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Jan. 30th, 2006 03:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ebonlockWell, that's that:
On Alito for cloture:
Aye 72
Nay 25
Okay, so it's obvious there is cloture today. It sucks. But it happens in the big leagues that sometimes you lose an inning. That doesn't mean you stop playing, it just means you take a deep breath and go back to the dugout for some fresh plays.
All this Faxing and phone calling and e-mailing...has scared the bejeebers out of the Washington establishment over the last couple of weeks. You know why? It came from a true grassroots movement. From anger, from true concern, from patriotism -- from a wellspring of individual citizens who cared enough about their nation to get off their butts and do something.
That is a lot of power waiting to be harnassed, folks.
And the powers that be that have controlled Washington, D.C., aren't the ones in the driver's seat of this vehicle. The citizens of this nation are. Something out of their control entirely -- a group of angry citizens who know how to use communications tools, and who aren't going to just sit by and be silent any longer.
If they think the Alito battle is the only one we're willing to fight, they can think again. This was merely the first skirmish.
ReddHedd is absolutely right, and I for one feel proud of myself for acting on my beliefs, and for those 25 brave souls who stood up for what they thought was right. One of them, Barbara Boxer, had this to say:
Although we knew the votes were not there for the filibuster, we though it appropriate so that the American people would know that we are even willing to pursue a losing effort, because the stakes are so high.
Damn straight. I shall be fascinated to see how the actual vote goes, will the Dems who voted against cloture step up and do the right thing? We shall see. If they don't, though, they'd better be aware that their constituents are paying very close attention now.
On Alito for cloture:
Aye 72
Nay 25
Okay, so it's obvious there is cloture today. It sucks. But it happens in the big leagues that sometimes you lose an inning. That doesn't mean you stop playing, it just means you take a deep breath and go back to the dugout for some fresh plays.
All this Faxing and phone calling and e-mailing...has scared the bejeebers out of the Washington establishment over the last couple of weeks. You know why? It came from a true grassroots movement. From anger, from true concern, from patriotism -- from a wellspring of individual citizens who cared enough about their nation to get off their butts and do something.
That is a lot of power waiting to be harnassed, folks.
And the powers that be that have controlled Washington, D.C., aren't the ones in the driver's seat of this vehicle. The citizens of this nation are. Something out of their control entirely -- a group of angry citizens who know how to use communications tools, and who aren't going to just sit by and be silent any longer.
If they think the Alito battle is the only one we're willing to fight, they can think again. This was merely the first skirmish.
ReddHedd is absolutely right, and I for one feel proud of myself for acting on my beliefs, and for those 25 brave souls who stood up for what they thought was right. One of them, Barbara Boxer, had this to say:
Although we knew the votes were not there for the filibuster, we though it appropriate so that the American people would know that we are even willing to pursue a losing effort, because the stakes are so high.
Damn straight. I shall be fascinated to see how the actual vote goes, will the Dems who voted against cloture step up and do the right thing? We shall see. If they don't, though, they'd better be aware that their constituents are paying very close attention now.
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-31 01:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-31 04:55 pm (UTC)How to fuck up utterly, in 8 easy steps:
Date: 2006-01-31 06:20 am (UTC)2) Decide on a filibuster after the hearings are over.
3) Have the public face of the filibuster be the last failed Presidential candidate, whose media image is already set in stone.
4) Reinforce that image by having him phone in the filibuster announcement from a conference in Europe. For extra points, make sure the town starts with a D, so that the GOP will get another easy laugh line in "Davos Democrats."
5) (this is critical) Allow a recess on Friday and a cloture vote on Monday, insuring that the filibuster will only last as long as it takes to run out to Starbucks (or, let's be fair, Cosi - we are in DC after all) and completely miss every major news cycle.
6) Put a bunch of red-state Democrats in the position of either voting for this complete clusterfuck and torching themselves back home, or opposing it and bringing down the wrath of the activists looking for DINOs to crucify.
7) ?????????????
8) Profit!!!!
A real honest-to-god filibuster, planned from the beginning, would have worked great, especially if the impetus had come from some of the lesser known or more GOP-friendly Senators. (God almighty, if Lieberman had been one of the instigators of the filibuster...of course, if I were eight feet tall and could fly, I wouldn't be stuck in coach class, so let's not deny reality here.) But to let the initiative come from John Fucking Kerry, to dawdle around until the last minute, and - worst of all - to line up a whopping three or four hours worth of actual debate time before the cloture vote? This bunch couldn't organize a piss-up in a distillery.
I dearly hope that maybe there's some momentum to be gained here, but I'm not counting on it. Given the lack of traction that we're getting from domestic spying and the whole Abramoff thing, I don't see much more happening from this. We'll all regret it in ten years, of course.
Hm. The battle's over and here I come out of the hills to shoot the wounded. Looks like I may still be a Democrat after all. =/
On the bright side, the approve/disapprove number is 39/54, from that notorious red rag the Wall Street Journal. Let's see what happens after tomorrow night. Anything is possible when giving the President a live mike is the equivalent of giving a 4-year-old a loaded pistol. No drinking games, though; under the new Health Savings Plan I won't be able to afford the liver transplant.
Re: How to fuck up utterly, in 8 easy steps:
Date: 2006-01-31 05:01 pm (UTC)Welcome back, comrade ;)
Seriously, I think the one thing that this whole fiasco has taught us is that we can't trust the Dem leadership to find their asses with both hands. And if we want something done we're basically going to have to figure it out, organize our base ourselves, and then just browbeat the politicians into doing something smart for a change.
I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, I mean look where it got the Christian Right. I may think they're a bunch of religious wackos with more in common with the Taliban than our founding fathers, but they sure as hell know how to organize, don't they? Taking a page from their playbook would not be a bad idea here. And the internet offers us a profoundly helpful means of doing our organizing.
Worth considering...
Date: 2006-01-31 05:51 pm (UTC)Today's GOP is not the Republican party of Lincoln, or Goldwater, or even of Reagan - it's a completely made-over enterprise that has jettisoned its libertarian and small-government leanings in favor of a broadly authoritarian and corporatist program with religious trappings. If I were less concerned about sounding like a stringy-haired Telegraph Avenue lunatic, I would describe it as "fascist."
I've run across an interesting piece in the Prospect about a different approach to values, arguing that "traditional values" have become an upper-class phenomenon: the richer you are, the more likely you are to be married, less likely to divorce, more stable home life, etc etc...and therefore, for instance, the GOP runs strong in the South because they can hold these values up as an aspirational goal for a poorer electorate. I'm not entirely convinced, but anyone who can get a second straight Democrat elected governor of Virginia - especially an admitted death-penalty opponent! - deserves at least a hearing...
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10844
Meanwhile, I would give you my State of the Union drinking game, but when the new Health Savings Account program kicks in, you won't be able to afford the resulting liver transplant. Hell, I've almost had to quit smoking...
Re: Worth considering...
Date: 2006-01-31 07:20 pm (UTC)