Do you feel the constitution has a left, right, and center. Just where, constitutionally, do you think that Obama has placed himself given his FISA capitulation and his telecom immunity turn about?

This issue really riles people up, in particular in his own party

What about those working class whites that everybody was so concerned about a month ago--are they riled up about FISA? I don't think so. In fact, I don't think most people outside of the intellectual leftie blogosphere know much at all about the details of FISA.

But a commercial suggesting Barack Obama wants terrorists to be able to make calls freely in the US because he's afraid not to coddle them? Now that will play well in the swaths of Appalachia that Hillary Clinton so readily played up as her territory. As much as I hate it, I think Obama's probably demonstrating his keen political acumen here.

In his less-than-complimentary piece a few weeks ago, David Brooks sums this point up nicely:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/opinion/20brooks.html

There is another serious candidate out there who opposes the war, opposes the Patriot Act, opposes torture, opposes warrantless wiretapping, and opposes this god awful FISA bill. His name is Bob Barr.

He also opposes the war on drugs, if that means anything to you.

And, unlike Nader, Barr is unlikely to be a spoiler in this race, as he is probably going to draw most of his support from principled conservatives disaffected by McCain. Fortunately, there is a lot on his platform that liberals can like, as well.

Sen. Obama's supporters are now spinning his spins on issues like FISA and withdrawal from Irag as examples of how he is a true leader who can change his mind when he is presented with new information.

When anybody questions him, his response is that we don't grasp what he is saying or we haven't really been listening if we think his position today is different from his position yesterday.

Every day, he reveals himself as more and more of a typical politician who will say or do nearly anything to get elected. The difference is that he was presented to voters as somebody who is above politics as usual.

There are those who will vote for Sen. Obama no matter what he says or does. No words from Joan Walsh or anyone else will persuade them to take a hard look at this candidate and decide if he is really the man they thought they were voting for in the primaries.

One of Obama's strategies was to get lots of young people to register to vote. After this stunt, I wonder how many of those new voters will still think it's worth the effort to vote this November?

I was actually a little dissapointed that Obama voted yes for all the reasons that Glenn Greenwald has detailed so well.

However seeing a Joan Walsh column making gratuitous hay out of it with a snide "see I told you Hillary was better and Obama was nothing so special" attitude has put me off any thoughts of actually being against him for long. Little gratuitous jabs at "Markos" and all the others who "claimed that Obama was the second coming" just made it seem even more childish.

God it seemed so far away, all the primary battle nonsense. How nice it would have been to leave it there.

Oops I forgot -- Joan doesn't want that topic in Salon, so I guess I'll just shut up and go away.

When I say "moving to the center," I mean what many people mean, which is voting with the right on some issues, remaining on the left for most.

It's an interesting point, the semantics of "center" and "moderate" and "independent." When some people say they are moderate, they mean just that: they're in the center on the issues themselves. On abortion, for example, a moderate might argue that the woman has all the rights until, say, the 16th week, when s/he gets a little queasy about the procedure (knowing whatever is happening physiologically in the little creature--fingernails, in utero hiccups, whatever) and thinks now the rights are with the fetus. This compared with the person on the right who thinks all rights go to the fetus from Day One after conception, and the person on the left who thinks all rights go to the woman until birth.

Someone else might say they are moderate or in the center but really mean that they feel very strongly right on some issues and very strongly left on others. Those people are really independents, in my opinion, but they often call themselves moderates.

Anyway, the purpose of my previous post was to express genuine surprise that Joan, who has made her contempt for voting third party crystal clear, seemed to be considering just that.

Well, here we were, thinking you'd come back from vacation, a gleam in your eye, ready to finally fire Camille Paglia, tell Mini-Me (aka Rebecaa Traister) to quit yapping about bacon, and woo Steve Benen back to run War Room full-time!

But little did we know that you had bigger plans! Your trusty Roget's at your side, your vacation was dedicated to moving from concern about your favorite whipping boy, to a full on sense of betrayal!

We can't wait to see the new headlines you've got in store for us in the weeks to come! In fact, we can't wait so badly that us folks at Salon The Parody already figured out what they're going to be!!!!

~ Anne Louise

“I criticize by creation, not by finding fault” ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

The Democrats took the party rightward all through the 1990's. The party of FDR, Truman, Jack and Bobby Kennedy gave us NAFTA, GATT, the WTO and Welfare Reform.

This followed decades of growing wussiness of the party that once gave us "Give 'em Hell, Harry!"

FISA is just one or a long line of unforgivable votes by the current round of Democrats. They've been caving on the Iraq War and (Kucinich excluded) they took impeachment off the table.

The Democrats are failing to learn from history. If progressives don't get what we want from the Democrats, we'll go with third-party candidates, like we did with Nader in 2000. Or, we might just stay home.

The public's fear of Bush, Cheney or McCain will only take them so far for so long. If they can't convince us that they'll support what we support and fight like hell for those things, then they deserve to lose.