Make sure every goddamn person I know shows up to vote this fall. Aside from that, I don't know that there's much I really can do. Only when people stop being so apathetic will things change.
Let's not go overboard. What has been done can be undone. Do what you can to make a Democratic victory more likely. Do what you can to pressure potential Presidential nominees to make clear that civil liberties are central to what makes America great.
Is there something we could do together? I mean we all piss each other off a lot, and I surely am guilty of that, but we've got a lot in common, and maybe being geographically dispersed could be an advantage. This isn't like any other blog community, though we're not supposed to say that. Anyway, yeah, I'm inspired to do something substantive about politics these days. Could we form a PAC or something?
Of course, we'll need a jar of peanut butter, a handle of aristocrat vodka, two tuning forks, a bear costume, seven hungry sailors, some saranwrap, lipstick, and one Iranian.
Things have gone very, very badly in this country before. So far, we've tended by fits and starts to correct the egregiously bad stuff. That's not guaranteed, but it's what's happened before. We need to make it happen again, and I think SCMT is right about how that happens. As disgusting and craven as this legislation is, and as much as I despise so many of my fellow citizens for supporting it and the evil trolls who enacted it, most of them aren't committed to executive overreach, they're just pig-ignorant and stupid. If we can elect better people, the law will move back toward decency. If we keep electing people like this, the law doesn't matter.
6: You have two choices: believe in the America that disapproves of the job Bush is doing, and is increasingly hostile to him, or believe in the America that made today possible. They're both here, in the same country, and, to date, the good guys have continually won over the long run.
I think today is scary, but I think a few years ago was much scarier. At least now we're not widely considered lunatics for not offering our full-throated support for any and all Bush policies. At least now you see Republicans leaking away from the President, positioning themselves for posterity, not wanting to go down, in the end, as (in Gingrich's words) on the wrong side of history, again.
We really always do win this one in the end. God willing, it won't be so long until we win again that something catastrophic happens.
And even some Republicans who said voted for the bill said they expected the Supreme Court to strike down the legislation because of the habeas corpus provision, ultimately sending the legislation right back to Congress.
“We should have done it right, because we’re going to have to do it again,” said Senator Gordon Smith, a Republican from Oregon, who had voted to strike the habeas corpus provision, yet supported the bill.
re:19
I prefer the more innovative Masturbate, Masturbate, Cry, Masturbate option.
My utterly unfounded horserace intuition says this might actually hurt the republicans a lot. My reliably centrist friend is in absolute high dudgeon over this.
Renew your passport.
Get a second citizenship and passport
Have an account overseas with money in it - Euros not Dollars.
Move close to the Canadian border or take a job overseas.
Have a fully stocked crash bag and lots of cash.
Have on open airline ticket to a country not likely to respond to a US deportation/redition request.
Hope that you will never have to use these.
I really don't see what good a Democratic congress will do vis a vis this bill. I can't imagine them repealing it for many years, if they ever do.
And honestly, I have a non-trivial fear that if there's another attack, there's going to be a serious push for internment. Fuck if I came here to be locked up by a bunch of ignorant cows.
What the hell. Let's have a quick rundown of "best bang for the buck" in firearms.
If you're going to own just one, it should be the Remington 870 shotgun, either the 7 round or the 4 round "deer" version. I'd personally go with the 4 rounder. Has a front sight and rifled barrel. 4+1 12 gauge with the ability to accurately shoot slugs.
Best handgun for the money is the Ruger GP-100. Shoots both .38 Special and .357 Mag, endlessly reliable, and will last forever.
A nice little rifle to go with that Ruger is the Marlin 1894C. Shoots same ammo as the Ruger, but at much higher velocity because of the longer barrel. Like the Ruger, is overbuilt and reliable.
What percentage of this is joke? A lot damn lower than it would have been a few weeks ago.
Prediction: If crazy shit happens, it will happen faster than we thought it would. If crazy shit does not happen, it will take longer than we expected for the danger of crazy shit to subside.
26: I don't think repeal is likely anytime soon, but a Democratic Congress would at least have the power to do some oversight that would make it harder for the Administration to keep lying about what it's actually doing. And a Democratic President might not even want to torture people or lock them up randomly in the first place.
What is there to do but keep trying in whatever ways that we can? I don't know. Seriously. Probably 35% or more of the country thinks it's perfectly okay if we throw away various rights and authorize torture as long as it's little brown people and Mooslims and shit to whom it happens. What do you do against 35% of the country, especially when voting is regional and allows large pluralities to assemble majorities in the legislature? It's one thing when you think most of your fellow citizens are not aware of what's being done in their names, but another when a near-majority of them are probably reasonably aware and totally ok with it. Yes, they're crapping all over the fundamental insights of the American constitution. Yes, they're basically laughing at any idea of moral or ethical progress over the last century. Yes, someday they'll bitterly regret it if they have even the least honesty or conscience. But for the moment, this day, there doesn't appear to be any way to stop them that I can think of.
Maybe it's just that the papers all told me this ship can't sink, but I really don't think now's the time to start boarding the lifeboats. It sucks, yes, it's shitty, it's bad law, it's a serious and unthinkable infringement of our rights. The law can be changed. No generation has ever had the monopoly on thinking their politicians were the most spineless and craven of all. slol may have finished his gin by now, but a few decades ago the bad and stupid law passed to appease a whipped up public furor meant to distract from the real problems of the day was about that very gin. Ten years ago it was about teh net.pr0nz. The pendulum swings, yes, in both directions. Sometimes it leads to really terrible ideas being acted upon. We steer it back over time and try to undo the mistakes as best we can. I cannot imagine giving up the life I have here just because Bush is a power-hungry asshole. I have the same reaction to that as I have had anytime anyone has suggested I ditch NC because it's "not liberal enough," namely, Oh yeah? And if I do, who's going to fix it?
This year we're very likely to pick up seats in at least one house. In '08, one of my senators is going to be very vulnerable. In '10, so will the other. In the meantime, I have work to do and games to play and kittens to scritch under the chin and movies to watch. Today was terrible, yes, but today must, like any day, be firmly fixed into a larger perspective - one that includes another day when it gets fixed.
What do you do against 35% of the country, especially when voting is regional and allows large pluralities to assemble majorities in the legislature?
You teach the other 65% to fear and loathe them. And once you're in power, you do something bad enough to that 35% that the other 65% stays with you out of fear of what their revenge would look like. Basically, you use Lee Atwater's playbook.
One thing we can do is to get the word out to people, what is being done in our names. The detainee legislation was proposed only a couple of days ago and as noted repeatedly on this site, has gotten close to zero coverage. I just wrote a letter to the editor of my local paper outlining what are the effects of the legislation and with harsh words for my FUCKIN senators who voted in favor. So that's, well, not nothing at any rate.
Either way, I'm sticking around until things become dangerous to me and mine.
That for sure, and I keep my passport current. This makes me another ten percent more certain that I'll give money and time in the next elections. (Which I didn't use to, because they used to go my way.)
This may not be the time, but I've thought variations on this before and now I'll say it outright, just this once. I'm sad about this bill because I read you guys being sad about it here. But I don't feel it inside. Inside, it is just a discouraged shrug.
You know what I am maddened about? That the Republican governor appointed a minor bureaucratic board that is authorizing tens of thousands of houses behind unstable levees. I think this might be more of a humanities/engineer split, because the Unfogged community is all upset at a grievous but largely intangible breach of justice? I'm upset that it is utterly foreseeable that people will drown pinned to their ceilings forty miles from here (and truly, I've read your grief over Katrina. I know you mourn both.). I'd be surprised if even the California locals here noticed when Schwarzenegger sacked the old board and replaced them with developers.
There are so many fronts in this battle. My attention is pretty concrete and local. I have a lot of respect for your dedication to your ideals, but they aren't where I get indignant.
I have a non-trivial fear that if there's another attack, there's going to be a serious push for internment.
Yes.
With regard to your post:
1) E-mail my less-political family and friends and summarize today's developments in two sentences. Ask them to speak up, either in private conversation or public forums, if they are so moved.
2) Write my political representatives and the newspapers.
3) Ask my faith community to support www.quit-torture-now.org
4) Think about whether there is a public place that I can stand in witness against this.
It's not much, but today I shot off an email to the organization I volunteered with before the 2004 election, NY Citizen Action, to see if I could do some swing-state phone banking or a GOTV bus trip to Pennsylvania or something. (God, I was working in PA when Santorum ran the first time and, believe me, you shouldn't put anything past that bastard. He ran the dirtiest campaign I've seen outside of Louisiana in the weeks right before the election. He did everything but accuse his opponent of molesting little kids.)
I feel very delinquent not having called to volunteer earlier -- it had been my plan, but I got so busy preparing for my trip. A lame excuse, I know.
Dammit. I just checked the account I used to send the email and my inquiry was bounced back because the mailbox is over quota. I'll have to call them tomorrow. I'm just hoping they're over quota because SO MANY people emailed to volunteer today.
OK, WTF? Take a look at the front page of my hometown newspaper website right now and tell me people in Ohio even knew this was up for a vote, let alone its significance.
39: a grievous but largely intangible breach of justice
I don't get this. I'm bothered by this bill because I think it will foreseeably lead to a lot more innocent people being tortured to death in a windowless basement.
I can see why, out of the two outrages -- drowning and torture -- you'd be more focused on the closer one, but I don't see anything intangible or abstract about either.
(A tiny part of my indignation is abstract, because I'm quite fond of the constitution and it just got torn up -- but that's really not what's bothering me).
Also, when I think about volunteering, I don't feel the idealism that I had when working for the Kerry campaign. I feel something closer to resentment. I guess because it all seems so futile -- I'll go and pour my heart into it again and we'll still probably lose. And I have to give up time and energy that I could have devoted to something else if other people WEREN'T SO FUCKING STUPID and PAID ATTENTION TO THEIR DEMOCRACY. And then I feel guilty for feeling resentful.
If I didn't have kids, I'd make the best of this misery with my old pal alcohol and relish the rising tide of black humor, which the Soviets were always so good at when they seemed to have the market on repression pretty much cornered.
But thanks to my family, I have to do positive things like volunteer and get out the vote and otherwise try to organize and educate. And teach my little sweeties to despise bullshit like this and all who make it happen. Wretched family.
48 - Now wasn't the time. But I can offer that there are people out there who aren't going to act because of a loss of habeus corpus, but who are 1. going to act because other reasons have them opposing this administration, and who are 2. diligently going about the small bureaucratic undoings, at local meetings over boring stuff.
Just curious, is rape still a war crime, per this bill? I mean, if only intentional infliction of extreme pain meets the standard for torture, but not degradation or humiliation, would that mean rape of detainees was legal?
According to the NYT: "Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture."
I can't quite parse that. What is non coerced rape? I better just read the damn thing, but I was trying to tell myself today I had no energy left to care, until I started bitching to my coworkers and I realized as my voice rose to a keening pitch that I evidently did.
Just curious, is rape still a war crime, per this bill? I mean, if only intentional infliction of extreme pain meets the standard for torture, but not degradation or humiliation, would that mean rape of detainees was legal?
Sure, unless it's rape that has a paper trail establishing that it was intentionally designed to cause both serious and severe pain or permanent bodily injury. Just like any other kind of torture.
[T]he real background to the movements that gradually assume political significance does not usually consist of overtly political events or confrontations between different forces or concepts that are openly political. These movements for the most part originate elsewhere, in the far broader area of the "pre-political," where living within a lie confronts living within the truth, that is, where the demands of the post-totalitarian system conflict with the real aims of life.
These real aims can naturally assume a great many forms. Sometimes they appear as the basic material or social interests of a group or an individual; at other times, they may appear as certain intellectual and spiritual interests; at still other times, they may be the most fundamental of existential demands, such as the simple longing of people to live their own lives in dignity.
Such a conflict acquires a political character, then, not because of the elementary political nature of the aims demanding to be heard but simply because...every free human act or expression, every attempt to live within the truth, must necessarily appear as a threat to the system and, thus, as something which is political par excellence.
Well, tonight I drank a lot and distracted myself by playing cards with friends. That wasn't very productive. Knowing myself, the likely true answer to this question is (a) feel shitty, (b) give money to various candidates that seem less awful than the alternative, (c) vote, (d) feel shitty, (e) complain about the media, (f) drink more, (g) feel shitty. I'm currently entering the academic job market and am applying for some jobs in Canada. I feel deeply ambivalent about the prospect of moving out of the country, and now the ambivalence is sharper and ever weirder.
Becks, it's worse than that. No major cable news outlet covered the issue. From what I understand, CNN literally didn't even MENTION today's vote. I simply don't understand; I mean, I get it, I suppose, but I just don't understand.
SCMT et al, a serious question: After today, why should I vote for the Democrats (as a party) in the fall? If my Senator were, say, Lautenberg -- which, thank God, he's not -- why should I reward his cowardice, his craven abdication of his responsibilities and his gutless pandering to the latent fascists among us, with my vote? An enabler of torturer is better than a torturer himself, I guess, but is that really better enough to warrant support? Especially if -- as is my fear -- we simply validate the Democratic strategy of spineless submission to whatever atrocity the Republican hard-liners vomit forth next?
As I mentioned in another thread, my Senators voted "No" so this isn't particularly an issue. But I damn well called both of them and told them that if they voted "Yes" they had lost my vote in perpetuity, Bush and the Republicans be damned -- which, after this, they will be.
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand."
Just saying. Because I can't otherwise say what I might otherwise be saying, yeah?
We can fix this. We've survived worse as a country, but first we have to let people know that there's a problem that needs to be fixed. Not sure what to do yet, though. I'm simmering.
You can have two citizenships at once, but it's not easy to do, as it usually requires establishing residency, employment, and jumping through years of hoops in another country. On the off chance you manage to get citizenship, you can hold it dual with American citizenship, because the only way you can lose your citizenship is to renounce it formally.
No major cable news outlet covered the issue. From what I understand, CNN literally didn't even MENTION today's vote.
CNN depresses me a lot, not least because a lot of people seem to still reflexively think of it as bearing some kind of standard for solid, "neutral" news. I know that the university where I currently work has a setup with flatscreen TVs scattered across campus that are supposed to serve as a handy, wholesome neutral source of information: weather, university bulletins, etc., and one of the advertised handy wholesome things you can set them to display is CNN. Yay, Glenn Beck is just what I want to see in the library reading room.
Depends on the country. For some (e.g. Ireland) if you have a certain amount of documentable ancestry from there you just have to fill out some paperwork and bingo, citizenship. For others you have to actually immigrate and wait a while and all the other stuff we make people do to get American citizenship.
Yeah, I meant without easy ancestry loopholes. It would take five years for me to get Canadian citizenship and I already have the groom lined up, y'know?
Tristero explains it all. Including today's vote. We are still underestimating how vicious and crazy the Republicans are. By about a magnitude. Bush, IMO, is quite capable of threatening to nuke Iran to get a victory in the Senate. Or worse. Quite honestly, our Senators need backup, need to feel they would have support if it came to violent confrontation. So far, they don't see it.
56:Word, but that has never stopped me before. So I make my stand here, to shout as a free man who loves his country:PUPPETS!
Bob, a lot of people today seem to suddenly be in the depressed place where you and I live all the time. We should feel warm and joyful with all these friendly guests we have.
Seven score and whatever years ago, these people, or people like them took America to a bloodbath for the right to whip their n******. At that time, the country, being loaded with newly arrived Irish, was willing to accept that challenge.
The MSM is also scared. These Republicans will blow up the world before accepting defeat. Will allow billions to drown in rising oceans in order to make sure their kids own the mountaintops. They are not the sharing type. They are radically evil.
The MSM seems to be thoroughly penetrated by Republicans, including most of the ownership. Democrats always look (even) worse than they really are because the media wants them to.
Somewhere, sometime I related torture to ante-bellum slavery. It was not just about the right to wield the whip, it was about actually making the strokes. They needed a victim, they needed their superiority affirmed constantly in actual violence. They need to wield the whip, to see the blood.
Look at Bush. I really think the man is constantly, existentially motivated to hurt others, in small and large ways. Every minute of his life is spent in sadism.
As I said, I have nothing sane to say today. I will go.
Umm, batten the hatches. We have yet to see the "October Surprise". Bush & Rove are smiling. The next six months are going to blow your mind. You ain't seen nothing yet.
I dunno... how about simple steps to make the people who did it pay, Becks-style? Every single person who voted for this in the House is up for re-election in six weeks, as are many who voted for it in the Senate. They didn't get into congress magically; they got voted in, probably by running a campaign with lots of resources.
They can leave the same way. Find out who the challenger is, and send them $100. Or $1000. Or go work for them, answering the phone, cold-calling people for donations, or reminding them to vote, or driving a van, or whatever.
Or if you aren't into direct campaigning, you can engage the Republicans in the think-tank game; there's Josh Marshall with his TPM Muckraker project; the Washington Monthly, The American Prospect, etc.
Certainly true. Running for office is a pretty damn big commitment, though, and hard to do when you're drunk. Has your office learned of the amazing awfulness that is Proposition 90 yet?
33: Those people are everywhere. My uncle is like that. He kind of opposed teh Iraq war, because he knew taht it would be unpopular, but he doesn't care about the merits of the issue. Those soldiers who've died signed on to be soldiers, and that's part of the deal. And who gives a shit about a bunch of dead Iraqis if it keeps us safe here, and Saddam Hussein sucked. Go ahead and torture the terrorists; he's not about to be tortured.
You know what does interest him: Westin and Concord are getting richer while the median income in Lincoln--a lovely 2-acre zoned suburb with lots of MIT professors is dropping (odd in an area with high property values). Must mean that it's all a bunch of Yankees with dividend incomE that isn't being taxed.
Well, starting in ten days I am going to go work for a small law firm that's suing some contractors on behalf of Iraqi torture victims. I am also hoping to publish an article about six prisoners at Guantanamo who were captured in a Taliban prison, using to illustrate what's wrong with this bill.
The point of which is, not "ooh, look at how virtuous I am"--I am proud of this, but that's not the point. The point is that you are not powerless. I know that's a cliche, but it is also true. It's possible to find small ways to help, and one thing can lead to another and those can become much bigger ways.
Obviously, it's an extreme example, it doesn't have to take over your life (and if you want it to, it helps to be a law student, especially at a school that opens doors--and even with that in mind I just plain lucked into a lot of this). But it got started because I wrote a weblog series on the Arar case. That led to me deciding to write my law school thesis on "rendition". That led to two volunteer jobs: 1) helping one of the GTMO lawyers research/edit his book; 2) helping Human Rights Watch with their research on CIA prisons, rendition, & military-CIA task forces in Iraq. Those things, combined, and with some intermediate steps omitted, led to the new job. And I found the story about the former Taliban/Al Qaeda prisoners at GTMO while I was skimming through CSRT transcripts for HRW for another project.
It's all very contingent: I could easily not have noticed the Arar story that set me off. But once you start, it has a way of reinforcing itself. You know more, so you care more, so you learn more, so you care more, and you get to know others who work on this, and you start to care about them and want to have their backs, and that draws you further in....
Also, slightly off topic, but did you all hear about the Iran Freedom Support Act which the House passed on a voice vote? (via Dr. Josh at Talking Points Memo.)
"It would be a critical mistake to allow a regime with a track record as bloody and as dangerous as Iran to obtain nuclear weapons," said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., sponsor of the measure. "Enough with the carrots. It's time for the stick."
And I don't see a damn thing in the world wrong with 39. This is a good fit for me, but God knows, there are a lot of important issues. (Including, say, having kids--if this happened three to five years from now no way I could've spent this much time on it). People do what they can. This happens to be something that gets to me, and is a good fit for my skills, and odd though it sounds, I enjoy working on it most of the time. (There's a side of me that was disgusted when I realized that Bush was using the 14 high level suspects as a campaign ploy to pass a bill like this...there's a side of me that was psyched that Human Rights Watch had figured out that 13 of them were CIA ghosts several months before.)
66: I had The Second Coming in my head tonight as well. But that's in part because it's one of the only poems I have memorized, so I think about it even when it's not relevant. Yes, this means my taste in poetry is totally mainstream bourgeoisie and I should be ashamed.
No, that's a good point, Katherine. There isn't really any point in destroying one's life uselessly; if you can find a grand way to work against these evils, great; if you can't, continue your life and work and vote against these evils as you can.
Between 2002 and 2004, I was in a position to marry into EU citizenship; while there were a lot of unrelated reasons that didn't happen, another compelling reason was my belief that people who believed as I did must not abandon ship. I still believe that, and more now than ever.
One of the reasons this legislation hit online political junkies so hard was because we were so convinced that the tide of public opinion was turning against, well, torture. We know that subarticle X and subarticle Y make this bill a true danger, but the majority of the public have no idea what just happened.
Yeah, thanks a lot, media outlets. But some blog stories can force their way into public consciousness--we're doing their research for free, after all. If liberal blogs continue to pound on this story, continue to be outraged (maybe even neglecting to provide that free research and factchecking for those other breaking stories?), then maybe this legislation will get at least some media coverage.
Oh, and these days I have the options either of trying to claim Canadian citizenship on the basis of my dad's birth, or marrying my honey and immigrating to Iran. My dad always promised that if I ever needed to disappear, for whatever reason, the cabin in the middle of nowhere could be my refuge. But I'm not convinced I could survive a winter there, when it comes down to it.
Oh, shit. Wait, no, pretend my exclamation (101) represented a belated realization of the Kobe-ness of my previous comment (100). Do, pretend; it will all make sense then.
Other than it requiring less of my aim, which is a very good thing, why would I want a shotgun over a handgun? Handgun's would have fewer storage issues. Also, this is wholly speculative, it costs a lot to legally own a gun in New York.
w/d: really, it's not about being armed. The army will always outgun you. The trick is convincing enough elements of the army a) not to fire upon your demonstrations, and eventually b) to turn over their arms to your cause.
100: that was really not my point at all. I am trying to talk people into working on this, and I mean more than voting.
It is intensely frustrating the contrast between the tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth on these issues right around moments like this, and the lack of sustained effort.
There is next to no interest among liberal weblogs in factual research on these issues. Not in doing it, not even in linking to it. Or on call-your-Senators posts before the lack of filibuster is a foregone conclusion. I tried NOT doing it last minute this time, unlike the Graham amendment, and just felt like I was depressing people with information they did not want to read, and nagging. But now everyone's in tears and talking about dictatorship. I just don't get it.
That's why 39 didn't bother me...if this isn't what catches your imagination, if this isn't what suits your skills, fine. But if it is, don't vacillate between ignoring it and talking idly about renouncing your citizenship and arming yourself and ignoring it again.
Sorry, I'm being obnoxious. It's not personally directed at anyone here or even this weblog, at all. I just wish I could've been more effective a few weeks ago.
It is intensely frustrating the contrast between the tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth on these issues right around moments like this, and the lack of sustained effort.
I wouldn't say there's a contrast between those things.
I can't imagine a situation in which anything I do would have any impact on what the national government does. I can therefore
A) get mad but not do anything about it,
B) get mad and do something that is doomed to failure,
C) or ignore the whole issue. I'm feeling like C is the most natural option right now, given that it's what everyone I know does.
I can't claim to be good on the sustained effort, Katherine, as much as I would wish to be. But I agree with you; that sort of sustained political engagement by ordinary people who are living ordinary lives is what is necessary. Whether people who read and comment on political blogs qualify as such is left to the ingenuity of the reader. But I do agree that the talk of emigration is too much.
We're moving into black comedy au style de l'époque Stalanienne. If we keep it light, dirty, and titillating, nobody can establish in law that we think our regime is a horrorshow.
washerdryer, I don't know what LSHR is...I'd say it just depends on the local chapter, on finding a few people you like to work with.
BTW, I realize this is not feasible for people with, you know, jobs, but this looks very much worth going to, especially the live event at Seton Hall. List of schools here. I know a couple of the presenters and they are really really great.
Each person helps the cause in his or her own way. You might not see the connection between your boozy gaming, and my writing a lame short story, but you see, butterfly wings flapping in Argentina, and all that.
I'm still awake despite having to get up in 3 hours, but that's mostly because I'm still pretty juiced over seeing The Mountain Goats tonight. Though in the interest of not being fired, I should probably go to bed at some point.
Other than it requiring less of my aim, which is a very good thing, why would I want a shotgun over a handgun?
You've kind of hit on it. Requires less practice, less precision, and is more likely to put someone down on the first shot. Also, there's a visual menace to a shotgun that no handgun can match.
Katherine, sorry, I think that's the abbreviation for Law Students for Human Rights, which I suppose could just be local to my school and not the more widespread group I'd imagined it to be.
Me and my best friend bought a bottle of tequila and drank over half of it tonight while mourning the state of our country and planning next March's trip to Egypt.
I'm not jumping ship or leaving the country. I'm staying here, damnit. I'm young, and I'm about to graduate from law school, and I am more passionate now about politics than I ever have been (and I imagine the increase will only continue), and I am going to fuck some shit up.
we had a human rights group but it wasn't called that & I actually wasn't all that involved. (I was on the Human Rights Journal, but didn't do summers abroad or whatnot.) Really, the thing to do is find people you like & think are effective if you're talking about volunteering, and that's going to depend on where you are. As far as donations my bias is towards Human Rights Watch...I think they're the best pure researchers, but they don't do organizing the way Amnesty does.
okay, bedtime. (Though I don't have to work tomorrow!)
130: Katherine, I'm already planning on attending that (via the livecast) as one of my profs is a main dude involved, and I am stoked about Craig Haney--I've used a ton of his work in my research, and he is the shit.
I hate everything. The NYT's headline: "Democrats See Strength in Backing Bush." What the fuck is that? Are they trying to spin this as a victory for the Democrats? Fuck that. Fucking fuck this bullshit.
Yes indeed. Are you going to the Northwestern one? If so, email me! (This comment has my real address, slightly modified to foil spammers...I think you can figure it out somehow).
109: Part of the problem is that the Bush Administration's strategy seems to be "foul on every play, the ref can't call them all". And while we in the blogosphere can, it's just plain tiring and it doesn't seem to do any good. In my particular case I'm pretty much outraged out; I'm on the razor's edge of either ditching grad school completely and devoting myself to politics full-time (which will destroy me), or just turning my back on the whole thing and walking away (which doesn't exactly help the country).
[Which dilemma is, I realize, exactly what Rove wants. But I'm not sure what else I can do.]
I made a cup of hot cocoa with a scoop of Haaagen-Dazs ice cream and a shot of rum and now I'm going to look at those pictures of baby marmosets over on Apo's blog and play the Llama song and when I wake up, it will all have been a dream and Toto will be chewing on my ruby slippers.
What I'm going to do is continue to not buy gas, for one. To continue to vote with my dollar, or lack thereof, for another. To not give my vote to a Democrat or a Republican, and let them know why, for another. Again, and some more.
yay Katherine! we all think you're great. also, yay Megan! at least here in Singapore I have more rights. they used to practice cold room/long time standing back in the day, but they stopped. too barbaric, in the icy air-conditioned room with the palm trees outside; they gave it up for lawyers and questions, left it to the barbarians. fuck fuck fuck.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it's a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.
Yeah -- that's a great poem -- which I had never read until just this instant -- thanks jim! -- but it does not seem applicable to the contemporary situation, precisely.
I think that buying guns is pointless. Look at the Montana militia, or David Koresh, or Randy Weaver. Once they were located they had no real military option and it became a PR game. They were just sitting ducks, hiding behind children in two of the cases. All were treated far nicer than leftists would be, because the wingers hated Clinton and Bush the First so much. We wouldn't get the good PR.
As for individual back-to-the-wall self-defense-to-the-death, that requires you to be awake all day and night every day and every night while they play cat and mouse.
Evidence that guns provide no protection against a well-organized tyranny is so counter to our ideology that it can be a shock, and most never see it. I remember learning as a teenager the Lee Harvey Oswald went hunting with his coworkers in Russia, and was stunned that the Russians had guns and went hunting.
A couple days ago, faced with the inevitability of this monstrosity's passage, I quit my job in the realization that I should be doing something useful to improve the increasingly hellish state of my country. But my job sucked, and I hated it anyway, so in and of itself I don't think it means all that much.
"Look at the Montana militia, or David Koresh, or Randy Weaver."
Perhaps one should rather look at the Iraqi insurgents. A few guys with rifles out in the boondocks are easy to nail without causing much "collateral damage" and a resultant political backlash, big cities are a completely different tactical situation.
I'm pretty sure that the Iraqi insurgents include a lot of the demobolized Iraqi Army. But one of the main poitns is that this isn't citizens against government or citizens against a foreign invader. 30% or so of Americans absolutely support George Bush, and the worse he gets the more they support him. They quibble on immigration and at some point failure in Iraq will start to get to them, but they're absolutely not on our side.
To put it differently, I've always thought that the anti-terrorist hoopla has been equally directed at the American internal enemy, which is us. People who aren't really worried much about the Taliban regaining power will go into a rage about the liberal domination of the New York Times.
I'm going to attempt to channel outrage and fury and sadness into action. We'll see how it goes.
Step one is to guilt trip my friends into political action -- the local Planned Parenthood and NOW organizations are organizing phone banks to try to get more women to vote. Seems like a good thing. MoveOn also has that Call for Change program going. Even my dad is participating.
Apart from that, I think it's time to move my "quit my job, go back to school, get a degree in public policy, and change the world" plan from the back burner to the front.
109, 110: This is, of course, absolutely right. The more attention I pay to this stuff, the more I realize that it's still nowhere near enough and I'm completely ineffective (as in yesterday's little bout of bloggy hysteria). The only thing to do is work harder to find a place to be actually useful.
39: Absolutely right. You do what good you can in the area where you can help. Not everyone has to focus on the same issues all the time, and anyone saying different is being an idiot.
Think globally, act locally. It's not just a pithy slogan, it's a good way to keep from going fucking nuts.
None of us can change this on our own. None of us should try to convince ourselves that we can turn the tide by Sheer Force Of Will (plus guns, or a public policy degree, or whatever). I'm not saying to drop out and stop working for change, just don't get solipsistic about it.
I'm not so sure 109 and 110 are right. I suspect part of what is driving the lack of attention to the sorts of projects Katherine mentions is a realization that those projects are not effective at quickly changing minds. People aren't changing their minds on the Bush Administration because they've been exposed to new facts about torture. They're changing their minds because Iraq is taking too long, and there exists a plausible explanation that blames Bush. Atrios has said that he models his blog on talk radio. I think he's a little right about what sorts of activities are effective politically. Factual research is useful in changing things only insofar as it makes more robust the explanations that are available to unhappy people. That's really valuable, but the payoff is distant and contingent on the existence of unhappy people.
I have no idea what that suggests people should actually be doing, other than learning to better incite hatred.
165.2: I'd like to clarify that my 46 wasn't intended as an attack on Meghan's 39, just a response to clarify my own position. Of course we can't all freak out equally about every outrage or we'd all have died of stroke years ago. And it doesn't surprise me that engineers are more emotionally invested in the outrages that result from shitty levee building, and lawyers like me are invested in outrages that result from habeas-stripping legislation. But I don't think either of those concerns is more or less concrete or abstract or ideological than the other: both of them matter because at the end of them there's people suffering who wouldn't otherwise be suffering. At least that's why the detainee thing matters to me.
Not that I do much that makes it manifest that it matters to me, other than whining.
115: if I want to give some hours to a group, LSHR, ACLU, or something else?
Is it really possible to give just "hours" to the ACLU (or similar)? As a lawyer rather than as an envelope stuffer, though I'll stuff envelopes if that's all that's on offer. I am well past my summer-vacation-student-intern days. Does anyone know?
I think that buying guns is pointless. Look at the Montana militia, or David Koresh, or Randy Weaver.
I think you're looking at this wrong. They've got a playbook for this kind of stuff, and it's not putting the military in the streets. Think Civil Rights movement, Klan intimidation, etc. Bully tactics. Remember how a bunch of Sikhs and other vaguely Middle Eastern looking people got attacked and beaten right after 9-11? Same type who were burning crosses in the 60's and earlier. That type of winger is still alive and well, and the Republican schtick of "you're either with us or the terrorists" along with the eliminationist rhetoric from the AM radio crowd is done to inflame that segment of the party. The shotgun isn't for the tank in the streets, it's for the guy who thinks he can burn a cross in your yard.
Hey Felix - I totally got that, and I also understood better how a loss of habeus corpus translates for you into torture in windowless basements. Not that different from drowning in your attic.
I agree it was useful of Megan to remind us of different priorities. I said upthread that there was not some national epiphany, my recollection. That Welch's "decency" moment, and the story told in "Good Night and Good Luck" were not widespread national experiences that everyone, or more than a very small number, noticed. So will it be this time.
I'm trying to figure out how the hell proposing an amendment and failing to pass it having promised not to filibuster counts as bucking anything.
The shotgun isn't for the tank in the streets, it's for the guy who thinks he can burn a cross in your yard.
This is pretty much right; the question shouldn't be 'can your shotgun take on an army?' 'cause you're pretty well scrod even if you have your own Apache at that point. It's more that 'given that there's no law & order, can you knock off the small-time violent mob or general jackass.
I think more than the lack of filibuster people are blaming the Democrats for not speaking up sooner. The perception is that they sat back and allowed McCain, Warner, and Graham to handle "opposing" Bush, even though we've seen that fake opposition over and over again. Granted, it's incredibly difficult for Democrats to get coverage from the media, but it looks like they didn't even try, and I don't think that's all the media's fault. If they continue to let the public conversation include only the Republican version of reality, then there's no chance that people's views on the issue will become more informed and improve.
I've been hinting for days how exasperated I am with some of our discussion of the political situation, as educated people more-or-less left-of-center. If I think of it as a forum for blowing off steam and expressing feelings, I'm ok with it, and love everybody more for the depth of your decency and concern.
But I think the contempt for Democrats continually expressed here is beginning to infect our sense of ourselves as Americans, and induce fatalism and despair. We have to be tougher than this, and more resilient.
In that respect, via Kevin Drum, I see that, yes, George Lakoff has some useful things to say, about the traps we fall into as liberals/progressives. And I must say, I think we've fallen into a lot of them lately.
I still have trouble seeing how they were supposed to do anything with only 34 votes. It's a huge problem that there are 66 votes in the Senate against the Constitution, but this is not a problem that can be primarily ascribed to the Democrats.
I think that McCain, Warner and Graham will live to regret what they did. There's no reason for the Democrats to regret it; their leadership stood firm, and was utterly outnumbered. We can't win in Iraq by will alone, and we can't win Senate votes that way either.
The answer is to elect more Democrats like the ones who voted no, and to give the boot to the Democrats and Republicans who voted yes. This is totally consistent with what we've been saying for years, up to and including the 'fuck Lieberman' part.
If the filibuster wouldn't work, it wouldn't work; they didn't even have enough votes to try. It's more the lack of balls up until that point. We'll keep the powder so so dry that you might think we don't have any powder!
Procedural question: how do amendments to bills get proposed? Can any senator propose them? Do you have to be on a committee? (Basically wondering why the habeas was sponsored by Specter and not a Democrat. )
No, that's a good way to engender anger and sadness. This is a good way to engender hatred (emphasis mine):
It is hard to imagine that any real American could oppose it. Perhaps the Dems are fighting it in order to deprive Santorum of a real victory—he is their major target in November. But it is alarming to see that the Dems are in cahoots with the appeasers in the State Department." (Corner )
Compare that with this:
I can't stand it any longer: This evening all the network news programs air Bush's slam, "The party of FDR and Truman is now the party of cut and run". There's no democrat presenting any equivalent slam against Bush or the "torture" republicans.(TPM )
"Torture republicans"? Cripes, how weenie. We should be calling them traitors. We should be saying that there are a handful of events that everyone on earth looks at to see how special America is, and these people have never been on the right side of Jesus on any of them. They were against fighting the Nazis. They were against the Civil Rights movement. They actually committed treason and tried to destroy the Union. They were behind the most successful terrorist organization in US history. And now they are trying to turn us from the nation of Founding Father Patrick Henry--"Give me liberty or give me death"--into the nation of Texas Republican John Cornyn--“None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead." Look: they're technically Americans, and we have a responisibility to live with them and work with them. Maybe at some future point, they'll get what America is all about. But right now--and possibly with the best of intentions--they are intent on destroying our country. We can't shoot them, and we can't exile them, but we can't let them lead America to its own destruction, either.
Is any of that fair? Mildly, at best. It's certainly sloppy, and it's certainly slippery. Who cares? It's the language of hate.
I don't think Reid or Durbin made any effort to filibuster, at all, nor do I think they strongly encouraged people in close races to vote no.
I am going off of their public statements...but if they were trying to twist arms and apply pressure, they wouldn't have said things in public which directly undercut that.
They may have applied pressure on the habeas vote--much fewer defections than the Graham amendment. And I guess it was not beyond all hope of turning, say, Snowe and Hagel and one more. But, the bill itself, I don't believe there was any serious effort to stop.
I still have trouble seeing how they were supposed to do anything with only 34 votes.
They could have tried making the case against, but instead they allowed the McCain-Warner-Graham kabuki show while most of the party said nothing. Getting beaten is one thing. Refusing to even take the field is another.
I think that McCain, Warner and Graham will live to regret what they did.
155: The poem as a whole (as Felix noted) is not what's relevant. The last four lines do resonate. Our statues are of the founders: Madison, Jefferson, George Mason (I'm in Virginia). They do look the same, don't they?
They did make the case against, in a number of floor speeches against the bill. Saying that they 'allowed' the McCain-Warner-Graham charade implies they could've done anything to stop or undermine, or even supplement it. I don't see it -- these three went into secret negotiations with the White House and suddenly emerged with a bill, fully formed. You think the Democrats just didn't RSVP for the negotiations or something?
McCain in particular could live to regret this vote. I tend to think it's far more likely that he's going to get beat up in 2008, either in the general or hopefully the primaries, than that any of the Democrats voting 'no' will get beat up over that. He went in claiming to be an independent and came out with a rubber stamp for Bush.
The plan, from the start, was to produce a bill that Democrats could not vote for. They've done it before and I refuse to believe that the Democrats were caught by surprise. But how to play the situation politically -- by calling foul from the start? No, that would make the Dem caucus look unreasonable. There wasn't even a bill to object to at that point! The only reasonable thing to do was to use the bill to highlight the way Republicans game the system to take laws straight from Bush's pen to the Senate floor. I believe that they are going to do this in the coming weeks.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Wednesday that Democrats were "on the sidelines watching the catfights" among Republicans on terrorism legislation. He said they had little choice until the GOP settled on its position.
Democrats may attempt to amend the detainee legislation should it reach the floor of the House or Senate, and they say they will defend their record on national security. But it is unlikely party leaders will make much noise this election season to ensure terror suspects are afforded legal rights.
Influencing their strategy are memories of the 2002 defeat of Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., who was ousted by Republican Saxby Chambliss following a TV ad campaign that attacked Cleland's patriotism. Cleland, a severely wounded Vietnam veteran, had voted against creating the Homeland Security Department.
"Max Cleland — having lost three limbs in Vietnam — thought the voters in Georgia wouldn't fall for" such charges, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, Richard Durbin, said Wednesday. "They did and he lost his Senate seat. We're not going to make that same mistake."
The McCain-Warner-Graham bill had habeas stripping even BEFORE the "compromise" (though not within the U.S.--that was new.) I had smoke coming out of years listening to everyone praise them or hide behind them for a bill that was already bad and which I knew full well would get worse.
"t's more that 'given that there's no law & order, can you knock off the small-time violent mob or general jackass."
Or "Can you entice the people with tanks and planes to turn them on the general public just to get you?"
The playbooks for this sort of thing were perfected by the Algerians and Vietnamese. However, it's probably difficult to get health & life insurance if one's occupation is listed as "insurgent".
I don't see how that contradicts what I was trying to say. The Democrats had no choice but to wait and see what secret bill would be produced, and then try to defeat it. In the meantime they emphasized that there were Republicans with serious qualms about doing... exactly what they ended up doing. A good way to paint Republicans as slavish Bush devotees with no principles, I should think.
When the bill came out, they attempted to replace it with a compromise bill and failed (no matter that the compromise bill was nearly as bad). Message: We won't do anything besides what Bush tells us. If the Democrats don't campaign on this, they are nuts.
First, register to vote here.
Second, get caught up on the news.
Third, I moved back to this country to be able to get involved in fighting this shit. Mr. B. and I are gonna have a li'l talk this weekend about our plans.
Fourth, get in touch with the ACLU and find out who the fuck else I need to join/read/subscribe to.
Fifth, call the local Democratic party folks and find out what we're doing. Volunteer some time.
Sixth, start talking to the other parents at the school, the neighbors, etc., and find out what they know and what they think, and if they're on the wrong side, start converting them.
That's the plan for now. It'll probably update as I get going.
But if I were you, Ogged, I'd make sure my passport was up to date and that I had cash available to buy a plane ticket at short notice, and maybe call a couple of friends in, say, Canada to make sure you can come for a "visit" if we do actually start interning people. If you don't have friends in Canada, you know people who do.
I can't blame Neil for repeating the conventional wisdom of the Democratic party, but the Democratic party has been losing for years, and will never be able to win with that philosophy.
Paul Wellstone was famous for his 99-1 defeats. On a few issues he may have nudged his party left, and on some small issues he accomplished things, but mostly he lost.
Now there's one kind of voter who votes for a candidate they respect even though they don't completely agree with them. It's a nice little swing demographic. Wellstone could get those votes, but this most recent thing puts them out of reach for Democrats.
Theres a probablly-larger demographic whichg votes against emaly-mouthed, evasive, game-players, regardless of ideology. They seldom vote for democrats any more.
Gingrich scheduled and lost dozens of high-profile votes on his road to power. He'd lose and broadcats "The Democrats just voted to raise your taxes!" The Republicans don't even want to win votes on abortion questions -- they'd prefer to be able to lose and milk that issue forever.
The Democrats never play an offensive, long-term game. They're always cutting the best deal immediately available, and they look weak to everyone.
McCain got visibility from this. Bush got visibility. The Democrats looked feeble.
In the medium term, everyone needs to have an index card (really a memorized amount of equivalent information, I don't expect people to actually carry a card) of well cited anti-McCain information. I keep hearing people who I know are generally "on our side" (sorry, Tia, ac) saying stupidly pro-McCain things. Not that they'd vote for him over a Democrat, but that, while voting for the Democrat, they wouldn't care that much about who wins between Democrat X and McCain.
Gingrich scheduled and lost dozens of high-profile votes on his road to power. He'd lose and broadcats "The Democrats just voted to raise your taxes!"
That was my point -- I thought the (remaining) Democrats were going to try to reap a political benefit out of losing this one.
I still think it's a good thing that a majority of Democrats (and the leadership) voted correctly on this bill, and firmly refuse to accept that the minority who didn't are 'representative' of the Democratic party as of now. (Maybe they once were, but no longer. I mean, Lieberman?) Accordingly, nothing about this bill is changing my political outlook, except that before I thought Dick Lugar might have been one of the mythical 'good ones.' No more.
An unsuccessful filibuster could have been good staging. And letting McCain carry the ball not only lost the issue, but it also let him look good and made them look lame. All this is true regardless of whether the bill passed or not.
An unsuccessful filibuster could have been good staging. And letting McCain carry the ball not only lost the issue, but it also let him look good and made them look lame. All this is true regardless of whether the bill passed or not.
An unsuccessful filibuster could have been good staging. And letting McCain carry the ball not only lost the issue, but it also let him look good and made them look lame. All this is true regardless of whether the bill passed or not.
Look, the perfect is the enemy of the not-completely-hopeless-yet. The Dems didn't filibuster, but they did vote against the bill, by and large. Midterms are coming up. Let's put more Dems in congress and then we won't have to *worry* about whether they have the balls to filibuster or not.
Of course they had a bloody choice. The habeas stripping stuff was GUARANTEED to be in the "compromise", and the war crimes provisions were already watered down in the McCain proposal, it was only a question of how much. You do not talk about the importance of not looking weak on national security, and make disgusting snide comments about a "cat fight", right before you launch on a full throated defense of this country's principles. They made some good speeches yesterday, but who payed attention?
I am going to vote, I am going to donate to certain candidates, but these bullshit excuses drive me insane. Every time I'm going to break out the credit card for Joe Sestak I read this crap and it saps my motivation.
What's an unsuccessful filibuster look like? Does it look better than votes on those four amendments? Because it seems like Reid traded one for the other, and he did it for a reason.
I also wish the Democrats had said "We refuse to let any bill that doesn't protect the rights of the accused," don't get me wrong, but all indications are they knew they wouldn't be able to achieve that, so the same bill would've passed in the end. How does that situation look? It distracts from McCain capitulating, for one thing, and suggests that the Democrats capitulated instead. Although a lot of people do seem to feel that they did, I don't think this is the overall impression.
Maybe I'm completely backwards, though, and what you say it is all that matters. In that paradigm, McCain is the big winner because he made the most noise, and it's no skin off his back to have given in to Bush so publically. But I bet that incident is going to haunt him later, perhaps when we learn more about exactly how Bush is abusing this power.
I agree that we should not try to punish the Democrats, as several have suggested. If the Democrats are hopeless, the US is hopeless.
I've been waiting for the Democratic Party to toughen up and get smarter for years now. There've been good signs, but yesterday was a tremendous letdown.
There are various ways that the Democrats could have staged their losing votes in order to get visibility make themselves look good. The strategy they chose made them look weak and by and large left them in the background. Furthermore, they gained absolutely nothing in the practical sense; Bush got what he asked for.
The filibuster is not the main point. The lackluster response is. (Of course, the defection by so many Democrats tied the leadership's hands in some respects.)
You do not talk about the importance of not looking weak on national security, and make disgusting snide comments about a "cat fight", right before you launch on a full throated defense of this country's principles. They made some good speeches yesterday, but who payed attention?
I expect to see attacks on Republican incumbents for rubber-stamping Bush's un-American power grabs, and I expect to see Democratic incumbents using those speeches to defend themselves from the coming Republican attacks. I don't think either of these things would be particularly out of tune with what we've been seeing so far. I also doubt it will rise to the level of a full-throated defense of this country's principles -- the argument will probably be more like "Your representative voted to make Bush judge, jury and executioner, how do you feel about that?"
Anymore, not like much. Successful filibusters don't makeit to the floor;unsuccessful, IIRC, bring about an immediate cloture vote, without any debate on the bill. Everything really happens in backrooms.
206: No, the main point is getting the law changed, and our most immediate hope of doing that is taking over Congress at the midterms. If we get people elected, we're then in a position to demand they listen to us.
Awesome. The trick with the wife is to get her into it too. My wife didn't think she'd like them, but she took a class with a little .22 Colt that belonged to my grandfather, and had a great time. Now she has a .357 of her own.
If you get one of those Remington 870 Express models, be sure to download the rebate coupon.
Agreed. The 870 and slugs are just about the perfect choice for ultimate social disagreements at reasonable ranges within a city. That combination is in my closet now.
I'll suggest not buying a pistol or rifle until you're comfortable with the shotgun.
218:Y'all do realize if we can connect Gary's call for violent revolution with some discussion of gun purchases, this thread, blog, archives, posters could draw some actual civil disobedience attention?
218: Not even Gonzo Al on magic mushrooms would try to make a case out of this thread. In any event, we can always think of ourselves as heroic canaries in the coal mine. More brie?
Right now I am halfway through drinking half a bottle of gin.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:14 PM
Definitely not leave. This is no time to just give up.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:14 PM
What are you going to do?
Make sure every goddamn person I know shows up to vote this fall. Aside from that, I don't know that there's much I really can do. Only when people stop being so apathetic will things change.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:16 PM
Definitely not leave. This is no time to just give up.
No, there's still a quarter-bottle left.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:16 PM
Let's not go overboard. What has been done can be undone. Do what you can to make a Democratic victory more likely. Do what you can to pressure potential Presidential nominees to make clear that civil liberties are central to what makes America great.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:19 PM
You think they're going to roll back this bill? When? With whose balls?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:21 PM
Is there something we could do together? I mean we all piss each other off a lot, and I surely am guilty of that, but we've got a lot in common, and maybe being geographically dispersed could be an advantage. This isn't like any other blog community, though we're not supposed to say that. Anyway, yeah, I'm inspired to do something substantive about politics these days. Could we form a PAC or something?
This may be one of my dumber comments.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:21 PM
Rationally, I know SCMT is right. Somehow, it's a small consolation.
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:22 PM
Of course, we'll need a jar of peanut butter, a handle of aristocrat vodka, two tuning forks, a bear costume, seven hungry sailors, some saranwrap, lipstick, and one Iranian.
ready?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:24 PM
oh, and dental dams. who's got those?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:27 PM
10: I have a whole box left over from my old job. Oddly enough, I'm not joking.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:28 PM
fine, I suppose we can just use the saranwrap.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:28 PM
sweet! we've got all the ingredients we need. Now, we join forces to create MEGATRONUNFOGGED! PWN3R OF TEH UN1V3R53!
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:30 PM
Things have gone very, very badly in this country before. So far, we've tended by fits and starts to correct the egregiously bad stuff. That's not guaranteed, but it's what's happened before. We need to make it happen again, and I think SCMT is right about how that happens. As disgusting and craven as this legislation is, and as much as I despise so many of my fellow citizens for supporting it and the evil trolls who enacted it, most of them aren't committed to executive overreach, they're just pig-ignorant and stupid. If we can elect better people, the law will move back toward decency. If we keep electing people like this, the law doesn't matter.
Posted by DaveL | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:30 PM
I'm willing to share this gin, mind you, because I have a bottle of whiskey, too.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:30 PM
Do you think leaving the country is real protest, or a cop-out?
My usual response to that idea is "I'd rather be America's conscience than America's victim."
Someone else put it as "you can suffer under America's domestic policy or under America's foreign policy."
Either way, I'm sticking around until things become dangerous to me and mine.
Honestly, what happened today changes almost nothing. Yesterday, the Administration could, in practice, do whatever they wanted to an enemy combatant.
Posted by Hamilton Lovecraft | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:33 PM
Briefly pulling my head out of the sand to ask, ostrich-like, 'Hey guys, Just how bad is it?'
Is it as bad as, say, My Lord Alberto Gonzales as soon-to-be-anointed Chief Justice of a soon-to-be-constituted American Court of Star Chamber?
Um, yeah. I guess it really is that bad, more or less.
Posted by Invisible Adjunct | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:35 PM
6: You have two choices: believe in the America that disapproves of the job Bush is doing, and is increasingly hostile to him, or believe in the America that made today possible. They're both here, in the same country, and, to date, the good guys have continually won over the long run.
I think today is scary, but I think a few years ago was much scarier. At least now we're not widely considered lunatics for not offering our full-throated support for any and all Bush policies. At least now you see Republicans leaking away from the President, positioning themselves for posterity, not wanting to go down, in the end, as (in Gingrich's words) on the wrong side of history, again.
We really always do win this one in the end. God willing, it won't be so long until we win again that something catastrophic happens.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:38 PM
What are you going to do?
What do I always do? Cry, cry, masterbate, cry.
Posted by mike d | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:39 PM
Cry, cry, masterbate, cry.
Who's your master? Come on, say it! Say my name!
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:41 PM
This is maddening:
Posted by J— | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:42 PM
re:19
I prefer the more innovative Masturbate, Masturbate, Cry, Masturbate option.
My utterly unfounded horserace intuition says this might actually hurt the republicans a lot. My reliably centrist friend is in absolute high dudgeon over this.
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:42 PM
That "let the courts sort it out" bit is the absolute height of cravenness. And I'm sure there were some Dems thinking the same way. Disgusting.
Posted by DaveL | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:44 PM
Often it's possible to masturbate and cry simultaneously, which is a huge time-saver.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:44 PM
Renew your passport.
Get a second citizenship and passport
Have an account overseas with money in it - Euros not Dollars.
Move close to the Canadian border or take a job overseas.
Have a fully stocked crash bag and lots of cash.
Have on open airline ticket to a country not likely to respond to a US deportation/redition request.
Hope that you will never have to use these.
Posted by DILBERT DOGBERT | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:44 PM
I really don't see what good a Democratic congress will do vis a vis this bill. I can't imagine them repealing it for many years, if they ever do.
And honestly, I have a non-trivial fear that if there's another attack, there's going to be a serious push for internment. Fuck if I came here to be locked up by a bunch of ignorant cows.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:50 PM
come live in textbasement.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:52 PM
ogged, I think what the democrats could do is make it a dead letter, piece by piece.
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:53 PM
What the hell. Let's have a quick rundown of "best bang for the buck" in firearms.
If you're going to own just one, it should be the Remington 870 shotgun, either the 7 round or the 4 round "deer" version. I'd personally go with the 4 rounder. Has a front sight and rifled barrel. 4+1 12 gauge with the ability to accurately shoot slugs.
Best handgun for the money is the Ruger GP-100. Shoots both .38 Special and .357 Mag, endlessly reliable, and will last forever.
A nice little rifle to go with that Ruger is the Marlin 1894C. Shoots same ammo as the Ruger, but at much higher velocity because of the longer barrel. Like the Ruger, is overbuilt and reliable.
What percentage of this is joke? A lot damn lower than it would have been a few weeks ago.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:53 PM
Prediction: If crazy shit happens, it will happen faster than we thought it would. If crazy shit does not happen, it will take longer than we expected for the danger of crazy shit to subside.
Of course, this is no kind of prediction.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:55 PM
26: I don't think repeal is likely anytime soon, but a Democratic Congress would at least have the power to do some oversight that would make it harder for the Administration to keep lying about what it's actually doing. And a Democratic President might not even want to torture people or lock them up randomly in the first place.
Posted by DaveL | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:55 PM
30 is true.
Posted by DaveL | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:56 PM
What is there to do but keep trying in whatever ways that we can? I don't know. Seriously. Probably 35% or more of the country thinks it's perfectly okay if we throw away various rights and authorize torture as long as it's little brown people and Mooslims and shit to whom it happens. What do you do against 35% of the country, especially when voting is regional and allows large pluralities to assemble majorities in the legislature? It's one thing when you think most of your fellow citizens are not aware of what's being done in their names, but another when a near-majority of them are probably reasonably aware and totally ok with it. Yes, they're crapping all over the fundamental insights of the American constitution. Yes, they're basically laughing at any idea of moral or ethical progress over the last century. Yes, someday they'll bitterly regret it if they have even the least honesty or conscience. But for the moment, this day, there doesn't appear to be any way to stop them that I can think of.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:58 PM
Man. Watched C-Span for the first time in a long time this afternoon. Our Representatives? Not very impressive.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 7:59 PM
Maybe it's just that the papers all told me this ship can't sink, but I really don't think now's the time to start boarding the lifeboats. It sucks, yes, it's shitty, it's bad law, it's a serious and unthinkable infringement of our rights. The law can be changed. No generation has ever had the monopoly on thinking their politicians were the most spineless and craven of all. slol may have finished his gin by now, but a few decades ago the bad and stupid law passed to appease a whipped up public furor meant to distract from the real problems of the day was about that very gin. Ten years ago it was about teh net.pr0nz. The pendulum swings, yes, in both directions. Sometimes it leads to really terrible ideas being acted upon. We steer it back over time and try to undo the mistakes as best we can. I cannot imagine giving up the life I have here just because Bush is a power-hungry asshole. I have the same reaction to that as I have had anytime anyone has suggested I ditch NC because it's "not liberal enough," namely, Oh yeah? And if I do, who's going to fix it?
This year we're very likely to pick up seats in at least one house. In '08, one of my senators is going to be very vulnerable. In '10, so will the other. In the meantime, I have work to do and games to play and kittens to scritch under the chin and movies to watch. Today was terrible, yes, but today must, like any day, be firmly fixed into a larger perspective - one that includes another day when it gets fixed.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:02 PM
What do you do against 35% of the country, especially when voting is regional and allows large pluralities to assemble majorities in the legislature?
You teach the other 65% to fear and loathe them. And once you're in power, you do something bad enough to that 35% that the other 65% stays with you out of fear of what their revenge would look like. Basically, you use Lee Atwater's playbook.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:06 PM
One thing we can do is to get the word out to people, what is being done in our names. The detainee legislation was proposed only a couple of days ago and as noted repeatedly on this site, has gotten close to zero coverage. I just wrote a letter to the editor of my local paper outlining what are the effects of the legislation and with harsh words for my FUCKIN senators who voted in favor. So that's, well, not nothing at any rate.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:10 PM
FUCK FUCK FUCK! Now I am wishing I had Republican senators so I could vote the fuckers out.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:11 PM
Either way, I'm sticking around until things become dangerous to me and mine.
That for sure, and I keep my passport current. This makes me another ten percent more certain that I'll give money and time in the next elections. (Which I didn't use to, because they used to go my way.)
This may not be the time, but I've thought variations on this before and now I'll say it outright, just this once. I'm sad about this bill because I read you guys being sad about it here. But I don't feel it inside. Inside, it is just a discouraged shrug.
You know what I am maddened about? That the Republican governor appointed a minor bureaucratic board that is authorizing tens of thousands of houses behind unstable levees. I think this might be more of a humanities/engineer split, because the Unfogged community is all upset at a grievous but largely intangible breach of justice? I'm upset that it is utterly foreseeable that people will drown pinned to their ceilings forty miles from here (and truly, I've read your grief over Katrina. I know you mourn both.). I'd be surprised if even the California locals here noticed when Schwarzenegger sacked the old board and replaced them with developers.
There are so many fronts in this battle. My attention is pretty concrete and local. I have a lot of respect for your dedication to your ideals, but they aren't where I get indignant.
Posted by Megan | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:13 PM
Anyone know where a breakdown of the votes is? It was 65-35, which means some Democrats voted for it. Fuckers.
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:18 PM
I have a non-trivial fear that if there's another attack, there's going to be a serious push for internment.
Yes.
With regard to your post:
1) E-mail my less-political family and friends and summarize today's developments in two sentences. Ask them to speak up, either in private conversation or public forums, if they are so moved.
2) Write my political representatives and the newspapers.
3) Ask my faith community to support www.quit-torture-now.org
4) Think about whether there is a public place that I can stand in witness against this.
Posted by Witt | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:18 PM
It's not much, but today I shot off an email to the organization I volunteered with before the 2004 election, NY Citizen Action, to see if I could do some swing-state phone banking or a GOTV bus trip to Pennsylvania or something. (God, I was working in PA when Santorum ran the first time and, believe me, you shouldn't put anything past that bastard. He ran the dirtiest campaign I've seen outside of Louisiana in the weeks right before the election. He did everything but accuse his opponent of molesting little kids.)
I feel very delinquent not having called to volunteer earlier -- it had been my plan, but I got so busy preparing for my trip. A lame excuse, I know.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:19 PM
Dammit. I just checked the account I used to send the email and my inquiry was bounced back because the mailbox is over quota. I'll have to call them tomorrow. I'm just hoping they're over quota because SO MANY people emailed to volunteer today.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:20 PM
Nevermind. I should read the fucking blog.
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:22 PM
OK, WTF? Take a look at the front page of my hometown newspaper website right now and tell me people in Ohio even knew this was up for a vote, let alone its significance.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:27 PM
39: a grievous but largely intangible breach of justice
I don't get this. I'm bothered by this bill because I think it will foreseeably lead to a lot more innocent people being tortured to death in a windowless basement.
I can see why, out of the two outrages -- drowning and torture -- you'd be more focused on the closer one, but I don't see anything intangible or abstract about either.
(A tiny part of my indignation is abstract, because I'm quite fond of the constitution and it just got torn up -- but that's really not what's bothering me).
Posted by Felix | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:28 PM
Also, when I think about volunteering, I don't feel the idealism that I had when working for the Kerry campaign. I feel something closer to resentment. I guess because it all seems so futile -- I'll go and pour my heart into it again and we'll still probably lose. And I have to give up time and energy that I could have devoted to something else if other people WEREN'T SO FUCKING STUPID and PAID ATTENTION TO THEIR DEMOCRACY. And then I feel guilty for feeling resentful.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:37 PM
39 Megan: You shouldn't have written that. You shouldn't have thought it either, but if you thought it you should have kept it to yourself.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:37 PM
48: Fuck off, Emerson.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:38 PM
You too, Tim.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:38 PM
If I didn't have kids, I'd make the best of this misery with my old pal alcohol and relish the rising tide of black humor, which the Soviets were always so good at when they seemed to have the market on repression pretty much cornered.
But thanks to my family, I have to do positive things like volunteer and get out the vote and otherwise try to organize and educate. And teach my little sweeties to despise bullshit like this and all who make it happen. Wretched family.
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:39 PM
Fuck off, everyone.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:40 PM
Therein lies the difference: on days like today, some people feel like telling the world to fuck off; some want a hug. I'm more the latter.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:46 PM
48 - Now wasn't the time. But I can offer that there are people out there who aren't going to act because of a loss of habeus corpus, but who are 1. going to act because other reasons have them opposing this administration, and who are 2. diligently going about the small bureaucratic undoings, at local meetings over boring stuff.
Posted by Megan | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:48 PM
53 -- Yeah earlier I was contemplating a post on the order of simply "Hold me." But feared it might be taken the wrong way.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:49 PM
Megan, I guess now isn't the time to say what I think either.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:52 PM
Just curious, is rape still a war crime, per this bill? I mean, if only intentional infliction of extreme pain meets the standard for torture, but not degradation or humiliation, would that mean rape of detainees was legal?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:53 PM
According to the NYT: "Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture."
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:54 PM
47 has it exactly right.
25:
Get a second citizenship and passport
Is this possible?
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:55 PM
I can't quite parse that. What is non coerced rape? I better just read the damn thing, but I was trying to tell myself today I had no energy left to care, until I started bitching to my coworkers and I realized as my voice rose to a keening pitch that I evidently did.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:56 PM
Just curious, is rape still a war crime, per this bill? I mean, if only intentional infliction of extreme pain meets the standard for torture, but not degradation or humiliation, would that mean rape of detainees was legal?
Sure, unless it's rape that has a paper trail establishing that it was intentionally designed to cause both serious and severe pain or permanent bodily injury. Just like any other kind of torture.
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 8:57 PM
5. Contribute to the ACLU.
6. Reread Vaclav Havel:
[T]he real background to the movements that gradually assume political significance does not usually consist of overtly political events or confrontations between different forces or concepts that are openly political. These movements for the most part originate elsewhere, in the far broader area of the "pre-political," where living within a lie confronts living within the truth, that is, where the demands of the post-totalitarian system conflict with the real aims of life.
These real aims can naturally assume a great many forms. Sometimes they appear as the basic material or social interests of a group or an individual; at other times, they may appear as certain intellectual and spiritual interests; at still other times, they may be the most fundamental of existential demands, such as the simple longing of people to live their own lives in dignity.
Such a conflict acquires a political character, then, not because of the elementary political nature of the aims demanding to be heard but simply because...every free human act or expression, every attempt to live within the truth, must necessarily appear as a threat to the system and, thus, as something which is political par excellence.
Posted by Witt | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:00 PM
Well, tonight I drank a lot and distracted myself by playing cards with friends. That wasn't very productive. Knowing myself, the likely true answer to this question is (a) feel shitty, (b) give money to various candidates that seem less awful than the alternative, (c) vote, (d) feel shitty, (e) complain about the media, (f) drink more, (g) feel shitty. I'm currently entering the academic job market and am applying for some jobs in Canada. I feel deeply ambivalent about the prospect of moving out of the country, and now the ambivalence is sharper and ever weirder.
Posted by redfoxtailshrub | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:01 PM
Consideration of the status of rape here.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:02 PM
Becks, it's worse than that. No major cable news outlet covered the issue. From what I understand, CNN literally didn't even MENTION today's vote. I simply don't understand; I mean, I get it, I suppose, but I just don't understand.
SCMT et al, a serious question: After today, why should I vote for the Democrats (as a party) in the fall? If my Senator were, say, Lautenberg -- which, thank God, he's not -- why should I reward his cowardice, his craven abdication of his responsibilities and his gutless pandering to the latent fascists among us, with my vote? An enabler of torturer is better than a torturer himself, I guess, but is that really better enough to warrant support? Especially if -- as is my fear -- we simply validate the Democratic strategy of spineless submission to whatever atrocity the Republican hard-liners vomit forth next?
As I mentioned in another thread, my Senators voted "No" so this isn't particularly an issue. But I damn well called both of them and told them that if they voted "Yes" they had lost my vote in perpetuity, Bush and the Republicans be damned -- which, after this, they will be.
Posted by Anarch | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:05 PM
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand."
Just saying. Because I can't otherwise say what I might otherwise be saying, yeah?
Posted by Invisible Adjunct | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:07 PM
We can fix this. We've survived worse as a country, but first we have to let people know that there's a problem that needs to be fixed. Not sure what to do yet, though. I'm simmering.
You can have two citizenships at once, but it's not easy to do, as it usually requires establishing residency, employment, and jumping through years of hoops in another country. On the off chance you manage to get citizenship, you can hold it dual with American citizenship, because the only way you can lose your citizenship is to renounce it formally.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:08 PM
No major cable news outlet covered the issue. From what I understand, CNN literally didn't even MENTION today's vote.
CNN depresses me a lot, not least because a lot of people seem to still reflexively think of it as bearing some kind of standard for solid, "neutral" news. I know that the university where I currently work has a setup with flatscreen TVs scattered across campus that are supposed to serve as a handy, wholesome neutral source of information: weather, university bulletins, etc., and one of the advertised handy wholesome things you can set them to display is CNN. Yay, Glenn Beck is just what I want to see in the library reading room.
Posted by redfoxtailshrub | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:12 PM
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
You know, a lot of the best have been busting their asses to stop this train, but it hasn't done any good, because they're way outnumbered.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:15 PM
52 was only in response to 49 and 50. I meant it in a nice way. I want to form the megazord, and live in a co-op with all of you.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:22 PM
Is this possible?
Depends on the country. For some (e.g. Ireland) if you have a certain amount of documentable ancestry from there you just have to fill out some paperwork and bingo, citizenship. For others you have to actually immigrate and wait a while and all the other stuff we make people do to get American citizenship.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:25 PM
Yeah, I meant without easy ancestry loopholes. It would take five years for me to get Canadian citizenship and I already have the groom lined up, y'know?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:27 PM
Go for it, Cala. You can get residency more or less immediately.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:32 PM
Tristero explains it all. Including today's vote. We are still underestimating how vicious and crazy the Republicans are. By about a magnitude. Bush, IMO, is quite capable of threatening to nuke Iran to get a victory in the Senate. Or worse. Quite honestly, our Senators need backup, need to feel they would have support if it came to violent confrontation. So far, they don't see it.
56:Word, but that has never stopped me before. So I make my stand here, to shout as a free man who loves his country:PUPPETS!
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:34 PM
Bob, a lot of people today seem to suddenly be in the depressed place where you and I live all the time. We should feel warm and joyful with all these friendly guests we have.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:41 PM
Seven score and whatever years ago, these people, or people like them took America to a bloodbath for the right to whip their n******. At that time, the country, being loaded with newly arrived Irish, was willing to accept that challenge.
The MSM is also scared. These Republicans will blow up the world before accepting defeat. Will allow billions to drown in rising oceans in order to make sure their kids own the mountaintops. They are not the sharing type. They are radically evil.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:42 PM
The MSM seems to be thoroughly penetrated by Republicans, including most of the ownership. Democrats always look (even) worse than they really are because the media wants them to.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:44 PM
Somewhere, sometime I related torture to ante-bellum slavery. It was not just about the right to wield the whip, it was about actually making the strokes. They needed a victim, they needed their superiority affirmed constantly in actual violence. They need to wield the whip, to see the blood.
Look at Bush. I really think the man is constantly, existentially motivated to hurt others, in small and large ways. Every minute of his life is spent in sadism.
This is what you are dealing with.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:49 PM
"Some say."
Posted by redfoxtailshrub | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:53 PM
As I said, I have nothing sane to say today. I will go.
Umm, batten the hatches. We have yet to see the "October Surprise". Bush & Rove are smiling. The next six months are going to blow your mind. You ain't seen nothing yet.
Bye.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:53 PM
I dunno... how about simple steps to make the people who did it pay, Becks-style? Every single person who voted for this in the House is up for re-election in six weeks, as are many who voted for it in the Senate. They didn't get into congress magically; they got voted in, probably by running a campaign with lots of resources.
They can leave the same way. Find out who the challenger is, and send them $100. Or $1000. Or go work for them, answering the phone, cold-calling people for donations, or reminding them to vote, or driving a van, or whatever.
Or if you aren't into direct campaigning, you can engage the Republicans in the think-tank game; there's Josh Marshall with his TPM Muckraker project; the Washington Monthly, The American Prospect, etc.
This is the engineer mindset though, so YMMV.
Posted by Jake | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 9:59 PM
It might be better to do those things sober.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 10:02 PM
Feh! Far better to send lots of money via PayPal when you're drunk and can't talk yourself out of it!
But it might be better to do some of those things when sober, too.
Posted by Jake | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 10:09 PM
Or you can run for office yourself.
Posted by Megan | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 10:19 PM
Certainly true. Running for office is a pretty damn big commitment, though, and hard to do when you're drunk. Has your office learned of the amazing awfulness that is Proposition 90 yet?
Posted by Jake | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 10:28 PM
"and hard to do when you're drunk"
this has never been less true than in the present, and it has been very false in the past as well.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 10:35 PM
33: Those people are everywhere. My uncle is like that. He kind of opposed teh Iraq war, because he knew taht it would be unpopular, but he doesn't care about the merits of the issue. Those soldiers who've died signed on to be soldiers, and that's part of the deal. And who gives a shit about a bunch of dead Iraqis if it keeps us safe here, and Saddam Hussein sucked. Go ahead and torture the terrorists; he's not about to be tortured.
You know what does interest him: Westin and Concord are getting richer while the median income in Lincoln--a lovely 2-acre zoned suburb with lots of MIT professors is dropping (odd in an area with high property values). Must mean that it's all a bunch of Yankees with dividend incomE that isn't being taxed.
This is Massachusetts.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 10:36 PM
Happy birthday!
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 10:47 PM
Well, starting in ten days I am going to go work for a small law firm that's suing some contractors on behalf of Iraqi torture victims. I am also hoping to publish an article about six prisoners at Guantanamo who were captured in a Taliban prison, using to illustrate what's wrong with this bill.
The point of which is, not "ooh, look at how virtuous I am"--I am proud of this, but that's not the point. The point is that you are not powerless. I know that's a cliche, but it is also true. It's possible to find small ways to help, and one thing can lead to another and those can become much bigger ways.
Obviously, it's an extreme example, it doesn't have to take over your life (and if you want it to, it helps to be a law student, especially at a school that opens doors--and even with that in mind I just plain lucked into a lot of this). But it got started because I wrote a weblog series on the Arar case. That led to me deciding to write my law school thesis on "rendition". That led to two volunteer jobs: 1) helping one of the GTMO lawyers research/edit his book; 2) helping Human Rights Watch with their research on CIA prisons, rendition, & military-CIA task forces in Iraq. Those things, combined, and with some intermediate steps omitted, led to the new job. And I found the story about the former Taliban/Al Qaeda prisoners at GTMO while I was skimming through CSRT transcripts for HRW for another project.
It's all very contingent: I could easily not have noticed the Arar story that set me off. But once you start, it has a way of reinforcing itself. You know more, so you care more, so you learn more, so you care more, and you get to know others who work on this, and you start to care about them and want to have their backs, and that draws you further in....
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 11:01 PM
Thanks for remembering, teo. Same to you. Maybe Brock can provide us with some cake.
This a great birthday present, in'nit?
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 11:01 PM
Also, slightly off topic, but did you all hear about the Iran Freedom Support Act which the House passed on a voice vote? (via Dr. Josh at Talking Points Memo.)
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 11:04 PM
"It would be a critical mistake to allow a regime with a track record as bloody and as dangerous as Iran to obtain nuclear weapons," said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., sponsor of the measure. "Enough with the carrots. It's time for the stick."
"Enough with the carrots"? What carrots?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 11:08 PM
This a great birthday present, in'nit?
Ugh. I could use some cake.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 11:08 PM
carrot cake.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 11:14 PM
And I don't see a damn thing in the world wrong with 39. This is a good fit for me, but God knows, there are a lot of important issues. (Including, say, having kids--if this happened three to five years from now no way I could've spent this much time on it). People do what they can. This happens to be something that gets to me, and is a good fit for my skills, and odd though it sounds, I enjoy working on it most of the time. (There's a side of me that was disgusted when I realized that Bush was using the 14 high level suspects as a campaign ploy to pass a bill like this...there's a side of me that was psyched that Human Rights Watch had figured out that 13 of them were CIA ghosts several months before.)
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 11:18 PM
94: Good idea. We've got all these carrots lying around that we could be offering to Iran, but Ileana Ros-Lehtinen won't let us. Carrot cake it is.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 11:20 PM
66: I had The Second Coming in my head tonight as well. But that's in part because it's one of the only poems I have memorized, so I think about it even when it's not relevant. Yes, this means my taste in poetry is totally mainstream bourgeoisie and I should be ashamed.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 11:22 PM
having kids isn't an "issue"--I meant "worthwile things to do with one's life". I think people get the gist though.
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 11:25 PM
95 - Thanks.
Posted by Megan | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 11:38 PM
No, that's a good point, Katherine. There isn't really any point in destroying one's life uselessly; if you can find a grand way to work against these evils, great; if you can't, continue your life and work and vote against these evils as you can.
Between 2002 and 2004, I was in a position to marry into EU citizenship; while there were a lot of unrelated reasons that didn't happen, another compelling reason was my belief that people who believed as I did must not abandon ship. I still believe that, and more now than ever.
One of the reasons this legislation hit online political junkies so hard was because we were so convinced that the tide of public opinion was turning against, well, torture. We know that subarticle X and subarticle Y make this bill a true danger, but the majority of the public have no idea what just happened.
Yeah, thanks a lot, media outlets. But some blog stories can force their way into public consciousness--we're doing their research for free, after all. If liberal blogs continue to pound on this story, continue to be outraged (maybe even neglecting to provide that free research and factchecking for those other breaking stories?), then maybe this legislation will get at least some media coverage.
Oh, and these days I have the options either of trying to claim Canadian citizenship on the basis of my dad's birth, or marrying my honey and immigrating to Iran. My dad always promised that if I ever needed to disappear, for whatever reason, the cabin in the middle of nowhere could be my refuge. But I'm not convinced I could survive a winter there, when it comes down to it.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 11:56 PM
Kobe!
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-28-06 11:59 PM
Oh, shit. Wait, no, pretend my exclamation (101) represented a belated realization of the Kobe-ness of my previous comment (100). Do, pretend; it will all make sense then.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:02 AM
Sophistic levity is probably out of place right now. I should go to bed.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:04 AM
Immigrating to Iran: probably not the best idea at the moment.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:04 AM
Other than it requiring less of my aim, which is a very good thing, why would I want a shotgun over a handgun? Handgun's would have fewer storage issues. Also, this is wholly speculative, it costs a lot to legally own a gun in New York.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:04 AM
Yeah, I typed and deleted a comment involving the right of return.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:06 AM
Oh, absolutely, Teo, but there's a weird little NYC part of me that thinks "I bet you could get a fabulous apartment for almost nothing!"
Usually I censor those real-estate-related impulses, so please forgive me. And, yes, of course emigrating to Iran would be mad right now.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:08 AM
w/d: really, it's not about being armed. The army will always outgun you. The trick is convincing enough elements of the army a) not to fire upon your demonstrations, and eventually b) to turn over their arms to your cause.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:12 AM
100: that was really not my point at all. I am trying to talk people into working on this, and I mean more than voting.
It is intensely frustrating the contrast between the tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth on these issues right around moments like this, and the lack of sustained effort.
There is next to no interest among liberal weblogs in factual research on these issues. Not in doing it, not even in linking to it. Or on call-your-Senators posts before the lack of filibuster is a foregone conclusion. I tried NOT doing it last minute this time, unlike the Graham amendment, and just felt like I was depressing people with information they did not want to read, and nagging. But now everyone's in tears and talking about dictatorship. I just don't get it.
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:15 AM
That's why 39 didn't bother me...if this isn't what catches your imagination, if this isn't what suits your skills, fine. But if it is, don't vacillate between ignoring it and talking idly about renouncing your citizenship and arming yourself and ignoring it again.
Sorry, I'm being obnoxious. It's not personally directed at anyone here or even this weblog, at all. I just wish I could've been more effective a few weeks ago.
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:17 AM
It is intensely frustrating the contrast between the tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth on these issues right around moments like this, and the lack of sustained effort.
I wouldn't say there's a contrast between those things.
I can't imagine a situation in which anything I do would have any impact on what the national government does. I can therefore
A) get mad but not do anything about it,
B) get mad and do something that is doomed to failure,
C) or ignore the whole issue. I'm feeling like C is the most natural option right now, given that it's what everyone I know does.
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:18 AM
I can't claim to be good on the sustained effort, Katherine, as much as I would wish to be. But I agree with you; that sort of sustained political engagement by ordinary people who are living ordinary lives is what is necessary. Whether people who read and comment on political blogs qualify as such is left to the ingenuity of the reader. But I do agree that the talk of emigration is too much.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:22 AM
"Sophistic levity is probably out of place right now."
We gave all this away, and there hasn't even been another attack.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:23 AM
Yeah, more sophistic levity. Otherwise the terrorists win.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:30 AM
JM, I know, and my desire to be armed will wane.
Katherine, if I want to give some hours to a group, LSHR, ACLU, or something else?
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:30 AM
We're moving into black comedy au style de l'époque Stalanienne. If we keep it light, dirty, and titillating, nobody can establish in law that we think our regime is a horrorshow.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:30 AM
I think we have a new motto.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:31 AM
we may josh the terrorists, but we aren't to allow them any of our carrot cake.
sticks for dinner, terrorists! and sticks for desert!
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:31 AM
(I was very occupied with my diacriticals; please ignore my spelling of the French adjectival form of Stalin.)
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:32 AM
To bed.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:34 AM
I'm going to stay up all night and finish my short story, for the cause!
who will join me? (no terrorists are allowed to join).
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:34 AM
you would think it's spelled "dessert" but not for terrorists, on account of we must keep their mouths very dry.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:35 AM
I have to be in class to at 11:00 to (oh cruel twists of fate) discuss the constitutional law of military tribunals (ex parte.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:38 AM
I have to be at work by 8:30, my dear home appliance.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:41 AM
anyway, that's just the sort of excuse an enemy combatant would give. I'm not sure you're allowed to go to sleep.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:42 AM
You have an hour timezone advantage; I nevertheless concede this point and question the wisdom of staying up all night.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:43 AM
I don't have anything to do until 1:00, but I'm going to bed now anyway. Good night, all.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:44 AM
Yes, but I also don't see how my staying up and drinking bourbon while playing video games will help you complete a short story.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:46 AM
enemy combatants, all of you.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:47 AM
washerdryer, I don't know what LSHR is...I'd say it just depends on the local chapter, on finding a few people you like to work with.
BTW, I realize this is not feasible for people with, you know, jobs, but this looks very much worth going to, especially the live event at Seton Hall. List of schools here. I know a couple of the presenters and they are really really great.
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:47 AM
Each person helps the cause in his or her own way. You might not see the connection between your boozy gaming, and my writing a lame short story, but you see, butterfly wings flapping in Argentina, and all that.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:48 AM
I'm still awake despite having to get up in 3 hours, but that's mostly because I'm still pretty juiced over seeing The Mountain Goats tonight. Though in the interest of not being fired, I should probably go to bed at some point.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:50 AM
Other than it requiring less of my aim, which is a very good thing, why would I want a shotgun over a handgun?
You've kind of hit on it. Requires less practice, less precision, and is more likely to put someone down on the first shot. Also, there's a visual menace to a shotgun that no handgun can match.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:51 AM
Katherine, sorry, I think that's the abbreviation for Law Students for Human Rights, which I suppose could just be local to my school and not the more widespread group I'd imagined it to be.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:51 AM
Also, there's a
visual menacephallic symbolism to a shotgun that no handgun can match.Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 12:53 AM
Me and my best friend bought a bottle of tequila and drank over half of it tonight while mourning the state of our country and planning next March's trip to Egypt.
I'm not jumping ship or leaving the country. I'm staying here, damnit. I'm young, and I'm about to graduate from law school, and I am more passionate now about politics than I ever have been (and I imagine the increase will only continue), and I am going to fuck some shit up.
In a good way.
[/Becks-style]
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 1:04 AM
Law Students for Human Rights
No such group at my school. Then again, my school is full of corporate wankers.
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 1:07 AM
m. leblanc: boo-ya.
we had a human rights group but it wasn't called that & I actually wasn't all that involved. (I was on the Human Rights Journal, but didn't do summers abroad or whatnot.) Really, the thing to do is find people you like & think are effective if you're talking about volunteering, and that's going to depend on where you are. As far as donations my bias is towards Human Rights Watch...I think they're the best pure researchers, but they don't do organizing the way Amnesty does.
okay, bedtime. (Though I don't have to work tomorrow!)
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 1:13 AM
130: Katherine, I'm already planning on attending that (via the livecast) as one of my profs is a main dude involved, and I am stoked about Craig Haney--I've used a ton of his work in my research, and he is the shit.
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 1:19 AM
phallic symbolism
Heh.
But seriously, I've had cops point guns at me a couple times, and the shotgun is much more threatening.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 1:21 AM
you're not in Chicago by any chance, are you?
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 1:22 AM
I hate everything. The NYT's headline: "Democrats See Strength in Backing Bush." What the fuck is that? Are they trying to spin this as a victory for the Democrats? Fuck that. Fucking fuck this bullshit.
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 1:23 AM
John Sifton (on the CIA/Bagram/rendition panel) and Joe Margulies (the intro) are also the shit.
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 1:25 AM
Yeah, I am in Chicago.
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 1:45 AM
Joe Margu/lies is a bad ass motherfucker.
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 1:46 AM
Yes indeed. Are you going to the Northwestern one? If so, email me! (This comment has my real address, slightly modified to foil spammers...I think you can figure it out somehow).
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 1:58 AM
Katherine is always right, and I am never right, except to the extent I can reflect some of Katherine's rightness. No snark intended.
Whether it be addressing a few envelopes or Storming the Bastille, individuals can change the world. Our enemies seek to Demoralize us.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 2:22 AM
109: Part of the problem is that the Bush Administration's strategy seems to be "foul on every play, the ref can't call them all". And while we in the blogosphere can, it's just plain tiring and it doesn't seem to do any good. In my particular case I'm pretty much outraged out; I'm on the razor's edge of either ditching grad school completely and devoting myself to politics full-time (which will destroy me), or just turning my back on the whole thing and walking away (which doesn't exactly help the country).
[Which dilemma is, I realize, exactly what Rove wants. But I'm not sure what else I can do.]
Posted by Anarch | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 3:45 AM
I made a cup of hot cocoa with a scoop of Haaagen-Dazs ice cream and a shot of rum and now I'm going to look at those pictures of baby marmosets over on Apo's blog and play the Llama song and when I wake up, it will all have been a dream and Toto will be chewing on my ruby slippers.
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 4:45 AM
What I'm going to do is continue to not buy gas, for one. To continue to vote with my dollar, or lack thereof, for another. To not give my vote to a Democrat or a Republican, and let them know why, for another. Again, and some more.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 5:18 AM
yay Katherine! we all think you're great. also, yay Megan! at least here in Singapore I have more rights. they used to practice cold room/long time standing back in the day, but they stopped. too barbaric, in the icy air-conditioned room with the palm trees outside; they gave it up for lawyers and questions, left it to the barbarians. fuck fuck fuck.
Posted by alameida | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 5:30 AM
As long as we're quoting poetry:
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it's a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.
Posted by jim | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 6:00 AM
gswift -- do you recommend breech-loading or muzzle-loading?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 6:02 AM
152: I don't think we need to worry; there's not much danger that next year we shall be living in a country that brought its soldiers home.
Posted by Felix | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 6:07 AM
Yeah -- that's a great poem -- which I had never read until just this instant -- thanks jim! -- but it does not seem applicable to the contemporary situation, precisely.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 6:13 AM
Full text of the poem
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 6:14 AM
closed to the contemporary situation?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 6:15 AM
I think that buying guns is pointless. Look at the Montana militia, or David Koresh, or Randy Weaver. Once they were located they had no real military option and it became a PR game. They were just sitting ducks, hiding behind children in two of the cases. All were treated far nicer than leftists would be, because the wingers hated Clinton and Bush the First so much. We wouldn't get the good PR.
As for individual back-to-the-wall self-defense-to-the-death, that requires you to be awake all day and night every day and every night while they play cat and mouse.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 6:23 AM
Evidence that guns provide no protection against a well-organized tyranny is so counter to our ideology that it can be a shock, and most never see it. I remember learning as a teenager the Lee Harvey Oswald went hunting with his coworkers in Russia, and was stunned that the Russians had guns and went hunting.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 6:35 AM
A couple days ago, faced with the inevitability of this monstrosity's passage, I quit my job in the realization that I should be doing something useful to improve the increasingly hellish state of my country. But my job sucked, and I hated it anyway, so in and of itself I don't think it means all that much.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 6:55 AM
"Look at the Montana militia, or David Koresh, or Randy Weaver."
Perhaps one should rather look at the Iraqi insurgents. A few guys with rifles out in the boondocks are easy to nail without causing much "collateral damage" and a resultant political backlash, big cities are a completely different tactical situation.
Posted by Biohazard | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 7:04 AM
big cities are a completely different tactical situation.
See, and a few days ago you were all mocking my armed resistance.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 7:15 AM
I'm pretty sure that the Iraqi insurgents include a lot of the demobolized Iraqi Army. But one of the main poitns is that this isn't citizens against government or citizens against a foreign invader. 30% or so of Americans absolutely support George Bush, and the worse he gets the more they support him. They quibble on immigration and at some point failure in Iraq will start to get to them, but they're absolutely not on our side.
To put it differently, I've always thought that the anti-terrorist hoopla has been equally directed at the American internal enemy, which is us. People who aren't really worried much about the Taliban regaining power will go into a rage about the liberal domination of the New York Times.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 7:17 AM
I'm going to attempt to channel outrage and fury and sadness into action. We'll see how it goes.
Step one is to guilt trip my friends into political action -- the local Planned Parenthood and NOW organizations are organizing phone banks to try to get more women to vote. Seems like a good thing. MoveOn also has that Call for Change program going. Even my dad is participating.
Apart from that, I think it's time to move my "quit my job, go back to school, get a degree in public policy, and change the world" plan from the back burner to the front.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 8:03 AM
109, 110: This is, of course, absolutely right. The more attention I pay to this stuff, the more I realize that it's still nowhere near enough and I'm completely ineffective (as in yesterday's little bout of bloggy hysteria). The only thing to do is work harder to find a place to be actually useful.
39: Absolutely right. You do what good you can in the area where you can help. Not everyone has to focus on the same issues all the time, and anyone saying different is being an idiot.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 8:06 AM
Think globally, act locally. It's not just a pithy slogan, it's a good way to keep from going fucking nuts.
None of us can change this on our own. None of us should try to convince ourselves that we can turn the tide by Sheer Force Of Will (plus guns, or a public policy degree, or whatever). I'm not saying to drop out and stop working for change, just don't get solipsistic about it.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 8:20 AM
I'm not so sure 109 and 110 are right. I suspect part of what is driving the lack of attention to the sorts of projects Katherine mentions is a realization that those projects are not effective at quickly changing minds. People aren't changing their minds on the Bush Administration because they've been exposed to new facts about torture. They're changing their minds because Iraq is taking too long, and there exists a plausible explanation that blames Bush. Atrios has said that he models his blog on talk radio. I think he's a little right about what sorts of activities are effective politically. Factual research is useful in changing things only insofar as it makes more robust the explanations that are available to unhappy people. That's really valuable, but the payoff is distant and contingent on the existence of unhappy people.
I have no idea what that suggests people should actually be doing, other than learning to better incite hatred.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 8:21 AM
165.2: I'd like to clarify that my 46 wasn't intended as an attack on Meghan's 39, just a response to clarify my own position. Of course we can't all freak out equally about every outrage or we'd all have died of stroke years ago. And it doesn't surprise me that engineers are more emotionally invested in the outrages that result from shitty levee building, and lawyers like me are invested in outrages that result from habeas-stripping legislation. But I don't think either of those concerns is more or less concrete or abstract or ideological than the other: both of them matter because at the end of them there's people suffering who wouldn't otherwise be suffering. At least that's why the detainee thing matters to me.
Not that I do much that makes it manifest that it matters to me, other than whining.
115: if I want to give some hours to a group, LSHR, ACLU, or something else?
Is it really possible to give just "hours" to the ACLU (or similar)? As a lawyer rather than as an envelope stuffer, though I'll stuff envelopes if that's all that's on offer. I am well past my summer-vacation-student-intern days. Does anyone know?
Posted by Felix | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 8:24 AM
SCMT:
Don't be silly--you can use the factual research to incite the hatred! Here's how it's done.
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 8:27 AM
I think that buying guns is pointless. Look at the Montana militia, or David Koresh, or Randy Weaver.
I think you're looking at this wrong. They've got a playbook for this kind of stuff, and it's not putting the military in the streets. Think Civil Rights movement, Klan intimidation, etc. Bully tactics. Remember how a bunch of Sikhs and other vaguely Middle Eastern looking people got attacked and beaten right after 9-11? Same type who were burning crosses in the 60's and earlier. That type of winger is still alive and well, and the Republican schtick of "you're either with us or the terrorists" along with the eliminationist rhetoric from the AM radio crowd is done to inflame that segment of the party. The shotgun isn't for the tank in the streets, it's for the guy who thinks he can burn a cross in your yard.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 8:29 AM
you would think it's spelled "dessert" but not for terrorists, on account of we must keep their mouths very dry.
Surely there's a good joke about waterboarding in there somewhere. Levity!
I hate everything. The NYT's headline: "Democrats See Strength in Backing Bush." What the fuck is that?
Actually it's "Democrats See Strength in Bucking Bush." That's a little better, I guess.
Posted by Anonymisstra Know It All | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 8:33 AM
Hey Felix - I totally got that, and I also understood better how a loss of habeus corpus translates for you into torture in windowless basements. Not that different from drowning in your attic.
Posted by Megan | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 8:35 AM
I agree it was useful of Megan to remind us of different priorities. I said upthread that there was not some national epiphany, my recollection. That Welch's "decency" moment, and the story told in "Good Night and Good Luck" were not widespread national experiences that everyone, or more than a very small number, noticed. So will it be this time.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 9:11 AM
I'm trying to figure out how the hell proposing an amendment and failing to pass it having promised not to filibuster counts as bucking anything.
The shotgun isn't for the tank in the streets, it's for the guy who thinks he can burn a cross in your yard.
This is pretty much right; the question shouldn't be 'can your shotgun take on an army?' 'cause you're pretty well scrod even if you have your own Apache at that point. It's more that 'given that there's no law & order, can you knock off the small-time violent mob or general jackass.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 9:13 AM
"Bucking Bush" should always be followed by a parenthetical "ATM".
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 9:19 AM
(More to the subject of the post, CharleyCarp has some suggestions.)
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 9:23 AM
how the hell proposing an amendment and failing to pass it having promised not to filibuster counts as bucking anything
No kidding. I have never had a lower opinion of the national Democratic Party than I do right now.
Worst. Opposition party. Ever.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 9:30 AM
And this, from CharleyCarp's comments is spot on:
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 9:33 AM
I've been hinting for days how exasperated I am with some of our discussion of the political situation, as educated people more-or-less left-of-center. If I think of it as a forum for blowing off steam and expressing feelings, I'm ok with it, and love everybody more for the depth of your decency and concern.
But I think the contempt for Democrats continually expressed here is beginning to infect our sense of ourselves as Americans, and induce fatalism and despair. We have to be tougher than this, and more resilient.
In that respect, via Kevin Drum, I see that, yes, George Lakoff has some useful things to say, about the traps we fall into as liberals/progressives. And I must say, I think we've fallen into a lot of them lately.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 9:34 AM
I still have trouble seeing how they were supposed to do anything with only 34 votes. It's a huge problem that there are 66 votes in the Senate against the Constitution, but this is not a problem that can be primarily ascribed to the Democrats.
I think that McCain, Warner and Graham will live to regret what they did. There's no reason for the Democrats to regret it; their leadership stood firm, and was utterly outnumbered. We can't win in Iraq by will alone, and we can't win Senate votes that way either.
The answer is to elect more Democrats like the ones who voted no, and to give the boot to the Democrats and Republicans who voted yes. This is totally consistent with what we've been saying for years, up to and including the 'fuck Lieberman' part.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 9:39 AM
If the filibuster wouldn't work, it wouldn't work; they didn't even have enough votes to try. It's more the lack of balls up until that point. We'll keep the powder so so dry that you might think we don't have any powder!
Procedural question: how do amendments to bills get proposed? Can any senator propose them? Do you have to be on a committee? (Basically wondering why the habeas was sponsored by Specter and not a Democrat. )
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 9:43 AM
"Levity!"
I whistle in graveyards, ok?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 9:44 AM
169:
No, that's a good way to engender anger and sadness. This is a good way to engender hatred (emphasis mine):
Compare that with this:"Torture republicans"? Cripes, how weenie. We should be calling them traitors. We should be saying that there are a handful of events that everyone on earth looks at to see how special America is, and these people have never been on the right side of Jesus on any of them. They were against fighting the Nazis. They were against the Civil Rights movement. They actually committed treason and tried to destroy the Union. They were behind the most successful terrorist organization in US history. And now they are trying to turn us from the nation of Founding Father Patrick Henry--"Give me liberty or give me death"--into the nation of Texas Republican John Cornyn--“None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead." Look: they're technically Americans, and we have a responisibility to live with them and work with them. Maybe at some future point, they'll get what America is all about. But right now--and possibly with the best of intentions--they are intent on destroying our country. We can't shoot them, and we can't exile them, but we can't let them lead America to its own destruction, either.
Is any of that fair? Mildly, at best. It's certainly sloppy, and it's certainly slippery. Who cares? It's the language of hate.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 9:46 AM
I don't think Reid or Durbin made any effort to filibuster, at all, nor do I think they strongly encouraged people in close races to vote no.
I am going off of their public statements...but if they were trying to twist arms and apply pressure, they wouldn't have said things in public which directly undercut that.
They may have applied pressure on the habeas vote--much fewer defections than the Graham amendment. And I guess it was not beyond all hope of turning, say, Snowe and Hagel and one more. But, the bill itself, I don't believe there was any serious effort to stop.
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 9:52 AM
I still have trouble seeing how they were supposed to do anything with only 34 votes.
They could have tried making the case against, but instead they allowed the McCain-Warner-Graham kabuki show while most of the party said nothing. Getting beaten is one thing. Refusing to even take the field is another.
I think that McCain, Warner and Graham will live to regret what they did.
What makes you think that?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 9:54 AM
155: The poem as a whole (as Felix noted) is not what's relevant. The last four lines do resonate. Our statues are of the founders: Madison, Jefferson, George Mason (I'm in Virginia). They do look the same, don't they?
Posted by jim | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 10:04 AM
They did make the case against, in a number of floor speeches against the bill. Saying that they 'allowed' the McCain-Warner-Graham charade implies they could've done anything to stop or undermine, or even supplement it. I don't see it -- these three went into secret negotiations with the White House and suddenly emerged with a bill, fully formed. You think the Democrats just didn't RSVP for the negotiations or something?
McCain in particular could live to regret this vote. I tend to think it's far more likely that he's going to get beat up in 2008, either in the general or hopefully the primaries, than that any of the Democrats voting 'no' will get beat up over that. He went in claiming to be an independent and came out with a rubber stamp for Bush.
The plan, from the start, was to produce a bill that Democrats could not vote for. They've done it before and I refuse to believe that the Democrats were caught by surprise. But how to play the situation politically -- by calling foul from the start? No, that would make the Dem caucus look unreasonable. There wasn't even a bill to object to at that point! The only reasonable thing to do was to use the bill to highlight the way Republicans game the system to take laws straight from Bush's pen to the Senate floor. I believe that they are going to do this in the coming weeks.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 10:04 AM
186. Yeah, now that you put it that way I'm with ya.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 10:06 AM
(And again, thanks for getting me to read the poem -- it is a powerful one.)
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 10:08 AM
neil--bullshit.
read this AP story:
The McCain-Warner-Graham bill had habeas stripping even BEFORE the "compromise" (though not within the U.S.--that was new.) I had smoke coming out of years listening to everyone praise them or hide behind them for a bill that was already bad and which I knew full well would get worse.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 10:11 AM
"t's more that 'given that there's no law & order, can you knock off the small-time violent mob or general jackass."
Or "Can you entice the people with tanks and planes to turn them on the general public just to get you?"
The playbooks for this sort of thing were perfected by the Algerians and Vietnamese. However, it's probably difficult to get health & life insurance if one's occupation is listed as "insurgent".
Posted by Biohazard | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 10:17 AM
I don't see how that contradicts what I was trying to say. The Democrats had no choice but to wait and see what secret bill would be produced, and then try to defeat it. In the meantime they emphasized that there were Republicans with serious qualms about doing... exactly what they ended up doing. A good way to paint Republicans as slavish Bush devotees with no principles, I should think.
When the bill came out, they attempted to replace it with a compromise bill and failed (no matter that the compromise bill was nearly as bad). Message: We won't do anything besides what Bush tells us. If the Democrats don't campaign on this, they are nuts.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 10:23 AM
Okay, what I'm going to do:
First, register to vote here.
Second, get caught up on the news.
Third, I moved back to this country to be able to get involved in fighting this shit. Mr. B. and I are gonna have a li'l talk this weekend about our plans.
Fourth, get in touch with the ACLU and find out who the fuck else I need to join/read/subscribe to.
Fifth, call the local Democratic party folks and find out what we're doing. Volunteer some time.
Sixth, start talking to the other parents at the school, the neighbors, etc., and find out what they know and what they think, and if they're on the wrong side, start converting them.
That's the plan for now. It'll probably update as I get going.
But if I were you, Ogged, I'd make sure my passport was up to date and that I had cash available to buy a plane ticket at short notice, and maybe call a couple of friends in, say, Canada to make sure you can come for a "visit" if we do actually start interning people. If you don't have friends in Canada, you know people who do.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 10:35 AM
I can't blame Neil for repeating the conventional wisdom of the Democratic party, but the Democratic party has been losing for years, and will never be able to win with that philosophy.
Paul Wellstone was famous for his 99-1 defeats. On a few issues he may have nudged his party left, and on some small issues he accomplished things, but mostly he lost.
Now there's one kind of voter who votes for a candidate they respect even though they don't completely agree with them. It's a nice little swing demographic. Wellstone could get those votes, but this most recent thing puts them out of reach for Democrats.
Theres a probablly-larger demographic whichg votes against emaly-mouthed, evasive, game-players, regardless of ideology. They seldom vote for democrats any more.
Gingrich scheduled and lost dozens of high-profile votes on his road to power. He'd lose and broadcats "The Democrats just voted to raise your taxes!" The Republicans don't even want to win votes on abortion questions -- they'd prefer to be able to lose and milk that issue forever.
The Democrats never play an offensive, long-term game. They're always cutting the best deal immediately available, and they look weak to everyone.
McCain got visibility from this. Bush got visibility. The Democrats looked feeble.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 10:37 AM
In the medium term, everyone needs to have an index card (really a memorized amount of equivalent information, I don't expect people to actually carry a card) of well cited anti-McCain information. I keep hearing people who I know are generally "on our side" (sorry, Tia, ac) saying stupidly pro-McCain things. Not that they'd vote for him over a Democrat, but that, while voting for the Democrat, they wouldn't care that much about who wins between Democrat X and McCain.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 10:47 AM
Gingrich scheduled and lost dozens of high-profile votes on his road to power. He'd lose and broadcats "The Democrats just voted to raise your taxes!"
That was my point -- I thought the (remaining) Democrats were going to try to reap a political benefit out of losing this one.
I still think it's a good thing that a majority of Democrats (and the leadership) voted correctly on this bill, and firmly refuse to accept that the minority who didn't are 'representative' of the Democratic party as of now. (Maybe they once were, but no longer. I mean, Lieberman?) Accordingly, nothing about this bill is changing my political outlook, except that before I thought Dick Lugar might have been one of the mythical 'good ones.' No more.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 10:47 AM
An unsuccessful filibuster could have been good staging. And letting McCain carry the ball not only lost the issue, but it also let him look good and made them look lame. All this is true regardless of whether the bill passed or not.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 10:50 AM
An unsuccessful filibuster could have been good staging. And letting McCain carry the ball not only lost the issue, but it also let him look good and made them look lame. All this is true regardless of whether the bill passed or not.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 10:50 AM
An unsuccessful filibuster could have been good staging. And letting McCain carry the ball not only lost the issue, but it also let him look good and made them look lame. All this is true regardless of whether the bill passed or not.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 10:50 AM
2 Kobe steaks would be deliciously decadent.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 10:52 AM
Woops.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 10:52 AM
Look, the perfect is the enemy of the not-completely-hopeless-yet. The Dems didn't filibuster, but they did vote against the bill, by and large. Midterms are coming up. Let's put more Dems in congress and then we won't have to *worry* about whether they have the balls to filibuster or not.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 10:59 AM
Of course they had a bloody choice. The habeas stripping stuff was GUARANTEED to be in the "compromise", and the war crimes provisions were already watered down in the McCain proposal, it was only a question of how much. You do not talk about the importance of not looking weak on national security, and make disgusting snide comments about a "cat fight", right before you launch on a full throated defense of this country's principles. They made some good speeches yesterday, but who payed attention?
I am going to vote, I am going to donate to certain candidates, but these bullshit excuses drive me insane. Every time I'm going to break out the credit card for Joe Sestak I read this crap and it saps my motivation.
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 11:04 AM
What's an unsuccessful filibuster look like? Does it look better than votes on those four amendments? Because it seems like Reid traded one for the other, and he did it for a reason.
I also wish the Democrats had said "We refuse to let any bill that doesn't protect the rights of the accused," don't get me wrong, but all indications are they knew they wouldn't be able to achieve that, so the same bill would've passed in the end. How does that situation look? It distracts from McCain capitulating, for one thing, and suggests that the Democrats capitulated instead. Although a lot of people do seem to feel that they did, I don't think this is the overall impression.
Maybe I'm completely backwards, though, and what you say it is all that matters. In that paradigm, McCain is the big winner because he made the most noise, and it's no skin off his back to have given in to Bush so publically. But I bet that incident is going to haunt him later, perhaps when we learn more about exactly how Bush is abusing this power.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 11:05 AM
I agree that we should not try to punish the Democrats, as several have suggested. If the Democrats are hopeless, the US is hopeless.
I've been waiting for the Democratic Party to toughen up and get smarter for years now. There've been good signs, but yesterday was a tremendous letdown.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 11:06 AM
There are various ways that the Democrats could have staged their losing votes in order to get visibility make themselves look good. The strategy they chose made them look weak and by and large left them in the background. Furthermore, they gained absolutely nothing in the practical sense; Bush got what he asked for.
The filibuster is not the main point. The lackluster response is. (Of course, the defection by so many Democrats tied the leadership's hands in some respects.)
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 11:15 AM
You do not talk about the importance of not looking weak on national security, and make disgusting snide comments about a "cat fight", right before you launch on a full throated defense of this country's principles. They made some good speeches yesterday, but who payed attention?
I expect to see attacks on Republican incumbents for rubber-stamping Bush's un-American power grabs, and I expect to see Democratic incumbents using those speeches to defend themselves from the coming Republican attacks. I don't think either of these things would be particularly out of tune with what we've been seeing so far. I also doubt it will rise to the level of a full-throated defense of this country's principles -- the argument will probably be more like "Your representative voted to make Bush judge, jury and executioner, how do you feel about that?"
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 11:17 AM
"What's an unsuccessful filibuster look like?"
Anymore, not like much. Successful filibusters don't makeit to the floor;unsuccessful, IIRC, bring about an immediate cloture vote, without any debate on the bill. Everything really happens in backrooms.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 1:16 PM
206: No, the main point is getting the law changed, and our most immediate hope of doing that is taking over Congress at the midterms. If we get people elected, we're then in a position to demand they listen to us.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 1:23 PM
183:Hate has gotten a bad rap, and is actually sometimes more useful than love. Motivates and energizes wonderfully. I blame Jesus.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 1:32 PM
Just so everyone knows, I've bookmarked comment 29 for later reference. I'm serious.
My wife is going to kill me when I bring home a shotgun.
But I must defend lady liberty!
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 2:57 PM
My wife is going to kill me when I bring home a shotgun.
WTF do you think shotguns are for? When you bring the shotgun home, for the first time your wife will respect and obey you, as Jesus taught.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 3:16 PM
Awesome. The trick with the wife is to get her into it too. My wife didn't think she'd like them, but she took a class with a little .22 Colt that belonged to my grandfather, and had a great time. Now she has a .357 of her own.
If you get one of those Remington 870 Express models, be sure to download the rebate coupon.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 5:39 PM
Thanks gswift.
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 6:35 PM
Hmm. Saw this thread name at the top of the recent comments list but read it as "What Does A Persian Do?" I think I've been here too long.
Posted by DaveL | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 6:45 PM
Re 211 --> 29
Agreed. The 870 and slugs are just about the perfect choice for ultimate social disagreements at reasonable ranges within a city. That combination is in my closet now.
I'll suggest not buying a pistol or rifle until you're comfortable with the shotgun.
Posted by Biohazard | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 7:21 PM
"What Does A Persian Do?"
Torture, apparently.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 7:29 PM
One advantage of shotguns is that they don't kill someone by accident next door if you miss. That happened a couple times one year back in Portland.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 7:34 PM
And they take out pigeons a lot quicker than poison does.
Posted by DaveL | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 7:49 PM
Hell yeah.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 7:56 PM
218:Y'all do realize if we can connect Gary's call for violent revolution with some discussion of gun purchases, this thread, blog, archives, posters could draw some actual civil disobedience attention?
How much would 500 Remington 870's cost anyway?
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 8:43 PM
More than I can afford.
Another one of the joys of the 870 is that you can accessorize. A side saddle is good times.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 9:29 PM
218: Not even Gonzo Al on magic mushrooms would try to make a case out of this thread. In any event, we can always think of ourselves as heroic canaries in the coal mine. More brie?
Posted by Biohazard | Link to this comment | 09-29-06 11:20 PM