Mirth? Oh my yes, and especially when preparing a tasty palaak panir. (It helps lift the spirits after all that tedious cheesemaking.)

Mmm.... Are we on the right thread here, or am I just slow on the uptake, as usual?

Put another way, we ALL want to see congress do something major NOW. But the constitutional process and various other constraints basically prevent that. They could jump up and down and scream bloody murder and issues contempt citations and initiate impeachment, and still these constraints will get in the way and slow things down. So instead of fighting these constraints, I think that we need to figure out how they work and find the best way to work within them.

I understand what you are getting at here, and I do understand about the "vicious insults", but even the vicious insults are part of the juggernaut. With respect to issuing contempt citations and initiating impeachment, even if this isn't the time to actually initiate them (Linda Sanchez did initiate the contempt citation process), it is still a valid criticism to say that they should generate the deep seated feeling that impeachment is both still on the table and on the horizon (to mix metaphors).

And they could make sure the public knows why business is stalled in Congress, up to and including reminding everyone at every opportunity that the Republican led 109th Congress failed, for the first time in decades if not centuries, to complete a budget for the next fiscal year. The Democrats are much more polite than they need to be to work a threading-the-9-holed-pearl strategy. Tip O'Neil would never have been so polite, and he did a lot of uphill battles.

At some point polite turns into impotent -- some of the constraints are the Democrats' own nightmares and fears, just as surely as some of Bush's dreams of power are fantasy and hubris. It isn't stooping to anyone's level to let them know you will use the full power of impeachment on anyone who broke the law, just because you aren't ready to do it yet. You said that a good prosecutor doesn't bring a case until he knows he has it, but he does convene the grand jury before that point.

I'm in favor of letting those guys know that impeachment, the International Court of Justice, and all the rest are in their future, because I'm in favor of making sure they don't escape incarceration and permanent exclusion from American politics. And it's fine for me to keep writing my Senators and Congressman to say that, because when they are ready to contemplate those remedies, which is scary for them, there's one constituent they don't have to wait for the focus groups to count on. As I said before, my Congressman has already signed on to starting impeachment inquiries, and I'm proud of him for that.

I think we aren't so far off from each other, just on the convex sum between dotting every i wearing an eyeshade, and preperceptive primal screams, we have different lambdas. What I meant about the law of the excluded middle is that most of those lambda values have non-zero truth, and contribute to the whole even if each one perceives the others as being errors.

Oh, a priceless quote for the mathematically inclined:

The court cannot, as the DTA charges us, consider whether a preponderance of the evidence supports the Tribunal's status determination without seeing all the evidence, any more than one can tell whether a fraction is more or less than one half by looking only at the numerator and not at the denominator

Chief Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals

What, no mirch, William?

Galls because it's me, or galls because you wish it weren't so? Or perhaps both?

And, of course, Nixon was not impeached. But he almost certainly would have been, had he not resigned, which is of course why he resigned. And then, as now, Repubs hold the cards. Then, principle might have played into it (although I would guess that so did politics). Now, though, it's mostly if not entirely politics. But whatever, if Dems can make it happen, I don't care how they do it so long as they do it. And the way to do it, I think, is to keep the pressure on, and actively persue a calculated showdown with the administration that will make Repubs want to flee in horror. Make Bush so radioactive that even Repubs start to whisper the I word.

-- kovie

It galls me because we can't put all these war criminals behind bars. Forget impeachment. I have been surfing and reading all day and what I've been reading even has me somewhat stunned. The last coup here happened in Florida and I think we'll just be riding that one out for the next 18 months. Then we will be stuck with a Democrat In Name Only but that will make things a whole lot better here. I wonder if our next President will ever have these kind of numbers:

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Even sticks and stones won't hurt Chavez's poll numbers

Yesterday I finally saw a full set of poll numbers on Chavez from Datos, one the polling firms with the best track record in giving accurate numbers.

Cutting to the chase, Chavez's approval rating stands at 71.1%.

That is an astounding number, especially given all the supposedly "negative" events since last December - the formation of a single party for pro-Chavez groups (PSUV), the nationalization of major companies, all the "shortages", the "closure" of RCTV (BTW, the "closed" RCTV will magically re-open tomorrow and resume spilling its bile), and the little hate fest the Venezuelan opposition had over the past month and a half. Despite all that, despite all the rocks and insults hurled at the government, its approval rating remains at 71%!

In some other numbers from the poll 53.3% of those polled think the country has improved over the past 8 years, 18.5% think things are the same, while 24.8% think things have gotten worse.

With respect to their own personal situation 49.8% say it is better, 33.4% say it has remained the same, and 15.6% say it has gotten worse.

Asked to classify the situation of the country 45.3% say it is good, 5.3% say it is excellent, 23% say it is bad, and 16.6% say it is very bad.

http://oilwars.blogspot.com/2007/07/even-sticks-and-stones-wont-hurt.html

We are a very evil and hypocritical people, Kovie. And those of us who aren't evil are very, very gullible and foolish. The there are the rest of us.

http://www.venezuelafoia.info/english.html