Thieves in the Temple.

anyone could be a terrorist! Anyone!

The Center for Constitutional Rights sent me an alert calling for the repeal of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, and it rang a bell -- I advocated against it in December 2006 (second paragraph). While the law states that "(n)othing in this section shall be construed...to prohibit any expressive conduct (including peaceful picketing or other peaceful demonstration) protected from legal prohibition by the First Amendment to the Constitution," the law also demands punishment for anyone who "intentionally damages or causes the loss of any real or personal property (including animals or records) used by an animal enterprise." Well, anyone who peacefully pickets an animal enterprise does "intentionally damage or cause the loss of any real of personal property," don't they? The "animal enterprise" in question is supposed to lose money in the short term due to the bad publicity, isn't it? The AETA implicitly suggests that even, say, the folks who advocated for divestment in South Africa in the late '80s could be counted as "terrorists" because they caused, intentionally, some corporations to lose money -- and you can just see John Roberts noting the inherent contradiction in the law and siding with the corporations against the First Amendment here, can't you? And n.b. the definition of "animal enterprise" is vague enough that it could encompass almost any enterprise, including a supermarket. CCR helps you demand repeal of AETA.

Meanwhile, the New York Times "reported" that, according to the Pentagon, 1 in 7 Guantánamo detainees "returned to the battlefield." Look what they were able to accomplish in just four words! First, they want you to think those folks in Guantánamo were all "on the battlefield" to begin with -- versus being sold there by bounty hunters or neighbors with grievances -- when most of them couldn't be charged with anything after being held all those years. Then you're supposed to be afraid that a full 14% of them are going "back," when any reasonable person would wonder why that figure isn't much higher, given the mere fact of their years-long detainment. And that's before we get to the numerous folks who've long questioned the Pentagon's figures, whom the NYT either ignored or cited in passing. The NYT did a tiny bit of mopping up on the story in its online incarnation, but not much; FAIR still encourages you to contact Times public editor Clark Hoyt (either 212.556.7652 or public at nytimes dot com) and ask him to examine the way the Times handled the story.

In other news, I've read the speech by Judge Sotomayor that got Newt Gingrich's shorts in a bunch yesterday, and I agree with most lefties that he's taking That Sentence out of context, possibly even on purpose. And yet I also think Ms. Sotomayor could have said it better in the speech -- or, more to the point, written it better. I think her intended audience, a live group of listeners, would have understood the context (decisions involving race and sex discrimination, not all decisions) better than anyone who read the speech after-the-fact would. But people gotta be aware of what they say, and they also gotta be aware of how what they say is gonna look on the page. Just ask Joe Biden.

(I'll be out of town for a few days, so I won't post again until Tuesday, most likely. Please patronize the excellent blogs on my blogroll until then. Also, please patronize the excellent blogs not on my blogroll.)

almost not a new post.

I had a morning appointment, and I only have one action alert in my inbox (and it is a solid test of our devotion to the Constitution, I promise you), so I have little to say today.

Except this: I congratulate Sonya Sotomayor in becoming the first Hispanic-American ever nominated to the Supreme Court. I haven't yet read her opinions in very much detail, so I may still find her insufficiently liberal, but I do know that the "objections" I've heard so far are rubbish. Especially Greg Mankiw's (the second link). By Ford, she only had $30,000 in the bank at some points during the last four years! Yeah, that's going to resonate with a lot of people -- if I had $30,000 in the bank, I'd be halfway to Catholic sainthood. Plus, he thinks he's so much smarter than you -- his summary of his paper "The Savers/Spenders Theory of Fiscal Policy" makes me think a better title would have been "The Articulation of the Obvious Using Big Words as Weapons Against the Reader." I really hate that in a person.

Bush Mobb crony corporations still hate the troops, plus more Republican whining.

During 2007 and 2008, the Department of Defense gave $80 million in bonuses to Kellogg-Brown-Root -- a former subsidiary of Dick Cheney's old employer, Halliburton -- for electrical wiring contracts in Iraq. They must have done a great job to earn all that money, right? Well, not exactly -- the Senate found last week that at least 18 U.S. soldiers have died of electrocution in Iraq since 2003, including a decorated Green Beret who got fried taking a shower. So pretend you're Brit Hume and you don't think 18 deaths is all that impressive a number. Well, the Army hired a master electrician to review electrical work in Iraq during 2008, and he said he found bad wiring in "every" one of the thousands of buildings KBR wired in Iraq. KBR even rewired buildings with previously safe wiring and, guess what, made those buildings unsafe. It's a wonder more of our soldiers haven't died due to the negligence of Tha Bush Mobb's crony corporations. And, remember, they got $80 million in bonuses for screwing up! Last I looked, conservatism was not about rewarding bad work that kills people. CREDO helps you petition Secretary Gates to rescind the bonuses, initiate a criminal investigation, and suspend contracts with KBR or any Halliburton-related entities. It won't bring our dead loved ones back, but it'll save others.

Meanwhile, Gov. Jim Gibbons, Republican of Nevada, has refused to meet with President Obama during the latter's visit to Nevada because, get this, he's offended that Mr. Obama told corporations they couldn't "go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayer’s dime." Mr. Gibbons says Nevada has lost $100 million in convention and meeting-related revenue since Mr. Obama's remarks. He can't be serious, can he? He must realize that the recession-if-not-a-depression more likely causes folks to cancel their conventions in Sin City? No, he does not -- he blames Mr. Obama's criticisms of the unjustly rich who are living off taxpayer money, not the bad economic times, for the woes of his state. Why he thinks this is a winning strategy for his 2010 re-election run is beyond me. When are Republicans going to stop acting like little whiny brats? When they're down to 8 governorships and 12 Senate seats?

readings for Friday, May 22, 2009.

Citizens for Tax Justice's provides a short paper (only 11 pages!) describing ways to fund health care reform. I've long argued that the kind of "sacrifices" the pundit class always tries to push on us aren't necessary -- hell, I've argued that tax increases aren't necessary if we just have the will to stop handing out corporate welfare, and certainly when the pundits argue for a national sales tax (!) or a tax on benefits paid by employers (!!) or more "health" "savings" "accounts" (!!!) they're doing a bait-and-switch. But we could also, you know, start taxing the rich again. Raising the top rate on capital gains taxes, expanding the range of incomes taxed for Medicare and then creating a high-income rate for that, treating investment income like it's, you know, income and not something to which we hold the rest of the economy hostage -- those are just some of the things CTJ recommends, and that's before we get around to making the income tax more progressive again, which the CTJ report doesn't even include. Rick Santelli probably wouldn't like any of this, but Rick Santelli is so, like, February already.

Contrary to what I said yesterday, that Nancy Pelosi's story on her knowledge of Bush Mobb torture techniques hadn't "evolved," I now admit, after reviewing factcheck.org's article on the subject, that she has, at the very least, relied on a very lawyerly way of asserting that she didn't know about waterboarding in 2002. She heard about it a few months after a CIA briefing from "an aide," she said after the relevant CIA memos came out -- though these memos may not be entirely accurate, either, as Senator Rockefeller has raised objections and they've already been corrected in the face of some rather meticulous diary-keeping by former Senator Bob Graham. So Ms. Pelosi story has "evolved" slightly after all, and she sounds like she's lying, at the very least about not protesting torture even when it wouldn't have made a difference. With all that, I find that my main point from yesterday's third paragraph -- generally, that Old Media sucks, and specifically, that Howard Fineman sucks -- survives my incompetence.

Obviously, Congress is off for a few days, as are many-if-not-all of you, so I won't post again probably until after the holiday. "Thieves in the Temple" wishes all of you a happy Memorial Day weekend -- and remember, as I said a few years ago, that the Iraq/Afghanistan soldiers have not died in vain; their deaths remind us of the terrible price we pay as families and as citizens when we permit our leaders to lie and fearmonger us into war.

health care and IMF action, plus Howard Fineman sucks.

Progressive States Network is preparing a letter signed by state legislators to Mr. Obama and Congress urging them to pass comprehensive health care reform this year, and they can help you get your state legislators to sign, too. So what, you say? State legislators have been confronting serious health care problems for 15 years, whereas Max Baucus, for example, has confronted it for about six months. So they know the challenges a little better, and they're also considerably closer to their constituents than the Reps we send to Congress. Their word might be worth something, even to Max Baucus, who respects all viewpoints, even the ones expressed by the good folks the D.C. police summarily threw out of his roundtable meetings this month. Anyway, I think it's a good idea, and Progressive States is a good organization doing good work, so go ahead and use the link.

The Senate plans to give the International Monetary Fund (or IMF) $100 billion to spend any way it likes without any oversight or conditions attached by the U.S. The Senate seems to have a lot of practice at this, as evidenced by Mr. Bush's $700-billion-because-it's-a-big-number bailout for irresponsible banks playing a shell game economy. Sen. Brown (D-OH), at least, has authored an amendment (S.AMDT.1161, if you want to find it on thomas -- it'll be a few more clicks than usual) that would require the IMF to exempt "health care, education, food aid, and other critical safety net programs" from IMF policies that impose government spending limits or wage ceilings. That's a start, at least, and it's worth a phone call; the Capitol switchboard is 202.224.3121, or you can find your Senators' phone numbers using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page. You may also want to mention that $100 billion is a lot to be throwing around with so little debate -- especially to the IMF, which has a record of wrecking economies in developing nations. To the point where they're not really "developing" any longer, in fact.

And now, for the single stupidest piece of writing I've seen in months-if-not-years: Newsweek's Howard Fineman tells us that the Republicans are "begin(ning) to gain traction" on the Obama Administration with their national security-related attacks. Does he present one piece of evidence to back this claim? No, he does not -- not one poll on the issue, not even a conversation with Tom Friedman's cab driver. Just a "clever" lede ("OMFG! Rush-Newt-Cheney = RNC! ROTFLOL!!!!") and a lazy accounting of the week's events -- if Nancy Pelosi sticks to her story and the CIA sticks to theirs, then nobody's explanation has "evolv(ed)," let alone hers. Of course I know Mr. Fineman can't get good poll information this quickly -- that famous Democracy Corps poll, suggesting parity-at-least between Democrats and Republicans on national security issues, was taken well over a week ago, even if its results were released only two days ago. But that's the point: why write the story before you know anything? Why not, I don't know, go talk to somebody? About something else? Because he wants to be "first" with the story? Or because he wants to create the story? And to think Old Media wonders why it's dying.

UPDATE. The Progressive States contact tool (in the first paragraph) does take for-freakin'-ever to load, but it does eventually load. And by "eventually" I mean "within three or four minutes," which in the grand scheme of things isn't really that long. Also, a propos of nothing, the new Pet Shop Boys record is really great and all of you should buy it like right now if not sooner.

more alerts about corrupt corporations, plus bonus quagmire.

The Senate passed their watered-down version of the credit card reform bill yesterday; now the bill goes back to the House for what may be a difficult reconciliation process (since the House's bill was way better). The banks intend to make that process even more difficult, I'm told, by trumpeting how the new bill helps bad customers at the expense of good customers. That's the corporate way: divide worker against worker, citizen against citizen. Well, I'm happy to pay a little for the bad decisions of some of my fellow citizens just to get credit card corporations to do better by all of us. And, ah, these are the corporations who crashed our economy lecturing the rest of us about "responsibility" and "bad decisions." I'm all for creating a new circle of Hell for them. Consumers Union helps you contact your Rep. And the People's Email Network, which considers the Senate bill "totally phony," helps you argue for limits on interest rates, which current credit card reform legislation pointedly omits. Limiting interest rates is still a cause worth fighting for -- I've put plenty of anti-payday loan action alerts up over the years -- and Sen. Durbin says he'll bring the issue up again in separate legislation. I'll keep an eye out for that.

Meanwhile, climate change legislation has also been a huge disappointment. I was never a fan of cap-and-trade in the first place -- why not just regulate the damn emissions? That used to work, before corporate-owned legislators convinced everybody that the Easter Bunny, er, free market would do the job better. But now that Big Oil and Big Coal have had a chance to vet cap-and-trade legislation, it's gotten even worse. Cap-and-trade was supposed to raise revenues for the federal government, right? Then what's the point of giving away the pollution allowances to big corporations for nothing? Mr. Obama's budget, incidentally, did not give away pollution allowances; this is all on Congress's head. Public Citizen has the contact tool, which you can modify as necessary. Given all my feelings about cap-and-trade, I would have to modify it significantly. But we citizens are supposed to communicate our will to our Reps and Senators, not some watered-down version of our will that we think our Reps and Senators will accept. Otherwise Congress will keep pushing back against us.

Meanwhile, mechanical monsters continue to kill innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- I've made it sound like science fiction, but that's what unmanned drone planes do. The Senate will vote, possibly as early as today, to continue funding the Afghanistan war to the tune of $90 billion. I've avoided passing along any action alerts that would ameliorate this bill, because my stance is the same -- narrow the mission from "getting rid of the Taliban" to "get bin Laden," and do that with people on the ground who might have a chance at ingratiating themselves with the locals (and that means more intelligence agents and fewer soldiers). You would do best, in the absence of a perfect (or even pretty good) contact tool, to simply call your Senators using the tools in the upper left-hand corner and communicate your will to them as best you can. You may want to add that Mr. Obama has provided no exit strategy.

Finally, here's part 338 of "why newspapers are dying": the Washington Post, whose op-eds seem to get worse and worse, ran this monstrosity this past Saturday suggesting that newspapers can only survive if websites pay for indexing and linking to their work. And if Congress makes sharing "hot news" illegal unless ISPs pay for it. And if Congress eliminates media consolidation restrictions. And if Congress gives more tax cuts to big newspaper chains. And gives newspapers an antitrust exemption. Pimp, please. Guess what the Post forgot to tell you when they ran this piece of corporatist reactionary filth? Why, that its authors have represented large media firms like the Hearst Corporation, the Tribune Corporation, Clear Channel, the Fox Corporation, and the New York Times, all of whom would benefit from their suggestions more than newspaper consumers like you and I would. You'd think any reasonable person would call that bias, wouldn't you? I've named a bunch of ways newspapers can survive in this age, and here's another: stop being so damn corrupt.

UPDATE. I erred in saying the Public Citizen tool could be modified; I was unable to modify it in either Safari or Firefox. I've been able to modify past tools, so I don't understand the problem. Use your judgment in deciding whether to sign it -- opposing corporate efforts to gut the cap-and-trade bill is worthwhile, but is the cap-and-trade effort itself worthwhile? That's another matter.

ANOTHER UPDATE. In re paragraph 3: I got through to Sen. Casey (whose staffer was quite gracious), but couldn't get through to Sen. Specter (I was on hold for five minutes the first time, then got a busy signal after talking to Sen. Casey's office). Some things never change.

warning: contains actual similes and metaphors!

The ever-alert News Dissector, Danny Schechter, informs us that the Senate may vote on credit card reform legislation today -- and, as ever, Republican winged monkeys are trying to attach poison-pill legislation like barnacles to broadsides. Not that legislation permitting folks to carry weapons in public parks is a poison pill to me, but clearly the Republicans aim to destroy the bill with such an amendment, not help out gun owners. If Democrats were smart -- and I'm only convinced that their President is smart -- they would call the Republicans' bluff and pass the bill with the irrelevant anti-gun control amendment intact, and thus start eroding one of the Republicans' last bastions of irrational support. Seriously, though, as a citizen, I don't approve of attaching irrelevant amendments to legislation. Haters do that. You can use the tools in the upper left-hand corner to call your Senator and tell them that if you like -- and to pass the damn bill already, because it's better than what we've got.

Public Citizen helps you support the TRADE Act, a Sherrod Brown/Mike Michaud production which (as I suspected last week) has not yet been reintroduced in this Congress. The TRADE Act had 74 House co-sponsors (and six Senate co-sponsors) last year; seems to me we can do better than that, especially since "free" trade elicits disapproval from both liberals and conservatives (and, even, from both Democrats and Republicans). Unlike most "free" trade agreements, which protect corporations über alles, the TRADE Act would protect community health, workers' rights, and the environment -- all of which "free" trade wrecks faster than Godzilla wrecks Tokyo. (Actually, comparing "free" trade to Godzilla is insulting to Godzilla, especially during his heroic period from the mid-'60s to the early '70s, but you get my drift.)

Meanwhile, you may not have noticed that the United Auto Workers will likely own well over half of Chrysler very soon, a fairly unprecedented arrangement in American economic history. But Sean Safford at orgtheory.net advises us that this may not be as great a boon to workers as it sounds. You may already sense that the union might have some trouble adapting to a more top-down role -- any work-related issue could pit worker against worker in a far more urgent sense than we as workers currently grasp. But Mr. Safford also reminds us that if Chrysler goes down, the UAW will go down with it -- and that means the $80 billion-plus retiree-benefit program (which used to be the corporation's responsibility, but has been the UAW's since 2007) will also go down with it. It's at the very best a huge risk for the UAW, and at the very worst a secret effort by Mr. Obama to rid America of one of its most powerful unions. In other news, I'm less hopeful about the utility of so-called "soft power" than Mr. Safford, obviously, and even given the problems with card-check (mainly, that it won't solve every problem), I'll keep fighting for the Employee Free Choice Act. (By the way, the comments are exceptional -- I spotted just one uninformed comment, easily dispatched by the author, and the rest are jam-packed with actual legal expertise, historical analysis, good writing, even humility when called for. Dick Polman or Will Bunch should be so lucky.)

but he's gay!

The People's Email Network still helps you call for a special prosecutor for matters of Bush Mobb-era torture. Given that Mr. Obama has reversed himself on releasing "not particularly sensational" photos depicting detainee torture, and given that NBC hack David Gregory "believes" torture is trouble for both parties, versus the party that actually ruled America while the torture took place, I actually want a special prosecutor even more than I did this time last week. The "liberal" President and the "liberal" media have a habit of provoking me -- though not as much, admittedly, as the suspicious death of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, tortured specifically to reveal "evidence" of Hussein/al-Qaeda "ties."

The impending discharge of Army Lt. (and Arabic linguist) Dan Choi for his homosexuality has inspired a pair of hilarious Daily Show analyses, as well as this CREDO action alert demanding, for the umpteenth time, that the government repeal don't-ask-don't-tell and let gays serve in the damn armed forces already. The reactionaries that get "liberal" media attention whenever they stomp their feet are no doubt at the ready to ask why, if Lt. Choi believes "lies poison a unit," he waited ten years to come out. I would advise those fools to try walking a yard in a soldier's shoes, or a gay soldier's shoes -- or anyone's shoes other than their own, for that matter.

Speaking of reactionary attempts to make bigotry sound enlightened, the always-helpful RNC Chair Michael Steele now advises Republicans to oppose gay marriage on the grounds that it would hurt small businesses. "Now all of a sudden I've got someone who wasn't a spouse before, that I had no responsibility for, who is now getting claimed as a spouse that I now have financial responsibility for," Mr. Steele says. "So how do I pay for that? Who pays for that? You just cost me money." It must have sounded better live than it reads on the page. In any case, he seems to have no idea that we could just as easily say that heterosexual marriages hurt small businesses, and thus Republicans prove Noam Chomsky's axiom that corporations are innately anti-family. Seriously, who thinks this argument is a get-out-of-permanent-minority-status card for Republicans? Say gay marriage hurts small businesses to 100 live-and-let-live types and 99 will still think you're just a bigot. I just hope the number who'd also think you really don't care about small businesses either would come anywhere close to that.

detain this!

President Obama has decided not to release photos depicting American personnel abusing detainees -- perhaps not coincidentally after a firestorm of protest from reactionaries. Mind you, the 2nd Circuit Court ordered the release of these photos -- which are either relatively tame or especially repugnant, depending on the source -- so the Obama Administration really has no room to object. The ACLU helps you remind the Obama Administration of what it must do. I thought this was all about transparency and accountability, anyway. That's what Mr. Obama said, at least.

Mr. Obama has reversed himself in one other area as well -- "free" trade. He's promised to review NAFTA, and hasn't done that, and worse, he's been pushing "free" trade agreements with Panama and Columbia left over from the Bush Administration (sic). I've told you more than enough times that Panama is Destination One for setting up an offshore company in a filing cabinet so it doesn't have to pay its share of taxes. The defeat-thus-far of the Columbia agreement is one of the few things of which this Democratic Congress can be proud (though they couldn't do it without their fellow Republican anti-"free" traders). Anyway, NETWORK, a National Catholic Social Justice Lobby, helps you advocate not merely for the defeat of current "free"-trade agreements, but for the passage of a viable alternative, the TRADE Act, a production of Rep. Michaud (D-ME) and Sen. Brown (D-OH). (I've described the TRADE Act here before; Messrs. Brown and Michaud introduced the bill in the last Congress, but haven't in this one, as far as I can determine.)

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) seeks comments regarding the storage of nuclear waste, and the Union for Concerned Scientists helps you leave said comments. UCS recommends you ask that the NRC require more spent nuclear fuel rods be stored in "dry casks," which are made of steel and concrete, and also that the NRC require said dry casks to be tougher than they are now. Currently spent rods spend a significant amount of time in wet pools, which reduces radiation and heat in the rods, but also makes them a) more volatile and b) more easily available to any terrorist who can get to them, and the spent rods could migrate to the more secure dry casks faster than they currently do. Perhaps not incidentally, the NRC also expects that the U.S. will run out of wet pool capacity around 2015. But it's nice to know that some folks actually do care about actually reducing the threat of a terrorist attack, isn't it? Not like the reactionaries who've been spending all week trying to implicate Nancy Pelosi in Mr. Bush's torture program. Ha ha ha! They think that because I'm a liberal, I'll shut up about torture now that Ms. Pelosi has been linked to waterboarding! How many times must I tell these pimps! My team is America, not the Democrats. Their team is not America, but the Republicans. And that team could get whupped by the 9-and-73ers.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: American Rights at Work would like you to put the heat on Arlen Specter (D?R?-PA) to remember that he was once a co-sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act. You'll have to watch a 30-second ad which is, at best, a necessary evil, and I don't endorse the idea that "Obama and Biden" stand with "working families" necessarily, but the Employee Free Choice Act will still help workers do better for themselves, and Sen. Specter's support is, unfortunately, crucial to getting it passed. You might also mention that the economy's getting better, and thus he can "revisit" his position as he said he'd do when he turned against the EFCA. You don't have to mention that since he turned against the EFCA he became a Democrat, because that's not particularly important. Judging by his recent votes, it's certainly not particularly important to him.

UPDATE. Minor spelling errors corrected in the above.

Revenge of the Crusher!

Sit back: the Philadelphia Inquirer, whose owner recently declared bankruptcy, has hired former Bush Mobb legal counsel John Yoo -- who famously said in 2006 that "no treaty" could prevent a President from crushing a baby's testicles in an attempt to get actionable intelligence -- to write a monthly column. For Inquirer Editorial Page Editor Harold Jackson, the hiring represents yet another attempt to deflect charges of "liberal bias." But for Philadelphia Media Holdings CEO Brian Tierney, it's apparently all about The Crusher being a Philadelphian, going to the same Delaware County private K-12 school as Mr. Tierney, being "a very, very bright guy," and being on the liberal Berkeley faculty. Like how Mr. Tierney sneaks the fact they went to the same school in there, like it's affirmative action for the rich and connected? (At the risk of piling on: of course you haven't gotten much mail about The Crusher lately, Mr. Tierney, because you only just announced his hiring, and only in a line at the end of his latest column. Gosh, how stupid do you think we all are?) (And at the risk of piling on further: no one takes away The Crusher's right to free speech, but no one has an inalienable right to be paid for said speech, either. I don't get paid for writing this blog -- if I did, I fear it would corrupt me.) Anyway, Hullabaloo suggests you submit anything you've written about torture, ever, to the Inquirer as an op-ed; the post links to the Inquirer's own instructions for doing so. And I've got one more thing to say to the Inquirer: I don't hate conservative op-ed writers, I hate bad op-ed writers. If they're so desperate to hire conservatives, they might try asking Paul Craig Roberts, who is also at Berkeley, though I doubt very much he speaks to The Crusher. Of course, Mr. Roberts is against the Iraq War, against "free" trade, against torture, against warrantless wiretapping, and against the bailout, so maybe he doesn't rate as a "conservative" to the Inquirer board -- despite being, you know, the father of Reaganomics.

Meanwhile, Firedoglake blogger Christy Hardin Smith would like you to call five crucial Senators in order to push along a vote on the nomination of Dawn Johnsen to the Office of Legal Counsel. I have supported Ms. Johnsen's nomination on the basis of her fervent and righteous opposition to Bush Mobb legal positions, including those of The Crusher; if she were pro-life instead of pro-choice, I'd still support her. Wasn't Mr. Bush complaining constantly during his second term that you just couldn't get good people into government? Well, he was talking about specific bad people who got hounded out of government by their own incompetence, but it does often seem you just can't get good people into government, and Mr. Reid's stalling on a vote on Ms. Johnsen sure does seem like that. I do not endorse Ms. Smith's point that the Democratic leadership should be twisting more arms, because the Democratic Party's infighting is none of my concern as a citizen. I only endorse the point that Ms. Johnsen would be a good OLC head, and that calling Sens. Reid, Durbin, Schumer, Leahy, and Bayh would help get her in. Calling Sens. Nelson of Nebraska and Specter of Pennsylvania would probably also help; you can find contact info for them using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page.

UPDATE. Maybe the Inquirer could try getting former Powell Chief of Staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson as a columnist. But, nah, he's too conservative for them. And by "conservative" I mean "conservative," not "the reactionary mishmash of militarism, nativism, corporatism, and religious extremism that characterizes most so-called conservatives today."

Take Yer Damn Medicine!

By now you've all heard how Senate hearings on health care systematically exclude single-payer advocates, though some form of government-insured care is the choice of the majority of Americans in every poll I've ever seen. Sadly, Mr. Obama seems to be trying to be "bipartisan" or "post-partisan" or "nice" or whatever about it, accepting health care corporations' voluntary pledge to cut the growth of health care costs by 1.5 percentage points every year. Not cut costs, mind you -- but the growth of costs, which reminds me a bit of Mr. Bush's pledge to cut the increase in greenhouse gases, not the total amount of greenhouse gases. And, Mr. President? "Voluntary" agreements are so, like, 2002. We can do better than that. True Majority helps you write a letter to the editor about single-payer health care. Well, they say a "public option," but I say no more "options" for corporations. If you're stuck for stuff to say, Progressive States can help you, as they describe how well already-existing public plans work at the state level.

Meanwhile, the Senate will consider giving $100 billion to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) without, and stop me if you've heard this one before, very much debate or adequate oversight of what the IMF decides to do with the money. No one wants to hurt developing nations, but you ought to be suspicious when lawmakers want something done superfast. And a lot of times "hurting developing nations" is exactly what the IMF does -- as you probably know if you saw the film Life and Debt, which described, among other things, how the IMF ruined the banana and milk industries in Jamaica in the name of participation in a global economy. The Senate Appropriations Committee will likely move on this legislation tomorrow, so RESULTS helps you call your Senators. They'll never see it coming.

Finally, in case you thought "Thieves in the Temple" was all about pointing out why newspapers suck and not about pointing out what newspapers could do to stop sucking (you know, besides doing a better job reporting the news), I submit for your approval this Free Press report describing strategies newspapers might employ to survive. Newspapers aren't going to like a lot of these strategies, particularly the ones labeled "become non-profit." But maybe newspapers shouldn't be profitable ventures -- certainly they can't handle it, if the last twenty-plus years or so are any indication. And I didn't like my medicine when I was a kid either (that yellow Triaminic? Yuckasaurus!) and I turned out OK.

I Got Yer Roundtable Right Here!

The Senate holds its third and final "roundtable" on health care reform, meaning there'll be more demonstrations for you to watch on youtube later on today. Single-payer demonstrators are gathering around the Dirksen building in D.C. as we speak; physicians are in white coats, everyone else is in black. Tomorrow, the California Nurses Association will lead a "Single-Payer Solidarity Rally" in D.C. March will begin at the Washington Court Hotel at about 11.45 am, and will proceed to the Upper Senate Park near the Union Station Metro stop. The rally should go on for two hours. Public Citizen provides more info on the above events. Oh, and that individual on May 5 who began to wonder aloud whether anyone in the audience didn't come there to protest? Apparently, it was Senator Kerry. I didn't recognize his voice. I must have blocked out that entire period of my life.

USPIRG still provides a petition endorsing a "Credit Card Bill of Rights." A strong credit card reform bill passed the House by a supermajority, and the President even went out of his way to tell Jay Leno that he supports credit card reform, but as Sen. Durbin said not too long ago, "the bankers own the place," and without our protests all Senators will sound like Arlen Specter before too long. According to USPIRG's chief consumer advocate Ed Mierzwinski, banks are going hog-wild on all the practices that will be banned by credit card reform bills already in the offering. Think they won't change the due date on your credit card bill just so they can trigger late fees and higher interest rates? They will. But, to paraphrase a famous philosopher: if money is all they want, then money is all they'll get. One thing I know for sure: no child of mine is ever going to work for a credit card company. Or a bank. Or Senator Baucus.

Meanwhile, I see the D.C. private school voucher program isn't dead yet. I thought it was dead. What are the problems with vouchers again? Roll call! Doesn't pay an entire tuition bill! Doesn't guarantee admission to a private school! Siphons off valuable money that could be used to make the public school system better! Doesn't provide enough non-religious private school alternatives! And we can't forget: doesn't work (as even the Bush Mobb Department of Education concluded)! Yet the remaining Republican Senators want to keep this thing going. I thought being conservative meant sticking with what works, not merely pandering to religious rageheads. Americans United for the Separation of Church and State provide a) more information and b) a contact tool telling your Senators you oppose school voucher programs.

Finally, I'm somewhat amused to discover that banks successfully lobbied to make the Obama Administration's "stress tests" a bit easier to pass. What leaped to mind when I read that? The revelation that Tha Bush Mobb rigged its missile shield tests so that that the program would pass them -- and, true to Bush Mobb form, it didn't do well even under easier conditions. The banks seemed to perform better in these easier stress tests, but of course they would, with a competent President running the show. That's not a complement to the banks or to the President. And, you know, you can almost imagine what a missile shield test would be like -- it would contain, you know, elements of reality in it. But banks already operate in an unreal economy; how, exactly, do you test unreality? The "stress test" sounds to me like just another way to mystify the public. To say the least.

UPDATE. I couldn't even sign the AU voucher's letter; for some reason it pointed me to a "report violation of church and state" page every time I tried. How offensive. You can always use the info above in a call to your Senator, of course; tools toward that end are, as always, in the upper left-hand corner of this page.

When Did This Stop Being America?

The Justice Department apparently won't prosecute the authors of the "torture memos," though the lawyers in question (one of whom is now a federal judge) may suffer at the hands of their state bars. And Bush Mobb poobahs are, as we speak, lobbying the Obama Administration to water down the Justice Department's report further. They cite, predictably, the "impossibility" of getting "candid advice" from lawyers if they fear prosecution, though lawyers are, I think, supposed to be afraid of what will happen to them if they advise their clients to do illegal things. Anyway, the ACLU helps you write a letter-to-the-editor demanding that we respect the rule of law in these matters.

Last month, the EPA formally declared carbon dioxide and five other "greenhouse" gases to be pollutants endangering public health and welfare -- which declaration gives the EPA the authority to regulate said gases. However, the EPA has to solicit public comments first, and the industries that stand to lose the most from regulation of heat-trapping gases -- the oil and coal industries -- have mobilized to defeat the EPA's effort. My guess is that the oil and coal industries won't recruit very many good citizens to declare their unbounded enthusiasm for carbon dioxide, but they can get a lot of their paid flunkies to wear mustaches, so to speak, and leave a lot of comments pretending to support pro-oil and pro-coal policies. So CREDO helps you counter them with your own comment supporting the regulation of these six gases. Of course, the EPA could then decide to issue weak, incremental regulations which do little to protect the air we all breathe -- but they'll need public comments on those regulations, too, and we'll be there for that.

Meanwhile, the People's Email Network continues to provide a contact tool with which you may call for a national, Canadian-style, single-payer system of national health insurance. The PEN also provides a helpful video from Real News, which shows events from the May 5 meeting in which the police eject one single-payer health-care advocate after another from the room. Senator Baucus also bangs his gavel a lot in the video, and even jokes that they "need more police." Ha ha ha! It's so funny when American citizens come to protest a Senate hearing that excludes their viewpoints! It's not like these citizens were flat-earthers, either -- single-payer health care is nowhere near as unpopular with the people as it is with the corporations, as evidenced about 3:40 in, when someone asks "is there anybody in the audience who didn't come to --" ("complain about single-payer health care," presumably, given the uneasy laughter that immediately followed). The video has other goodies, as well -- like when Senator Bunning fudges the facts on tax rates in other countries.

In other news, I find myself compelled to defend Michael Savage. Mr. Savage apparently just found he can't travel to England, because England bans folks from entering their country if said folks have "unacceptable behavior, including animal rights extremists, right-to-life, homophobe and far-right extremists, as well as those who advocate hatred and violence in support of their religious beliefs," in the unwieldy words of one government official. Michael Savage is a vile, foul-mouthed jerk who's never right about anything, but vile, foul-mouthed jerks who are never right about anything have the same rights as the rest of us, and the best way to deal with them (short of radically tougher laws preventing media consolidation, for example) is to shine light on their shameful activities and boycott their advertisers. (Also, n.b. that even the Council for American-Islamic Relations, who've battled Mr. Savage in court, came to his defense.)

Penny Rants for Sunday, May 10, 2009.

Frank Luntz wrote a memo (dutifully transcribed in part by the Politico's Mike Allen) advising Republicans on how to take on "socialized medicine," and Republicans on the Hill have begun to deploy its memes. Though no one's ever gone broke underestimating the incompetence of Democrats, I think the Republicans will fail if they take his advice. Not because anyone on the right offers better advice, but because Mr. Luntz's little rhetorical jewels have nothing to do with any actual American's experience of health care. He's going to have Republicans try to convince us they're worried about government bureaucrats "setting standards of care," "making people stand in line," and "denying treatment"? Hello? HMO bureaucrats do all of that now. And anyone who's tried to solve any of their serious health problems knows that in their bones. Would it be piling on to mention that Mr. Luntz urges Republicans to offer their own vision for health care, but doesn't suggest what that vision might be?

Meanwhile, right-wing troglodytes claim that the Employee Free Choice Act would lead to intimidation of workers by unions. These same folk turn a blind eye to intimidation of workers by corporations -- or they think that's just the free market working its magic. But, as Nathan Newman at Progressive States suggests, "intimidation by unions" hardly exists. In the academy I believe they would call it a chimera. A study by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign concerning card-check in Illinois found that between 2003 and 2009, over 20,000 public sector workers used card-check to form unions, and how many complaints of "union coercion" were filed during that time? One. And the state Labor Relations Board dismissed that complaint as meritless. Right-wingers would do well to prove that "union intimidation" actually exists with facts, and not stories they heard from their now-dead uncles.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Union for Concerned Scientists finds that genetically-engineered crops don't actually make substantially more food. Traditional methods of breeding and agriculture still work best, the report essentially says, which sounds, if I may say so, awfully conservative. So why do today's nominal "conservatives" argue for genetically-engineered crops? I'd hate to think it's because there's money in it. You want to know why people go hungry? Think back to British subjects eating Ethiopian apples in the mid-'80s while Ethiopians starved and you'll have the answer: businesses grow food to be sold, not eaten. The more we take control over our food -- through joining co-ops, patronizing local/small/organic growers, growing our own food, and other tactics -- the fewer hungry people we'll have. And, if I may dare to sound conservative again, we've got to get government out of our way in these matters -- which is exactly the same as saying we've got to pry our government from the grip of big agribusiness.

Penny Rants for Saturday, May 9, 2009: Special "2010 Republican Senate Election Follies" Issue!

Last week I predicted Arlen Specter would rout Pat Toomey in 2010, but since then he's looked like someone doing his damndest to lose. You can almost account for his complete unwillingness to vote with his new party, because he's still trying to convince everyone he's "independent." But you can't account for "I never said I'd be a loyal Democrat," instead of "I never said I'd be a lockstep Democrat," which he would have said if he were at the top of his game. And here's what I would have had him say about his Norm Coleman remark: "I was responding to a tongue-in-cheek question about the absence of Jewish Republicans in the Senate -- I was one a minute ago, so I can joke about it -- and so I said 'they should do the right thing and make Norm Coleman Senator.' I meant it to be taken lightly, as I meant much of the interview to be taken lightly, but obviously I should have realized how that would sound to other people, and I'm sorry I didn't, and I won't do anything like that again." Not I have to get used to my new teammates. In Pennsylvania, they've always said a nuclear holocaust would kill everyone except cockroaches and Arlen Specter. I think that's still true about cockroaches.

Our Arlen's not the only Senator up in 2010 with problems, though -- it's been worse than a soap opera around Jim Bunning in Kentucky. On April 30, Mr. Bunning apparently encouraged Kentucky GOP Secretary of State Trey Grayson to run for the Republican Senate nomination, and since Mr. Grayson has said he won't run against Mr. Bunning in a primary, the GOP has decided this means Mr. Bunning will retire. Yet Mr. Bunning has since consistently told reporters he's not retiring -- plus he's told anyone who wants to listen that the state of the Republican caucus in the Senate is all Mitch McConnell's fault, about which he's (at most) a little more than half-right, since those first six losses in 2006 were on Bill Frist's watch. Many probably blame Mr. Bunning for his predicament -- it wouldn't be the first time he's behaved oddly during a re-election campaign -- but I'm inclined to think the Party is trying to embarrass him out of the race. Would it be unbelievable that Mr. Bunning said to Mr. Grayson go ahead, run against me, it's a free country, and I'll pound you into sand and then Republican operatives trumpeted that to the press as the old man's "blessing"? Or even, as Mr. Bunning claims, that he simply encouraged Mr. Grayson to start an exploratory committee because it would help him in future statewide races? Bleak as it seems for the former Phillies ace, you can't count out an old workhorse, no matter how disengaged he seems -- especially one who voted against the bailout and who springs to life whenever he grills someone from the Federal Reserve. Possibly the whole saga might get cleared up tonight, at the annual Kentucky GOP Lincoln Day Dinner. I bet not, though.

Meanwhile, Sen. Thune calls a gay Supreme Court candidate "a bridge too far." Before Mr. Thune's remark, I had not heard any scuttlebutt about Mr. Obama having any inclination, or being under any pressure, to nominate a gay candidate, and I still haven't. So what was Mr. Thune thinking? You know, besides "I hope Rep. Sandlin doesn't run against me in 2010"? He was thinking "I'll stand up for my 'base' and get credit for keeping a (expletive) off the Court." He might even have been thinking "I'll see if I can make Jeff Sessions look good today," and behold! The Artist Formerly Known as Jefferson Beauregard Sessions promptly declared that homosexuality wouldn't be a deal-breaker in a Supreme Court nominee. (Later, of course, he walked that statement back.) Here's what Mr. Thune wasn't thinking, though: that Mr. Obama can now get away with nominating someone a little more liberal than he might have done before, as long as he or she isn't gay. Here's what else he wasn't thinking: like the sand under your feet in an undertow, his "base" is shrinking.

UPDATE. As expected, Mr. Bunning restated his desire to run again in 2010 at the Lincoln Day Dinner.

It's Actual Bipartisanship Friday!

Despite all your phone calls and letters to your Congressfolk -- many of whom, on both ends of the political spectrum, already support you -- Tha Bush Mobb's leftover Panama "free" trade deal (or PFTA) (or PFFFTA!) isn't dead yet. You remember PFFFTA!, right? It would give handouts and unwarranted tax breaks to banks and big corporations, and you'd be paying for it with your taxes. Inexplicably, the Administration wants a vote on this monstrosity by Memorial Day, so now Public Citizen provides a letter-to-the-editor tool with which you may express your opposition. You'll probably find a lot of opposition to a PFFFTA! among your fellow newspaper-reading citizens, too, regardless of their ideological stripe. You would think, in a democracy, that when such a vast number of folks oppose something, that something wouldn't happen. Should we try a different tack? Should we adopt the tactics of the right-wing elite, and stomp our feet and whine like brats until we get what we want? No, of course not. We're better than that.

Reps. McGovern (D-MA) and Lundgren (R-CA) have introduced H.R. 278, the Global Securities Priorities Resolution, which calls for the reduction of U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals to 1,000 warheads each. The money saved through said reductions would a) extend the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which aims to dismantle nukes and nuke materials in former Soviet Union states and elsewhere and b) fund international food and nutrition efforts, such as the McGovern-Dole program. Other co-sponsors of H.R. 278 include Reps. Dreier (R-CA), Moore (D-WI), and Moran (D-VA). Sensing a trend here with all these names? This is what actual bipartisanship looks like, gang -- not the let's-pull-together-to-give-right-wing-crybabies-everything-they-want "bipartisanship" that "liberal" media elites seem to prefer. Council for a Livable World helps you ask your member of Congress to support H.R. 278.

Speaking of issues left and right agree upon frequently, Sen. Kerry (D-MA) fired a pre-emptive strike Wednesday against the next pro-media consolidation argument -- that argument being that only relaxed media cross-ownership rules will save newspapers. In other words, let newspapers own TV stations and ISPs, or they'll die. So die already! But I wish Mr. Kerry, devout an opponent of media consolidation as he's been, would show a little more subtlety on the "technology" issue. I maintain that the problem with newspapers (which people still enjoy reading, especially those multitudinous poor people who don't have broadband) isn't the "new technology," but the old technology's mammon-worship -- the more newspapers become "businesses," the more they crave profit, the worse their news-gathering gets, and the less useful they become to the folks who need them. Newspapers will die, in other words, because they suck, not because the internet is great.

I Got Yer Disruption of Congress Right Here!

USPIRG provides a petition demanding credit card reform. You may recall the Consumers Union-provided tool for supporting S. 414; the USPIRG petition helps you declare support for a set of principles, rather than specific legislation. I gather USPIRG isn't entirely happy with S. 414 (which has been watered down a bit lately), or prefers the House bill which passed by a ridiculously large margin, and I don't blame them for either of those things. But you know what this means? You can go ahead and support both without worrying about your Senator's staffer going sigh, it's this guy again, he called last week. The Senate may vote next week, so get busy.

Meanwhile, remember when I said there might be a demonstration outside the May 5 roundtable discussion on health care led by Sen. Baucus? Well, there sure was -- eight demonstrators asked that Congress consider single-payer health care, and were promptly arrested and charged with, dig this, "disruption of Congress." I didn't know it was a crime to petition for the redress of grievances as the First Amendment expressly permits. I didn't know it was a crime to go against the wishes of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and the Heritage Foundation, all of whom were also at the meeting and none of whom were arrested for "disruption of Congress." We the people "disrupt" Congress for good reason -- they screw us approximately every time we draw breath. The Senate Finance Committee will hold another roundtable on May 14, so there'll be another chance for us to make our mark.

"It's Bigger on the Inside."

Pennsylvania residents, take note: on April 30, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out the state's ban on campaign contributions from the gaming industry. Given that Pennsylvania doesn't limit campaign contributions generally, the Court probably ruled correctly, but that doesn't solve our problem: namely, that special interests can buy access and influence to state politicians and thus shut out the concerns of ordinary citizens like you and I. So Common Cause helps you advocate for campaign contribution limits. Apparently state Rep. Dave Levdansky plans to introduce a bill that would limit campaign contributions to candidates for most-if-not-all statewide offices. More details on that bill as they arrive.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg News reports on a Cayman Islands building that is the official address for, get this, almost 19,000 American corporations. How do they all fit in there? The business that actually lives there, a law firm named Maples and Calder, instructs us that businesses don't "live" there out of a desire not to pay taxes, but they don't deny that corporations "living" there pay fewer taxes. Spokeshack Charles Jennings says corporations "live" there "in order to raise capital and conduct global business." See, there's that "we have to compete globally" thing again. Always corporations take us hostage! American corporations need to serve American communities. We can discuss this again if-and-when we ever have an official one-world government.

Et Cetera, Et Cetera, Et Cetera.

Are banksters winning the fight against Mr. Obama, or is Mr. Obama playing a double game against them? Well, as light appears as both wave and particle, et cetera. As citizens, of course, we must concern ourselves with action, and S.414, which would reform the credit card industry, may well die a sad death without our action. Thus Consumers Union helps you call your Senators and then report to them how the call went. You may want to note to your Senator that the bill won't go into effect until nine months after its enactment. I can think of two ways to play that: a) if your Senator is a co-sponsor, demand that the bill goes into effect immediately upon enactment; b) if your Senator is a right-wing nutjob, remind him/her that it doesn't take effect for nine months and no more concessions need be made to them. You do not need to call your Senator a "right-wing nutjob" while you're on the phone with his/her staffer.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama has declared, again, his desire to close off-shore corporate tax havens (a desire incorporated into the budget Congress just passed), but corporations keep fighting it, saying they ought to continue paying just the taxes they owe to the country they do business in, a right not currently enjoyed by U.S. citizens working abroad. Besides, there's a difference between paying taxes for doing business in a country and stashing your country in some P.O. box in some foreign country where you don't actually do any business except avoid paying your taxes. I'm also not convinced that corporations need the tax breaks to compete with other corporations in other countries -- the only great economies in history, contrary to what you may have heard, were protectionist economies whose companies stayed home and tended more closely to the needs of its consumers at home. True Majority helps you demand that Congress resist corporate pressure to continue to permit off-shore tax havens. Now I'm no Democrat apologist, but during Mr. Bush's first term, the Democrats did try to shut down off-shore corporate tax havens, but the Republicans shut them down. It was that simple. You know what that means? It means that with their 18-plus seat margin in the Senate, their 70-plus seat margin in the House, and their crucial one-seat margin in the Oval Office, they really have no excuses now.

Foggy Notion.

The Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Sen. Baucus, will hold roundtable discussions on health care on May 5 and May 14, and apparently will continue Congress's longstanding practice of inviting corporate health care supporters and shutting out single-payer supporters. Public Citizen helps you demand better. They provide a list of 13 Democratic Senators on the Finance Committee to call -- I guess they've given up on the Republicans -- but you can find the full list here, though you'll have to click through to individual Senator's websites to get contact info. If you're stuck for things to say to said Senators, Public Citizen also provides this handy info sheet about single-payer health care. Public Citizen would like you to call said Senators only if they're from your state, and if none listed are from your state, call Sen. Baucus. There may also be protests outside the meetings; more details about that as they arrive.

H.R. 1147, the Local Community Radio Act, now has 43 co-sponsors in the House, including nine Republicans. The bill hasn't moved out of committee, though, so Free Press helps you encourage your Rep to be a cosponsor. Wonder why low-power FM has such broad bipartisan support, from Maurice Hinchey to Ron Paul? Because conservatives traditionally believe that the smallest communities ought to have the most power, and that cookie-cutter corporate radio stations deny them that power. Cookie-cutter corporate radio stations don't give a hoot about local news, local affairs, diverse local populations -- but smaller radio stations do. And hell, Republicans do act conservative (as opposed to corporatist, militarist, or fundamentalist) every once in a while. I'm always glad when they do.

Planned Parenthood still encourages you to support Dawn Johnsen for assistant Attorney General in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel. But frankly, my support for Ms. Johnsen has little to do with her pro-choiceness -- if she were a vocal critic of Tha Bush Mobb's torturous torture rationalizations and just happened to be pro-life, I'd still support her. As it is, she's a vocal critic of Tha Bush Mobb's torturous torture rationalizations who just happens to be vocally pro-choice, and so Republicans have decided to stall her nomination with the little power they have left. I wonder how many actual conservatives really get excited about these Republican machinations. I know how the reactionaries feel, but they're not the majority.

UPDATE. I had to delete the two yahoo.com-related "find your Congressfolk" tools, as they appear to be broken. Also, I've been tweaking the blog's appearance somewhat. Please bear with me on that.

penny rants for the day of May 3, 2009.

Didn't I say that someone would use Rasmussen's brand-new-just-for-Obama poll metric to delude his right-wing followers? Why, none other than Bill O'Reilly did on Thursday. Did Mr. O'Reilly really cite the "strongly approve" and "strongly disapprove" numbers, which were fairly even, in order to contend that Americans are "divided on the job deal"? Yes, indeed he did. And did he mention that Rasmussen figures Mr. Obama's total approval ratings at around 55 percent, compared with total approval ratings between 35 and 38 for Mr. Bush in 2007 and 2008? No, he did not. It's harder to suggest Americans are "divided on the job deal" (so to speak) if you cite the total approval ratings -- and if other outlets, not incidentally, generally have Mr. Obama's total approval ratings 10 points higher than Rasmussen does. Mr. O'Reilly's overall point, apparently, is that not enough Americans understand that Mr. Obama is a liberal. "There's nothing wrong with having a liberal belief system," Mr. O'Reilly says -- but if that's true, why croak out all those paragraphs about it?

Walter Shapiro suggests that Mr. Obama has positioned himself as "the first anti-cable-news president." I've noticed Mr. Obama's occasional dissing of "cable chatter" too, and praise the Lord that he does it! For cable TV is a cancer on our political discourse, and richly deserves the death currently being suffered by newspapers. I find two points of disagreement with Mr. Shapiro, however. Mr. Shapiro seems to think it's a bit risky (he says "against the grain") to take on a medium "that 40 percent of voters say they watch regularly." Well, 40 percent only wins elections in Europe. Second, he lets a Pew pollster posit a false dichotomy between Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow. Cable TV has no "liberal Sean Hannity" -- Rachel Maddow, as anyone who's watched her knows, is a lot more balanced, a lot more civil, a lot more useful, and a lot more fun than Sean Hannity, who has exasperated even Ron Paul with his rudeness.

Finally, former Bills QB/U.S. House Rep/VP nominee Jack Kemp died at the age of 73 yesterday. I know that Ronald Reagan was the star in the conservative firmament after Mr. Goldwater's defeat in 1964, but the Republicans would have done better with a President Kemp -- Mr. Kemp never strayed from his message that supply-side economics is good for the poor, and Mr. Reagan's "big government is the problem" message always sounded, frankly, sour by comparison. Mr. Kemp's continued support for cutting all-taxes-everywhere-all-the-time has been a persistent annoyance, but I think he was as disturbed by Tha Bush Mobb as anyone else: I read his columns about Iraq during the winter of 2002-2003 and I sensed a man frustrated with Mr. Bush's aims and too afraid or too loyal to come out and speak to it. Anyway, Godspeed, Mr. Kemp. Maybe we'll get a print-this-when-I'm-dead book from him, like we got from Jerry Ford.

readings for the day of May 3, 2009.

The FactCheck Wire, "faster than the speed of spin" according to its subhead and we can only hope, provides a helpful guide refuting misconceptions about swine flu, which has infected some 226 Americans (as of 11 a.m. today). Long story short: you don't get it from eating pork, you can still travel though you ought not go to Mexico (or anywhere if you're already sick), this strain of swine flu may be new but swine flu isn't, we don't know that H1N1 will be unusually dangerous (indeed, some 36,000 folks die every year from seasonal flu outbreaks), Barack Obama doesn't have it, and illegal immigrants almost certainly didn't bring it. If you like, you can also get to the CDC's swine flu FAQ page from there, or, er, from the link in the previous clause. Whichever.

Just in time for David Souter's retirement Media Matters provides us with a brief list of right-wingers who thought judicial filibusters were bad back in 2004 and 2005, when the Republican Senate leadership seriously considered changing Senate rules so judicial nominees couldn't be filibustered. There is, of course, a reason they (and I) bring it up: remember not long ago when Sen. Bunning suggested there'd be another conservative on the Supreme Court because Justice Ginsburg wasn't long for this world? Lost in that controversy was Mr. Bunning's implication that they'd somehow get a conservative Justice in there despite a Democrat doing the picking and only 41 Republicans in the Senate at that time. How do you get a conservative Justice under those conditions? There's only one way, and I bet Messrs. Limbaugh, Lowry, Stein, Hannity, et al, will promptly forget their opposition to judicial filibusters as soon as Mr. Obama makes his pick. Which, given Mr. Obama's vaunted discipline, could be real damn soon.

penny rants for the day of May 1, 2009: the Arlen Specter lifetime!

Just as light appears as both wave and particle, Arlen Specter's abrupt move to the Democratic side of the aisle appears as both opportunism and sincerity. Of course Mr. Specter knew he'd be toast in a primary against Pat Toomey. But put yourself in his shoes for a minute. Pretend you've been a loyal Republican in the Senate since 1980. Pretend that everytime the Party needed your vote, you gave it to them. Pretend that you personally delivered three of the most right-wing Justices on the Supreme Court. And pretend you did all that while cultivating a largely undeserved reputation for "independence" -- in short, that you invented the O'Reilly Stratagem long before the Factor was a gleam in Little Billy's eye. And your reward for almost thirty years of this most valuable kind of loyalty is what? Your party mutates until it cares about none of its nominal constituents (i.e. conservatives), but only about its loudest-shouting, emptiest-minded, most emotionally-crippled members, none of whom know enough (or care enough) to wink back at you anymore. Damn, I'd also be muttering et tu after a betrayal of that magnitude. But great risk sometimes yields great reward -- with the national Democrats now firmly in his corner, with Pennsylvania's elites still firmly in his corner, and with eighteen months for Pennsylvania's liberals to get used to the idea of holding-their-noses-in-the-voting-booth, Mr. Specter stands to get 70% of the vote in 2010, just like he thinks he's always deserved.

In other news, I must confess that I've been extremely negligent in following the most recent mortgage cram-down legislation meltdown -- a Sen. Durbin amendment to a bankruptcy reform bill failed 47-51 in the Senate yesterday, and guess which number includes the newest Democrat (and thus puts the lie to "worries" about the power of filibuster-proof majorities). Admittedly, I get zero email alerts about mortgage cram-down (i.e., permitting bankruptcy judges to modify mortgage terms, which oddly they already can do for some rich dude's second home), and that fact makes my job a bit more difficult. But still, failure is failure, and I've failed the tribe. Luckily, Sen. Durbin has not: his rant about banks, of all people, complaining about "moral hazards" is positively inspiring, and he promises to be back with mortgage cram-down legislation until the banksters don't own the country anymore. That might take a few more Democratic Senate pick-ups. In other words, it might take another year and a half.