Month: July 2007

Speaking In Tongues

by digby

Here’s Bill O’Reilly last night:

Presidential Homeland Security adviser Frances Townsend answered press questions today about a national intelligence report that says Al Qaeda is getting stronger. According to the Bush administration, the chaos in Pakistan is a primary cause of that.

Not good news, because the Bush administration has spent billions trying to destroy Al Qaeda over the past six years. But the threat from Al Qaeda is a strong Republican issue. And President Bush knows it. So if Americans are dialed into that threat, they are more likely to cut the president some slack in Iraq and the terror war in general.

It’s interesting to note that Stratfor, a private intelligence outfit that has been very accurate, disputes the Al Qaeda analysis. On its website, Stratfor says “Bin Laden is probably gone for good, and Al Qaeda likely lacks the ability to strike in any strategically meaningful way.”

Now on the other side, the left understands that if Al Qaeda does strike America, it will be in deep trouble. Liberal stands against Guantanamo, NSA listening, and other anti-terror measures will come back to haunt the left. So their strategy is to paint President Bush as soft on bin Laden and dumb on Iraq.

[…]

Anyway, the central theme of that column is a theme the Democratic Party will use if terrorists hit us again. That Bush failed to neutralize Al Qaeda and wasted American resources in Iraq.

“Talking Points” believes both the right and the left are playing games to some extent. Certainly, Al Qaeda remains dangerous, but the only way to hit them is to invade Pakistan. Do the Democrats want to do that?

On the other hand, it would be a tragedy if after all the blood and treasure Americans have sacrificed, Al Qaeda has not been badly damaged.

America should be united in fighting these savages, but we’re not. Ideology has poisoned a reasoned, disciplined approach to defeating the jihadists. America’s great strength, diversity of thought, can also be a weakness. And Al Qaeda knows it.

The old saying goes, “United we stand, divided we fall.” Well, we’re divided. And that’s the Memo.

Can anyone decipher what Billo is advocating there? Does he think al Qaeda is dangerous or not? Is he saying the we should invade Pakistan or is he saying that that’s impossible, but we should be united in doing … what? He might as well be speaking in tongues.

It’s only a matter of time before we see something like this:

Now, listen to me, goddammit! The
Arabs are simply buying us! They’re
buying all our land, our whole
economy, the press, the factories,
financial institutions, the
government! They’re going to own
us! A handful of agas, shahs and
emirs who despise this country and
everything it stands for —
democracy, freedom, the right for me
to get up on television and tell you
about it — a couple of dozen
medieval fanatics are going to own
where you work, where you live, what
you read, what you see, your cars,
your bowling alleys, your mortgages,
your schools, your churches, your
libraries, your kids, your whole
life! And there’s not a single law on
the books to stop them! There’s
only one thing that can stop them —
you! So I want you to get up now.
I want you to get out of your chairs
and go to the phone. Right now. I
want you to go to your phone or get
in your car and drive into the
Western Union office in town. I
want everybody listening to me to
get up right now and send a telegram
to the White House —
By midnight tonight I want a million
telegrams in the White House! I
want them wading knee-deep in
telegrams at the White House! Get
up! Right now! And send President
Ford a telegram saying: “I’m mad as
hell and I’m not going to take this
any more! I don’t want the banks
selling my country to the Arabs! I
want this C.C. and A. deal stopped
now! — I want this C.C. and A. deal stopped
now! — I want this C.C. and A. deal
stopped now!

Howard Beale’s time has come.

H/T Newshounds

Pulling An All-Nighter

by digby

This is fun. Think Progress is live-blogging the all-nighter with video and all kinds of good stuff. Josh Marshall is asking for choice nuggets of speechifying if you’re watching on CSPAN. And Huffington Post is staying up all night too.

All of you west coasters who have nothing to do tonight can participate as well:

10:49 PM: Take action. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) urges you to make a call to wavering senators. See his personal “all-nighter” call sheet.

I especially liked this little report from Think Progress:

9:49 PM: More from the Iraq rally outside the Capitol: Sen. Patrick Leahy addresses the crowd, “Thank you, you’re a lot nicer to me than Dick Cheney.”

Now back in Chris Matthews’ day the crowd might have chanted “Dick Cheney can go fuck himself!” in response. The wholesome protesters of Americans Against Escalation In Iraq and MoveOn.org are much too well mannered and well behaved to do such a thing.

But I’m not.

Update: Mad Kane has one of her patented song parody’s for tonight: The Full-a-Bluster Song. Warning: ear worm.

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The Disappearing Protests

by digby

David Shuster was on Hardball earlier interviewing some of the Move-On folks who are coming out to the capitol to protest Republican obstructionism and support Harry Reid’s all nighter. And what was the first thing out of Chris Matthews’ mouth?

Well it’s certainly a wholesome looking crowd for an anti-war bunch.

Apparently he was expecting to see some long haired college kids burning bras and taking over the ROTC building, which isn’t a huge surprise. It’s just the Washington establishment’s irrational fear of hippies rearing its anachronistic head again.

But Matthews has a very strange grasp of history on the best of days. This is from a segment on yesterday’s show, in which he’s speaking with The Weekly Standard’s Matthew Continetti:

CONTINETTI: I look at that video; what strikes me is you look at footage from the waning days of the Vietnam War—I was not around, so I have to rely on the footage—and you see thousands of people marching, huge clashes between government forces in some cases. I look at that video and I see five people, mainly Cindy‘s entourage, and then one guy.

MATTHEWS: Jonathan, me to you, the draft. The draft; that explains it all. If you were vulnerable to the draft right now, you would have a much less frisky attitude about this war than you might have right now. Jonathan, your thoughts? I think it‘s the draft that explains why this has become a microcosm of a fight in the streets, rather than hundreds of thousands of hard hats going up against lefty college students. It does not look the same, because the stakes at home, unfortunately, are not being shared.

It’s certainly true that the draft was a huge part of the Vietnam protests. But Matthews and Continetti don’t have to reach that far back to see large numbers of anti-war people taking to the streets. I realize that MSNBC was told by their marketing gurus not to make too much of them, but you’d think people would at least recall them when they are complaining about the lackluster Iraq war protests.

*cross-posted on Salon

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Three Stooges Strategery

by digby

It is so rich listening to these Republicans decry the tyranny of the majority and stand up for the inalienable right to filibuster after their tiresome “up-or-down vote!” mantra of the last six years. Nobody ever accused them of being intellectually consistent. But this takes real chutzpah. From Think Progress:

When Democrats held up the confirmation of a few of President Bush’s right-wing judicial nominees, conservatives repeatedly complained of “obstructionism.” Senate conservatives had threatened to deploy the “nuclear option,” which would have eliminated the traditional Senate practice of filibustering.

Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS): “[Filibustering] is wrong. It’s not supportable under the Constitution. And if they insist on persisting with these filibusters, I’m perfectly prepared to blow the place up.” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) spokesman: “Senator McConnell always has and continues to fully support the use of what has become known as the ‘[nuclear]’ option in order to restore the norms and traditions of the Senate.”

Today, however, these conservatives are proposing the exact opposite of the nuclear option — a permanent filibuster. The Washington Post reports today that McConnell has requested that all Iraq amendments meet a 60 vote threshold, an effort designed to quietly block withdrawal legislation from ever passing the Senate:

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell responded to Reid with a counteroffer: an automatic 60-vote threshold for all key Iraq amendments, eliminating the time-consuming process of clearing procedural hurdles. … [A]ll the controversial war-related votes held since Democrats took control of the Senate in January have required 60 “yeas” to pass. “It’s a shame that we find ourselves in the position that we’re in,” McConnell said. “It produces a level of animosity and unity on the minority side that makes it more difficult for the majority to pass important legislation.”

You can’t help but be impressed by the sheer audacity of their strategy. Since the November election, in every situation, the Republicans have responded by not compromising, negotiating or capitulating in even the most minor ways. They have instead aggressively upped the ante.

The Democrats won largely as a result of the public’s desire to end the Iraq war. What did the president do? He escalated it. The Democratic congressional majority quite naturally wanted public oversight, the president offered private, undocumented “talks.” Then, when the congress issued subpoenas to ex-staffers, the white house directed them not to comply. One showed up and testified incoherently, and the white house ordered the other one not to show up at all. Even when the congress asked for documents about Pat Tilman the president invoked executive privilege.

The Republicans in congress have not been any better. Today you see them completely reversing their recent position that the filibuster is unacceptable (recall their mantra, “elections have consequences”) and bizarrely calling for a permanent filibuster on all Iraq measures, as if ending the occupation should require a super-majority!

I don’t think the Democrats have fully internalized what is going on yet. As I wrote the other day, we are dealing with a political party that is employing a strategy of anarchy in which incoherence is used to flummox the opposition and confuse the media. They are confident (and likely right to be so) that this will never catch up to them because the media has ADD and today’s political atrocity is forgotten by the next news cycle. By running circles around the Dems with obnoxious disregard for the congress and gleefully flouting their own precedents and rhetoric, the president and the Republican minority are almost daring the Democrats to try and stop them. Which is the point. They are going for the big narrative, which is the old stand-by that the Democrats are too soft to run the country: “If they can’t stop Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham, how can we trust them to stop Osama bin Laden?”

The question comes down to whether the Democrats will make sure the Republicans are held responsible for the mess they made or whether they are going to allow themselves to be held responsible for failing to stop them. The Republicans are betting that the public will blame the indulgent parents when the children run wild and it’s a pretty creative plan for a party that has a deeply loathed president and monumentally unpopular agenda.

I wonder what the Democrats’ strategy is?

*Cross posted at Salon.

Hyping the Intelligence Again?

by digby

Like many other Americans this morning, when I reached for my coffee and read the paper, I was shocked to see that a new National Intelligence Estimate says we are suddenly in grave danger of another terrorist attack. And the scariest thing is that it’s the dreaded “al Qaeda in Iraq,” working in cahoots with the big kahuna, bin Laden, who are threatening to come over here and kill us all in our beds:

“Of note, we assess that al-Qaida will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the homeland.”

That sounds very bad. How odd then to read this, in a different article in the same newspaper:

U.S. intelligence analysts, however, have a somewhat different view of al-Qaeda’s presence in Iraq, noting that the local branch takes its inspiration but not its orders from bin Laden. Its enemies — the overwhelming majority of whom are Iraqis — reside in Baghdad and Shiite-majority areas of Iraq, not in Saudi Arabia or the United States. While intelligence officials have described the Sunni insurgent group calling itself al-Qaeda in Iraq as an “accelerant” for violence, they have cited domestic sectarian divisions as the main impediment to peace.

Like so much of Washington reporting, you have to sift through the runes to decipher what these two articles are actually telling us. I’m guessing that we are once again dealing with a battle of the intelligence agencies.. One group, we don’t know which, is saying that Al Qaeda in Iraq is working with bin Laden to strike in the United States and the administration is hyping it to justify the occupation. Another group is telling us that Al Qaeda in Iraq is really a separate group that has its own agenda and we needn’t worry that they are interested in the US. This will logically be used to justify ending the occupation. It’s up to the reader to decide what is true.

The only thing we really have to go on is our experience with the Bush administration and NIEs, which hardly lends much credibility to their claims. They have a nasty little habit of twisting the facts, after all. Still, it does stand to reason that with bin Laden running free and the successful jihadist recruitment the Bush administration’s errors and misjudgments have brought about, the terrorist threat would be raised. Nobody can deny that many, many more people in the world hate America than hated it before George W. Bush took office.

But considering the fact that the post Iraq war games specifically say that American withdrawal will not increase the local terrorists’ strength, the idea that this threat comes especially from the “al Qaeda in Iraq” boogeyman should probably be greeted with skepticism. There is good reason to be suspicious that they are hyping the Iraq terrorist threat at a time when the congress is getting serious about reining them in. (We know they like to “introduce product” according to a political timetable.) With their track record of dishonestly conflating the terrorist threat with Iraq (as well as crying wolf dozens of times over the years here in the homeland) it’s completely fair to take into account that foreign policies based on the Bush administration’s “threat assessments” haven’t exactly worked out very well. A second, third and fourth outside opinion should always be required from these people. As the president himself famously said, “fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

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The Make-Up Scandals

by digby

For as long as I can remember, one of the truisms of modern politics was that Richard Nixon lost the 1960 presidential debate to John F. Kennedy because he refused to wear make-up and was all pasty and sweaty looking on the TV. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard the old trope “If you heard the debate on radio, Nixon definitely won!” For more than forty years it has been an article of faith that politicians had better pay attention to how they look on television or risk being Richard Nixon.

Suddenly, in 2007, intrepid summer interns are feverishly combing through FEC reports ferreting out every last penny politicians spend on hair and make-up so journalists can breathlessly report it as if it says something unusual about the candidate. The implication is that the vain candidates are spending the donations they receive from nice little old ladies on frivolous, unnecessary personal services. Reporters seem to take particular joy in interviewing the hair and make-up artists to get a little quote that makes the male candidate look like some sort of prima donna, if not outright feminine. Just using the word “foundation and powder” in the context of a presidential candidate is apparently enough to make the newsroom giggle like school girls.

Despite all this new chatter about hair cuts and make-up, it’s interesting that we haven’t heard a thing about the one candidate in the field who actually makes a living day in and day out wearing make-up during the entire workday (and no, I’m not talking about Hillary Clinton.) Like his namesake, the “southern fried Reagan” Fred Thompson has had hair and make-up professionals touching up his rugged visage day in and day out for years. He probably also gets manicures and facials and might even get various parts of his body waxed. (In Hollywood Fred’s world, make-up is the least of it.)

Since the press has decided that politicians who care about how they look on television are suspect, I assume we will be getting a full expose of the television star Thompson’s beauty regime. It is, after all, now considered a measure of the man’s character and sheds an important light on what kind of a leader he will make. The public has a need to know. And nobody needs to wait for his FEC reports. All they have to do is call up the production staffers at “Law and Order.” (If they’re too busy, maybe they can outsource it to the political professionals at “Inside Hollywood” or Page Six.)

*This is cross posted at Salon where I’ll be helping to fill in for Tim Grieve in the War Room while he’s making the move to DC.

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Religious Right Hitmen

by digby

I noted a couple of weeks back that pastordan had found an amazing example of the AP taking dictation from an unknown Republican’s new oppo research arm, Focus on the Family — and today Max Blumenthal sheds some new light on the story. Turns out it was Hollywood Fred’s boyz:

With onetime Republican presidential frontrunner Senator John McCain in meltdown, Mitt Romney suddenly finds himself under fire from some of the Christian right’s most influential activists. Romney’s evangelical critics claim the former Massachusetts governor and devout Mormon was complicit in the Marriott hotel chain’s sale of pay-per-view porn on its in-room television sets when he served on the corporation’s board of directors from 1992 to 2001. Two Christian-right operatives involved in orchestrating the charges have enlisted as Internet organizers for former Senator Fred Thompson, who is preparing to enter the race formally. The tactics of these religious-right players, targeted below the radar against Romney, are calculated to alter decisively the outcome of the Republican primary contest. The assault was launched on July 5 with an opening shot in the form of a breathless press release issued through the mega-ministry Focus on the Family. In it, veteran antiporn crusader Phil Burress called Romney’s failure to take action against pay-per-view hotel porn during his tenure on Marriott’s board “extremely disturbing.” That same day, a Focus on the Family spokesman took to the radio airwaves to ask whether Romney would “turn a blind eye” to pornography if elected President. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, which functions as Focus’s Washington lobbying arm, immediately joined the pile-on. He briefed the Associated Press on the record, explaining that Romney must “take some responsibility” for his supposed connection to Marriott’s porn profiteering. The AP report on the accusation against Romney was subsequently reprinted in the pages of major outlets from the Boston Globe to the Washington Post. It only took a full six years after Romney resigned from Marriott’s board for the Christian right’s leading lights to profess their outrage–and only hours for the press to echo it.

It is a testament to the absolute desperation of the Christian Right that they are forced to settle on Hollywood Fred. Romney is a flip-flopper extraordinaire, but he could be counted on to do the fundamentalists bidding down the line. He’s about taking care of business and he’d feed the freaks whatever they needed, at least as much as Junior or Reagan ever did. But they can’t get him past the Morman haters. So, 60ish Hollywood Fred with the trophy wife and the two new babies it is. (Hey, maybe that’s progress.)

Thompson and Romney can bloody each other up all they want as far as I’m concerned. But I am just a little bit concerned that the Associated Press is doing Hollywood Fred’s dirty work for him. The Democrats are sure to be the real victims of this as soon as all the wingnut oppo-assassins decide on a candidate and aim their fire our way. It would be really refreshing if the mainstream press stopped laundering their smears for them just as a change of pace if nothing else, but it looks like they are going to be with them all the way. Indeed, they’re stoking their “relationships” early.

Update: Here’s more on the new Christian Right idol, and the principled reasons why they believe in him:

Fred Thompson just got some encouraging news. Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission tells The Brody File the following: “My assessment is that at this moment in time it is Fred Thompson’s race to lose. It may be a convergence of the right man, in the right place and at the right time. I have never seen anything like this grassroots swell for Thompson. I’m not speaking for Southern Baptists but I do believe I have my hand on the pulse of Southern Baptists and I think I know where the consensus is.” Strong words. Dr. Land doesn’t endorse candidates but he is a powerful figure in Evangelical circles. His words matter. So why the fascination with Thompson? Land told me there are a lot of factors. He believes electability is extremely important and thinks that Thompson may be the best social conservative candidate right now to beat Hillary Clinton. He says just look at the head to head polling between the two of them. But there’s more. You know, it was Land that came up with the term, “Southern-Fried Reagan” when describing Thompson. So now he tells me the following: “He has an ability to connect with people. He comes from small town America where he can appeal to NASCAR dads, Security moms, and Reagan Democrats.”

I have long said that the Christian Right is not in the business of religion at all. They are in the business of politics. That’s why you are hearing the arguments of a political strategist coming out of the mouth of the head of the Southern Baptist convention. I’m certainly looking forward to hearing more about how these deeply moral, conservative spiritual leaders choose presidents on the basis of “electability.” It’s very inspiring.

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Go Harry

by digby

Well waddaya know? You go out of the loop for a few hours and the next thing you know, Harry Reid is telling the Republicans to bring it:

“I would like to inform the Republican leadership and all my colleagues that we have no intention of backing down. If Republicans do not allow a vote on Levin-Reed today or tomorrow, we will work straight through the night on Tuesday. The American people deserve an open and honest debate on this war, and they deserve an up-or-down vote on this amendment to end it.

“Given the Republican leadership’s decision to block the amendment, we have no choice but to do everything we can in the coming days to highlight Republican obstruction. We do this in hopes of ultimately getting a simple up-or-down vote on this and other important amendments that could change the direction of the war.

“All Senators will be welcome to speak their mind. Those of us who are ready to end the war will make our case to the American people. Those who support the status quo are welcome to equal floor time to make their case. Let the American people hear the arguments. Let them see their elected representatives engaging in a full, open and honest debate. Let them hear why Republicans are obstructing us on this amendment.

“Whenever Republicans are ready to allow a vote on this most crucial legislation, we stand ready to deliver the new course that has been so long in coming.”

This is a good start. The American people are not aware that the Republicans are standing in the way of every piece of important legislation before the nation and the press is, as usual, failing to tell them. Indeed, the Democrats in congress are being blamed for the GOP’s obstruction. The Dems need to draw them a picture and this is one way to do it.

As Rick Perlstein notes here, the last time the wingnuts felt something was so important they were willing to go to the floor and talk till they turned blue was a long, long time ago:

History buffs, and those with long memories, will recall the last time conservatives found something important enough to stand up and obstruct all night long: the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The one that outlawed discrimination in public accomodations.

We’ll have to see if protecting their lame-duck loser’s Iraq policy is as important to them as Jim Crow was to an earlier generation. You never know with these people, it just might be.

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The Good Executive

by digby

Those of you who having been reading this blog for a while know that I am a death penalty opponent. In fact, the idea of the state putting people to death actually makes me a little bit sick. I think killing is only justified in self-defense, even if self-defense is construed in rather broad and vague ways at times, and I can’t see how anyone can construe self-defense as taking an incarcerated individual into a little room and killing him in a highly ritualized fashion. But that’s just me.

But even if I were to grant that the death penalty can sometimes be just, it simply cannot ever be just to execute innocent people. And that is exactly what the state seems to be about to do. From LGM:

The NY Times has the story today of Troy A. Davis, a 38-year-old man who has been on Georgia’s death row for 17 years. Mr. Davis was convicted of shooting a police officer who had come to break up a scuffle outside an Atlanta nightclub. There was no physical evidence tying him to the shooting. He admits to being at the scene but claims that he turned and ran as soon as someone threatened to shoot. At his trial, prosecutors, according to the Times, “relied heavily on the testimony of nine eyewitnesses who took the stand against Mr. Davis.” But in the years since his trial, seven of the nine witnesses have recanted or changed their stories, admitting that they were (again, per the Times) “harassed and pressed by investigators to lie under oath.”

Mr. Davis has exhausted his appeals. The Supreme Court last week refused to hear his case. And because of a recent (1996) law “intended to streamline the legal process in death penalty cases, courts have ruled it is too late in the appeals process to introduce new evidence and, so far, have refused to hear it.” Why streamlining the path to death is a good idea totally escapes me. But beyond that, the existence of a law barring evidence that could exonerate a man less than one week from his execution seems both barbaric and blindingly stupid. Sure, in the absence of such a law, some people who are guilty of the crimes for which they were convicted would abuse the system and seek to submit unimportant evidence up to the last minute. But to me this seems a small price in efficiency to pay in order to ensure we don’t put innocent people to death. (As you may have read before, I don’t believe in capital punishment to begin with. But within the framework we now have, this law seems particularly cruel.)

I’ve never understood this “efficiency” argument. I know that everyone regrets that the justice system is clogged with too much crime, but nonetheless, it is the purpose of the justice system to dispense, well, justice. Efficiency should be way down on the priority list when it comes to the death penalty. We can afford to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s.

The irony in all this is, as Scott Lemieux points out in a later post at LGM, that the Supremes believe that an executive would never let an innocent person be executed, so there’s nothing to worry about:

I have a follow-up post on the Troy Davis case at TAPPED. Among other things, I discuss the famous Scalia concurrence in which he asserts that there is no constitutional right to bring evidence — no matter how compelling — of actual innocence after one had been validly convicted of a capital crime. But why worry?

I can understand, or at least am accustomed to, the reluctance of the present Court to admit publicly that Our Perfect Constitution lets stand any injustice, much less the execution of an innocent man who has received, though to no avail, all the process that our society has traditionally deemed adequate. With any luck, we shall avoid ever having to face this embarrassing question again, since it is improbable that evidence of innocence as convincing as today’s opinion requires would fail to produce an executive pardon.

Right. Unless his name is Scooter, it’s not bloody likely, whether it’s the Governor of Georgia or the president of the US — mostly because rightwingers have aneurysms when anyone suggests that anyone on death row could possibly be innocent, no matter what the evidence says.

But again, this clever Scalia quote illustrates the convenient conservative theory that justice and the rule of law should be reliant on the good faith and good will of the executive. I suspect this comes from the idea that is currently in vogue among the rich and successful that being rich and successful equals being “good.” If an executive fails to free a man on death row, that means, by definition, that man cannot be innocent. The “good” executive would never allow an innocent man to be executed.

But be sure to prepare yourself for the whiplash when the Democrats attain executive power and the Republicans rediscover their antipathy for monarchical executives. (Democrats can never be “good.”) But that is not to say they will shift their fervent belief in the death penalty. They will just shift seamlessly into their familiar rhetoric that criminals are running rampant and any Democrat who pardons or commutes a convicted man’s sentence is a soft-on-crime dirty gay hippie. You do not win with these people.

Update: more on this from LGF again:

Yoo Tortures The Law Again

He’s back, with another crackpot theory justifying arbitrary executive power in defiance of the plain language of several constitutional provisions as well as the structure and underlying theoretical basis of the Constitution.

As Stephen Holmes points out (and expands on in his new book), it’s not just that Yoo believes as a normative matter — contrary to the fundamental principles of liberal democracy– that power is most effectively deployed when it’s secret and unchecked, but his farcical attempts to locate the monarchical executive in the original meaning of a Constitution that (although it leaves the precise contours of executive power vague) plainly cannot support such a reading:

Yoo will undoubtedly keep the fire going for the Republicans. You never know when the zombies are going to emerge and it’s always nice to have the good executive legal theory neatly delineated.

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Monday Action

by digby

I’ve been linking for the last couple of weeks to CAF’s campaign to force the Dems to expose the obstructionists, and I hope that many of you have signed up. Chris Bowers has compiled some examples of the legislation the Democrats have allowed the Republicans to block with their “intent to filibuster” obstructions. It’s time to make them stand up and do a real filibuster if they are going to block legislation like this:

1. January 17, Reid Amendment to Legislative Transparency and Accountability Act of 2007: a bill to provide greater transparency in the legislative process.
2. January 24, Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007: a bill to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to provide for an increase in the Federal minimum wage.
3. February 5, A bill to express the sense of Congress on Iraq: disapproving of the troop escalation in Iraq.
4. February 17, A bill to express the sense of Congress on Iraq: disapproving of the troop escalation in Iraq (again).
5. April 17, Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007: an original bill to authorize appropriations for fiscal year 2007 for the intelligence and intelligence-related activities of the United States Government, the Intelligence Community Management Account, and the Central Intelligence Agency Retirement and Disability System, and for other purposes.
6. April 18, Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act of 2007: a bill to amend part D of title XVIII of the Social Security Act to provide for fair prescription drug prices for Medicare beneficiaries.
7. June 11, No confidence vote on Alberto Gonzales: a joint resolution expressing the sense of the Senate that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales no longer holds the confidence of the Senate and of the American people.
8. June 21, Baucus Amendment to CLEAN Energy Act of 2007: To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide for energy advancement and investment, and for other purposes.
9. June 26, Employee Free Choice Act of 2007: A bill to amend the National Labor Relations Act to establish an efficient system to enable employees to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to provide for mandatory injunctions for unfair labor practices during organizing efforts, and for other purposes.
10. July 11, Webb Amendment to the national defense authorization act for fiscal year 2008: to specify minimum periods between deployment of units and members of the Armed Forces for Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.

I doubt that the public has any idea that the GOP have blocked these bills. And they never will if the Democrats don’t force the Republicans to stand up and publicly defend their actions and put their mouths where their money is. I want to see Huckleberry Graham give his famous dramatic reading of Miss Mellie’s death scene in “Gone With The Wind” to obstruct passage of the Webb amendment, don’t you?

Update: CHS at FDL has more on this, here. And still more:

Please, call your own Senators and voice your support for the restoration of habeas rights and respect for the Constitution and the rule of law. And throw in an extra call or two for the Senators on the waffling list above. For why this is important — and why it needs our support now — read here. And here. As I said before:

We are better than this as a nation. We either stand up for those ideals that our forefathers risked their lives to obtain for all of us – the right of habeas corpus being so dear to them that they enshrined it in the text of the Constitution itself, rather than leaving it to the Bill of Rights. Or we stand for nothing at all but whatever is expedient in the moment according to the whim of the imperial presidency. Make no mistake, what the Bush Administration and its Attorney General are proposing under the fearful guise of a never-ending national security emergency is to collapse the three branches of government into one all-powerful executive during a time of self-declared, non-ending war of their own making. I choose liberty. What say you?

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