Clean elections: Initiative challenge may have come up short

According to Willamette Week, the well-funded petition drive to put a recall of Portland's public financed City Hall elections on this spring's ballot appears to have come up short. The signature sheets turned in by the lavish-spending pro-downtown business First Things First Committee contained 40,998 signatures (only 26,691 valid signatures were needed to get the measure on the ballot), but initial sampling indicates that there were too many unregistered voters and duplicate signatures on the signature sheets to qualify. A successful appeal sounds unlikely.

Appreciative nod to Loaded Orygun and Jack Bog's Blog for catching this item. I sympathize with Jack's belief that a referendum is a better way to establish voter-owned elections than a split City Council vote, and at p3 we're also pleased to note his grudging inclination to vote for clean money, had it come to the ballot (it probably still will, just not this time). If City Hall candidates don't have to make themselves utterly beholden to developers before they can even seriously compete, it might--might! maybe!--reduce the number of rim-shot-worthy projects around town.

Loaded Orygun has an interview with the only candidate who's currently qualified under the clean election law.

It's all about where you're standing (updated)

Americans who are shocked and dismayed that Cheney gunshot victim Harry Whittington has become the butt of humor from Team Bush itself must not have been paying close attention.

Bush and those he surrounds himself with have a long history of finding amusement in suffering--so long as someone else is doing the suffering.


1999: Tucker Carlson asked Governor Bush about a Larry King interview with Texas death row inmate Karla Faye Tucker.

King, Bush said, asked Tucker difficult questions, such as "What would you say to Governor Bush?"

What did Tucker answer? Carlson asked.

"Please," Bush whimpered, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "please, don't kill me."

2000: When candidate Bush was interviewed by David Letterman who'd just returned from heart surgery), Dave asked Bush about what it meant to be "a uniter, not a divider" (the latter's long-abandoned campaign theme)? Bush's answer:

"It means when it comes time to sew up your chest cavity, we use stitches as opposed to opening it up."

Letterman looked politely uncomfortable, and some of the studio audience actually booed.


2004: At the annual dinner Radio and Television Correspondents' Association where, by tradition, the president is expected to deliver a few self-deprecatory bits of staff-written humor from the podium, Bush amused the audience of political and media insiders with a slide show depicting himself looking around the Oval Office for the elusive WMDs that had been his administration's ragged excuse for invading Iraq the year before.

One pictured Mr Bush looking under a piece of furniture in the Oval Office, at which the president remarked: "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere."

After another one, showing him scouring the corner of a room, Mr Bush said: "No, no weapons over there," he said.

And as a third picture, this time showing him leaning over, appeared on the screen the president was heard to say: "Maybe under here?"

2005: After some delay in responding to the devastation Hurricane Katrina caused the Gulf Coast, Bush gave a press conference following a briefing by then FEMA director Michael Brown, and told the audience:

The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch.

(And don't even get me started on his "dictator" jokes.)

Compared to Junior's idea of funny, which seems never to have risen far above his adolescent fondness for blowing up frogs, his dad's testy line "Read my hips!" now seems like the soul of gentle, Keillor-esque humor.

Ah, twenty-twenty hindsight. It's a killer, ain't it?


Postscript: I didn't mention this point because I figured it was self-evident, but Joe at AMERICAblog is probably right to assume that it should be made clear:

I expect Jon Stewart and Jay Leno to make jokes about this incident. That's their job. But, for Scott McClellan and Jeb Bush to make fun of the whole thing is just creepy and incredibly unseemly.

As the Repubs used to say in 1998:

It's not the shooting your friend in the face with a shotgun; it's the coverup.

Possible signal of distorted judgment

Haven't read this in several years (before 1998, at least), so I dusted it off a few days ago and started in. It's not a bad preliminary sketch of How We Got Here (and it has a pretty good opening sentence, too):

Although American political life has rarely been touched by the most acute varieties of class conflict, it has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds. Today this fact is most evident on the extreme right wing, which has shown, particularly in the Goldwater movement, how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. Behind such movements there is a style of mind, not always right-wing in its affiliations, that has a long and varied history. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. [ . . . ]

When I speak of the paranoid style, I use the term much as a historian of art might speak of the baroque or the mannerist style. It is, above all, a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself. Webster defines paranoia, the clinical entity, as a chronic mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions of persecution and of one's own greatness. In the paranoid style, as I conceive it, the feeling of persecution is central, and it is indeed systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy. But there is a vital difference between the paranoid spokesman in politics and the clinical paranoiac: although they both tend to be overheated, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression, the clinical paranoid sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him; whereas the spokesman of the paranoid style finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others. Insofar as he does not usually see himself singled out as the individual victim of a personal conspiracy, he is somewhat more rational and much more disinterested. His sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic, in fact, goes far to intensify his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation.

Of course, the term "paranoid style" is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing entirely prevents a sound program or a sound issue from being advocated in the paranoid style, and it is admittedly impossible to settle the merits of an argument because we think we hear in its presentation the characteristic paranoid accents. Style has to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content.

A few simple and relatively non-controversial examples may make this distinction wholly clear. Shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy, a great deal of publicity was given to a bill, sponsored chiefly by Senator Thomas E. Dodd of Connecticut, to tighten federal controls over the sale of firearms through the mail. When hearings were being held on the measure, three men drove 2,500 miles to Washington from Bagdad, Arizona, to testify against it. Now there are arguments against the Dodd bill which, however unpersuasive one may find them, have the color of conventional political reasoning. But one of the Arizonans opposed it with what might be considered representative paranoid arguments, insisting that it was "a further attempt by a subversive power to make us part of one world socialistic government" and that it threatened to "create chaos" that would help "our enemies" seize power.

Again, it is common knowledge that the movement against the fluoridation of municipal water supplies has been catnip for cranks of all kinds, especially for those who have obsessive fear of poisoning. It is conceivable that at some time scientists may turn up conclusive evidence that this practice is, on balance, harmful; and such a discovery would prove the anti-fluoridationists quite right in the substance of their position. But it could hardly, at the same time, validate the contentions of those among them who, in characteristic paranoid fashion, have charged that fluoridation was an attempt to advance socialism under the guise of public health or to rot out the brains of the community by introducing chemicals in the water supply to make people more vulnerable to socialist or communist schemes.

A distorted style is, then, a possible signal that may alert us to a distorted judgment, just as in art an ugly style is a cue to fundamental defects of taste.

Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid
Style in American Politics (1964)

Oregon blogs are having a good weekend

Two good pieces; check them out:

At Loaded Orygun, Torrid has a good round-up of the state of play for clean money in Portland elections, a topic dear to our heart here at p3. A nice big slice of the kind of dig-deep blogging LO was designed for. Good on 'em.

And at BlueOregon, T. A. Barnhart muses on what drives otherwise sensible people to look for a Great Leader instead of pitching in to help make our current system of government work better. Read this, take a short walk to lower your blood numbers, and then take a look at Greenwald's recent post on "conservatism," if you haven't already.

Cult of Bush (updated)

Glenn Greenwald has a good piece--part meditation, part wall-nailing--on what it means to be "conservative" today. At least, what it means to "conservatives" to be "conservative" today. And what it means, says Greenwald, is this: Conservatism is unquestioning loyalty to George Bush and uncritical agreement with what ever he says today--even if it means ignoring what he said yesterday.

People who self-identify as "conservatives" and have always been considered to be conservatives become liberal heathens the moment they dissent, even on the most non-ideological grounds, from a Bush decree. That’s because "conservatism" is now a term used to describe personal loyalty to the leader (just as "liberal" is used to describe disloyalty to that leader), and no longer refers to a set of beliefs about government.

That "conservatism" has come to mean "loyalty to George Bush" is particularly ironic given how truly un-conservative the Administration is. It is not only the obvious (though significant) explosion of deficit spending under this Administration – and that explosion has occurred far beyond military or 9/11-related spending and extends into almost all arenas of domestic programs as well. Far beyond that is the fact that the core, defining attributes of political conservatism could not be any more foreign to the world view of the Bush follower.

As much as any policy prescriptions, conservatism has always been based, more than anything else, on a fundamental distrust of the power of the federal government and a corresponding belief that that power ought to be as restrained as possible, particularly when it comes to its application by the Government to American citizens. It was that deeply rooted distrust that led to conservatives’ vigorous advocacy of states’ rights over centralized power in the federal government, accompanied by demands that the intrusion of the Federal Government in the lives of American citizens be minimized.

Is there anything more antithetical to that ethos than the rabid, power-hungry appetites of Bush followers? There is not an iota of distrust of the Federal Government among them.

And he's got the goods. He's got the examples. He's got the archives. Don't miss the Update, covering the exhuberant willingness of Free Republic's fire-breathers to throw overboard some of their most cherished positions rather than disagree with Bush's PR Flavor of the Day.

It'll be in the Readings list on the sidebar. Check it out.

And don't miss Digby's tweak of Greenwald's fundamental argument: "It's not a Cult of Bush; it's a Cult of Republican power." Bumper sticker version: It Didn't Start With Junior.


Update: Greenwald provoked a lot of counterattacks after the above was posted. He addresses them pretty thoroughly today.

For those who like their irony applied with a trowel, the conservative pushback was filled with denunciations and dismissals of Greenwald as being a "liberal," as proven by his disagreement with Bush--which was, of course, precisely the pattern Greenwald was calling them on in the first place. Keywords to watch for: "Vibrant examples" and "Some things are beyond satire."

A detectable drop in the overall quality of network television

Tonight, FOX airs the last four episodes of "Arrested Development"--the network still insists, Scott McLellan-like, that this is only a "season finale," since the official death sentence may not be pronounced until fall scheduling decisions are announced in a couple of months.

(If your idea of a good TV review is when the writer steps on nearly all the jokes, but congratulates herself for not spoiling one or two, you'll appreciate this write-up from the Chicago Trib. If, on the other hand, you prefer to let art flow over you, you can just wait until tonight.)

Rumors persist that Showtime may pick up the series once it's officially cancelled. For what it's worth, those rumors rarely mention ABC as one of the interested suitors anymore. And another rumor has it that Justin Bateman has signed to be in this dubious-sounding project, which would affect his availability. So you never know. That's why they call them rumors: You can't count on them.

But enough fretting and worrying: Tonight, after a long drought, we drink from the fire hose. Four new episodes--rumored (dammit!) to be among the best in AD's three-year run--shown back to back. It's sort of like celebrating swearing off by going on a binge--probably not the worst possible analogy for a show like this.

In the unlikely event that you'll be watching the Olympic opening ceremonies tonight--although I suppose someone will have to--set your DVRs.

(Bonus opinion: My theory of the Olympics--that it's not really an Olympic sport if it takes a judge to tell whether you "won"--would have the whole business over in about three days. So much easier for everyone. Of course, that means that snow-boarding and floor gymnastics wouldn't be Olympic events anymore, but duplicate bridge might be, so I haven't got all the bugs worked out yet. But I still think I’m right.)

Fissures

Another Bush party-liner splits off from the monolith:

The Republican Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) has issued 51 questions to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on President Bush's warrantless wiretap program.

The letter, issued to Gonzales today and acquired by RAW STORY, demands answers to myriad legal questions on the program, which involved eavesdropping on Americans' calls overseas. Sensenbrenner has given Gonzales a Mar. 2 deadline to respond.

First Wilson, now Sensenbrenner.

Same rule applies for the Dems with either of these two, though: Make full use of the opportunity they're providing--exploit it to the fullest--but don't even consider trusting them. Sensenbrenner likes nothing more than to work up an appetite for breakfast by crushing a few Democrats' stones.

(Same with Grover Norquist, as long as we're on the subject.)

(Special bonus fissure: Michael "Heck-of-a-Job" Brown is now apparently willing to publicly shake down the president to save his own sorry, incompetent hide. Not as important as a defection by Wilson or Sensenbrenner, I would imagine, but pretty amusing all the same. I suppose, really, that's the advantage of being feckless but connected: Yes, you can get appointed to jobs you're utterly unqualified for and be exposed to the world as a buffoon, but when it really hits the fan and you have to find someone well-connected to threaten in self-defense, you're in a much more target-rich environment.)

Net neutrality (continued)

Following up on an earlier post about net neutrality, the Senate Commerce Committee, and the plan of Yahoo and AOL to charge bona fide commercial emailers a per-message fee to deliver messages to their users:

The Commerce Committee had its first meeting Tuesday, and this seems to be the gist of things so far:

Last fall, the House Energy and Commerce Committee released a 70-page draft proposal (click here for PDF) and held a lengthy hearing. It outlines rules for a broad set of technology services divided into three major categories: broadband Internet service providers, voice over Internet Protocol providers and broadband video providers.

Technology companies like Google and Amazon.com criticized that version, which they accused of failing to spell out a network neutrality mandate--that is, a requirement that companies that own broadband pipes don't favor certain content over others when transmitting it.

Barton gave no indication as to how that draft would change before its formal introduction on the House floor but said he was aiming to put a bill out for public review "very quickly." With respect to network neutrality in particular, he said, "it's pretty tough to determine what is right in my mind."

If the story advances from here--if Barton determines what's right in his mind?--I'll post it.

Reading: History refresher from Digby

I'm a little late in adding this to the Reading list on the sidebar, but better late than yada yada yada.

Digby points out that domestic bugging, dirty tricks, and ratfucking are not apparent anomalies of Bush's second term; They're the mother's milk that Karl Rove and his ilk were raised on in Nixon's GOP:

Remember: Watergate was about bugging the Democratic National Committee. The "3rd rate burglary" was to replace an illegal bug that had been planted on the telephones of prominent Democrats.

The lesson of Watergate for the chagrined Republicans was that they needed to be more forceful in assuming executive power and they needed to be more sophisticated about their campaign espionage. This is what they've done.

Anybody who even dreams that these guys are not using all their government power to spy on political enemies is being willfully naive. It is what they do. It is the essence of their political style. This is Nixon's Republican party and they have finally achieved a perfect ability to carry out his vision of political governance: L'etat C'est Moi. If the president does it that means it's not illegal.

There's more, including the education of young Karl, all leading to the point that what's being exposed now is nothing extraordinary for Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest; it's just business as usual. The only thing extraordinary is the exposure and the possibility of a political (and legal) price to be paid.

Scorpions (updated)

The Skirt, and some of my fellow PDX/DLers, have been mulling over Rep. Heather Wilson's call for Congressional investigation into Bush's domestic wiretapping. Skirt wrote me:

this gave me chills... I smell impeachment hearings... if not for this, then for one of BushCo's other offenses

It's interesting--okay, and darkly amusing--to watch the GOP begin to fracture as they realize that Junior has no coattails to ride on any longer. Karl can still bully them (like the Repubs on the Judiciary Committee), but only for a while longer.

Wilson and Bush, meanwhile, have been joined at the political hip from the beginning.

So, if she's willing to do the right thing now (i.e., call for congressional inquiry) but she's doing it for slimy reasons (i.e., she's got bad poll numbers and she needs some air freshener to cover over the stink she's picked up from Abrahamoff and Cunningham), then fine--the Dems should use the opportunity she's created, but never, ever trust her. That whole enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend business only goes so far.

Trust but verify.

Or, in a metaphor more appropriate to Wilson's New Mexico roots, always put crumpled up newspaper around the bed before you go to sleep and shake out your shoes before putting them on in the morning.

Update: Josh at TPM makes the spot-on observation:

Every position Wilson takes is finely calibrated to keep her politically well-positioned since she'll probably never have a truly easy race in her district.

He links to a great story I'd forgotten--the merry chase Wilson led her critics on when they tried to pin her down last summer: Did she support Bush's plan to privatize Social Security, or didn't she? And, as Kos reminds us, Wilson "expressed outrage at the Abu Ghraib scandal, then voted against efforts to investigate."

Democrats, shake out your boots in the morning.

A p3 guide to Great Caves of America

Carlsbad Caverns: An extensive range of geological formations near Carlsbad, New Mexico.

Overview (CCNP website): Carlsbad Caverns National Park contains more than 100 limestone caves that are unequaled in the profusion, diversity and beauty of their formations. The caves are the summer home for a world-famous colony of migratory Mexican free-tailed bats. The park contains 33,125 acres of rugged wilderness backcountry terrain.

Arlen Specter: Chair-to-be of the Senate Judiciary Committee, backs down on defense of women's right to abortion.

Nov 4, 2004 (Philadelphia Daily News): Specter, as presumptive chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, suggested that he would block any Bush nominee to the Supreme Court who opposed abortion rights. Reiterating his position that a woman's right to choose is "inviolate," he said overturning Roe v. Wade today would be akin to trying to reverse Brown v. Board of Education, the court's 1954 landmark desegregation decision.

Nov 17, 2004 (Fox News): After two days of appealing to fellow GOP senators, embattled Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania said he would make a public statement to assure Republicans at large he would not block anti-abortion judicial nominees from President Bush.

Arlen Specter, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, backs off pressuring Attorney General Gonzales on domestic surveillance revelations.

Dec 21, 2005 (Fox News): Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter said Wednesday he remains skeptical about a government surveillance program despite an explanation from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. [ . . . ]

"When a cannon hits you between the eyes, you take notice and I was immediately asked what I thought about it and I said, 'Well, it's a matter that requires a hearing,"' Specter said.

Feb 6, 2006 (Think Progress): Attorney Alberto Gonzales won’t be sworn in [before his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the government program surveilling U.S. citizens], even though the last time he testified under oath he misled the committee about the program. Leahy noted he was sworn the other two times he appeared before the committee. Leahy appealed the ruling of the chair and asked for a roll call vote.

[Following the roll call vote, Specter fretted: "This is really not a very good way to begin this hearing."]

Ransom

It almost sounds like that urban legend that makes the rounds on the Internet every couple of years. You know: the one warning us that the Post Office is going to impose a 5-cent surcharge on every piece of email--and telling us to forward the warning to all our friends? That one?

From the p3 It-Would-Be-Funny-If-It-Weren't-True files comes this little gem in this morning's NYTimes:

Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers.

America Online and Yahoo, two of the world's largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely.

The Internet companies say that this will help them identify legitimate mail and cut down on junk e-mail, identity-theft scams and other scourges that plague users of their services. Thy also stand to earn millions of dollars a year from the system if it is widely adopted.

As I noted last spring:

From the beginning, the World Wide Web was a source of irritation to corporate America: There were all these people--millions upon millions of "web surfers" (remember when that's what they were quaintly called?) out there . . . and no one could figure out how to make a dime off of all this.

Well, no one except the ISPs, I should say. True, Google, PayPal, and Amazon have figured out how to use the web's resources to create specific services that drive sales. And with relatively secure ordering and payment systems, retailers have moved catalog sales and customer relations to the Internet without much trouble.

But the real money is to be made at the fundamental level of access itself. Which is why, for example, the telcos are fighting the idea of public WiFi and generally looking for legislative protection to monopolize access to the Internet.

As Paul Maud'Dib observed, whoever has the power to destroy a thing controls it. If AOL and Yahoo have the power to block corporate emailer's access to me, they control the internet. Period.

Now I'll grant you--a system that would cut down on the Herbals/Mortgage/OEM spam I get every day is something I'd greet with an open mind. Same--even more so--with phishing attempts (a rarely-used online account of mine was suspended not long ago because I didn't believe the renewal advisory notices from them were really from them).

But the price--at least in the AOL/Yahoo model--would be steep: Not only would the system filter out unsolicited bulk email be filtered out, but airline updates, order confirmations, catalog offers, etc., might be caught in the filter as well if they don't pay "postage"--which is, here, a polite euphemism for "protection." And that could escalate; as one analyst in the Times article points out:

As for companies that send e-mail, "some will pay, but others will object to being held to ransom," he said. "A big danger is that one of them will be big enough to encourage AOL users to use a different e-mail service."

The result of that scenario: Certain online services--let's pick one most people like, such as Orbitz or Expedia bargain updates--will only be available to people with the right email provider. And the Internet will have taken a big step toward becoming a limply regulated monopoly like the cable industry.

(Oregon angle: How's your cable bill lately?)

This is not the way we want the Internet to work.

Fittingly, the Senate Commerce Committee's hearings on net neutrality will be webcast live on Tuesday the 7th.

Blogger outage

Blogger.com had one of its not-infrequent-enough outages today, which made a lot of blogs inaccessible, and also caused some new posts--and comments, apparently--to disappear like your lap when you stand up.

Note to Trey: I got your comment about Willard Scott via email, although it seems to have vanished from the site itself. (The rest of you will just have to wonder what the hell that was about.)

Urgent advice to any blogger.com bloggers: Blogger doesn't automatically back up all your posts. If you're paranoid--or at least, if you're paranoid enough--you can find a hack here to help you make a backup of all your posts. Consider it. It's a little Rube Goldberg-esque, but it works. Isn't it worth 10 minutes to make sure you don't lose everything you've ever posted?

Weekend viewing

Moveon.org has a new TV ad, calling for a special prosecutor to investigate Bush's illegal wiretapping of Americans.

Visually very slick--the last word, so to speak, on the Bush-Nixon parallel.

Background, press release, and line-by-line documentation here.

The question no one but p3 dares to ask

Yesterday, of course, was Groundhog's Day. The media and curiosity-seekers from around the world gathered in Gobbler's Knob PA to watch as Punxsutawney Phil was brought out by his handler. Officials declared that Phil had indeed seen his shadow, and that we've therefore got six more weeks of winter to look forward to.

Groundhog's Day is an occasion for local entrepreneurs to cheerfully cash in on the publicity. And Phil's appearance this year was underwritten in part by corporate sponsors including Domino's Pizza, McDonald's, First Commonwealth Financial, and Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion (don't even ask).

Phil doesn't announce his forecasts himself, of course; he has an inner circle who speak for him. It's generally known that the inner circle prepares Phil's forecasts for him in advance, with the help of the national weather services, although by tradition the existence of this back-stage help is stoutly denied.

And about that prediction: Should we keep the winter clothes out another couple of months? Although his official web site claims that Phil has been 100% accurate for the last 120 years, National Climactic Data Center estimates Phil's accuracy rate since 1980 at about 59 percent, although other sources put that figure at somewhere between 28 percent and 39 percent.

All right, people--let's review:

• Punxsutawney Phil has no obvious credentials or qualifications for predicting the weather other than the fact that he has a job predicting the weather. He was put in the job by people who find it useful for him to front the operation. Under any other circumstances, the fact that people claim to rely on him for this job would be ridiculous.


• Even by the most optimistic estimates, he's been right only about 15 times in the last 25 years, not much better than flipping a coin, although his people have doctored the statistics to make it appear much higher. And actually, once you start digging, you quickly realize that no reliable data exist to evaluate how well he's been doing.


• The only reason he's gotten as many right as he apparently has is because he's got handlers--let's be blunt: a bunch of well-dressed middle-aged white guys--who do the actual heavy lifting for him.


• Independent professionals in his field don't take him seriously for a moment.
  


• His dismal accuracy record is generally overlooked, though, since no one ever really expected he could predict the weather anyway.


• He works, calculating generously, a few hours every February 2nd and takes the rest of the year off.


• Even so, he gets housing, per diem, and a staff (including a driver).


• Those around him know that the actual work he does is less important than the opportunity he creates for insiders and big corporations to make money off the hoopla.

So--is it me, or does Punxsutawney Phil sound an awful lot like a Bush appointee?

Won't someone please help those poor Republicans?

Apparently the Republicans, unable to abide the thought of any voting exercise untampered-with, and finding no other contests at hand to be jimmied, were driven to rig their own election this morning:

House Republicans are taking a mulligan on the first ballot for Majority Leader. The first count showed more votes cast than Republicans present at the Conference meeting.

Won't someone help those poor Republicans?

Apparently the Republicans, unable to abide the thought of any voting exercise untampered-with, and finding no other contests at hand to be jimmied, were driven to rig their own election this morning:

House Republicans are taking a mulligan on the first ballot for Majority Leader. The first count showed more votes cast than Republicans present at the Conference meeting.

Loaded, cocked, and aimed

Adding to the p3 blog list: Loaded Orygun, a collaboration in advocacy reporting by Carla from Preemptive Karma and Torrid from Also Also. Here's their story:

We're looking forward to telling Oregonians what's what in this state. We're out to give you the straight dope in an informed and intelligent way. We're looking under all the rocks and digging out all the skeletons..and then we're going to find out why the media isn't reporting it.

Non-Oregonians will just have to handle the multi-leveled pun in their title as best they can, but the rest of us can nod wisely.

So best of luck to LO, and hey, you two: Don't let the new blog be an excuse on first and third Thursdays--you hear me?

"I still do have some hope, but much less confidence"

SusanG at DailyKOS just finished up a six-part interview with Daniel Ellsberg, the Defense Department analyist who leaked the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers to the press, moving from safe house to safe house as one newspaper would publish several sections of the Papers until the Nixon administration obtained an injuction, then other newspapers would continue publication until they were hit with an injunction, and so on. (The White House, searching for information to use against Ellsberg, authorized the infamous "plumbers" team to break into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist.)

You really need to read the whole series, but this segment is damned good by itself--if by "good" we mean "smart and articulate but scary and depressing as hell."

How can we prevent this country being turned into a police state by this administration in the next three years? That's what I think is facing us and I have not talked in those terms at any other time in my life. We've already seen that the hope for tying up this administration in various ways prior to another 9/11 has been given us essentially by leaks. The Abu Ghraib leak, the secret prisons, NSA. Plus a demonstration of incompetence and corruption in Katrina. That's a major factor there.

I would say that with actually existing democracy, as it is right now, if there's a big terrorist attack, our actually existing democracy will not protect us against a transition to a police state. I don't believe we will be able to avoid that. I hope I'm wrong. even when I'm certain about something, I'm often wrong. Right now, I'm working with others in hopes of making that prediction wrong.

I think before a police state happens we do have enough to work with that we can have some effect on these other things. Really, I'm a hell of a lot more hopeful than I was four months ago. And the crucial aspect of that has been determined by leaks, and the public's response to them, limited and inconclusive as that has been so far.

Read his chilling list of what we get if another 9/11 happens while Bush is still in office.

From the segment quoted above, you can link to the earlier parts of the interview:

• Part I, January 20, 2006 - The Pentagon Papers and the Overlooked 1968 Leaks
• Part 2, January 21, 2006 - Judith Miller, the New York Times and Government-Controlled Press
• Part 3, January 22, 2006 - The Cult of Secrecy in Government and Its Undermining of Democracy
• Part 4, January 27, 2006 - Whistleblowing and Effective Activism
• Part 5, January 28, 2006 - Iraq/Vietnam Parallels and Other Foreign Policy Fiascos
• Part 6, January 29, 2006 - Bush, the Next 9/11 and the Approaching Police State