Yes, the Constitution IS optional. What are you going to do about it? Elect more Blue Dogs like last time? Well, that sounds like a plan, doesn't it? Go right ahead. Yes, the Rule of Law DOES apply only to the Little People, and then only to some of them based on race and gender. What are you going to do about it? Elect more pseudo-Progressives and Blue Dogs? Go right ahead. They're begging you to.

Yes, the Presidency has been turned into a competitve monarchy, and yes it can operate very effectively as an Autocracy. What are you going to do about it? Call and fax and write stern letters? Elect more Blue Dogs? Please! By all means! Have at it!

They see their job as protecting and defending The Government, not the Constitution. And they think they're doing a pretty good job. Too bad radical extremists don't appreciate the job they're doing.

Your job, in fact the job of all ordinary Americans, is to keep on consuming the economic, political, and social products they believe you deserve. -- Ché Pasa

Fuckin'a right on. What are they going to do about it? Just what they have been doing -- nothing of consequence. It's maddening isn't?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/opinion/11krugman.html

(or click on signature)

In previous years, payments to doctors were maintained through bipartisan fudging: politicians from both parties got together to waive the rules. In effect, Congress kept Medicare functioning by expanding the federal budget deficit.

This year, the Democratic leadership decided, instead, to link the “doctor fix” to the fight against privatization and offered a bill that maintains doctors’ payments while reining in those expensive private fee-for-service plans. Last month, the Senate took up this bill — but Democrats failed by one vote to override a Republican filibuster. And that seemed to be that: soon after that vote, Senators Max Baucus and Charles Grassley had another bipartisan fudge all ready to go.

But then Democratic leaders decided to play brinkmanship. They let the doctors’ cuts stand for the Fourth of July holiday, daring Republicans to threaten the basic medical care of millions of Americans rather than give up subsidies to insurance companies. Over the recess period, there was an intense lobbying war between insurance companies and doctors.

And when the Senate came back in session, it turned out that the doctors — and the Democrats — had won: Senator Kennedy was there to cast the extra vote needed to break the filibuster, a number of Republicans switched sides and the bill passed with a veto-proof majority.

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Notes: it differs from our FISA situation in that

1. It is a much more potent election issue

2. It had powerful but opposed lobbies weighing in

3. Republicans broke rank

The new FISA law is quite simply a major victory for the terrorists because the America that I awoke to yesterday morning is different from the America that I awoke to on Wednesday. Bush has been saying for years that our enemies hate us because they hate our freedoms. The freedom-hating terrorists. Following that logic, they must hate us a little less today because we are less free today. Where is this heading and where will it stop?

If bernbart does discover she is mistaken, she will write back and say so; she's done that before. It may just take her a while. A day or two, no more, and she will see where she's mistaken.

Okay, my wife is loading a clip, and has put a bullet into the chamber, and the gun under her pillow. That means it's time for bed.

bernbart:

However I'm not doing anything illegal.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph on a cracker. Ask your alleged husband if all of his clients are guilty as charged, and if all his wives missed points by as wide a margin as you have.

Glenn, I'm sorry you had to take any time out of your day to deal with stuff like this; it must be distracting, to say the least, and frustrating. Thank you so much for all the work you've done on this issue; you are a clarion voice.

And the only reason it won't get prosecuted is because the Democrats want to have a unitary executive too.

Yes, but what they want, and what they are going to get are two different things. As I remember it, Bush and Cheney actually took very little in the way of power. Everything they got was abdicated to them, by people who, like so many in government, had conflicting interests and responsibilities (or so they thought, anyway). They all abdicated to Cheney and Bush in some areas because they thought it would advantage them in others. That will not happen with Obama, they'll want it all back.

I must go to bed, there's so much to do. Thanks to all, and thanks to bernbart for the many laughs. You're a kick, sweetheart! Stay as sweet as you are, and I hope you never find the spel-chek. It wouldn't be the same.

I think maybe Voice has divined tomorrow's topic.

And Goodnight, William Timberman, wherever you are!

If I had about a month to bang it into shape, and somebody standing over my with a whip. And threatening to shoot me if I put one joke in it. (Not that I could duplicate his experience which he references)

From Timberman in 2006, (what it took me till about, oh 2009 to formulate):

The problem with the Democrats is that they don't have an alternate narrative. If the war in Iraq is an aberration slowly become an abomination, what exactly is America's role in the world? Ask them, and you won't get a single answer.

Most Democrats in the House and Senate seem to accept the post-War narrative which their Party in fact invented -- America on guard against and finally triumphant over World Communism, America the guardian of world peace and democracy, America the ardent defender of the defenseless Jewish state. They question the tactics which put us in Iraq, but not the strategy.

Even many of the rank and file, the Democrats I worked with as volunteers during the last election, for example, believe that we're at war with irrational terrorists, that it is a war, and that GWB just sent the troops to the wrong place. They had/have no problem at all with the Iraqi sanctions, Clinton's air war against Saddam, or stationing troops in the stans on Russia's southern borders.

To put it plainly, the Democrats who have a fundamental criticism to offer of American foreign policy, and the economic policy which accompanies, it are a minority. You find many of us in places like this because our narrative has to be heard here first; it has little place in the councils of the Party at the moment.

The same was true during the struggle over civil rights, and during the Viet Nam debacle; the vilification of Fannie Lou Hamer, or Eugene McCarthy was every bit as debilitating then as Joe Lieberman is today. To this day, many Democrats blame us for the present weakness of the party. If you radicals hadn't split the party, Hubert Humphrey would have won, and the war would have been over in six months; if only you'd been more responsible.

If we want a true opposition to American Manifest Destiny in this country, we'll have to create one, and we'll have to win elections with it. The Democratic Party may be the more hospitable of the two parties to those who actually have an alternate narrative, but only just. These things take time.

This was one of his first letters

He better come back. If he doesn't, I'm stealing all his stuff, you hear that Timberman!