Thieves in the Temple.

fast, lean, and frightening.

The House votes on budget reconciliation tomorrow. The House and Senate had agreed on a budget before adjourning at the end of December, but Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND) apparently used procedural arcanities to get the budget sent back to the House for another vote, and good for him. The budget resolution will, of course, precede another round of tax cuts for the rich. It's not that we're not willing to sacrifice in These Difficult Times -- it's just that we are disgusted with Mr. Bush's cronies getting fat off These Difficult Times while we sacrifice, while Jon Kyl and Lindsey Graham pretend that "irresponsible spending" has only to do with social spending.

Tomorrow morning we ought to pummel the phones like we did with Alito; that didn't go the way we wanted, but the practice helped us. If the national lines are busy, use the local lines. More tomorrow.

your tax dollars at work.

Today is the day we call our Senators about filibustering Sam Alito, and then the PATRIOT Act expires on Friday, but I don't believe in ignoring other pressing matters just because our erstwhile President turns everything into a crisis, so here goes.

Senator Obama has introduced the CLEAN UP Act, which would require that all legislation introduced in the Senate, including conference reports and earmarks, be posted on the Internet 72 hours before the legislation is voted on by the full Senate.  This change would, not incidentally, make it much easier for Congressfolk and/or their staffs to read the legislation before they vote upon it (though not in the case of the PATRIOT Act, where Rep. Sensenbrenner's legislation was replaced with Ashcroft's the night before the vote).  CLEAN UP would also require conference committee meetings to be open to the public or be televised, and would require both chambers of Congress to identify any changes made to conference reports and which member made the change.  Some may decry the additional bureaucracy that will glom on as a result of this bill; I guess such folks would prefer the secret bureaucracy that allows lawmakers to attach earmarks to bills and change conference reports without having to count the cost.  This bill sounds like a good idea to me, and maybe it does to your own Senator as well.

Reps. Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Rahm Emmanuel (D-IL) (wasn't I just dissing Rep. Emmanuel the other day?  Yes, I do believe I was) have called for House subcommittee meetings to investigate whether the IRS is unfairly targeting low-income taxpayers.  I'm hopping mad most of the time about how much corporations get away with in cheating their obligations to the commonwealth, so it makes me doubly mad to hear that the IRS might be putting the squeeze on poor people -- and for political reasons, no less! -- even more than our not-progressive-enough tax system already does.  Perhaps your Representative wants to join this call.  Or maybe your Senator wants to begin a Senate investigation.  If you want to be crass, you might mention when calling that protecting the poor is a strategy that always wins politically.  Just ask Hugo Chavez.

Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) says Mr. Bush still has some 'splainin' to do in re the NSA wiretapping.  This would be the same Chuck Hagel that said not too long ago that "I took an oath of office to the Constitution. I didn't take an oath of office to my party or to my president."  Perhaps this statement explains why one of Mr. Hagel's disappointed constituents suggests that Hagel is no longer a conservative, but now an "Acting-Democrat," and adds that actual Democratic Senator Nelson is "more representative" of him.  How much evidence does this constituent give to support this claim?  As is the right-wing wont these days, precisely none, undoubtedly because the observation is so "obvious" that evidence would only be a drag on its power.  Think it's mean of me to pick on some average Joe from Nebraska?  Hey, I didn't put a gun to his head and make him express himself on the internet where everyone could see it.  Contact information for your Senators is the same as it was a few minutes ago, if you'd like them to stand behind Chuck Hagel, and Arlen Specter, and Lindsey Graham, and all the other Ann Coulter-minted "traitors" who now likely constitute a majority of the U.S. Senate.

internet justice Sunday!

"Network neutrality," according to Common Cause, is the principle that "internet users should be able to access any web content they want, post their own content, and use any applications they choose, without restrictions or limitations imposed by their Internet service providers (ISPs)."  And surprise, surprise!  "Network neutrality" is under siege by the big telecoms and their lackeys at the FCC.  The FCC officially adopted "network neutrality" principles last year, but refused to adopt enforcement mechanisms, and the FCC has since ruled that network providers -- the companies that own the actual cables through which the Internet flows -- can charge Internet application providers like Yahoo! and Google fees for higher-speed service.  This will be the death knell of the internet as we know it, because then the big telecoms will set up "tiers" of service (or "premium" services) that will make some websites easier and faster to access than others.  And if you can't pay the fee, then your website -- you know, the one you didn't need tens of thousands of dollars just to start?  The one you operate by your own hard work and intelligence? -- will be shunted to the slower tier, effectively destroying our chance to create a true "marketplace of ideas" where ideas can succeed or fail on their own merit.  You might as well call this the age of "pay-to-play" on the internet.

New telecommunications legislation is winding its way through Congressional committees now, and if it's like most other Congressional legislation, it'll do exactly what big corporations want.  But the last time the government tried something similar -- that would be the Michael Powell rule changes of 2003 -- they were blindsided by a grassroots campaign that even converted Trent Lott, and eventually the pro-corporate forces lost in court.  But this fight should be easier -- we've already done one winning campaign against all odds, and what user really wants the big telecoms telling them where they can go and how fast they can get there?  You may want to tell big telecom moguls that you want to keep the internet as free and democratic as it is.  It's not like the big telecoms have a case -- this Brave New Internet won't be "pay-for-performance" or provide "better service," and, contrary to what some blindly pro-business non-cons think, saying anyone "uses their pipes for free" is a big fat lie.  We already pay the big telecoms a monthly fee for internet service, more than our compatriots in many other countries do.  And the big telecoms aren't starving, or Verizon wouldn't be paying Ivan Seidenberg $90 million per year.  Will the big telecoms ever have enough of our money?

You might want to call your Representative after that -- particularly if his name is either Joe Barton (R-TX) or John Dingell (D-MI), who are House Energy/Commerce Committe Chair and Ranking Member, respectively, and thus in charge of shaping the resulting telecom bill.  Find contact information using the "write your rep" tool in the upper left-hand corner of this page.

(Some information in this post also compiled from this Consumers Union press release.)

UPDATE.  I had intended, as the post's title might suggest, for this post to go out on Sunday, but I forgot about that West Coast time-difference thing, so it's dated for Saturday.  I predict I will successfully avoid this embarrassment on January 30, 2006.

filibuster update and next steps.

At least 11 Senators (Kerry, Kennedy, Stabenow, Durbin, Clinton, Reid, Boxer, Feingold, Wyden, Dodd, Feinstein) have vowed to filibuster the Sam Alito nomination; only 30 more and we've got a filibuster!  You can call your Senators' DC phone numbers this weekend and leave voicemails asking them to join the Alito filibuster; then you can call again on Monday morning and speak to a live operator, since the cloture vote is tentatively scheduled for 4.30 pm.  I bet the Republican leadership moves it closer to the morning if they get scared.  If you can't reach their Washington, DC numbers on Monday for some obviously inexplicable reason, use the "write yer Senators" tool in the upper left-hand corner, visit their websites, and find their local phone numbers (usually they'll have a "contact" link).  Three Democratic Senators (Ben Nelson, Tim Johnson, Robert Byrd) have voiced intentions to vote for Alito, but word on the street is that all three will be carefully monitoring their phones this weekend, as well they should be.  And, if you watch big media news this weekend, don't believe the hype that Kerry is "making a big mistake."  I've seen him make plenty of mistakes, and this isn't one of them.

If the filibuster holds, the Republican leadership will attempt to change the Senate rules so that no future judicial nominee can be filibustered.  But I think there's less support for that, even in the Senate, than there was this time last year.  I believe the Democrats have 48 votes in favor of opposing the Republican rule change (all 44 Democrats plus Jeffords, Snowe, Chafee, and McCain).  The most likely of the remaining Republicans to oppose the rule change are (I'll speculate in descending order) Susan Collins, Chuck Hagel, Lisa Murkowski, Gordon Smith, George Voinovich, and Arlen Specter, and we need three of those (four if we get Specter, since he hates being the deciding vote on anything).  These six aforementioned Senators deserve respectful phone calls.  (Of the 7 Republicans in the Gang of 14, DeWine and Graham, who are not have not been and will never be "centrists" as the media like to call them, have already declared they'll vote to change the rules if Alito gets filibustered; I suspect Warner will vote to change the rules as well.)

I think the most important reason to keep Sam Alito off the Supreme Court is that he'll almost certainly rubber-stamp Mr. Bush's attempts to make himself more powerful than Congress and the courts -- and (and I can't say this enough!) that'll be bad, bad news for conservatives if Hiilary Clinton becomes President.  It's remotely possible Sam Alito will disappoint far right-wingers like David Souter and John Paul Stevens! did, but it's not likely.  From what we know, he will drastically weaken the Constitution, and that's the opposite of his job.

signs of life.

Congress shows encouraging signs of getting with the ethics reform program.  Reps. Obey and Frank plan to introduce legislation to move to an entirely publicly-funded system, which, as I've said before, won't be expensive.  Senators Coleman, Allard, and Nelson have apparently embraced the idea of an independent, bipartisan commission.  But Senator Santorum wants to ban all 527 funding, which I could only support in the context of publicly-funded campaigns, since 527 groups (which include MoveOn and Swift Boat Vets for Truth, remember) are the best way for the average citizen to influence the money pit with small donations.  I think our Senators and Congressfolk need to hear from us about publicly-funded elections.  I think it'd surprise them.

6th District Pennsylvania voters, take note:  U.S. Rep. Jim Gerlach will meet with voters in Bryn Mawr this Saturday, at 2 pm, to discuss raising automobile gas mileage standards.  This is long overdue; according to the National Academy of Sciences, increasing the fuel economy of cars and trucks to 35 mpg by 2013 would, among other things, conserve one million barrels of oil each day in 2013, which figure would represent more than twelve times the daily yield of Ted Stevens's pet Alaska drilling project.  PennPIRG, which hosts the event, suggests that Rep. Gerlach is eager to hear more, and the tide may be turning on this issue -- folks across the political spectrum want better mileage and less reliance on foreign oil, and even the Senate was nonplussed with the oil companies' excuses last fall.  For the event's exact location, click here.

We already know that we still need to call our Representatives and Senators and oppose the immoral House/Senate budget resolution (which Senator Conrad managed to get sent back to the House, using budget rule-making arcanities only he appears to know about), but we also know we need to do more, and thanks to United for a Fair Economy, we also know we can.  The Emergency Campaign for America1s Priorities have planned over 200 events across America before the budget vote; these will include press conferences, congressional district office visits, town halls, and vigils, all so we can make clear to our Congressfolk that we don't like cutting social programs in order to fund more millionaire tax cuts (certainly in the House's case -- the Senate's tax cut plan was vastly different).  Find an event near you by downloading this document.

TrueMajority gets into the act to save the Endangered Species Act from those who would destroy it in order to "save" it -- specifically by gutting standards and then bribing corporations to meet the gutted standards, as if they can't survive without sucking at the government teat.  Use this letter-writing tool if you haven't used any other.

Alito the conqueror.

Judiciary voted 10-8 to send the Samuel Alito nomination to the Senate, and Democrats will decide this week whether to filibuster the nomination.  They should weigh Senator Russell Feingold's opposition to Alito very carefully, not only because Feingold is a prodigious intellect among Senators, but because Feingold has a genuinely narrow view of the Senate's "advise and consent" responsibilities -- he's voted for both John Roberts and John Ashcroft, for example.  I believe Samuel Alito must be filibustered, thanks to his fifteen long years of being a tool of corporate interests, his fifteen long years being a tool of the far right, and, most importantly, his fifteen long years defending the spurious "right" of the "unitary executive" at the expense of individuals.  One more time, here's the page to send a note to your Senators if you haven't done so already.

"what would Ralph do?"

Codepink has called for a National Call-in day tomorrow, Wednesday, January 25, to protest the nefarious PATRIOT Act conference report, which 41 Democrats and 4 Republicans filibustered late last year.  Codepink also reports that the PATRIOT Act conference report permits the government to throw protestors who "disrupt" events in jail for ten years, and just remember: if you're of a right-wing stripe, Hillary Clinton might one day have the power to throw you in jail under this provision, and it's just possible she might have more than a little hankering for revenge.  The Capitol switchboard is 202.224.3121, or you can use my tools in the upper left-hand corner to find your Senator and Representative.  Find those numbers today, too, so that you don't have to tomorrow, if the House and Senate websites are down for some obviously inexplicable reason.  Codepink also provides a sample letter to send to said Senators.

Ralph Nader talks real Congressional ethics reform in Counterpunch.  The Democrats' eight-point plan is better than the Republicans' eight-point plan (which, helpfully, bans gym access for former Congressfolk who become lobbyists), but neither is anywhere near Common Cause's five-point plan.  And that again isn't as good as What Ralph Would Do, which begins with the notion that "campaign contributions" are really "investments" or "bribes. " Mr. Nader's suggestions include:  terminating below-market-rate sale/loan arrangements with corporations; giving citizens standing to sue to challenge corporate welfare abuses; establishing automatic corporate welfare sunsets; and a ban on corporate welfare for corporate wrongdoers.  And those are just the highlights.  Read the whole thing.  And remember:  conservatives don't like corporate welfare, either.

The Campaign to Defend the Constitution calls for the mainstream news media to blacklist Pat Robertson, saying he "deserves (the) cold shoulder, not an open microphone," and summarizes some of his most recent rhetorical excesses.  But that's not how I feel.  In a healthy culture, Pat Robertson would get to express himself, and then the culture would shame him for his arrogance and small-mindedness, and then he would censor himself, and become a productive member of society in some way that doesn't involve praying for more Supreme Court justices to die.  I don't think the problem is that the mainstream media airs his grotesqueries, or even that the mainstream media gives him too much airtime.  I think the problem is that the mainstream media is too afraid to offend him or his followers, and as such they don't question him vigorously.  They don't function as part of a community, in other words.  I'd be happy to have Pat Robertson on the air plenty as long as he gets called on his rubbish.  Why do we avoid offending the weak?  Do we think that makes us better people?  It doesn't.  It makes us as weak as they are.  We ought to spend more time building our own media, a media that stands apart from the almighty dollar, so that we don't ever become beholden to the nefarious calculations that lead the "liberal media" to coddle and enable Pat Robertson.  This blog is just one small effort in that direction.

UPDATE.  It's not just that the new PATRIOT Act can throw protestors in jail for a decade; it's that they can create a whole new (and virtually unaccountable) secret police to do it, as Paul Craig Roberts informs us.

the sad, sad truth, the dirty lowdown.

According to my sources, the Senate takes up the PATRIOT Act again tomorrow. More info as it arrives.

I had a lot of penny rants stored up -- in fact, this was going to be the "Super Fat Sunday Sleep-In" version of the penny rants -- but I didn't have time to make them as good as I wanted them to be, so I'll just run them down quickly:

No, Mrs. Clinton, being a Democrat in the Senate is not like being on the plantation, no matter how brutish Republicans get. For one thing, no one on the plantation made $100,000 a year to be brain-dead.

No, Al Gore is not insane, but anyone who calls Al Gore "insane" without responding to any of his points should receive a psychological evaluation. Though not at government expense -- I'm not going to be anyone's enabler.

Tha Bush Mobb is harrassing Google because it wants to see how many kids are using the internet to look at porn? Yeah, sure. For standing up to them, Google is my hero this week, but they're so big they're always skating on thin ice with me. (That's despite the fact that I use their search engine all the time.)

About 27/100 of one percent of Americans will pay the Estate Tax in 2006. That means out of every 10,000 folks who die, some 27 -- twenty-seven! -- will pay the Estate Tax. Note to the rageaholics who call it "the death tax" because Frank Luntz told them to: you will never make enough money to pay the Estate Tax -- unless you support programs like the Estate Tax.

According to the February 2006 Consumer Reports, standards for free-range chicken are so lax -- basically, federal regulations permit a "free-range" chicken to spend as little as five minutes out of its coop per day -- that you might as well not bother, unless you really know your local organic grower very well. Oddly enough, that localharvest.org link I have on the left side might help you with that. (Can't link to Consumer Reports, though, because it's for subscribers only. But why aren't you a subscriber?)

Mr. bin Laden makes a surprise appearance yeah-sure (and I'll bet they pondered its Deep Meaning in These Troubled Times all day on TV Pravda), right around the same time Karl Rove makes a speech saying terror is going to be the big issue in 2006. I thought terror was the big issue in every election lately -- you know, as in "terrorizing the electorate."

I'd love for The Daily Show to play ZZ Top's "Sharp-Dressed Man" every time Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes an appearance. Partly because Mr. Ahmadinejad does dress rather sharply, but mainly because I know that being associated with a video famous for its leggy, scantily-clad women would irritate him to no end.

Terry Gilliam: not laughing at the Medicare drug plan.

The Medicare drug prescription plan has been in effect for only a few weeks, and how bad is it? Bob Novak calls it a scheme of "hideous complexity" that "discourages seniors from signing up" and "will further swell the budget deficit." HR 752, the Medicare Prescription Drug Savings and Choice Act of 2005, would reform the Medicare drug plan so that a) the government can negotiate better prices with drug companies and b) it has some semblance of consistency in re premiums, co-pays, and covered drugs. Speaker Hastert will likely never let this bill come to a vote, unless a majority of Representatives sign a "discharge petition," and 80 have done so already. So you might want to encourage your Representative to sign on as well. Of course, if the bill does come to a vote and passes, it still has to pass the Senate and evade a likely Mr. Bush veto threat. Let's make this as tough for Mr. Bush to veto as possible. Hardship builds character, and looking at the evidence I don't think Mr. Bush has endured enough hardship in his life.

the many kinds of poisons.

They gone done it again: hot on the heels of their Bill Bennett hiring, CNN has apparently hired radio talker Glenn Beck to do a one-hour TV show on CNN Headline News. Beck has a reputation for being a nice-guy right-winger, and I've even seen him do that act on Hannity and Colmes. But I'm such a churl that I only value good ideas, and don't care whether bad ideas come from nice people or not. Besides, there seems to be plenty of evidence that Glenn Beck is not, in fact, a nice guy -- he has wished for Dennis Kucinich to burst into flames, and has confessed that he's wanted to kill Michael Moore, asking "is this wrong?" I guess Glenn spends a lot of time reminding himself that feelings are never wrong. If you like, you can contact Ken Jautz, President of CNN Headline News, at 404.878.5633, or you can call the New York line at 212.275.7800 and ask for the comment line, or you can use CNN's handy feedback form. But they really don't care what you think unless you sneeze money, so it might be better to make your cable company come out and put a block on CNN, which they'll get tired of doing if they have to do too many times. This was a suggestion a friend of mine made to me months ago, and I've only just come around to seeing what a good idea it is. Or, you can call your Congressperson and argue for a la carte cable programming. Make sure to tell them the liberal sent you.

The EPA wants public comments -- well, maybe not so much "wants" as "hopes it doesn't get any though it has to ask anyway" -- about a rule exception which would allow poultry factory farms to release dangerous levels of ammonia without, guess what, notifying local, state, or federal officials. Because it's just so arduous for those poor, poor, pitiful corporations to fulfill their obligations to the communities in which they operate. Besides (they'll tell us), regulations are always bad for the economy -- though paying lawyers in order to ensure compliance with regulations does create jobs for those lawyers, and therefore creates jobs for people who have actually gone and gotten themselves educated, so by "bad for the economy" they would have to mean "bad for my ability to gild the plumbing in my summer home." You may submit your comment -- which would be something like "big chicken farms ought to follow the same pollution reporting rules as any other industry" -- by March 27 under Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-SFUND-2005-0013, at this location (search for "Environmental Protection Agency" and "all document types" and the Docket ID given above -- it seems to work whether you also check "exact phrase" or "any word"). You can also read more about the rule here.

And finally (cue long applause from the convention hall), Pennsylvanians for a Fair and Independent Court plan to rally against the Alito nomination on Monday, January 23, from noon to 1 pm, at the west side entryway of City Hall near 15th and Market Streets. After a short press conference you'll be pairing up and talking to folks who are going into and out of City Hall about why putting Sam Alito on the Court would be a bad idea. RSVP to Jeanette Blize if you can make it.

a welfare state for bad ideas.

Where does a man begin flogging the Christine Flowers column in Monday's Philadelphia Daily News?

In sum, she invokes Oliver Wendell Holmes's "marketplace of ideas," where ideas "flourish or perish under their own power," to suggest that liberals "muzzle dissent" more than right-wingers do.  Her evidence?  Well, for one thing, "an unscientific poll involving a tally of (her) recent e-mails leads (her) to believe that liberals are less 'liberal-minded' than their conservative counterparts."  It couldn't be that people of the same stripe disagree more agreeably than people of a different stripe do, though one can observe this very phenomenon in this blog's comments.  She also claims that liberals have "sought to muzzle dissent" no less than five times since 1992, which list might invite the retort "five incidents of chicken pox do not constitute an epidemic."  But it's also possible she gets angry emails from liberals because her ideas aren't good enough to "flourish" but still do, thanks to her column helpfully provided by the local media, and I'm inclined toward this explanation, because only one of her five listed events (liberal opposition to military recruitment on college campuses) represents a possible incident of liberal "muzzling."  The other four events range from outright lies to, what do you know, incidents where liberals exercised their First Amendment rights by criticizing people they didn't like.

First, the outright lies.  Bob Casey was ostracized at the 1992 Convention because he wouldn't endorse the Democratic Presidential candidate.  This is, I would expect, a fairly common phenomenon though it doesn't reflect well on the party.  If it were a mere matter of his pro-life views, six other pro-life speakers wouldn't have been able to speak at the Convention, either.  And Rick Santorum didn't express "traditional views on family" so much as he compared homosexuality only slightly favorably to bestiality and suggested that the reason so many Boston priests fondled kids is that Boston is a liberal city.  It's a lie to suggest liberals were angry about "traditional views on family" rather than his reactionary views on society.

And criticizing isn't the same as "muzzling."  Who exactly has put duct tape over Rick Santorum's mouth for spewing his spew?  No one has prevented Santorum from standing for the Senate, or for the Presidency in 2008 if that is his will.  And Bill Cosby was, in Ms. Flowers's own words, "criticized," not muzzled, not prevented to speak (as he would speak about similar topics later and those comments were duly reported).  And, finally, the Dover decision does not "muzzle" -- do liberals require the teaching of quantum mechanics in Buddhism class just because some people find the experience of Einstein's mind a religious experience?  And even if the decision were "muzzling," the man who did the muzzling is a conservative Republican justice appointed to the bench by Mr. Bush.  Surely such a man would have stood up to liberal tyranny, if it existed.

Conflating "dissent" and "criticism" and "muzzling" and "censorship" is a right-wing trick I'm getting damn tired of, but I suspect with Ms. Flowers it's also intuitive:  she really feels oppressed when people disagree with her, or with her heroes.  Well, I'm not opposed to making people feel ashamed of themselves when they say things they ought to be ashamed of, as Rick Santorum and so many others have certainly done.  "For shame!" is also free speech; you may find it unpleasant or uncivil, but not oppressive.  And the First Amendment does not only apply to one person at a time; it applies to all of us, all of the time, and that includes those moments when we criticize others, no matter how that makes their sympathizers feel.

I mean, really.  This column should have "perished," but it's no better or worse than most right-wing sputum circa 2006.  And I've a damn garden to tend to.

the citizen action option.

Surprise, surprise:  apparently the IRS spends more time going after the poor than going after the rich, and isn't even being terribly scrupulous about it.  Bradford Plumer cites good reasons (the IRS has been seriously underfunded for years) and bad (the Republicans are out to get the Earned Income Tax Credit, but can't do it directly).  So next time I hear Rick Santorum or somebody talk about how much he supports "tax cuts for working families," I'm going to throw this in his face.  Hell, why not throw it in all our Congressfolk's faces, right now?  You know, as in "I'm calling you because I read this report in the Times and I'm concerned that the IRS might be wrongly accusing poor taxpayers of fraud while letting corporations get away with murder."  Tools are in the upper left corner.

Meanwhile, a Zogby poll suggests that 52% of Americans want to see Mr. Bush impeached if he wiretapped American citizens without a judge's approval.  43% don't want to see him impeached, meaning it's not nearly as close as Bush's "mandate."  According to the poll, an astounding 23% of Republicans want to see Mr. Bush impeached over this matter, along with 38% of Born-Again Christians and, of course, 71% of our fellow travelers the Libertarians.  On that note, afterdowningstreet.org has contact information for cable news outlets so you may persuade them to cover this item.  You remember -- part of that "vicious pit bull" of a media (according to Bill O'Reilly) that you and I and everyone else in the reality-based world have to drag into doing the important stories.

Peripherally related to these and other matters:  from January 20-22 in New York City, a Commission of Inquiry will ask whether Mr. Bush and his Mobb are guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.  Witnesses and judges will include Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, former British ambassador Craig Murray, Scott Ritter, Dennis Brutus, ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern, David Swanson, and many others.  This Comission will be open to the public; Friday and Saturday sessions will be at the Riverside Church, while the Sunday session will be at Columbia Law School.  No doubt some non-cons are saying "see?  Bush ain't so bad!  This sort of thing could never happen in a real tyranny," as if we don't prevent tyrannies by doing exactly this kind of thing, or as if the presence of worse conditions elsewhere mandates that we do nothing about bad conditions here.  More info is available at this location.

And finally, the People's Email Network has reconfigured their anti-Alito page so that you can demand a filibuster from your Senators.  The Republican leadership has a narrow concept of "advise and consent"-- unless it's Harriet Miers up there, of course -- but we've been democratically electing Senators since the 1890s, so the Republican leadership might want to start refining their concept of "representing our constituents."  What else is there, if not that?  If there is a filibuster, the next step would be to contact Chuck Hagel, Lisa Murkowksi, Gordon Smith, and George Voinovich and encourage them to vote against changing Senate rules to prohibit the filibuster of judicial nominess, which would be Bill Frist's next move -- and, I think, a less popular move than it was a few months ago, when (by my reckoning) he had 50 or 51 votes.

Abramoff and I.

Dick Polman reminds me that Jack Abramoff was not President of his college's Republican club, but president of the College Republicans in the early '80s, where he was friends with ultra-rightists Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed. And while he was there, he summoned a demon with this utterance:

"It is not our job to seek peaceful coexistence with the left. Our job is to remove them from power permanently."

Still wondering why we liberals seem so angry these days? It's because folks like Abramoff aren't just crooks; they're crooks who want us permanently silenced. Last I looked, there was still only one way to permanently silence me.

Funny thing is, I do not seek to remove conservatives from power permanently. A society without conservatives would be disastrous. In fact, I seek harmony, not mere "peaceful coexistence," with conservatives. But I will not lie about myself in order to achieve harmony. And I certainly will not seek "peaceful coexistence" with right-wing demagogues like Santorum, Bozell, O'Reilly, Hannity, DeLay, etc. Any "harmony" I achieve with such folks would be a false harmony, like the harmony between President Clinton and the Gingrich House. That "harmony" gave us George W. Bush.

the coming Augean task.

Republicans and Democrats will unveil their (competing?) plans for ethics reform this week, but it's not their initiative to seize: it's ours. Common Cause promotes a five-point program for ethics reform: one, an independent, nonpartisan ethics commission (versus the current five-from-each-party arrangement in the House, for example); two, a gift and travel ban for Congresfolk; three, a ban on lobbying job offers for Congressfolk; four, publicly-funded clean elections system for Congressional campaigns; and five, full, real-time disclosure of lobbying contacts. You can support this campaign by using Common Cause's letter-writing tool.

And don't let anyone tell you that publicly-funded clean elections would be a tax burden. It won't. For one thing, clean election campaigns like those in Maine and Arizona have a qualifying system -- in which a candidate must raise a certain number of small donations in order to qualify for government funds -- which means that tax revenues likely won't carry the whole burden. For another thing, Messrs. Bush and Kerry spent some $800 million combined on their Presidential campaigns in 2004; that works out to about $6.50 per tax return. If Congress spent double that in 2006, that'd be $13. And of course, we don't have to allow them to spend as much money as they want -- presumably they only raise vast sums to outspend the other guy, and ask yourself if that $800 million bought us a good campaign in 2004. I think spending $1 billion out of a $2 trillion budget to keep big money out of politics is a bargain. And spending $500 million would probably be a better bargain.

By the way, I suggested here a while back that Democrats will be taken down in significant numbers by the Abramoff imbroglio, but that isn't likely. It is true that a few Democrats have received money from Abramoff clients, and some of those (like Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota) likely did favors for Abramoff clients upon receiving that money, but Abramoff's claws sink further and deeper into Republican backs. That's because Abramoff is a Republican himself, you see -- one of these fellows who was President of his college's Republican club, and no doubt thinks he's been persecuted his whole life because of that. Obviously Abramoff is going to take on some Democratic clients because he has to, and also because he would want to avoid appearing too obviously partisan. But last I looked, Republicans don't extend their power by funneling so much money to Democrats that they become a threat.

happy birthday!

The Riverside Church, on Riverside Drive between 120th and 122nd Streets in New York City, sponsors a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from the same pulpit where Dr. King gave his watershed “Beyond Vietnam” speech.  Tribute event will begin at 4.45 pm today (worship service is 10.45 this morning, if you're interested -- the sermon looks pretty good) and feature musical performances, prayer, and guest speakers, including Martin Luther King III, Ambassador Andrew Young, Susan Sarandon, Jeffrey Wright, and Cissy Houston, and Marian Wright Edelman.  Directions are available at the Riverside Church website.

Meanwhile, over at ZNet, Paul Street writes about how we tend to remember our heroes, like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as being less forward-thinking than they really were.  Obviously because we're not very forward-thinking ourselves!  But I presume that once we legislate a living wage and eliminate war as an instrument of policy, we will understand Dr. King much better.  Eliminating racism was only one of his many worthwhile goals.

"must they politicize everything?"

Did you know your cell phone records could be sold online?  Neither did I, until those infernal liberals at MoveOn told me today.  Turns out this isn't just a privacy issue (do you really want your employer finding out you're calling other potential employers?), but a security issue as well -- as the Chicago Sun-Tiimes noted on January 5, an FBI agent received his own phone records within three hours of buying them from locatecell.com, and John Aravosis of Americablog was able to purchase records for one hundred phone calls General Wesley Clark made during the month of November.  It's bad enough that the government can do-the-thing to your privacy rights, but there should be broad bipartisan support for preventing unscrupulous individuals from doing same.  MoveOn calls for Congress to pass a law proscribing the sale of unauthorized phone records, and this is where you sign to show your support.

In Circus Alito news, at least one conservative blogger suggests that, contrary to media spin, the Democrats did not make Judge Alito's wife cry.  Judge Alito's wife left the hall immediately after Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina asked "tough" questions apparently intended to mock the Democrats' "tough" questions.  I've always said right-wingers don't appreciate irony well enough (they either miss it entirely or sledgehammer you with it), and so it goes with Lindsey Graham.  In any case, Judge Alito had withstood eight hours of questioning at this point (which seems a more compelling explanation for his wife's reaction), and I doubt very many of Alito's defenders would decry Republican "meanness" if the wife of a Democratic Supreme Court nominee left the room in tears after tough questioning.

nighttime in the switching yard.

Over the holidays, both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Timesechoed the charge reported by the Boston Globe -- that the NSA doesn't just wiretap without a warrant; it mines data. Specifically, we are told, the NSA examines every piece of data that comes across telecommunications switches and checks for suspicious keywords or numbers. The NSA wiretapping has drawn the ire of a few more Republican Senators than the PATRIOT Act conference report did, and that was temporarily stopped dead. But your Senators might need a little more steel from their constituents, which includes you. And if you think you have nothing to hide from a little surveillance -- you know, since you're not giving aid and comfort to al-Qaeda -- just remember that the definition of "nothing to hide" can change awfully quick in the hands of the powermad. That's what the Founders teach us.

Speaking of Sam Alito, the ACLU has come out against his nomination, mainly on the grounds that he has not demonstrated enough of a commitment to halting the excesses of executive power, and they have a letter-writing tool for you to use if you like. I know Judge Alito claimed yesterday that no one is above the Bill of Rights, but I think that means he just watches what he says more than Antonin Scalia does. In my eyes, he wears the Scarlet B. I wish I didn't feel like that, I really do. But I do feel like that.

more baby steps.

Mr. Bush has no interest in checking the greed of American multinational corporations, but we don't just live in a country; we also live in states, counties, cities, and towns, and when the federal government doesn't listen, then we must turn to our more local communities.  "Fair Share for Health Care" initiatives require large corporations doing business in a particular state to a) provide a minimum health care benefit to their employees or b) pay into state health care funds, so that they're not sucking at the corporate welfare teat, and so that employees don't have to turn to Medicare to get health care, as many Wal-Mart employees now have to do.  Personally I'd prefer single-payer health care -- and so do many conservatives, if polling data is accurate -- but supporting this particular initiative doesn't preclude any of us from supporting a better idea later.

Following up on the so-called "Small Business Health Fairness Act":  Senator Lautenberg's office informs me that he does not support the SBHFA, but he is a cosponsor of S. 637, the “Small Employers Health Benefits Program Act of 2005,” introduced by Senator Durbin, which would create a separate health insurance program for small business employees (a small business would have less than 100 people) and the self-employed, S. 637 would, among other things, require plans to limit enrollees’ annual out-of-pocket expenses, include consumer protections, and cover mental as well as physical health care.  Like I said, I'd like to do better, but I won't withhold my support for S. 637 on that basis.  If I did, I'd never get anything done.  I'm guessing S. 637 is going to be stuck in committee for a while, unless we do something.  Tools are in the upper left-hand corner.

this is planet Earth!

When the Senate returns next week, it will take up Richard Pombo's nefarious attempt to gut the Endangered Species Act.  You remember that one, the one that essentially says, "please, please, Mr. Big Corporation Sir, we'll pay you to obey the law we've just gutted because you're always complaining about how hard it is to obey the law?"  Perhaps Mr. Bush will show his compassionate side by attaching the Pombo bill to his next budget, thus ensuring Mr. Bush's fourth consecutive year of budget stalemate despite expanded majorities in both Houses of Congress.  In the meantime, let's ensure that Pombo's bill is filibuster-bound.

In a related matter, the Department of the Interior recently announced that it intends to remove the grizzly bear from the protected list after 30 years.  They've decided, no doubt, that the standards you have to meet in order to remove an animal are just too high and they're going to take some bold, decisive action to fix that.  Or they've decided there are too many bears encroaching upon residential areas (a controversial issue in the northern part of my state), which is a separate issue entirely.  No matter:  let your Representatives know that we don't just remove any animal from the protected list just because we feel like it.

Finally, Care2 calls for a boycott of Exxon-Mobil, on the grounds that a) they only care about profits, b) they don't care about global warming, c) they don't care about renewable energy, d) they still want to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and e) they haven't made proper restitution for all that oil they spilled in 1989.  I've been boycotting Exxon-Mobil for about a dozen years myself, but bad PR also works in our favor, so here's a letter-writing tool for you to use. 

right, like I said.

Here's the lead paragraph of an AP report from this morning:

"A majority of Americans want the Bush administration to get court approval before eavesdropping on people inside the United States, even if those calls might involve suspected terrorists, an AP-Ipsos poll shows."

In other words, a majority of Americans understand the NSA wiretapping issue better than the many right-wing Useful Idiots for al-Qaeda.

Please do not ape Douglas McKinnon and suggest that the American people hear so much about warrants from the "liberal media" that they've been duped into believing you should get warrants before spying on terrorists. That is a way of saying the American people are too stupid to think for themselves, which they are not. The American people have been divided against each other by multinational corporations and clever politicians. But the American people are not stupid.

Bill Bennett: the resurfacing?

I'd prefer to wash my hands of CNN entirely, but reportedly they've done gone and hired Bill Bennett to be their new Bob Novak.  Bill Bennett is not only noticeably worse than Bob Novak, he's also the idiot who injected race into a statement about abortion and crime on his radio show and then lied the next day about what he'd said.  Deliver your opposition to this nefarious development in one of three ways:  fill out this CNN feedback form, call CNN's Washington line at 202.898.7900 and ask for the comment line, or call CNN headquarters in Atlanta at 404.827.1500 and ask for the comment line (at which point you'll follow prompts to leavea message or talk with a live person).

Don't be the fool who claims that we liberals waste too much time on whether Bill Bennett has a job or not.  It took me two minutes to fire off an email to CNN.  It took me another ten to create and post this blog entry, which hopefully will inspire other citizens to spend two minutes spanking CNN.  Being a good citizen is really not all that time-consuming. Why would anyone think being a good citizen is all that time-consuming?

penny rants for the day of January 6, 2006: stupid right-wing pundit tricks!

Bill O'Reilly claims that the mainstream media's "hatred" of Mr. Bush was the "stealth story" of 2005.  His evidence?  It's all in paragraph five (making nine extraneous paragraphs), and it lists seven Bush acts (all relating to the "war on terror" -- has O'Reilly given up on defending Bush Mobb economic policy?) that the media "in general" "doesn't like."  Unfortunately he also writes about these acts "in general" -- because people like "plain talk," I guess -- thus conveniently missing the point about why the media might not like them:  it's not NSA wiretapping but wiretapping without warrants; not "terrorists captured in civilian clothing" but terror suspects who The Bush Mobb can't even charge after four years of captivity; not "the CIA rendition program" but the practice of sending suspects to a country that tortures because your own citizens hate torture; and so on.  And of course it's not the media that doesn't like Mr. Bush's policies, but the citizenry:  the mainstream media, far from being a "vicious pit bull bent on destruction," has been a Johnny-come-lately to all of these stories.  The media tolerated the PATRIOT Act and Gitmo and regurgitated Bush Mobb lies about Iraq's WMD capabilities all through the run-up to the Iraq war.  The media didn't run the Abu Ghraib photos for four months, and the media held the NSA story for an entire year, which included a Presidential election.  And from this we must conclude that the media hates Bush?  The same media owned mostly by five megacorporations that donate mostly to Mr. Bush's party and have become fat off Republican (and Clintonoid) corporate deregulation policies for a quarter-century?  Doesn't a Harvard education buy more than this?

Cliff Kincaid still can't think straight.  Still thinks everything he hates is equal to everything else he hates, which I guess is very post-modern of him, but misunderstands (probably on purpose) the concept of irony in paragraph 4.  Engages in simple ad hominem arguing in paragraph 6.  Misapprehends (again, probably on purpose) the difference between a leak that endangers someone who was not doing something illegal (being an undercover CIA agent) with a leak that accuses someone of doing something illegal (wiretapping without warrants, tapping calls without actual suspicion of terrorist ties).  Then changes the subject in paragraph 8 (does Cliff Kincaid understand the concept of a "thesis"?) to an NBC report accusing the Pentagon of spying on Quakers, slyly evading the point of whether the Pentagon is supposed to be spying on anyone at all.  And, for his last trick, suggests that "radical" is the opposite of "peaceful" (not in my Thesaurus!) and that a Quaker award to Barbara Lee "invites more violence and terrorism."  What a horrible world Cliff Kincaid lives in:  Americans committing treason everywhere just by breathing, and conveniently they're all people who disagree with him!  He'd have called Gandhi a terrorist.  Cliff Kincaid's work doesn't just insult intelligence; it insults sentience.

Ann Coulter, at least, engages with liberals not made of straw every once in a while -- she actually acknowledges and even discusses that whole getting-a-warrant business vis a vis the NSA wiretapping.  Even here, though, she can't help but invent liberal enemies:  no one has called for Mr. Bush's impeachment on the basis of "listening in on terrorists' phone calls to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi" but on the basis of breaking the law by listening in on innocent citizens' phone calls without judicial oversight.  If Mr. Bush is going to do that, then what, kids?  The terrorists have won.  If Mr. Bush somehow can't convince a court to give a warrant to "(spy) on people with Osama's cell phone number," then he shouldn't be President.  And I believe the group "Democrats and other traitors" includes Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.  I wouldn't go calling Senator Hagel a traitor if I was her.  And if I really thought he was a "traitor," I'd have called the FBI already, instead of grandstanding about it like these Useful Idiots for al-Qaeda.

Santorum's canoe takes in water; film at 11.

One more letter-to-your-Senator-tool opposing the Alito nomination makes its way to my inbox, this one courtesy of American Rights at Work.  I still regard Alito's position on abortion as the great bait-and-switch -- get pro-lifers to support Alito so he can continue to expand corporate power, and get pro-choicers to oppose Alito so they won't talk about his record of expanding corporate power.  But I would like to see one of our fervently pro-choice Democratic Senators on Judiciary to ask Judge Alito what he thinks about a pharmacist's "right" to refuse filling birth control prescriptions on religious grounds.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that Justice Sunday III -- hosted by Bush supporter, faith-based grant collector, and former Eagles halfback Herb Lusk -- will have Senator Rick Santorum in tow.  You may recall that Santorum criticized the Dover school board the other day, so perhaps his appearance at this far-right pep rally (replete with fog machine, no doubt) will mend some fences.  Santorum's not going to convince his opponents at this late date that he actually holds nuanced positions on Religious Right issues.

(Extra special gold star points to anyone who can crack the riddle of the subject header.)

et tu, Luttig?

The Supreme Court overturns a 4th District Court opinion preventing the government from moving Jose Padilla from military court to civilian court today.  But the big news is:  another clock stops because of George W. Bush!  About 9-10 paragraphs down, we discover that the author of the 4th District opinion that prevented the moving of Padilla, the opinion that suggested the federal government was risking "credibility before the courts," was none other than the nefarious J. Michael Luttig.  This must be why he's not the Supreme Court nominee -- Tha Bush Mobb looked into its Magic 8-Ball and found that Judge Luttig would oppose them on some particular of their ever-evolving "doctrine" of "executive discretion."

Speaking of the Supreme Court, those Judiciary Committee hearings on Samuel Alito start next week, and Justice Sunday III (what a hootenanny that must be!) precedes it.  So here's one tool with which to write your Senators opposing the Alito nomination, and here's another.

bad news for Tom DeLay.

Lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleads guilty to at least three charges, and will apparently cooperate with federal investigators to nail some twenty-odd Congressfolk, at least a few of whom are presumed to be Democrats.

But that's not what I mean by "bad news for Tom DeLay"!  Ha ha ha ha!  I am such a trickster!  No, the bad news for Tom DeLay is that he's in such big trouble to begin with.  This is late-breaking news, obviously -- I could have undertaken the brief analysis I'm about to describe over thirteen months ago -- but it's nonetheless instructive.  You may recall that DeLay got 55% of the vote in his 2004 re-election bid, an unusually low number for a ten-term incumbent.  You may also recall that DeLay explained this low figure by pointing to the Texas state legislature's redistricting in 2004, undertaken expressly for the purpose of generating more Republican seats in the House of Representatives.  He suggested that when you create more Republican districts, you necessarily dilute the Republican districts that had been delivering supermajorities to Republican candidates, so that although more Republicans win, they'll all have lower tallies.

That sounds like a reasonable explanation for Tom DeLay's 55%, right?  Sure it does.  But the facts often obliterate even Tha Bush Mobb's most reasonable assertions, and so it goes with this one as well.  Looking up Texas's Congressional delegation, I found that out of 20 Texas Republicans not named Tom DeLay, only one -- one! -- finished with a smaller percentage of the popular vote in their districts than DeLay did in his.  And that fellow, Rep. Pete Sessions, garnered 54% of the popular vote in Texas's 32nd district against a twelve-term Democratic incumbent whose district disappeared beneath him, whereas Tom DeLay ran against a complete unknown.  All four first-term Republicans did better than DeLay (although Ted Poe -- who ran against Nick Lampson, another Democratic incumbent whose district disappeared beneath him -- came close to DeLay, getting 56% of the vote in Texas's 2nd distict).

So, while Jack Abramoff might be able to sink Tom DeLay, I think that boat's already taking a lot of water.

2006, another number.

I hope all of you had a safe and happy New Year's celebration.  We should be able to make 2006 a better year than 2005, though 2005 has set the bar pretty low for that particular goal.  How bad was 2005?  Apparently forgetting that he lost an entire American port city due to incompetence, and is poised to lose the hearts and minds of an entire region due to incompetence compounded by arrogance, Mr. Bush said 2005 was a pretty good year, and that's all you need to know about how bad 2005 was.  If 2005 ignites the citizenry to take a more active role in their government, fine, but I never wish for bad things to happen just so good things can happen.  The other side does that, and I may be giving them too much credit in saying so.

I'm not one for New Year's resolutions, but I have made a resolution that relates directly to this blog's mission:  I will not push for, or even hope for, a Democratic victory in the 2006 Congressional elections.  That isn't merely because producing a Democratic House and Senate would be fool's gold, given the Democrats' unwillingness to offend the Republicans' corporate paymasters in the hopes that they'll get to feed at that trough.  It's also because our mission isn't to get the perceived Good Guys back into power and then sit back; our mission is to express our will to our Representatives every day and then make them pay when they don't do our will.  In other words, to paraphrase a famous philosopher, we have to go to war with the Congress we have.