Tag: Open Thread

Do you miss Mitt?

Conventional wisdom says perhaps you should, for now the focus will be entirely on the Democratic jackass race that shows no signs of melting down until June if then.

• Mukasey: No, I Will Not Investigate Waterboarding
  
  By Paul Kiel, TPMMuckracker – February 7, 2008, 11:44AM
• Mukasey: No, I Will Not Investigate Warrantless Wiretapping
  
  By Paul Kiel, TPMMuckracker – February 7, 2008, 1:10PM
• Mukasey: The Law Is What The Justice Department Says It Is
  
  By Paul Kiel, TPMMuckracker – February 7, 2008, 3:00PM
• Mukasey to Muckraker: Get Press Releases off The Website
  
  By Paul Kiel, TPMMuckracker – February 7, 2008, 3:55PM
• Mukasey: No, I Will Not Enforce Citations for Contempt of Congress
  
  By Paul Kiel, TPMMuckracker – February 7, 2008, 6:24PM

Your Bonus Muck-

• We Don’t Discuss Interrogation Techniques until We Want to
  
  By Paul Kiel – February 6, 2008, 1:03PM
• White House Insists on Confirmation of Torture Memo Author
  
  By Paul Kiel, TPMMuckracker- February 6, 2008, 4:35PM

  … For more than three years, Steven Bradbury has been the acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel, the crucial Justice Department office that has the power to issue “advance pardons,” as former OLC head Jack Goldsmith put it. But Senate Democrats, because of Bradbury’s role in approving the warrantless wiretapping program and enhanced interrogation techniques that include waterboarding, have opposed White House efforts to have him confirmed and remove his acting status.

• Today’s Must Read
  
  By Paul Kiel, TPMMuckracker – February 7, 2008, 9:44AM

  If it’s seemed to you that the administration has blundered its way into its recent pro-waterboarding PR offensive, you’re right.

• GOPer: 99% of Americans Would Support Waterboarding
  
  By Paul Kiel, TPMMuckracker – February 7, 2008, 2:25PM

Bonus coverage from emptywheel–

“Are you the people’s lawyer or the President’s?”

DocuDharma has kept an admirable concentration on the real issues that confront us, centered primarily on the essential lawlessness of the current administration and it’s Congressional and Village Idiot enablers.

Update: Conyers Says He’s on Edge of Starting Impeachment

by David Swanson, AfterDowningStreet.org

Friday 2008-02-08 04:34

h/t: Tigana

So tomorrow we’re set up for what are likely to be a string of defeats on the Protect America Act extension which we’re all supposed to ignore because we can’t keep our concentration focused on anything except cheap plastic distractions like the Super Bowl (congratulations Obama for your Giants endorsement) and Super Tuesday horse racing (go Sea Biscuit).

Glenn Greenwald–

In the Senate, Democratic and Republican leaders have, according to Congressional Quarterly and others sources, reached an agreement as to how to proceed on the FISA vote this Monday. There are currently numerous amendments pending to the Cheney/Rockefeller Senate Intelligence Committee bill, almost all of them introduced by Democrats (with one co-sponsored by Arlen Specter) and most of them (if not all) unacceptable to the White House and the GOP.

The essence of the new agreement is that most of the amendments will be subject to a simple up-or-down vote — if they get 50 votes, then they pass — while several of the amendments will require 60 votes to pass (allowing, in essence, the Republicans to filibuster those amendments without actually having to go to the Senate floor and engage in a real filibuster).

Senate Democratic leadership sources are trying to claim that this is some sort of victory for Senate Democrats, and echoing that sentiment, even some of the most insightful and knowledgeable around — such as McJoan at Daily Kos — are hailing the agreement as evidence that “Dems didn’t cave” and that “they held tough.” Unless there is something I’m overlooking, I don’t understand that perspective at all.

Update III-

UPDATE III: Dan Froomkin, quoting The Providence Journal’s Scott MacKay, has excerpts from former GOP Sen. Lincoln Chafee’s new book:

The book excoriates Mr. Bush and his GOP allies who repeatedly fanned such wedge issues as changing the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage, abortion and flag-burning. But he saves some of his harshest words for Democrats who paved the way for Mr. Bush to use the U.S. military to invade Iraq. . . . “The top Democrats were at their weakest when trying to show how tough they were,” writes Chafee. “They were afraid that Republicans would label them soft in the post-September 11 world, and when they acted in political self-interest, they helped the president send thousands of Americans and uncounted innocent Iraqis to their doom. “Instead of talking tough or meekly raising one’s hand to support the tough talk, it is far more muscular, I think, to find out what is really happening in the world and have a debate about what we really need to accomplish,” writes Chafee. “That is the hard work of governing, but it was swept aside once the fear, the war rhetoric and the political conniving took over.” Chafee writes of his surprise at “how quickly key Democrats crumbled.” Democratic senators, Chafee writes, “went down to the meetings at the White House and the Pentagon and came back to the chamber ready to salute. With wrinkled brows they gravely intoned that Saddam Hussein must be stopped. Stopped from what? They had no conviction or evidence of their own. They were just parroting the administration’s nonsense. They knew it could go terribly wrong; they also knew it could go terribly right. Which did they fear more?”

Chafee was describing the 2002 lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, but the description is just as apt today. And his description of what Democratic Senators did back then after meeting with White House and Pentagon officials sounds a lot like what many of them do today after meeting with White House and NSA officials.

Read it and weep.

Are you clear what’s happening here?

Tomorrow is another day of struggle and all cranky and hung over I expect you back at work.

It little profits that an idle king, by this still hearth, among these barren crags, match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole unequal laws unto a savage race…

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel.  I will drink life to the lees!  All times I have enjoy’d greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those that loved me and alone, on shore;  and when thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades vext the dim sea…

I am become a name for always roaming with a hungry heart!

Much have I seen and known- cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments.  Myself not least, but honour’d of them all.  And drunk delight of battle with my peers far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades for ever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use.

As tho’ to breathe were life!  Life piled on life were all too little, and of one to me little remains; but every hour is saved from that eternal silence, something more…

A bringer of new things; and vile it were for some three suns to store and hoard myself and this gray spirit yearning in desire to follow knowledge like a sinking star beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus, to whom I leave the sceptre and the isle.  Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil this labour, by slow prudence to make mild a rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere of common duties, decent not to fail in offices of tenderness, and pay meet adoration to my household gods when I am gone.

He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port.  The vessel puffs her sail.  There gloom the dark, broad seas.  My mariners, souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me- that ever with a frolic welcome took the thunder and the sunshine, and opposed free hearts, free foreheads…

You and I are old.

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil.  Death closes all, but something ere the end, some work of noble note may yet be done; not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks.  The long day wanes, the slow moon climbs, the deep moans round with many voices.

Come, my friends,  ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.  Push off, and sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows, for my purpose holds- to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down.  It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, and see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides and tho’ we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are- One equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will.

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Ulysses, Alfred- Lord Tennyson

So.  You’re not looking for meta or political, but the personal reminiscence or poetry.

Well on Wednesday you’ll get typeset Tennyson, but today you get me and Kools.

I used to smoke Kools, the worst cigarette in the world because it’s Mentholated and filtered with asbestos.  I’d smoke until my lungs felt “brown”.

One time, while I was smoking Kools, I got invited to a party with a bunch of people I didn’t know.  They also didn’t smoke and the girls were kind of cute and interesting and I didn’t realize at the time how much I stank.

Eight hours later I emerged (having been welcomed and accepted and indulged in what I most desire which is intelligent conversation with peers) and I got in my car and right after I fired it up I fired up a Kool.

And right after I turned the corner out of sight I parked and barfed my guts out from the sick.

Did that stop me?  No.  I went on to smoke and not smoke.  I finally started (I’m done now) once again at a High School Reunion where I practically ripped open a cigarette machine for a pack of Merits because I felt inadequate.  So did the girl with the biggest tits in second grade who was right next to me and would have banged me in the hall if my fiance hadn’t been in the ballroom.

Gotta love reunions.

From there I went on to a point where it was kind of a bonding ritual between me and the dad.  He’d always smoked and so had his mom and dad.  They liked the smell and so do I.  You can smoke in my car if you like, I’m already dead.  I know exactly how long it takes to smoke a Kent III King- 5 minutes because that’s how long our mandatory breaks were.  Smoke them to the stub and crush them in the tub I have my last ashtray hanging around unclean to remind me what my lungs look like.

But there came a time when I decided I was done so I went on the gum and it’s been a while.

Ah. Everyone still loves Don Vito and the Corleones on the rock hard hockey puck chicken circuit.  At least that’s what they say to my face.

Why I even had my friend Vincenzo drop by.  We were very civil.

While I sometimes speak ex cathedra there is only one capo di tutti.

I wish to make it clear that 200 – 500 words and a graphic is only a suggestion for a front page piece, not a requirement.  It’s actually rather easy to be Front Paged here, all you have to be is good.  We’ll make it look pretty if you don’t have artistic sensibilities to be offended.

Not that being good or Front Page aspirations are a requirement to post- you get 2 (count ’em) TWO! essays a day so you can easily change your mind about what’s important, follow BREAKING!!! developments if you care to.

On the other hand there are three Pony Parties a day (@ 9, noon, and 6) if all you have is a comment for an Open Thread and Muse in the Morning, DocuDharma Times, and 4 at 4 are also there for your convenience.

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