Still going after all these years.
On this two-hundred-thirty-first Fourth of July, it’s good to know that the president is in favor of clemency.
For his pals.
That the Vice President is willing to declare his own personal branch of government to avoid laws governing the executive branch.
They say every nation gets the government they deserve.
Heaven help us.
Well, this week our favorite Washington political operative, our Vice President Dick “Go F*ck Yourself” Cheney, did what seven years of liberal activism could not: he removed himself and his office from the executive branch of government. That he did so to assert privilege to flout oversight rules related to the handling of classified documents seems especially appropriate for our most secretive of politicians.
But turnabout is fair play, and the VP uncharacteristically left himself vulnerable. A courageous Democratic member of Congress obliged with one of the finer statements of the newly bipartisan reality of Washington life that I’ve seen since, well, 2000:
Washington, D.C. House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel
issued the following statement regarding his amendment to cut funding
for the Office of the Vice President from the bill that funds the
executive branch. The legislation — the Financial Services and General
Government Appropriations bill — will be considered on the floor of
the House of Representatives next week.“The Vice President has a choice to make. If he believes his legal
case, his office has no business being funded as part of the executive
branch. However, if he demands executive branch funding he cannot
ignore executive branch rules. At the very least, the Vice President
should be consistent. This amendment will ensure that the Vice
President’s funding is consistent with his legal arguments. I have
worked closely with my colleagues on this amendment and will continue
to pursue this measure in the coming days.”
Heh. At any rate, if the VP’s office is no longer part of the executive branch, we should be thanking heaven for small favors.
Ah, Reverend Don Wildmon. Once known for picketing TV shows and comic strips, now turning his attention to hate crime legislation. The latest American Family Association newsletter hysterically claims that new anti-hate-crime legislation in front of the House (HR 1592) and Senate (S 1105) would make it illegal to preach against homosexuality.
The actual text of the bill, in fact, says that that’s not what the bill trying to do. Section 8 says that nothing in the bill “shall be construed to prohibit any expressive conduct protected from legal prohibition by, or any activities protected by the free speech or free exercise clauses of, the First Amendment to the Constitution.” The whole bill targets violent felonies causing bodily injury that are motivated by prejudice. If the Reverend Wildmon would spend more time reading and less time picketing, he might have picked up on the distinction.
Good to know that one can go from a legislative aide position to a federal immigration judgeship on the strength of one’s ability to riot in corridors pretending to be a grassroots protester. Yes, I’m talking about the poster child for the problems at DOJ, Garry Malphrus, whose fast track to success started when he participated in the infamous Brooks Brothers Riot during the Florida recount in 2000. Now it looks like Malphrus was just one of the recipients of the administration’s impressive, and institutionalized, cronyism: according to Monica Goodling, for several years now, “Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) had provided guidance some years earlier indicating that Immigration Judge appointments were not subject to the civil service rules applicable to other career positions.”
In other words, the administration is using one of the most politically hot positions in the justice department as a way to repay political favors. And I do mean repay: an annual salary of $113,904 is nothing to sneeze at.
Is it any wonder that the cries for impeachment of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales are crescendoing?
It’s interesting how “open declarations of war” in the blogosphere sometimes have a way of starting something big. From my experience, it took kicking the rhetoric up to the declaration-of-war level to get people talking honestly about the rights of customers not to be treated as criminals.
Now comes this: An Open Declaration of War Against The House Republican Leadership. It’s interesting enough to contemplate voters rebelling against the Republicans who continue to reward corrupt members of their ranks, but this is something else: this is RedState.com, the right-wing blogging site.
And while it’s fun to watch the good old-fashioned fragging going on, I have to wonder how many more of these events it will take before the GOP breaks ranks in a serious way and re-aligns without the dead weight that is currently dragging the party down.
…regarding the Cluetrainfulness of the Blue State Digital folks vs. Salesforce.com’s campaign management toolkit. Does what Blue State Digital enables count as what Doc Searls calls vendor relationship management? After all, it’s about voters taking the process into their own hands and starting to drive the campaign activities of candidates that interest them.
Looked at this way, the contrast between the two approaches becomes clearer. Salesforce sells VRM (Voter Relationship Management), the political analog of customer relationship management), while Blue State Digital provides CRM (Candidate Relationship Management), the political analog of vendor relationship management. Confused yet?
CNet: Salesforce.com throws its hat into political ring. Salesforce.com, already a player in the online CRM market, is marketing a custom edition of its application to manage political campaigns.
Web software as a service in the political market? Sounds a lot like the business plan of Blue State Digital, right? Except of course that it’s an entirely different play. Salesforce’s application focuses on tracking donors, managing campaign budgets, and reporting to the FEC. Blue State Digital does campaign strategy and grass roots enablement—and taking online donations.
The difference appears to be that Salesforce is taking a top down approach, assuming that the campaign is in control and driving the get-out-the-vote events and other campaign activities. Blue State Digital’s approach assumes that its job is to get the voters riled up, harness their energy and ideas, and enable them to identify viable candidates for office and organize their own campaign activities around the candidates of their choice. Big difference.
In fact, kind of the difference between traditional marketing and Cluetrain marketing.
Oh, and the other big difference? Salesforce’s product, Campaignforce, is in use by Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate who has made his own governorship of Massachusetts into a punchline and retreated from every position he took to win the state. The products by Blue State Digital are in use by the DNC, Democracy for America, and Harry Reid—you know, the folks that led the way to the Democrats regaining power in both houses of Congress last November.
I do have to give credit where due, though: SalesForce’s integration with Google Maps and YouTube sounds cool.
Plan for a cover-up:
Hmm.
You know, when Doonesbury had a character in the 70s become President Carter’s secretary of symbolism (cardigan, thermostat, etc.), I thought it was merely clever hyperbole. I see now I was wrong, though apparently the scope is only the USDA Forest Service’s symbols. Which include, heaven help us, the Junior Snow Rangers.
And Woodsy Owl. Who has been put on a shape-up or ship-out diet, apparently. I mean, seriously. Look at the owl on the left versus the owl on the right. Which one looks less threatening? Which one looks like a child predator? “Give a hoot,” indeed.
Finally, snow in the Northeast. It’s coming down steadily right now but is a little light. I have to fly to Columbus this afternoon, so hopefully it doesn’t get too heavy between now and then.
In the meantime, I’m left pondering the encounter between Senator-elect Webb and Lame Duck — er, I mean President Bush in which the president asked how Webb’s son, who is serving in Iraq, was doing, and Webb responded, “I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President.” Bush’s response? “I didn’t ask that. I asked how your boy was doing.” Tin Man takes a cut at the etiquette of the situation, as does the New York Times, but for me it boils down to this: you’re asking the parent of a soldier who is in a hostile country about his son. What parent isn’t going to say, “I’d like him at home”?
And if Webb’s response counts as uncivil in a time when the other side has been busy jamming phones and inventing controversies about the patriotism of legless veterans who question the war’s execution? Well, God help us then, because it will be a snowy day in Hell before we can have an honest debate about this war with these people. And by these people I mean both the politicians and the press who cover them.
David Byrne says he was mysteriously left off the voter rolls last Tuesday. He writes, “As someone who doesn’t trust this government one inch I wouldn’t put it past them.” I guess that settles some questions about the interpretation of some of his earlier songs.
Byrne goes on to write about some things that have challenged me about this country recently, the need for checks and balances and the country’s emergent “bully culture.” I have coworkers who shrug about the administration’s endorsement of torture and its dismissal of habeas corpus. I think he’s right that there is a lot of rebuilding to do in the country as a whole.
…same as the old country, with a few important differences.
Yes, the Democrats have taken the House and appear to be within reach of the Senate (assuming Jim Webb’s lead survives the recount). Yes, a Democrat (albeit a former NFL quarterback) took a House seat in western North Carolina (sorry, Uncle Forrest). Yes, anger at the President and the Iraq war have unified the country.
But those issues alone don’t mean that the country has gone progressive. Virginia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin all passed amendments making gay marriages unconstitutional; the Virginia law even curbed the ability of businesses to recognize domestic partnerships.
If this election was a victory for the Democrats, it was a vindication for Howard Dean, whose 50 state strategy put safe races in play and swung enough house seats to shift the balance of power.
But compare the Democratic house victory yesterday to the Republicans in 1994. As bankrupt as the Contract with America ultimately became, it was based on coherent ideology and gave a clear direction for the country. Where is the Democratic direction for the next two years? I’m a supporter, and I don’t hear anyone articulating a vision of the role of government, the rights of humanity, constitutional limits on the power of the executive, America’s role in the world. We need the party to step up and put those stakes in the ground.
The Democrats have to show they can lead. But right now I’ll settle for our regaining a voice—and power—in the process.
…than watching election returns from a Las Vegas hotel room.
Someone asked me who I was pulling for in the elections today. I said, “I’m pulling for habeas corpus.”
Maybe we’ll be able to welcome back that old friend in coming months. We hoped for the Senate back but we’ll definitely take the House.
Provided, of course, that the Democrats act decisively to curb the excesses of the administration. My one plea to the party: reverse the mistakes of the last twelve months; strip the administration’s power to suspend habeas corpus and to impose martial law; and return to fiscal discipline. I want to see all of those things happen, as much as I hate to say it, before we witch-hunt through the administration for illegal acts. We desperately need to return checks and balances on our constitutional powers before we spend all our political capital going after the evil slimelords in the executive branch.
I hate that I’m on the road this week, so I won’t be able to watch the election coverage from the comfort of my own home. But I have to believe that there will be somewhere I’ll be able to watch here in Las Vegas. Not that I want to place any bets on the outcome. This year’s race for the Senate is a real nailbiter.
Two links for the morning. One is an eloquent post from Zalm about the challenges of looking at this race from a Christian perspective, especially in light of the Ted Haggard implosion. The other is a reminder that the Electoral Vote Predictor site, which takes nationwide polling data to predict election outcomes, has been retooled to predict the composition of the US Senate. It’ll be interesting to see if this year’s polling data is any more accurate than two years ago, when the site was predicting Kerry/Edwards in a win for the presidency.
When did the scandal about Mark Foley taking advantage of Congressional pages turn from a scandal about pandering and corruption of minors and become a scandal about his sexuality?
Probably about the same time he became a Democrat (thanks, Bill O’Reilly).
Free clue: the issue should be his handling of a public trust and his hypocrisy, not his sexuality. In this country, in our legal system, and even in our morality, I say we punish the act and not the person.