This incident has everything to do with the climate of anti dissent/you are with us or against us/to oppose authority is anti-American inflicted on us by the Bush regime. My daughter is an 8th grader in an outstanding public school in the progressive SF bay area. Her class discussed the 1st amendment and free speech last week. A classmate whose parents are natives of coastal California, college educated and staunch Republicans raised he hand and told the class that her parents had told her that people shouldn't be allowed to speak aganist the president and against the military, because we should just trust the president to do the right thing for us and he knows better than the people what the right thing is. The teacher suggested that she ask her parents if that should apply to all presidents or only to the current one. The next time they discussed the subject,, she raised her hand and said that her parents told her that it applied only to Republican presidents because everybody knows that Republicans love the USA but Democrats hate our country and wish for our enemies to defeat us.

We have a facade of democratic processes barely covering a fascist structure and mentality. Just like in the 3rd Reich circa 1933, dissent and criticism of the government is compared to and depicted as treason and to collaboration with the "Enemy". Individual freedom is curtailed, the right to privacy is disappearing, government power is increased, the court increasingly side with the government in its march to limit and eliminate individual freedom. The opposition is meek scared and cooperative with the authoritarian government. It's hilarious when Americans label Hugu Chaves as "authoritarian". Venezuelans enjoy now more freedom than Americans and their government is less intrusive. Chaves is much more of a democratic head of state than Bush and Darth Vader.

I live about 40 miles south of senator Feinstein's incredible 17 million dollar mansion in the posh Pacific Height neighborhood of San Francisco. Rest assured that she doesn't represent her voters and their values at all. She has nothing but contempt for her voters and for the Democratic base. 30 years ago, as a SF supervisor and then mayor, she exhibited conservative tendencies sharply out of sync with her progressive environment. She was considered even then as a Republican disguised as a Democrats. With the exception of abortion rights, she is a Republican in anything but name. Unfortunately, no Democrat has dared run against her in the California primaries, so she kept getting reelected, which only meant that the Republicans have often had a safe "Democratic" vote for their radical agenda.

In Europe, Israel, Latin and America and probably a few other parts of the world, Liberal is associated with burguase, the mercantile middle class, capitalism and the political center. It's anything but "left wing", "progressive" or "radical". People from other counrties are constantly astonished to hear the term "liberal" in associated with left wing leanings in the US. Anothe comment about Feinstein;she's extremely intransigence and hard headed, although almost always calm and civil. She has voted consistently for the military industrial complex interests and for the national security state and never indicated that she would change that voting pattern. She has always made it clear in her infuriatingly condescending manner that she considered herself far more intelligent than her voters and superior to them and never tried to hide very hard her contempt for her constituency. Fortunately for her, the Republicans always nominated radical right wing extremists to run against her, so we never really had any choice but to vote for her, since no Democrat ever dared to challenge her in the primaries.

Can't argue with anything you said. It's actually coastal California that's very blue, excluding San Diego. The further you get from the ocean, the more red California becomes. Realistically, there was no chance of unseating DiFi in the primaries, and voting for her was the classic vote for the lesser of two evils. Believe me, her Republican opponents have been so repulsively reactionary that you would never have forgiven California voters for allowing them to become US senators because of our deep disappointment with DiFi.

She has never pretended to represent the have nots or to care about them. Her only excuse to run as a Democrat and not a Republican is that she is pro-choice. She has always been always a corporatist, commerce-above-all "Democrat". Her husband is an obscenly wealthy defense contractor and she associates almost solely with very wealthy people who could care less about those unlike them. Unlike most other Democrats-in-name-only, she never invested too much energy in hiding that fact.

Feinstein had a Jewish father and Catholic mother and was raised as a Roman Catholic. I'm not sure when she decided she was Jewish and how sincere her switch had been.

feinstein grew up attending exclusive and expensive Catholic private schools. She attended Stanford university when it was admitting only the kids of white and wealthy people who at least then tended to be almost exclusively Republican. She loves to be wealthy and associate with wealthy and powerful people. She is really representing the interests of her socioeconomic class and of her own family. If she weren't from SF or California, she would probably run as a Republican.

She is much more intelligent than either, but she is a pro-corporate, pro-establishment, pro-Wall Street, pro- corporate deregulation, pro-large defense contractors politician. She is an integral part of the Beltway establishment and will never step out of line. Once you understand who she is, her voting record makes perfect sense. A friend of mine hates her so much that despite being a pro Jesse Jackson socialist back in 1988 and a 1960's Berkeley anti-war veteran, she voted for Republican Pete Wilson, whom she despises, when Feinstein tried to unseat him and become California's first female govenor in 1988.