loved this fisa photo shop at sadly no
http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/...hives/
9719.html
epic fail indeed
"Last I heard, Dukakis was visiting professor in the Department of Public Policy at the School of Public Affairs at UCLA."
Well, that's NOT a bad gig!!! *G*
Hey, you want a Pub or not?
Back the dem, we deal with the results after.
Removing Pelosi, Reid, Hoyer, and more is essential.
They VOTED (or will vote) to let FISA and telco immunity pass cuz they are COMPLICIT in it all, and that includes war crimes for INVADING Iraq, torture, rendition, and domestic spying.
I keep saying it, it's not for the telco's, it's to keep THEM out of prison, Bush/Cheney be damned. They're worried about their OWN hides, and Bush/Cheney have them by the gonads all the way.
Harumph.
Let's get Obama elected, then if we have to, TURN ON HIM HARD!
But for god's sakes people, let's get him ELECTED first!!!
Hubris, yer killin me . . . the dem is the choice, let's not lose that or you can HAVE McShame and the next four years with WORSE than what we have now. Think SUPREMES!!! Think personal rights issues for all minorities, or for ALL of us!
Please, don't go rabid and riling up the masses AGAINST our only hope, hoss!!
Killin me, just killin me . . . 
Obama has already been futzing around with language of the fisa bill. "Like the bill but doesn't want to give them immunity. We need the bill though."
This will not fly if he doesn't vote NO because of the immunity. He HAS to vote against it. It will probably pass without his "yes" vote, but still. He cannot vote for immunity.
pelosi and hoyer .... need to go. I'm remembering something about hillary having very close ties to the telecom and pelosi with the torture. I think they're both in deeeep. And others as well.
"With a nice 15 point lead, plenty of money in the bank and support of his own party, this guy thought he had the race sown up also."
It might be a good idea to mention that that was immediately after the convention, and a typical bounce. Otherwise even the wise people who read this could get caught up in the post-convention euphoria this year and take this year's bounce seriously despite your premonitory counsel.
I said this before.
Now I'll say it again.
Louder.
The United States of America is NOT a republic.
The United States of America is an oligarchy with a republican false front.
You aren't going to be able to make sense of retroactive telco immunity without taking account of this fact.
StormCrow:
Oligarchy? Or. Elected/Bought Officials?
Chicken? Or. Egg?
Can't have one without the other.
My point?
We can't control the oligarchy without controlling the elected officials.
Hence, you got two choices hoss.
1) Pure outright street revolution, and dump the tea in the harbor, to fight the oligarchy outright.
2) Hound the elected officials at ALL levels, ground up, and up down. And change the rules the oligarchy has to play by.
Retro telco immunity is all about protecting the elected ones from prosecution. The oligarchy can afford the fines. :D
The Elected Officials can't do The Hague. :D :D
N that's how the wheat separates from the chaff.
A constant grind, grind, grind.
:D
Rome was a Republic. Lesson: Fuck Republics.
The whole essence of this debate doesn't exactly boil down to evisceration of the 4th amendment. Cause let's be honest here, the 4th amendment has been alive only insofar as elected officials have been willing to stand up for Constitutional principles. "Law and order" Republicans have never given a shit about the Constitution and Democratic Blue Dogs are just as bad. Instead the whole vile wickedness of FISA 2008 boils down to corruption and collusion. Committing a crime and then having it retroactively made legal is classic corruption. The telcos paid off the right people and walked away scot free. This is the sort of shit that rots a society from the inside out. The economy goes underground, the lawmakers become more and more meaningless, and the "leader" rules by dictate.
Hoyer, Pelosi, and Reid are small people in the end whose weakness and stupidity will simply be a footnote in the political histories of this era. If Obama wants to be a part of this corruption then he can go ahead and piss away strong support for weak or no support. If you are really for change, prove it. If not get out of the way for someone who is.
First of all, Senator Dodd needs to know the netroots and at least some voters have his back if he is to filibuster or at least the telecom immunity clause.
I know the whole bill has the support of 49 Republicans, plus Joe Lieberman and Harry Reid, DiFi, Biden. That's 53 already. Probably Hillary, making 54. Finding another 7 (or 6) is a no-brainer.
Whether Obama supports the bill in general or owes some favors, he can afford to actively block the immunity portion at least. Favors repaid, right flank covered.
If Obama were to publicly support Dodd on actively shooting down the telecom immunity portion, he'd lend moral weight and courage to wavering Senators and possibly sway things the other way.
Whatever money you were going to give Obama this month, give it to the Strange Bedfellows PAC and Rep. Holt (and/or any other brave Congresspeople). Oh, we'll probably go back to feeding the Obamachine next month, but the Senator needs to remember that he is, in fact, still a Senator, representing Illinoisans and soon to be representing all of us. We are all unhappy about FISA but really pissed at the sleazy backscratching of the immunity clause.
As netroots fundraisers we can be more excitable than the average voter, but we hit that PayPal button more reliably. And by foregoing public federal funds, Obama has put his fundraising partially in our hands.
We're taking the risk that skipping a month could be the little bit that costs Obama (and us) the White House. That's called taking a bit of risk for principle. Obama could stand to do the same every so often. A big part of our respect for him is founded on that. It's why a lot of us didn't support the get-along-go-along politics of Senator Hillary Clinton and sleazy back-scratching from the likes of Mark Penn and Terry McAuliffe.
Somewhat off-topic...
Why is it that everyone ascribes the failure of the Roman Republic/Empire to moral reasons and compare the US to it? What about the Carolingian empire? The Ottoman? Aztec? Zulu? It's from Gibbon, isn't it? Or because all of our famous monuments are Greco-Roman? The sample of empires is statistically small, and, like unhappy families, each unhappy in its own way.
Excellent thread, Hubris!
Obama is in the relatively comfy position he's in because the progressive wing of the party jump-started his campaign.
And, not incidentally, bailed on Hillary like she was a pot of ebola virus stew.
He fucking well needs to remember it, and he DOESN'T need to start triangulating pieces of himself off to the warpimps, again, a la Hillary.
At this point, americans are one hell of a lot more interested in seeing some intelligent leadership than they are in bipartisanship.
Don't fuck with us, Barack; the mid-terms aren't be that far off.
It IS worth noting that Dukakis didn't have a congenital idiot of a faux cowturd, who's presidency has turned into a perfect clusterfuck of a storm, to run against.
Nor did he show the political courage that Obama did, when way back in 2002, he went TOTALLY against the agit-prop grain and spoke out against the war.
He just needs to sustain that courage. It shouldn't be tough, the shitmire "stability" derives from two things:
Bush has crammed more of our troops into what used to be Iraq than were used in the invasion, and he's paying various militias and factions a million dollars a day, to lay low.
Same old...it's the mob plan; what happens when you stop paying the protection money?
Or does Obama plan to keep on paying it?
Like you said, Larue: We will turn on him like a cobra, if he tries to run the same bullshit to keep this misery going. :o)
"Why is it that everyone ascribes the failure of the Roman Republic/Empire to moral reasons and compare the US to it?"
Bjacques, this is one of the things that sets my teeth on edge. It drives me a little crazy, and it's been doing so for at least the last 40 years.
Gibbon DID NOT help.
But I think there are two other contributors to this problem that should be considered.
(1) American public schools peddle crap for history. That means that everybody emerges with a background education that is essentially nil.
That means that most people's ideas about historical dynamics are going to come from cultural memes and political propaganda.
Personally, I think cultural memes probably dominate propaganda as a root cause issue. Because ...
(2) American popular culture is profoundly moralist. This goes back a ways, too. Read any careful study of popular conceptions of root causes of epidemic disease prior to about 1900 or so, and you'll see a recurring theme.
Americans tended to think that people came down with diseases like cholera because the victims were presumed to be immoral people.
Not because of some presumed physical causative agent, such as a bacterium or a toxin.
My point? When people don't know anything useful about the dynamics of a system, the explanations they put forward for its behavior are going to tell you volumes about their worldview and prejudices.
despair
wailing, deep depression (no wait, it's not depression, this sucks out loud)
the ice cream ain't working today. . .
Gibbons 19th century British worldview of the fall of the Roman Empire has been largely discredited due to the fact that "barbarization" of the empire both helped the Roman Empire grow and also remain stable for hundreds of years.
So he actually got it backwards. What destroyed the western Roman Empire(the Ottoman Turks finished off the eastern Roman Empire in 1453), was a total breakdown in civil-military affairs caused by the use of private armies AND the total screwing over of soldiers that had been used by Rome and then thrown out like trash and told to go fuck themselves when they needed help(this is what Adrianople was made of).
So let's make this clear: 1) the raising of private armies (Blackwater) and 2) the offshoring of military recruitment coupled with a down-the-road reneging on the promise(join the US military and get US citizenship, oh wait you are Hispanic so go to hell).
wengler: Yeah, I agree.
But if you go back a bit further, you'll note that both private armies and treatment of vets were indirect consequences of the latifundia system.
Systematic optimization of a slavery system eats away at every sector of the non-slave economy like acid. The latifundia system threw most of the Italian small farms out of business. The free farmers could not compete with slaves.
This created that pool of urban jobless that Gaius Marius created his New Model Army out of.
Gaius Marius' army wasn't an army of conscripts, as prior armies had been. It was an army of long-service professionals. Who ended up owing primary loyalty to their paymasters, rather than the state.
The Senate did NOT help mitigate this, because every bit of farmland given to vets as pension benefits was one less bit they could run as latifundia.
This created the crisis that wrecked the Republic. It pretty much insured that magnates could turn legions into private armies when the resources of any single magnate exceeded the point where he could recruit, equip, train, field, and pay multiple legions out of his own pocket.
The Empire's issues strike me more as a failure of a fairly successful system to scale up. Plus the lack of a real constitution that would have mitigated the civil wars attendant on the collapse of each successive dynasty.
But don't ignore the pressure on the borders, which went sharply and permanently up between AD 170 (approximate beginning of the long barb volkerwanderung) and AD 225 (Sassanid dynasty took over Persia).
Prior to 170, civil wars hurt, and they hurt badly. But the Empire had the reserves to recover, given half-decent government. Which the founder of each new dynasty was generally smart enough to provide.
After 225, Rome COULD NOT AFFORD civil wars. But their lack of an orderly succession process guaranteed them.
The Third Century Crisis was the direct result. After that, there was NO reserve left anymore. So a catastrophe like Adrianople wasn't a recoverable failure.
The movie Gladiator is another source of Rome as bad analogy to the US.
Al Giordano:.
Does anybody really think that unwarranted surveillance of US citizens abroad - our phones, our emails, etc. - isn't already happening?
There's already a loophole big enough to drive a super-computer through on a trailer: There's no US law that prevents US law enforcement agencies from receiving recordings and data files from foreign agencies, or private sector telecommunications companies abroad, if permitted by the government in that country. I have direct lived experience with this in Mexico.
Dukakis? Same lame argument the Clintonistas were making.
The Netroots is a small direct action machine (don't confuse Obama's online donors with the subset of those who give a shit about teh blogz) and there's just no interest in hamstringing the nominee with a purity test.
And so it begins...
I don't like or trust Obama, but - were I an American citizen - I'd still vote for him, as he seems (from this vantage point, anyway) to be the least destructive choice. Of course, God only knows what things will be like once he's in the White House. Bill Clinton used an affable facade and a lip-service to liberal pieties to enact an agenda that was pure GOP thugishness, while being under constant attack from the GOP over the least, minor, petty bullshit.
Will it be the same with Obama? I suspect it will...but it's still unthinkable to allow McCain anywhere near the Presidency. A nice little catch-22, that. Something has to be done to break up this sick renewal of Politics As Usual, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how that's to be managed.
I never figured that Barack Obama would seriously buck the oligarchy. If he does, he's toast. It's that simple.
But I'll still vote for him, because he's competent.
And because he's carrying the fight to the Republicans better than any other Presidential candidate has for the last 40 years.
The oligarchy isn't the only threat. Given adults in charge of the formal government, it isn't even the major one.
Hey, John D., I've disagreed with you in the past, but here I'm on your wave.
It's interesting how "surprising" events only reveal what we already knew was true.
Yes, I'll still vote for BHO because as you say he will probably be the least destructive, and as Stormcrow says the next post down, he's competent. I think he even has a heart and a soul, underneath the Sucks Least tee shirt.
But this FISA thing is now baldfaced theater ... and apparently it always was.
Congress is a huge game ... we knew that.
We the "People" are the ones being played. We're also the bank that pays out to the winners. We knew that too, but it's been more fun to play Democracy. (Who was it said that government is the entertainment wing of the military-industrial complex?)
I feel like a fog has lifted.
Look, I am mad about FISA. But I am NOT going to lay this all on BHO
and I actually feel much more like this
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonl...4343/811/
540243
(thanks TT)
As happened during the term of poor old Jimmy Carter, I suspect this country has so many bills, literal and metaphoric, coming due during the next administration that the next president will not be able to cope with the problems, and so will become deeply unpopular, no matter what he does or does not do.
Hence, President McCain would be the best thing for the Democrats, and President Obama would be the best thing for the Republicans.
By 2012, Clinton may consider herself lucky to have been pushed out of the race.
Monster from the Id:
The republic will not survive even four years of President McCain. Just the Supreme Court issue alone should have convinced you of that.
If it hasn't, then I suggest you start doing your homework. Or start packing your bags.
Because the Staatspolizei aren't going to spare you simply because you voted for McCain. They'll take you to the arena and shoot you anyway.
"They'll take you to the arena and shoot you anyway."--Stormcrow
Yeah, right after the little gray aliens send me back with an implant. 
SC, if you actually believe that's gonna happen, you spend too much time on blogs. Y'all have been screaming "The Police State Is Coming! The Police State Is Coming!" for years now.
Eventually the panic reflex wears out, and one can no longer believe you.
Minstrel Boy, I'm with ya.
For me, it's chocolate that's not working. Just went to sleep for 12 hours.
I didn't expect the baldfaced capitulation so very soon, I really didn't. On some survey in the last six months, I wrote the #1 request I had from the next President was to dismantle the power grab and restore checks and balances -- because without that, we are at the mercy of whoever's in the Oval Office. And I don't trust ANYONE who would actually run for the position: In real life, there are no Jed Bartletts.
Now we know. He wants the power, yep, he does. Just as much as Bush did.
I can honestly say I think Hillary would have done the same thing (althoug she'd have gotten more in exchange, I do believe). I can also honestly say I think John Edwards would have said "No". But maybe that's the reason Edwards is out.
I'm scared for us all. Of course I'll vote for whoever is running against McSame, but that means I'm voting for a so-called constitutional scholar who (despite all the rhetoric) is willing to accept diminishment of the Constitution if it gets to be him in charge.
This coming out, this soon, means the election is in trouble. Because when his dobermans turn on him, it needs to be AFTER he's in office, not before. Now I'm not so sure.
"Eventually the panic reflex wears out, and one can no longer believe you."
Fine. Believe what you choose.
But don't start pissing and moaning when political dissenters start getting the full Gitmo treatment, the Supremes rule that this is all OK with them, the Congress caves like they're doing with Telco immunity right now, and you start figuring that you're next.
Enter Darwin, stage left.
He wants the power, yep, he does. Just as much as Bush did.
Maggie, if he didn't want the power, he would never, ever have gone to the pains he has, to come this close to securing it.
These people go through a selection process just to get to where they are.
Just like everybody else does.
Say you decide to go through a grad program. A tough one, in the hard sciences or math or engineering. One that washes out at least 40% of the people who start out, as nearly all the serious ones do.
Would you even begin something like that if you didn't want it??? Badly???
That's a selection process in action. Right there.
Politicians go through them too.
Kucinich didn't want it. Not that much. How long did he last?
Barack and Michelle Obama are going through a whole wide wonderful world of shit right now. As you and I both know. It's going to pile up a hell of a lot deeper and fouler before November. And that's assuming people with maggots in their heads and scope-sighted rifles in their hands don't start seriously hunting him.
You think he'd go through all that ugliness and risk if he didn't want what was at the end of it? Bad enough to risk dying for it?
Jeeze.
These people are human beings, not plaster saints. They don't do things like this because they're heroes. They do them because they want.
They want to win. Or they want the power. Or they want the possibility that they'll be remembered longer than most all of us, who're forgotten a month after the dirt's shoveled over us. Or something.
People don't do things like this for no personal reason.
I'm not sure I could even remotely trust somebody who did. I'd question his sanity.
"Enter Darwin, stage left"
In a black helicopter, no doubt.
Not to worry; my Bilderberg Group Platinum Membership Card will protect me. I've been fixing the world's vanadium prices for years, you know. In fact, I recently was granted mastery of niobium and tantalum prices as well; all of periodic group 5B to myself!
Maybe I should get a fluffy white cat...
"Do you expect me to talk?"
"Noooooo, Mr. Stormcrow, I expect you to diiiieee!"
Oh wait--it was Blofeld who had the cat, not Goldfinger.
Tsk, only 45 and the senile dementia is setting in already...
Hurry, Stormcrow! Maggie is developing an immunity to Kool-Aid! OH NOES!
As usual, my advice to any poor government drone assigned to spy on me is: Strong coffee, and lots of it. Also plenty of Kleenex, 'cause you'll be bored to tears.
What devastating wit.
Too bad your common sense is not as well developed.
Four years ago, people were yapping about Ralph Nader with the same empty sarcasm. I wasn't impressed then, either.
Nader was relevant in the 2004 election? Are you sure you didn't mean 8 years ago?
*******
I must go now; I've been called to jury selection today. Ciao for nao. 
The incurably self-righteous are always yapping about Nader. He promises them an escape from tawdry, mundane reality which is even sweeter than the one the neocons proffer.
But it's cut from the same cloth.
Oh, as long as I'm thinking of sarcasm.
That wasn't bad, Id. But you could learn a thing or two from DemFromCT over at dKos this morning. He makes sarcasm an art form.
But he's a mere padwan compared to As'ad AbuKhalil's Jedi Master, over at Angry Arab News Service. And he does that every single day.
I am rather preterbe by this..pissed off infact...not sure what hes upto yet...what hes playing at.
there is a lot of pressure on the middle calss right now..a lot...every push is teh one taht could send thigns too far...this was one more push.
I still trust Mr Obaam, but that trust is strained...he needs to remember who put him in power, who helped him to the drivers seat...there will be a revelution under the next president, the onyl question left is the path that revolution takes.
I have no problem with someone "wanting the power", as long as he or she is honest about the reason they want it.
I still think, and hope, that Barack Obama wants it because salvaging something from 8 years of bush, not to mention the country-club republicanism of the Clinton's, will, except for Iraq, be mostly about REFRAINING from working to perpetuate the corporate 4th Reich that junior has spent so much blood and money empowering.
John McCain's wanting it has very little to do with political philosophies; he wants it because when he thinks about sitting in the oval office, his dick gets so hard that a cat couldn't scratch it.
It's not a tough choice, so far. But if Obama's idea of good government is opening the back door so that the bastards who've dragged us to the edge of the warrantless- buttfucking precipice, can ooze through, then he will be a one-term president, and should be.
I have no problem with someone "wanting the power", as long as he or she is honest about the reason they want it.
Tanbark, I think you know, just as well as I do, what would happen to ANY politician who 'fessed up to that in public.
Need I remind you that one of the most important of the many besetting sins of American political culture is hypocrisy??
Actually, hypocrisy is one of the most important besetting sins of the human species, period.
But what can you expect of a species that evolved in an utterly amoral and pitiless natural environment? OF COURSE we're a species of predators and sinners, or else we couldn't have survived in this environment.
That's why I'm close to deciding that the Gnostics were right, that the good and loving God had nothing to do with the origin of the natural universe and the life in it.
A problem with the old Gnosticism was: If the good God didn't create this universe, who did? The Gnostics had to postulate a world-maker called the "demiurge", who was inferior in virtue and/or wisdom to God--"wisdom" because in some versions of Gnosticism, the demiurge was not an evil being, just a bungler--kind of like Aule creating the Dwarves in Tolkien's mythos.
However, now that the natural sciences inform us that no creating and governing intelligence is required to explain the origin and continuing existence of the natural universe and the living things it contains, a truly monotheistic Gnosticism is possible--no "demiurge" is needed.
The natural universe is neither good nor evil, because it has no mind and no life [although it contains minds and lives]; it cannot choose to be anything other than it is, hence moral terms are irrelevant to it.
The good and loving God continues the existence of our personalities after death through sheer grace, or so I am coming to believe.
Id, one of the things I DO NOT believe in, by this time, is a benevolent God.
If there is a God that is mindful of us, it probably resembles one of HPL's Great Old Ones a lot more closely than anything else.
I don't pretend to have any evidence, SC. I just feel that I need some kind of belief system to keep me from becoming a complete nihilist. Some people don't need one; some people can believe absolutely that death is the end--no ifs, ands, buts, afterlives, resurrections, or reincarnations--and yet remain highly ethical, compassionate, and reasonably contented people.
I tried that--I was agnostic from roughly ages 15-24--and I found that I am not one of those people. It has occurred to me that my basic personality, which I am prudent enough to suppress for the sake of my personal safety and liberty, is closer to the villains of my beloved comic books than to the heroes. [But then, I've read that the only real difference between criminals and the rest of us is that the criminals, for whatever reasons, have weaker control of their impulses.] I'm one of those people whose basic outlook is "What's in it for #1?", hence I feel I need some kind of belief system, that without it I would simply be a fellow motivated purely by self-interest, by rewards and punishments [formal and informal], a true "Monster from the Id".
I feel that I need my faith, idiosyncratic and tenuous as it is, to keep me a Sesame Street monster rather
than a real monster.
Id you jsut need to shift your frame a bit...tehre is a joy to eb found in helpign others..a certin smugess that can be gain by helping with no obvious gain for your self...a feelign of superiority that is achived when others think your actions are alturistic.
no 0ne is every truly alturisict, but you gain a lot when others think you are
Moonglum just described how non-elite conservatives think of the elite, "creative class", variety of liberals--that they are frauds, pretending to be unselfish so others will think well of them.
Before anyone misunderstands--no, I was NOT calling Moonglum phony.
In that sense, everybody with their head screwed on right is a fraud.
I believe that lying to yourself, about yourself, is incredibly self-destructive. It sets you up for failure: garbage in, garbage out.
Note that I believe this with a fervor a 17'th century Jesuit would have envied, because I've seen this gotten disastrously wrong. Up close and personal.
But if you trumpet what you really are in public, you're liable to get yourself run out of town on a rail at best, stoned at worst. You have to lie like Ananias. I don't think there's a single solitary human being on Planet Earth who's clean enough inside to air that dirty laundry in public.
The "non-elite conservatives" you're talking about haven't looked in mirrors recently. Or they wouldn't even think like that, let alone act like that.
I'm not guessing about that last one, either. I wish I were. The confirming experiences were seriously ugly.
Stormcrow is correct. For prudence's sake, we must all pretend to be better people than we are when others can observe us.
But in the perfect, unaccountable privacy of the voting booth, we can be the nasty talking apes that we truly are--which is the GOP's only hope this time.
".. in the perfect, unaccountable privacy of the voting booth, we can be the nasty talking apes that we truly are--which is the GOP's only hope this time."
Not quite.
We can also turn into a circular firing squad. By way of voting for an utterly compromised and incompetent man, because our man is somewhat compromised, and less than perfectly competent.
There's hope for those professional criminals in that.
Failing that? They're going to eat dust and spit teeth in November.
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