That's kind of a low bar for "delighted," I think.
Does anyone else get the feeling we're now playing Achilles to Bush's Tortoise (Lewis Carroll version), trying to pass laws requiring him to obey the law?
Look, it may seem pathetic, but it's necessary. We got into Iraq on the basis of a resolution authorizing military force if a whole bunch of conditions were met. They weren't, we went to war anyway, and Congress didn't kick up a stink. If we're going to stop lawless unilateral action by the Executive, Congress has to object to it, loudly.
The Executive is always going to have all the practical power -- that's what Executive means. All Congress has is law and publicity, and if they're going to control the Executive, they have to use the tools they have.
I agree that the failed amendment was an instance of Congress, and the Opposition Party, doing the sort of thing it should do to slow down an out-of-control Executive and an out-of-control administration. I realize you're not saying it's the greatest thing ever, but just that it's a small example of the right sort of thing, and I agree.
Which makes me wonder all the more: where is the press in picking up on this kind of stuff? That's what it takes to turn a more or less futile legislative display of impotence into an important political event: raising an issue like this to the level of national attention, showing where the lines are drawn.
Re: the incipient unfogged collective action campaign. Why can't the UCA just focus on trying to buy a few journalists in various high to middle positions? I myself couldn't afford more than a twenty now and then, but if we all contributed, who knows?
That, right now, strikes me as the most baffling imbalance in the national landscape: the fact that the press is entirely closed to the Democratic view-point. Even if we (deo volented) win the mid-terms, we're still going to have to cope with a press that firmly believes that Democrats have cooties and Republicans are cool.
2: I realize that, it's just that the larger problem is that we have a president who feels totally free to abuse his power, and feels free to do so because he knows he won't personally feel any repercussions. And he knows that because not only does he have a party of corrupt cronies behind him, but because a good chunk of Democrats are too craven to oppose him. Forty-seven Democrats voted against this! There's no explanation other than sheer cowardice for that.
And there's the fact that, given that this was almost certain to fail, it needed to be done in the spirit of a public protest. This shouldn't have been an obscure news item buried for months and brought up again as a frustrating curiosity on a couple blogs; this should've been a major issue brought up within the larger context of a lawless executive. Note also the reaction to Feingold's censure motion, in which yet another opportunity to take a fucking stand turned into a chance to practice the party's duck and cover skills.
4
yeah, the Feingold moment was indeed one of the lowest in the history of the Democratic Party. One of the lowest in the history of an group of people allegedly organized for collective action (setting aside a certain reading group I have heard of--but if you pick Heidegger, you are just setting yourselves up for failure).
What was especially depressing about the Feingold episode was that his action *did* actually grab a little bit of media attention. I'm pretty sure Lexis would show there was more coverage of that than of the Iran amendment LB refers to.
So, great: you've got the spotlight for a second, guys. And what do they do with it? as SJ just said, they used it as an opportunity to display their cowardice--with a really *large* audience this time.
Can't anyone in the Democratic party play this game?
Something I don't get: good stories like this or the detainee bill get little or no coverage, yet the HP Scandal has been all over the NY Times and NPR for what seems like weeks. And it's utterly boring and petty. "Did she or didn't she know pretexting is illegal?!?!?" For fuck's sake. Snooze!
So when I hear that stories don't make it b/c they just aren't sexy enough...well, surely that's not a sufficient explanation.
Wow, do I agree with 6. To whom is the HP leak scandadalsdflkas........ (sorry fell asleep for a second there).
To whom is the HP thing more interesting than the possibility of attacking Iran?
A serious question to those more knowledgeable: Is there any way the HP story is in any way relevant to anyone not directly involved?
In that it demonstrates that anyone - even if they're very rich and fairly powerful, such as a member of HP's board, or even if they're a well-connected journalist - is vulnerable to the simplest of social-engineering tricks when it comes to the safety of their personal, private information, yes, it is relevant to everyone. At this point the coverage is about Dunn and the people involved, however, which is not where that relevance lies; the relevance lies in the way this same tactic could so easily be used against anyone by just about anyone else. A secondary but also relevant story which I'm not seeing anywhere is the response of the wireless providers and how this demonstrates private, corporate responsiveness (or lack thereof) to actions which impact their clients. I heard a blip on NPR the other night about Verizon and Cingular suing the people who actually performed the pretexting in order to recover the data and any profits they garnered from it, which is nice, but I don't really know how you guarantee you've got all data. A xerox machine is not exactly the pinnacle of data reproduction technology.
It is also relevant to everyone because such personal privacy is not just a lofty ideal but can, in fact, have direct impacts on their day-to-day lives and their ability to perform in their careers. Again, though, that's not the angle the coverage is taking.
I'm not trying to argue that the coverage isn't petty and off-putting, however; quite the opposite.
To whom is the HP thing more interesting than the possibility of attacking Iran?
I don't think it's more important than the possibility of our attacking Iraq, but I think it might serve as a wakeup call to libertarians who think government intrusiveness is the problem.
Has anybody heard a "women with corporate power" take on the HP mess?
Of course, whether it's more important or not is possibly subjective (though I doubt it - anyone who considered cell phone records more important than casualties caused by American actions also probably has really messed-up priorities), but they're all important: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, privacy, security, the balance of power between Congress and the executive, the balance of power between government and corporation, and if you stand far enough back I'm willing to bet they all blend into a set of common, central issues if not really common "causes" (as defined purely in the sense of cause-and-effect not fighting-for-a-cause "causes").
They're all wrapped around central tentpoles of privacy, security and abuses of power. The media we have today is very, very bad at drawing out those common themes and using them to organize their coverage so that the themes are what are important. They find it much easier to focus on personalities than concepts, and so we get coverage of Abramoff or Dunn or Foley or bin Laden that focuses on the personal rather than the ways in which their specific stories may indicate larger problematic trends: corruption, abuse, fanatical fundamentalism, etc. It's tremendously depressing to me to know from the media that bin Laden is obsessed with Whitney Houston but not what event(s) in his life made becoming a terrorist mastermind seem like a good idea or whether his story is similar to or significantly and importantly different from those of others who have used positions of religious and financial power to manipulate the beliefs of their followers to dangerous ends.
I think the main selling point of the HP scandal is that it happened under a chairwoman -- all the stories seem to run with a large picture of Dunn. It's a Mean Girls kind of thing.
I love it when someone else comes up with the cynical feminist slant so I don't have to. Yeah, I think female villains make a better story.
female villains
People are going to feel pretty bad when she dies of the incurable cancer she has.
Are you kidding? Female villain dying horribly, preferably in a disfiguring way, makes a great story. There's a reason Glenn Close got smallpox at the end of Dangerous Liasons.
Afraid of her physical weakness, she became obsessively controlling of her company, pouring herself into what she wanted to be the greatest legacy of her too-short life. Alas!
think the main selling point of the HP scandal is that it happened under a chairwoman -- all the stories seem to run with a large picture of Dunn.
I'm not sure that's true. It's a big story, HP's a mythic company, and she's at the center of it. I'm betting that if you looked at most business-gone-bad stories, they'd include pictures. (I'd point to Enron, but it was several orders of magnitude bigger. Though I bet I could pick Lay out of a lineup.) But there should be more fodder soon: I thought I saw something suggesting that former female CEO Fiorina is the one who OK'd the leak investigation. It's supposed to be in her upcoming book.
Getting back to the original topic somewhat, my 2004 campaign donation to my Representative was the worst money I ever spent. I can't think of a single time that she voted the way I expect from a Dem Rep. Maybe on Schiavo. I don't think I can bring myself to vote for her next month, but I'd hate to see the GOP keep a one-seat majority too. (The Rep's name rhymes with Belissa Mean.)
What would be the long term systemic effects of allowing Congress to so precisely limit a President's military options, though? With a president like Bush, the reduction in executive flexibility is a good thing, but given how quickly int'l politics moves these days would this reduction be good over the long run?
Don't be silly. No one's arguing that the President doesn't have the authority to repel an attack. We're arguing about whether he has the authority to attack another country.
Explain what you mean by 'how quickly int'l politics moves these days' that would require the President to be able to attack another country without Congressional authorization. Be specific. Use examples.
The US Government gets confirmation that another country----North Korea, or Iran, or China, or...----is about to ship sophisticated explosives and weaponry, including possibly radioactive material, to a dealer known to also sell items to various terrorist groups. While the US Government has high confidence in the current location of the arms-package (let's say 80%), that confidence diminishes dramatically each day after the package is shipped (20% each day).
Other examples would include a sudden escalation between China and Taiwan, or the collapse of Musharraf's government and the failure of that government to destroy their nuclear weapons before collapsing.
There is also this: the ability of the US to credibly bargain with troop deployments or air strikes in part depends upon Congress leaving the President with considerable flexibility to engage in such actions quickly and without the uncertainty that the legislative process would introduce.
In your China/Taiwan or collapsing Pakistan scenarios, no president should have difficulty getting a military force resolution passed quickly.
In your "nukes to terrorists" scenario, I'm not convinced that a military strike is the solution to such a problem. We hear that China is giving weapons to al-Qaida (?!) and in response we... bomb China?
The final point: I'm comfortable with restricting the president from using immediate air strikes as a bargaining chip, barring already-current hostilities.