Month: May 2006

Senate Committee Erupts in Shouting as Anti-Gay Constititutional Amendment Is Approved

Jon Ponder

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) voted to move an anti-gay constitutional amendment that he didn’t agree with out of his committee for a vote by the full Senate — and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) lost it:

A Senate committee approved a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage Thursday, after a shouting match that ended when one Democrat strode out and the Republican chairman bid him “good riddance.”

“I don’t need to be lectured by you. You are no more a protector of the Constitution than am I,” [Specter] shouted after [Feingold] declared his opposition to the amendment, his affinity for the Constitution and his intention to leave the meeting.

“If you want to leave, good riddance,” Specter finished.

“I’ve enjoyed your lecture, too, Mr. Chairman,” replied Feingold, D-Wis., who is considering a run for president in 2008. “See ya.”

Amid increasing partisan tension over President Bush’s judicial nominees and domestic wiretapping, the panel voted along party lines to send the constitutional amendment which would prohibit states from recognizing same-sex marriages to the full Senate, where it stands little chance of passing.

Democrats complained that bringing up the amendment is a purely political move designed to appeal to the GOP’s conservative base in this year of midterm elections. Under the domed ceiling of the ornate and historic President’s Room off the Senate floor, senators voted 10-8 to send the measure forward.

Among Feingold’s objections was Specter’s decision to hold the vote in the President’s Room, where access by the general public is restricted, instead of in the panel’s usual home in the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Specter later said he would have been willing to hold the session in the usual room had he thought doing so would change votes.

Not all those who voted “yes” support the amendment, however. Specter said he is “totally opposed” to it, but felt it deserved a debate in the Senate.

“Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman,” reads the measure, which would require approval by two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states.

Socialists: NSA Spying a Blueprint for Mass Repression

Buck Banks

From left field: If you want a different perspective on what’s happening in the mainstream media’s coverage of the National Secret Agency’s domestic spying program, truck on over to the World Socialist Web Site. Columnist Patrick Martin writes that “the media commentary has deliberately downplayed the sinister nature of the program. This is a deliberate cover-up of what is without question the most wide-ranging invasion of privacy by the federal government in US history.”

Maybe Martin has a point. Several, actually. Like most socialists, he’s rather long-winded, so I’ve performed the valuable service of extracting his main points in a more succinct, edited form. Read the full version here.

There has not been a single serious media commentary questioning why a supposedly “narrowly focused” program should collect data on an estimated 225 million Americans.

Computer programs used by NSA to analyze phone call databases it purchased from the big telecommunications companies are an advanced form of the “social-network analysis” software used by commercial and political marketing firms to profile potential advertising targets. Phone trees are traced to identify nodes and determine common interests and activities among those targeted.

The purpose is to select targets for more intensive electronic surveillance or arrest and detention.

‘This is almost certainly the largest single intrusion into American civil liberties ever committed by any US administration.’
— Bruce Afran

Every person who has ever telephoned a 900 number, for instance, now has that fact permanently recorded in a government database, making him or her vulnerable to blackmail by federal agents. Likewise for those whose phone records suggest problems with gambling, narcotics abuse, or even extramarital affairs.

AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth provided the NSA with the calling records on 224 million land-line and cellular telephone customers — 80 percent of the land-line and 50 percent of the wireless users in the U.S.

The three companies connected 500 billion telephone calls in 2005 alone, and over two trillion since 9/11. Information on all these calls — number calling, number dialed, time and duration — is now in the NSA database, along with historical information of unknown but vast dimensions.

No previous regime, no matter how dictatorial — not Nazi Germany, not Stalinist Russia — was able to compile such an all-encompassing record of the private activities of its citizens.
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Rightwing House Chairman Says Bush Flipflopped on Immigration Bill

Jon Ponder

House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Penn.), who was one of the House manager of the Clinton impeachment, is upset with his former Dear Leader, who he says pushed to have draconian measures inserted in an immigration bill last year but changed his mind this year:

Sensenbrenner chairs the House Judiciary Committee and would be the House’s chief negotiator on any final immigration package for Bush’s signature. He said it was the White House that had requested two controversial felony provisions in the bill the House passed last winter.

“We worked very closely with White House in the fall in putting together the border security bill that the House passed,” he said. “… What we heard in November and December, he seems to be going in the opposite direction in May. That is really at the crux of this irritation,” he said of Bush.

So Mr. Bush was for turning 12 million undocumented residents into felons, but now he is against it.

Ethics Committee Finally Finds One Bad Democrat to Balance 434 Questionable Republicans

Trish

After 16 months of “political gridlock,” the House Ethics Committee finally got the vital missing piece it needed in order to begin investigating Bob Ney and other Republicans involved with both Jack Abramoff and Inmate Duke Cunningham: a dirty Democrat.

The committee waited to investigate U.S. Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), who has “stink” written all over him until — praise Jesus! — they uncovered equally fetid Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.). CNN:

Now Republicans everywhere can hold Jefferson up as living proof that we are just as bad as they are.

The simultaneous investigations of Ney and Jefferson give a bipartisan tone at a time when Democrats are trying to make a campaign issue out of Republican misconduct.

The committee of five Republicans and five Democrats had been in a partisan deadlock since the beginning of last year. The House GOP leadership removed two GOP members of the committee and the Republican chairman after they had admonished DeLay for his conduct. Since then, the committee has fought over committee rules and staffing, and failed to get a sixth vote to begin any investigation.

Members of the committee added that they would have investigated Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) if he had just been patient and waited for a defiled Democrat like the rest of them. Instead, he opted not to face the voters this fall, denying the glacial Ethics Squad potentially their biggest prize.

“But for his imminent resignation from the Congress … we would have recommended to our colleagues on the committee the formation of an investigative subcommittee to conduct a formal inquiry into those allegations,” [committee members] Berman and Hastings said.

Well darn. Who would have thought letting nearly a year and a half go by without acting would have consequences? But then again, Jefferson was worth waiting for. Now Republicans everywhere can hold him up as living proof that we are just as bad as they are. I mean, a 434 to 1 ratio pretty well speaks for itself, don’t you think?

Bush Makes Insulting Personal Remarks to Australian PM to His Face — Media Yawns

Jon Ponder

Towel snaps: If the United States had a normal president, we’d be in the midst of an international incident right now had he personally insulted Australian Prime Minister John Howard to his face the way President Bush did today:

PRESIDENT BUSH: Somebody said, you and John Howard appear to be so close, don’t you have any differences? And I said, yes, he doesn’t have any hair… He may not be the prettiest person on the block … but when he tells you something you can take it to the bank.

And yet as of 7:00 PM PST, as far as I know, only Keith Olbermann on MSNBC has picked up this story.

Klosterman: The Era of Predictable Disillusionment

Trish

Chuck Klosterman wrote a great piece for ESPN Magazine about why Barry Bonds matters. We’ll save his five reasons on that subject for another day, but his summation of the post-Clinton years is dead-on. The essay was excerpted in The Week magazine.

…the U.S. started acting like a rogue state, and The Simple Life premiered, and we re-elected the same president we never really elected in the first place

In November 2000, the United States held a presidential election, and nobody knew who won, so we just kind of made up an outcome and tried to act as if that was normal. Less than a year later, airplanes flew into office buildings, and everybody cried for two months. And then Enron went bankrupt, and the U.S. started acting like a rogue state, and The Simple Life premiered, and we re-elected the same president we never really elected in the first place. Later, there would be some especially devastating hurricanes and three Oscars for an especially bad movie called Crash…

If it’s the era of anything, it’s the Era of Predictable Disillusionment: a half-decade in which many long-standing fears about how America works (and what America has come to represent) were gradually — and then suddenly — hammered into the collective consciousness of just about everyone, including all the people who hadn’t been paying attention to begin with.

Right. Ignoring it won’t make it go away, nor does it provide exemption from being strapped in a seat on the Rove-conceived roller coaster of division and made-up strife we no longer even recognize as such.

Instead, we routinely take ardent stands on things previously of only passing interest to us, like stem cell research, gay people holding weddings, husbands unplugging wives from life support, and citizenship for Mexican workers. We debate absurd “solutions” to illusionary “problems” like putting a fence around the lower 48. Meanwhile, we either don’t notice or claim not to care when cameras are erected on every highway exit ramp and bridge, and better records of our cell phone calls are provided to the government than to us.

As Paris Hilton herself said, if caviar wasn’t expensive, no one would eat it. I’d rather think they’re putting something in the water than think we are just this easy to play.

Poll: Like Father, Like Son — Bush Drops 5 Points to 33% in WaPo Poll

Jon Ponder

Same as Poppy in the Washington Post-ABC Poll:

Bush’s job approval rating now stands at 33 percent, down five percentage points in barely a month and a new low for him in Post-ABC polls. His current standing with the public is identical to President George H.W. Bush’s worst showing in the Post-ABC poll before he lost his reelection bid to Bill Clinton in 1992. Bush’s father fell below 30 percent in some other independent polls that year.

Bush Guts Education, Human Services to Save a Pittance

Buck Banks

Unkind cuts: There has been a lot of discussion in the media about the budget battles over the 2007 federal budget and the ballooning supplemental spending bill that Herr Bush has threatened to veto. But there has been virtually no coverage of what Bush says he wants to cut out of the federal budget.

The Office of Management and Budget has just released its report on the spending reductions Bushco wants — surprise! — they are mostly in education and health and human services areas. The total is nearly $7.3 billion, almost half of it in education spending cuts.

Here are some of the program terminations I consider to be most egregious.

From the Department of Agriculture Bush wants to cut $511 million, including $75 million from watershed protection and flood prevention, and $10 million from the beleaguered Forest Service.

Given our current gasoline ‘crisis,’ does it make sense to also cut the $64 million Oil and Gas Research and Development program?

From Education, the “Education President” wants to cut 42 programs for a total of $3.5 billion. High school vocational training will see elimination of $1.15 billion in programs. Other education programs getting the axe include Arts in Education, Civics Education, National Writing Project, School Dropout Prevention and Vocational Rehabilitation for Migrant and Seasonal Farmworkers. You can bet some children are getting left behind.

Remember, these are eliminations, not budget cuts — gone, daddy, gone.

From the Energy Department Bush is slicing $114 million in programs. Those include the University Nuclear Energy and the Geothermal Technology programs. Given our current gasoline “crisis,” does it make sense to also cut the $64 million Oil and Gas Research and Development program? It does to somebody, ‘cause it’s history.
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