I think that, as usual, Glenn Greenwald has said it well in the case of Mukasey:

"Every time Congressional Democrats failed this year to stop the Bush administration (i.e., every time they "tried"), the excuse they gave was that they "need 60 votes in the Senate" in order to get anything done. Each time Senate Republicans blocked Democratic legislation, the media helpfully explained not that Republicans were obstructing via filibuster, but rather that, in the Senate, there is a general "60-vote requirement" for everything.

How, then, can this be explained?

The Senate confirmed Michael B. Mukasey as attorney general Thursday night, approving him despite Democratic criticism that he had failed to take an unequivocal stance against the torture of terrorism detainees.

The 53-to-40 vote made Mr. Mukasey, a former federal judge, the third person to head the Justice Department during the tenure of President Bush . . . Thirty-nine Democrats and one independent [Bernie Sanders] opposed him.

Beyond that, four Senate Democrats running for President missed the vote, and all four had announced they oppose Mukasey's confirmation. Thus, at least 44 Senators claimed to oppose Mukasey's confirmation -- more than enough to prevent it via filibuster. So why didn't they filibuster, the way Senate Republicans have on virtually every measure this year which they wanted to defeat?"

And what the hell was going on with this coming to vote with so many of the '08 candidates not there to do, or not do, what they promised? Do Democrats control when things come up to vote, or don't they?

Democrats are just not serious about bringing the administration to account, in general. Opposing is not enough if you aren't willing to use the legitimate means at your disposal to make your opposition real.

There's a number of good comments on the article (it's one of the most civilized and substantive blog comment threads I've ever read, actually), one of the best of which is jayackroyd's, which relevantly brings up the only good argument that I ever saw about confirming Mukasey, namely that we could have ended up with so much worse:

"It is not merely that we could have done no better. It is that we would have had much worse. Failing to confirm Mukasey would have ended the confirmation role of the senate for presidential appointments for the remainder of the term. Bush would simply have left postions open...or filled them with interims who could never be confirmed....The administration modified the Patriot Act after it was passed to permit unconfirmed USA appointments. (Question to Leahy: "Why are most of those appointees still in place?")

The appointment of a purely political commissar to the AG post would do even more damage to the DOJ, and to the rule of law of in general. Looseheadprop over at FDL has been writing recently about the greatly reduced productivity of the depattment, with many fewer prosecutions, and even fewer convictions than under previous administrations. Putting someone in who could rebuild the department is not without merit...."

He goes on to say:

"However...this whole line of argument implciitly assumes that the Congress has no remedy to a president who holds the confirmation process in contempt, and will willfully violate the confirmation provisions of the Consititution. What Bush has said here, again, is that if you want to stop what I am doing, then start impeachment proceedings. Short of that, there is no letter nor spirit of the Constitution that binds me.

It is absolutely breathtaking that impeachment is off the table in the face of this contemptuous disregard for what I thought were inviolate, core American values."

Couldn't have said it better. This is a really good analysis, and one that I hadn't quite gotten to -- I was still stuck at "Mukasey should not be confirmed, but man, we actually could end up with worse." It shows that the fundamental problem is much deeper than what to do about Mukasey: it's what to do about a president who doesn't care about the rule of law. And the bulk of the Democratic party power structure has decided that the answer is to wait it out, rather than fight it out. Let things get worse and worse and worse, don't care about anything that happens to Americans or anything that happens to anyone who runs afoul of the illegal, immoral behavior being allowed to go on. Anything they grandstand about to the contrary is exactly that: grandstanding. Bullshit. Lip service. There is no line in the sand that they won't erase when a Republican trips over it, no line in their souls that they won't blur for the sake of political tactics.

With the confirmation of an AG who isn't willing to call a spade a spade on the matter of torture, I couldn't disagree more with their decision than I do right now. And I couldn't agree more with ondelette about the digustingness of Feinstein.

Write to or call your Senators, and tell them to join Chris Dodd in his courageous and firm stand on any FISA bills containing telecom amnesty.

And while you're at it, write again and tell them not to confirm Mukasey.

This is not a small deal. We are talking about a bill that grants immunity to companies who helped the Bush administration illegally spy on Americans, and furthermore contains unprecedented expansion of power to spy on Americans. Which is going to be passed by a Democrat-controlled Senate. And we're talking about a guy who won't say he doesn't believe in the indefinite detention of Americans without charges, and won't say whether anything in particular constitutes torture, who also appears likely to be confirmed as head of the Justice Department by this same Senate. It's ridiculous, it's cowardly, it's tragic, it's disgusting.

If either of these things happen, the Democrats as a party are pretty fucking useless. I've always resisted the tendency that many have to claim that there's no significant difference between Democrats and Republicans, because there are huge differences, but the differences are not worth much without the requisite spine to stand up for them. The level of my anger on this issue and related issues is making it difficult for me not to want to start a whole entire new party. On the other hand, maybe I should just forget Edwards and vote for Chris Dodd. I can't even find anything on Edwards' page about the FISA stuff. I really like Edwards' positions, but we're not going to have much rule of law to work with on his issues if this stuff doesn't get sorted out.

From a discussion of Michael Moore's new movie about the American healthcare system on Salon:

Benn argues that for-profit healthcare and the other instruments of the corporate state, like student loans and bottomless credit-card debt, perform a crucial function for that state. They undermine democracy by creating a docile and hardworking population that is addicted to constant debt and an essentially unsustainable lifestyle, that literally cannot afford to quit jobs or take time off, that is more interested in maintaining high incomes than in social or political change.

And art pictures of the magniture of the unsustainability.

One of the things I've read recently about healthcare that I found absolutely appalling is the story of a little girl, Ava Cipriani diagnosed at two and a half with rare, severe cancer. She lost her battle with cancer recently, and her parents are left with more than two million dollars of medical bills. Why? No one should end up with a two-million dollar medical bill because their child got the bad end of a statistically rare occurrence and they and her doctors did the very best for her.

I've started to become really bothered by the whole consumerism/capitalism thing, the disposability of everything, the packaging of everything, the shipping of everything over long distances, the creation of everything so that it's easier to throw it away when it breaks than repair it. The money-valuing of everything, even things that have a value far beyond anything money can express. And the way that constant attempts to "save money" are so highly valued -- by medical insurance companies, by companies who cut customer service or ship it to India, or close branches in underserved neighborhoods, by transit agencies that cut their unprofitable routes that serve customers that are few in number but large in need. And I don't mean I'm bothered by just everyone else's behavior, I mean I'm bothered by my behavior, and by the way the system encourages everyone to behave, as the above quote says, with a kind of docile focus on money and buying things and staying afloat.

I don't really have any conclusions about this, just an increasing desire to reach some.

My Verizon bill for this month includes Menlo Park's new Utility User Tax. I was pretty startled by the amount, which adds more than a dollar to my relatively modest cell phone bill. After reading two contrasting positions on it, the only overwhelming impression I've come away with is that neither person is telling the whole story -- nor are they really even attempting to rebut the parts of the story that the other tells! Is there a long-term issue with the projections? Is the surplus really a surplus? I sure can't tell from that article.

I'm disappointed that even this relatively meager amount of contrasting argument wasn't clearly presented during the election, or at least I don't recall it being presented. Had I been more aware that there was controversy over this issue, I would have researched the issue more closely. As it is, I'm pretty sure I voted for it. I guess that means it would be bad form of me to change my Verizon billing address now, huh?

I guess I'll just let the council know I hope it goes to street maintenance. For a city largely populated by people with a lot of money, Menlo Park sure does a crappy job of repairing potholes. There are at least three or four large potholes or areas of extreme wear and cracking on Menlo Ave in downtown, and a giant one at the intersection of Roble and El Camino. And while they're at it, they could repave my street past the next intersection where it's worn and rough!

And next time I'll remember that in the city where arguments over a pool contract can get ugly, nothing is uncontroversial.

This issue doesn't come up so often anymore (particularly since the midterm elections) but back in 2004, a lot of people talked about emigrating because they were so frustrated with the US. That reaction always struck me as wrongheaded for a number of reasons, not least because other nations have their own issues, and the people saying this rarely knew much about the places they assumed were now 'better' than the US. But this excerpt from a post about Second Life on BoingBoing sums up the main problem with it very well:

Citizens get to petition for redress of their grievances from a state that represents them; customers can only take their business elsewhere. Customers only ever get to love it or leave it.^* Citizens get to change it.

The people who were suddenly talking about emigrating were, in most cases, acting like they were customers of their own country. But there's still a big difference between a country and company, and we all have a responsibility to act as citizens of our countries, not behave like there's nothing we can do to change them. Especially because there obviously wasn't nothing we could do!

^*I do think it's a bit cynical to say that customers only "ever get to love it or leave it", though. More accurately, customers can only ultimately love it or leave it -- that's all the power they have. But they (we) have a lot of influence, via either purchasing behavior that goes beyond just buying or not buying, or by direct verbal feedback.

Not exactly news: Fake buttered popcorn isn't good for you.
News to me: But in more ways I thought.

I was so startled to hear about this that I wanted to spread the news a bit. It's put me off microwave popcorn for good. Not wanting to eat the calories and bringing better snacks has definitely helped, and this provides the extra motivation I need not to go there anymore.

You know, I don't think I've smelled as much popcorn since I put this article up in the kitchen...

During discussions about Wear a Hijab Day, a number of people mentioned that Muslim men can't be identified based on dress. While that's true in a technical sense, it's often possible to identify with some high probably that a person is Muslim by some combination of dress, appearance, and behavior.

I kept the news on after I watched House tonight, and I heard that six Muslim men were removed from a US Airways flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix. The reason cited was that they were praying before boarding (gee, maybe because devout Muslims pray 5 times a day, so it's not that surprising they'd need to do it before a flight?), and people were nervous. They were denied the ability to buy new tickets on any other US Airways flight.

It's patently clear that this occurred because people are 1) able to identify Muslims, or people who appear to them to be Muslim, and 2) uncomfortable riding airplanes with them, even in the absence of good reasons to be. This is a form of prejudice and discrimination. It's ridiculous that US Airways would not permit them to remain on the airplane in the first place, but you can somewhat write that off on the basis of not wanting to try to convince whoever was concerned that it was okay. But to not allow them onto a later flight shows that not only are some US Airways customers creating and perpetuating discrimination, so is US Airways itself. Security paranoia doesn't make us safer, but it does make us scareder. (Any you all know that "the terrorists win" if we're scareder, right? Good.)

People should be able to wear the clothes they want to wear, and be the people that they are, without fearing discrimination, harassment, or violence. I'm going to try to take some time to write a letter to US Airways (whose America West aspect I'm unfortunately scheduled to travel on over Christmas) and tell them that I find their behavior completely inappropriate, and that I'll be boycotting them in the future if I don't see concrete indications that they regret the incident and will not condone any further incidents of this type.

I find all the coverage of the election for House majority leader really annoying, because it seems like every single paper I can find essentially says "OMG teh Democrat dissension!!11!"

I've read some stuff (notably Lakoff) that talks about how the Republicans have this get-together, and they agree on what they're going to focus on this week, and who'll get what they want this time and who next time, with the result that a rather fractious party looks coherent and on-message all the time. The tone of this story is that the Democrats could learn from this and would do well to emulate it.

I disagree strongly (though not completely) with this. To me, being able to have open disagreement and debate in the party is positive. I trust a party whose debates and disagreements are acted out on the public stage, because that's what politics should be -- open debate, disagreement, each person making their case, and then everyone voting. That's what should happen in popular elections, and in House elections, as it has this time. I trust a party that has room for differing opinions, because inside that party, people will have to defend their ideas, and their ideas will be the better for it. It doesn't improve ideas if everyone just agrees to take turns getting what they want.

Of course, political infighting can be taken too far, and no one's better off if everything is a confusing mess and people who should allegedly be working together are at each other's throats (the West Wing episode "We Killed Yamamoto" is an absolutely excellent piece of television that conveys this message quite clearly*). Even while disagreeing, it's important that a party have core values that it consistently expresses. (Otherwise, why is it even a party?) To the extent that the Democratic party doesn't do that -- which is large -- they could definitely benefit from more coherence. But to the extent that debate and disagreement are part of the process of politics and the process of idea generation and refinement, those things are positive, and I'm sick of the media acting like dissent is a bad thing.

*In other West Wing news, Rob Lowe (Sam) is joining the cast of "Brothers and Sisters" on ABC. I'm tempted to start watching it now.

Good news.

Not-so-good news.

So close!

Thank goodness (and hope the numbers don't reverse).

Looks like Menlo Park may be taking a new direction too. I was excited to vote in that one.

And...yahoo!

From Salon, Money trails lead to Bush judges:

Hagel says campaign contributions could play into that process, as a demonstration of "how loyal and appreciative" a judicial candidate is. "That certainly has an appearance of impropriety," he said. "It gives the impression that the senators' decision-making process could be influenced by money."

Gee, really?

I was surprised to learn that it's presently legal and not against the official ABA code of ethics for a judicial candidate to make political contributions. It seems obvious to me that this has the potential to taint the process, even if in many cases it's not known, or it's something they would have done anyway but the timing was bad. I hope that the revised code of ethics passes. It's typical of Salon to headline the article as if this is a Bush issue, but there's some mention that it's not uncommon generally, and to me, it's not a partisan issue. It's that networking and personal acquaintance already do more than enough to narrow the field of candidates, and I want to think that at least within that narrowed field, the best judicial minds are being selected, not those with the most connections, the most "loyalty", or the most money.

This is why, as Alice's shirt used to say, I'll be post-feminist in the post-patriarchy.

Take some time out and donate to one of the worthy organizations that helps our rights in these matters. The Salon Broadsheet post has a good collection of links. I gave to Access in Oakland, because choice is no choice at all if there's no access.

He cannot dispense the law, if he follows it not himself. He cannot dispense the law, if he thinks himself immune to it. He cannot dispense the law, if he will not deal it to his fellows in the same measure as he does to those whom he has in charge. --Mercedes Lackey, Exile's Valor

We currently have many lawgivers who don't meet this standard. Let's not allow that to continue.

An article at Salon alerted me to one of the scariest things of all the scary things that I've ever heard that the Bush administration is planning: a bill that could, because of its wording, suspend habeus corpus for almost anyone who opposes the Bush administration in any way. The Supreme Court has already ruled twice that HC can't even be suspended for the people currently defined as "enemy combatants", so this law would probably be ruled unconstitutional even if passed. But it should never be passed. The writ of habeus corpus is one of the main things that keeps a government from becoming a tyranny. The ruling of the previous laws unconstitutional hasn't stopped the administration from dragging their feet to keep any cases from actually getting through, even if they're legally allowed to do so. But it's important to maintain at least the legality of the cases, and not force lawyers and others to spend a lot of effort getting another law ruled unconstitutional before they can restart the cases.

This is discussed in more detail at the CCR's website.

I'm off to look up who my rep is (I got some mail from her recently, but don't remember her name), and make sure that I send a letter and email about this. The bill number according to GovTrack is H.R. 6054. The bill is still in the committee process but has been recommended for consideration by the full House.

Slacktivist has previously done a couple of pieces on Bush's (at best) incoherent position on stem-cell research vs. IVF, but his newest one, with new information about a non-lethal technique for stem-cell extraction, is particularly clear.

This is the kind of thing that drives me just insane about many people, not just Bush. They hold positions that are simply not compatible with each other, and somehow this seems okay to them. For most people it's laziness: they never bother contemplating the reality of their positions. And, well, they should bother, but it's not their main job in life to do that. But the President is supposed to spend his time contemplating his positions and the nation's positions, and is essentially required, in the form of an election platform, to come up with a reasonably coherent set of positions.

I can't really say it better than Slacktivist, but I'll try a simple summary:

Bush has previously said that he objects to embryonic stem-cell research because it kills embryos. Killing embryos is bad because they are potential human life and therefore sacred. Whether this is a good objection or not (it is not, in my opinion), it is his given position.

Researchers (may) have worked out a way to do said research without killing any embryos. Therefore Bush's objection is irrelevant. Bush now objects to embryonic stem cell research because it involves embryos in research. But previously that was not his objection. If that was his objection, he could have stated it at the outset, since this research has involved embryos from the beginning. But his focus has always been on the embryo death -- because that's what sells to his base, I guess.

By itself that's bad enough. But add in his positions on IVF and you see obvious incoherence. Thousands of embryos are discarded every year from IVF clinics. Bush doesn't care. Yes, politically he can't oppose IVF (which means that this incoherence exists for all of the many people who share his position). But he could advocate for measures that limited the number of embryos created (and fund research to improve IVF's effectiveness with fewer embryos), encourage adoption, or any number of other things that would allow him to survive politically while still working toward his goal of No Embryo Left Behind.

He also has no problem with a cell-removal procedure done on IVF embryos to choose the healthiest one -- even though it's the same procedure as the one used to remove a cell from an embryo for stem-cell research. Somehow, it's bad to remove a cell and use it to learn more about our biology, and maybe to help save lives, but not a problem to just take it out, check it, and throw it away. What is going on here?

Examination makes it clear: he doesn't care. It's all about politics, and what sells, and not losing face by appearing to change his mind. He doesn't have any courage of his convictions, because he doesn't have convictions that he cares enough about to think them through.

Just a quick note: sorry if the suddenness of the journal switch was bothersome to anyone. I mistakenly posted the explanatory entry with the wrong security level. It is now public at lyspeth if anyone wishes further explanation.

--

Mostly the way I keep up with the news these days is to read the copy of the Mercury News that someone at work puts in the lunchroom. This week they reported that the amendment to prohibit flag-burning had failed in the Senate by only one vote. And that Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, had voted for it.

Seriously, people. A "California Democrat" voted for such an amendment. Her reasoning?

"There is no idea or thought expressed by the burning of the American flag that cannot be expressed equally well in another manner."

Yes, that's what "free speech" means -- that there's at least one way to say anything that you want to say. Gee, and here I thought it had something to do with getting to pick what you wanted to say AND how you wanted to say it.

I'm proud to say that I did not vote for her in the primaries (my first California elections!). And I will never do so in the future.

Flag-burning is no casual act -- it should mean something. But it is a powerful form of political expression that should remain available to us, especially in times like these when there is a great deal of political dissatisfaction and dissent.

I also find the attitude that seems to be prevalent among the high-up Republicans these days about constitutionality really bothersome. They seem to have the following reaction:

"Let's ban X."
"But banning X is unconstitutional."
"Fine then, let's ban X by amending the constitution."

There's no apparent pause for thought in there that hey, maybe there's some sort of reason why banning X is unsonstitutional, and we shouldn't just run roughshod over that obstacle.

The Constitution sometimes needs amending, but I hope never to limit our freedoms. Prohibition, the only amendment I can think of off the top of my head that limited freedom, was overturned in the end.