Sherry Chandler

But I’ll start with Glenn Greenwald’s blog:

Chris Dodd went to the Senate floor last night to speak against the FISA bill and delivered one of the most compelling and inspired speeches by a prominent politician that I’ve heard in quite some time. He tied the core corruption of the FISA bill’s telecom amnesty and warranltess eavesdropping provisions into the whole litany of the Bush administration’s lawless and destructive behavior over the last seven years — from torture and rendition to the abuse of secrecy instruments and Guantanamo mock trials — with a focus on the way in which telecom amnesty further demolishes the rule of law among our political class.

That speech signals that the small minority in the Senate devoted to stopping this bill have made this a priority. Small, vocal, passionate minorities in the Senate — backed up by vocal, passionate and engaged citizens — can do much to prevent a bill’s quick and painless passage. Dodd’s speech can be seen and/or read here. I highly recommend it, and if I had one wish this week, it would be that any journalist who will ever write or utter the words “FISA,” “telecom immunity” or “Terrorism” would be forced to watch this speech from start to finish without distraction.

…

Beyond the FISA bill’s evisceration of the rule of law, the Fourth Amendment and surveillance safeguards, what has always been so striking with this controversy has been how transparently sleazy and corrupt it reveals the Congress to be. Right out in the open, telecoms have just led Congressional supporters of telecom immunity around like little puppets. It’s just amazing — though extremely common — that while negotiations over the bill occurred in total secrecy, with civil liberties groups and the public at large being completely excluded, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer “negotiated” directly with the telecoms over how the telecoms’ amnesty bill should be written.

Telecoms broke our surveillance laws, and then our Democratic Congressional leaders ran to them to take instructions on how to write the special law to protect them, and they didn’t even really bother to hide that.

White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail :

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

This week, more than six months later, the E.P.A. is set to respond to that order by releasing a watered-down version of the original proposal that offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.

Over the past five days, the officials said, the White House successfully put pressure on the E.P.A. to eliminate large sections of the original analysis that supported regulation, including a finding that tough regulation of motor vehicle emissions could produce $500 billion to $2 trillion in economic benefits over the next 32 years

Ideology-Based Hiring at Justice Broke Laws, Investigation Finds

Senior Justice Department officials broke civil service laws by rejecting scores of young applicants who had links to Democrats or liberal organizations, according to a biting report issued yesterday.
…
Former Justice Department officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations said the study underscores the challenge for the next president.

“The Honors Program at DOJ has always been the ‘A-list,’ ” said Nicholas M. Gess, a Justice official under President Bill Clinton. “The next attorney general will be stuck with many from the ‘B-list.”

High Medicare Costs, Courtesy of Congress

On Wal-Mart’s Web site, you can buy a walker for $59.92. It is called the Carex Explorer, and it’s a typical walker: a few feet high, with four metal poles extending to the ground. The Explorer is one of the walkers covered by Medicare.

But Medicare and its beneficiaries aren’t paying $59.92 for the Explorer or any similar walker. In fact, they’re not paying anything close to it. They are paying about $110.

For years, Congress has set the price for walkers and various medical equipment, and it has consistently set them well above the market rate, effectively handing out a few hundred million dollars of corporate welfare every year to the equipment makers.

But as of July 1, this system is set to change. Companies will instead have to submit bids — to compete with one another, just as Wal-Mart competes with Target — if they want to continue selling products to Medicare. Based on a pilot program, the price of walkers, delivery and setup included, will fall to about $80.

Now, would you like to guess how the equipment makers feel about this?

Right.

With the changeover looming, they have increased their contributions to Congress. They have also started publicly claiming that competitive bidding will, among other things, deprive some patients of oxygen equipment they need.

Hillary Clinton returns to the Senate:

But as she returned in defeat to her old home in the Senate yesterday, she was received as if in triumph. And, in a sense, her stature had increased during the failed primary battle: She left as a legislator but returned as the leader of an 18 million-strong movement of women and working-class voters — a group whose support Clinton’s Democratic colleagues fervently desire.

And so, as Clinton entered a private luncheon in the Capitol, these colleagues greeted her with cheers, hugs and high-fives. “It’s great to be here among my colleagues,” Clinton teased, “just another regular, plain old superdelegate.”

Well, since we’re about words here, we’d probably better do this one, too. I found it at Via Negativa

While I’m stealing memorials to George Carlin, I’d be remiss in not pointing you to Lance Mannion’s George Carlin is Safe at Home. Lance gives us one of Carlin’s sports routines:

Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game. Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.

Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park.The baseball park! Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.

Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.
Football begins in the fall, when everything’s dying.

In football you wear a helmet.
In baseball you wear a cap.

Football is concerned with downs - what down is it?
Baseball is concerned with ups - who’s up?

In football you receive a penalty.
In baseball you make an error.

I am not into sports but this one is fun, and touching in the context. Click over and read it all.

I can’t claim to have been a big George Carlin fan but he has been part of the cultural texture of my life for a long time and in losing him we have lost the voice of an era, a voice of my era, a speaker of truth, and his passing grieves me.