I thought it would be a good idea to post the entirety of Klein’s posts since Monday, at Swampland and at Time Magazine, on the Dodd filibuster maneuver and Reid’s pulling of the FISA telecom immunity bill:
December 2007 archive
Dec 20 2007
Pony Party….Philadelphia
I’m off this morning on an 8th grade field trip to Philadelphia. The weather isnt bad (should be low 40’s with little wind), and the company should be juuuuust great!! We’re being given a list of historical things to find and visit…and we’re to see how many we can get to. I sure hope shopping on south street is on the list ;)…
someday maybe i’ll get to be introduced by johnny depp….
Dec 20 2007
Kucinich answers your questions at 10questions.com
10questions.com had a video quesiton for the candidates contest in which the top 10 vote getters were asked of the questions. Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama, Mike Gravel, John Edwards and Mike Huckabee have been the candidates who have answered the questions. Dennis and Barack show as only having nine questions answered.
(Note: This has heavy video usage for those of you with dial-up.)
Dec 20 2007
Comparison and Contrast: Privacy and Violation of Human Rights
Full piece posted on ePluribus Media 2.0.
As is often the case in hotly contested discussion, claims of invalid comparisons are often made alongside calls to compare “apples to apples” instead of “apples to ice buckets” or some other such mis-matched scale.
In order to help further along the discussion of why rendition, torture and individual rights to privacy, decency and proper representation in a court of law matters no matter the reason, I present two current stories after the fold that both concern the abuse of a man and a tortured penis.
Make the jump…
Dec 20 2007
‘I am only one, but I can do something’
I am only one,
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything,
But still I can do something;
And because I cannot do everything
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
— Ten Times One is Ten (1870), Edward Everett Hale
Dec 20 2007
Docudharma Times Friday Dec.21
This is an Open Thread: Sorry Were Open/Yes Were Closed
USA
Spending Bills Still Stuffed With Earmarks
Democrats Had Vowed To Curtail Pet ProjectsBy Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 21, 2007; Page A01Twice in the past two years, Alaska lawmakers lost congressional earmarks to build two “bridges to nowhere” costing hundreds of millions of dollars after Congress was embarrassed by public complaints over the pet projects hidden in annual spending bills.
This year, Rep. Don Young and Sen. Ted Stevens, who are Alaska Republicans, found another way to move cash to their state: Stevens secured more than $20 million for an “expeditionary craft” that will connect Anchorage with the windblown rural peninsula of Matanuska-Susitna Borough.
Now what Alaska has, budget watchdogs contend, is a ferry to nowhere.
Bush remains thorn in Democrats’ side
By Janet Hook, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
7:14 PM PST, December 20, 2007
WASHINGTON — Just more than a year ago, a chastened President Bush acknowledged that his party had taken a “thumping” in the congressional elections, and he greeted the new Democratic majority at the weakest point of his presidency.But since then, Democrats in Congress have taken a thumping of their own as Bush has curbed their budget demands, blocked a cherished children’s health initiative, stalled the drive to withdraw troops from Iraq and stymied all efforts to raise taxes.
Rather than turn tail for his last two years in the White House, Bush has used every remaining weapon in his depleted arsenal — the veto, executive orders, the loyalty of Republicans in Congress — to keep Democrats from getting their way. He has struck a combative pose, dashing hopes that he would be more accommodating in the wake of his party’s drubbing in the 2006 mid-term voting.
Dec 20 2007
Docudharma Times Thursday Dec.20
This is an Open Thread: There are no hidden fees
USA
E.P.A. Says 17 States Can’t Set Emission Rules for Cars
WASHINGTON – The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday denied California and 16 other states the right to set their own standards for carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles.
The E.P.A. administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, said the proposed California rules were pre-empted by federal authority and made moot by the energy bill signed into law by President Bush on Wednesday. Mr. Johnson said California had failed to make a compelling case that it needed authority to write its own standards for greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks to help curb global warming.
The decision immediately provoked a heated debate over its scientific basis and whether political pressure was applied by the automobile industry to help it escape the proposed California regulations. Officials from the states and numerous environmental groups vowed to sue to overturn the edict.
Democrats savor power for a year but end it feeling unfulfilled
Their approval of a bill giving Bush funds for a war they oppose helps sum up their 2007 congressional record.
By Richard Simon and Noam N. Levey, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
December 20, 2007
WASHINGTON — Congressional Democrats ended their first year in control of Congress in more than a decade Wednesday, approving a $555-billion government spending measure that gave President Bush $70 billion for an Iraq war they had promised to end.And underscoring the frustrations that have beset the new majority much of the year, Democratic leaders left the Capitol complaining that much of their agenda had been thwarted by congressional Republicans who repeatedly stopped their most cherished initiatives.
“We could have accomplished so much more,” said a rueful Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) at a news conference in the old office of a Reid predecessor, Lyndon Johnson.
Despite the more than five dozen Iraq-related votes throughout the year, Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) were never able to muster the support needed to compel the president to begin withdrawing U.S. forces.
Dec 20 2007
Muse in the Morning
 Muse in the Morning |
The muses are ancient. The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them. Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward. In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.
It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse. Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets. Others have been suggested throughout the centuries. I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts. And maybe there should be many more.
Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…
Dec 20 2007
Torture: Always Wrong
Today, Mark Filip, the administration’s nominee to be Michael Mukasey’s deputy, had his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. And much like his future boss did during his hearing, Filip (like Mukasey, a former federal judge) treaded lightly, seeming deferential while also proving elusive on certain key questions.
When Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA ) asked whether waterboarding is torture, he punted, parroting Mukasey’s answer exactly. Like Mukasey, Filip called the practice “repugnant.” But stopped short, explaining that since Mukasey is conducting a review, he couldn’t “get out in front of him on that question.” He added: “if I am confirmed… I would view it like any other legal question and take a long hard look at it, and if I had a view other than his, I would tell him so.”
Kennedy responded that after what Mukasey went through at his hearing, “We thought you’d be able to give a response.”
Repugnant. Well, I suppose that’s one word for it.
Dec 20 2007
CIA to Release Videotape Docs to Senate Committee (Updated)
In a turnabout, the CIA said “it would begin handing over documents to Congress about the destruction of videotapings showing the harsh interrogation of two terror suspects after the House Intelligence Committee threatened to subpoena two agency officials,” according to a breaking story from Associated Press.
This comes after the bombshell revelations earlier yesterday that at least four administration officials, including David Addington, Harriet Myers and Alberto Gonzales, were involved in discussions about what to do with these incriminating videotapes. dday had an excellent diary on this earlier.
The turnabout also comes after House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) said he was going to subpoena former and current CIA officials and attorneys if they didn’t agree to appear before the committee. The agreement by CIA apparently also includes agreement on the testimony of CIA general counsel John Rizzo, the official who is said to have ordered the destruction of the tapes, though CIA won’t commit him to a specific date.
Dec 20 2007
I’m a Grandpa! So Indulge Me.
OK. I know this is a political site, not Facebook or MySpace, and that, given the state of the world, there are certainly more important things for me to be using my share of pixels than talking about my family. But tonight I can’t help myself. My first grandchild has arrived. If you haven’t already guessed, that’s her to the left.
She was born by c-section on December 17 in Manchester, England, and weighed in at 7 pounds, 1 ounce. Her name is Mariam Ahmed al-Musaud al-Hashim. Mariam is the name of her mother’s mother, and also of her father’s other wife. (Yes, my stepson’s father-in-law is a polygamist.)
Dec 20 2007
The Stars Hollow Gazette
Assault On Reason, Time Excerpts
…
| American democracy is now in danger-not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas. |
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| In the world of television, the massive flows of information are largely in only one direction, which makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation. Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They hear, but they do not speak. The “well-informed citizenry” is in danger of becoming the “well-amused audience.” Moreover, the high capital investment required for the ownership and operation of a television station and the centralized nature of broadcast, cable and satellite networks have led to the increasing concentration of ownership by an ever smaller number of larger corporations that now effectively control the majority of television programming in America. |
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| (W)hat if an individual citizen or group of citizens wants to enter the public debate by expressing their views on television? Since they cannot simply join the conversation, some of them have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30 seconds in which to express their opinion. But too often they are not allowed to do even that. MoveOn.org tried to buy an ad for the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast to express opposition to Bush’s economic policy, which was then being debated by Congress. CBS told MoveOn that “issue advocacy” was not permissible. Then, CBS, having refused the MoveOn ad, began running advertisements by the White House in favor of the president’s controversial proposal. So MoveOn complained, and the White House ad was temporarily removed. By temporarily, I mean it was removed until the White House complained, and CBS immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused to present the MoveOn ad. |
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| Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason. But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets-through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas. |