

Second, and this is me being cynical, it seems like a great excuse for Democrats to not do the things that their supporters want them to do, but their benefactors do not. The financial, defense, and energy industries, to name three of the more blatant ones, have their own agendas and very deep pockets. Those agendas are not progressives', generally speaking.

Progressives and others have begged the Senate to make this change in the past, and they have not. Unless the power to pass legislation and get other things done is more important than having the power to stop it, then I don't think that's going to change without, as I like to say, someone making a demand.

What's more, as anyone who wants to think back as far as the last presidential administration would recall, when the Democrats could have blocked radical conservative appointments to the Supreme Court and elsewhere, they declined. They also declined to block the bill that made Bush's illegal surveillance of Americans legal, among other things. They didn't use the power of filibuster to their supporters' advantage when they held it.

So, while blaming the Republicans for exploiting this predicament is no doubt emotionally satisfying to some, it is only part of the story. The other part is that the Democrats really have no one to blame but themselves.

Image credit: Congressional Budget Office (via Beat The Press)


In yet another example of how wonderfully government is working for us lately, Reuters explains how the congressional Supercommittee has solved all of our economic problems:

Lawmakers abandoned their high-profile effort to rein in the country's ballooning debt on Monday in a sign that Washington likely will not be able to resolve a dispute over taxes and spending until 2013.

Lawmakers abandon deficit-cutting effort

First, let me take a side trip here while I get all Dean Baker on Reuters' ass and point out how loaded the words "ballooning debt" are. Ballooning, are you serious? The debt is still less than our GDP, which is about the only valid way of measuring this kind of thing.That's a lot, but it would have been a hell of a lot less had we not been running deficits all through the Bush Administration, who gladly told us that we could both lower taxes for the rich and finance a couple of wars, and the Obama Administration who told us the same thing. The only difference is that the Obama Administration told us this in such a way that they made career "progressives" all warm and sticky inside, whereas the Bush Administration were just a bunch of feckless warmongers.

As that Dean Baker link points out, interest on that debt is a small fraction of GDP, easily affordable. I wish I could have gotten a mortgage for my house that only consumed three percent of my income.

But anyway...

I suppose that if I'd bothered to put down at the time what my expectations were when this committee was announced, it would be that they would debate endlessly how hard to screw the 99% of us who aren't financing their campaigns. Then, I probably would have predicted, they'd have settled on not screwing us quite as hard as they could have. In that latter part of the prediction, I appear to be in error. Even when the parameters of the solution were restricted as I suspected they would be, the collection of assembled legislative geniuses couldn't agree.

Image credit: Mark M./Occupy Together


I feel so silly now.

They could have agreed to repeal the Bush tax cuts, and then get our armies out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and could have completely eliminated the deficit. That, however, would have taken disappointing the people they work for. So we knew that wasn't going to happen. Left with no viable way of reducing the deficit without either committing political suicide or making themselves ineligible for lobbying gigs after their days in Congress were over, they decided to do nothing.

Go figure.

In the end, they behaved the same way as the larger, but still remarkably shallow gene pool they came from had. While it wasn't what I would have predicted, it's an outcome that shouldn't come as much of a surprise.

U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern (MA-03) has posted an online petition at his candidate's website:

"It's time for a constitutional amendment that makes it clear Free Speech is for people, not corporations. It's time for a constitutional amendment that lifts up the promise of American self-government: of, for, and by the people."

Corporations Aren't people

Just like the last time I encouraged readers to sign an online petition, I'm not sure what good it will really do. I view these things as more publicity stunt than serious legislative effort. We need to have this conversation, though, and we need to keep this issue in front of Congress until it does something useful.

Image credit: Rep. Maxine Waters official website


More of an indirect quote via Politico, but I love it anyway:

[Rep. Maxine Waters CA-35] had expressed out loud the sense of frustration that a president whose election was hailed as a crowning moment in African-Americans’ struggle for equality has not resulted in the sweeping change pioneered by a white Southern Democrat’s Great Society four decades earlier.

President Obama learns perils of roiling Maxine Waters

Ouch! Oh, and snap! I added that emphasis, of course, and the link.

Nothing quite captures how useless Barack Obama has been as President, both to African Americans and the rest of us. Taylor Marsh adds:

Whether Pres. Obama is comfortable addressing this specific reality head on or not, minority unemployment is a ticking bomb.

For the first African American president to not be able to speak directly to the plights of minority unemployed, which is Rep. Waters’ home base, represents the mirror image of Obama’s lack of connection with the blue collar working class, whose economic plight is also turning downward.

The Perils of Pissing off Maxine

There’s a lot of trouble out here in the land beyond the Beltway. Unemployment is worst in minority communities, I expect, but there are predominately white ones that will be getting there soon. Nothing makes a country unstable like lots of young unemployed men contemplating their bleak futures. Just ask Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Greece.

Maxine Waters isn’t Barack Obama’s problem – she’s just one of the least problematic symptoms.

If President Fierce Advocate weren't so utterly uninterested in our problems out here, I suspect he'd be hearing a lot less from Rep. Waters.

He'd definitely be hearing a lot less from me.

Dean Baker on what's wrong with the economy,and what isn't:

The only way to get close to full employment in the short-term is through much higher levels of deficit spending. In the longer term we will have to lower the value of the dollar to get the trade deficit closer to balanced.

It really is that simple. The problem is not regulation, taxes, or uncertainty, the problem was that the stimulus was not big enough or long enough. As it is, we are sitting around watching our national leaders debate why the water that they heated to 160 degrees is not boiling. This is getting really painful.

Another Lesson on National Income Accounting for Robert Samuelson

I am beginning to despair that we will never see anyone in a position of leadership in this country acknowledge this basic fact.

Cue the idiots who want to blame this on Republicans. It's not the Republicans who are in power, and they aren't the ones making the President and Democratic members of Congress say the stupid things they are saying about the economy. No one who is in a position to make things change in DC is doing anything but what Baker describes. Anyone who actually does seem to see some relationship between the non-boiling of water and the temperature is basically saying that we need to lower the air pressure so it will boil at 160 degrees. If you don't know why that's funny, then check the link, and remember what happens to people who are at 29,000 feet when they don't have a supplemental oxygen supply.

With the endless faux-drama over the national debt, I think this video is as timely as it was in 1972:



"Good God, consider yourselves fortunate that you have John Adams to abuse, for no sane man would tolerate it!"

Remove the wigs, substitute "Barack Obama" for "John Adams", and we could sell this thing as a musical comedy about the "Great Recession".

UPDATE: Speaking of the debt ceiling nonsense, economist Dean Baker has put the politics of it in perspective better than anyone I've read thus far:

The Democrats need the Republicans' to get a tax increase passed through Congress. The Republicans need the Democrats to give them cover for cuts that are unpopular across the board.

The NYT's False Symmetry Between Republicans and Democrats

As with so many things recently, the surest way for Republicans to get their agenda implemented is to put the Democrats in charge.

And yet there's an endless supply of people who wonder why I say don't support the Democrats until that changes...

Image credit: U.S. Congress official photo

Another Update (1:20 PST): David Dayen, who was live-blogging a hospital press conference, writes that Rep. Giffords is alive, and has had surgery, and is in critical condition but that the attending physician is optimistic that she'll recover. My guess is that we'll know in a day or two at most.

Meanwhile, a federal judge and a nine-year old boy have died in the shooting.

Update: A local TV station reports conflicting stories about Rep. Giffords' condition. As I mentioned in the previous update, the local sheriff reported that she is still alive.

I've left the main body of this article as it was originally written. Any changes will be in updates, or new articles.

It happened only three hours ago as I write this, but it now appears that U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-08), a Democratic congresswoman, has been shot and killed at a public meeting in Tuscon:

Chief Richard Kastigar with the Pima County Sheriff's Department has confirmed that 12 people were shot at a Gabrielle Gifffords event. The shooting occurred this morning at a Safeway Store near Oracle & Ina.

Gabrielle Giffords was shot. Her condition has not been disclosed by authorities. One shooter is in custody, authorities said.

12 people shot, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords wounded

The Arizona Daily Wildcat (the local college paper) reports:

Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head during a "Congress at Your Corner" event at a Safeway in northwest Tucson at approximately 10:15 a.m., according to reports from National Public Radio and Arizona Public Media.

Rick Kastigar, bureau chief for the Pima County Sheriff's office, said 12 people were wounded "some of them greatly," according to the Arizona Daily Star.

Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords shot and killed in Tucson

The report of her death has been confirmed by Talking Points Memo and The New York Times, based on NPR reporting. TPM reports this about the gunman:

Local news confirmed initial reports by NPR that the suspect in his late teens or early twenties was tackled on the scene and is in custody.

Congresswoman Giffords Shot In Arizona

The NYT article describes the event:

The shooting occurred at a Safeway supermarket in northwest Tucson as Ms. Giffords hosted an event, called “Congress on Your Corner, to allow members of the 8th Congressional District to meet her individually. She has held several events since first taking office in January 2007. At one such event in 2009, a protester was removed by police when his pistol fell on the supermarket floor.

Last March, her Tucson office was vandalized a few hours after the House vote overhauling the nation’s health care system, the authorities said. Earlier events in Tucson, Oro Valley, Green Valley, Sierra Vista, and Douglas had attracted between 75 and 150 people, according to a statement announcing the event. This was her first event since her re-election to a third term in November.

Congresswoman Giffords Shot in Tucson

As the photo shows, Rep. Giffords was young for a congressperson, 40 years old. She was married just three years ago, according to the NYT. That makes this shooting particularly tragic.

But perhaps the most tragic thing is the nature of this event. You won't have to read too many articles on Congress here to see that one of the problems I have with that body is how disconnected it is from its electorate. This event was one where a congresswoman went out to meet her constituents, rather than making them come to her. I don't know what her voting record was, but that willingness to seek out her voters where they are is something I find admirably unusual about her. Incidents like this, which happened at a place that's hard to secure, will probably increase Congress's isolation.

My condolences to Rep. Giffords' friends and family, and to the other victims of this event.

UPDATE: From FireDogLake, this update:

Update II: Sheriff Dupnik says that Gifford is still alive but in critical condition, says he is 100% sure, at 2:29 pm ET.

That's a half hour after the report I quoted at the top of the article, but I'm not sure if it's any more reliable. At this point, the people who are most likely to know about her condition are the staff at the hospital Giffords was taken to. Everyone else gets the information second hand.

At least at the time the sheriff last spoke with the hospital staff, though, Giffords' fate was still in doubt.

UPDATE (1:40 PM PST): The alleged gunman, Jared Loughner created an incoherent stream-of-consciousness video a couple of weeks ago. In his opening sentence, he refers to himself in the past tense. I think it's safe to assume this guy's missing a couple of fries from his happy meal.

Caption: This is a chart of cloture motions asked for and acted on in the U.S. Senate between 1919 and 2010. In the last two legislative sessions (2006-2010), they have reached record proportions. Clearly, the current Senate rules are becoming a problem.

Image credit: Chart from this table at the Senate's web site by Cujo359


Jon Walker, on all those "political reality" considerations Washington, DC is always so concerned about:

This time with my family just reinforces my firm belief that pursuing good progressive policy meant to help people will become good politics. People don’t care about floor speeches, the silly rules that prevent bills for passing, CBO scores, or show votes for amendments that everyone in Washington knows aren’t going to pass. Most people vote for politicians hoping they will make good decisions that will result in improved lives and communities, not for someone they think will make a great floor speech on C-SPAN 2 before an empty chamber.

Dear Congress, Almost No One Knows or Cares About Your Kabuki

Count me as one of those people. I'm an engineer, or a computer scientist, depending whether we're talking generalities are specifics. I only learn about congressional procedure out of self-defense when I have to argue with fools who like to make excuses for the party or politicians they favor. The plain fact is that very few of the procedures Congress uses are defined, or even implied, in the Constitution. They are rules that each legislative body has agreed to use while conducting business. Those rules must be subject to change if they aren't working for the country's citizens anymore.

As I've pointed out before, there were ways that the Senate could have gotten around Republican filibusters, had the Democratic leadership wanted. No one talked about the "nuclear option", did they? No one floated the idea of letting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan hang fire while we waited for the Republicans to stop obstructing the process at a near-record pace this session, nor did they mention disallowing all GOP-sponsored amendments until they agreed to limit themselves to a certain number of silent filibusters. This much I know about Senate procedure: if the Majority Leader doesn't want something to make it to the floor, it won't. That would include all those earmarks that Republicans say they're against, but really live by as much as Democrats do.

The logical conclusion is that this state of affairs was just fine with the Democratic leadership. It was only in the lame duck session, after they had lost the House in the last election, that they got serious about doing anything that was the least bit progressive. Vice President Joe Biden let the cat out of the bag toward the end of last year. In effect, he said that if the Democrats didn't have enough Senators to override cloture, we voters just need to elect more. As the election results proved, this was a stupid idea from the word go. Why? Read that quote again. We don't care about procedures, particularly when many of us know that those procedures aren't set in stone. The ultimate message of this election, no matter whether it was Teabaggers or progressives who were sending it, was "Get it done".

We wanted results, and all we got were excuses. Sometimes, failure is punished in DC. For the Democrats, at least, this was one of those times.

UPDATE: Added the cloture motions chart from this table at the U.S. Senate's web site.