Sherry Chandler

From the NYTimes:

JOHN McCAIN and Barack Obama are not the only winners to emerge from the long presidential primary season.

The two presumptive nominees, along with the many candidates who bowed out along the way, spent more than $900 million through the end of May, about $470 million more than was spent on primaries in 2000, when both major parties last had competitive primary battles. Nearly half of the current spending has been paid to just a few dozen companies.

…

Some experts say they think that as campaign spending rises, the candidates benefit much less than the companies. “The total amount of money doesn’t matter, especially since you start to see diminishing returns,” said Ray C. Fair, an economist at Yale who studies economic influences on presidential elections. “What matters is the difference in spending between the two parties.”

Elections are bought in this country. So, while it may be one (wo)man, one vote at the polls, it is not on human one dollar. That’s only on your IRS return.

My husband was doing some work up in the attic when he came across this WWII vintage advertising card. I leave it to you to find any irony on this Independence Day:

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Added: By the way, I’d like to go on record as believing that the mere fact of being a war hero is not necessarily a qualification for the presidency just as the fact of not being such a hero is not a disqualification. I recommend that we all take a little time to read Paul Krugman’s column for the day, Rove’s Third Term. It begins like this:

Al Gore never claimed that he invented the Internet. Howard Dean didn’t scream. Hillary Clinton didn’t say she was staying in the race because Barack Obama might be assassinated. And Wesley Clark didn’t impugn John McCain’s military service.

Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, titled his tell-all memoir “What Happened.” But a true account of modern American politics should be titled “What Didn’t Happen.” Again and again we’ve had media firestorms over supposedly revealing incidents that never actually took place.

I abhor this practice, call it Swiftboating if you will, and think it should be broadly condemned no matter which candidate it is used in support of. One of the things that appalled me so about the Democratic primary this year is that partisans within the party were not just willing but enthusiastic about just this kind of Rovian attack. As voters we should not tolerate it.

“Will Rovian tactics work this year?” Mr. Krugman asks. If you ask me, these tactics have already worked. See Melissa McEwan and Maureen McClusky, Destroying Hillary Clinton (and here for part two) in The Guardian.

A more relevant question might be “Will Rovian tactics continue to work this year?”

Mr. Krugman thinks the press is a little ashamed of themselves over their attacks on Clark. I sure hope so. I sure hope they’re a lot ashamed.

What was it George W. Bush said?

Fool me once … can’t get fooled again?????

From the NYTimes, Judge Rejects Bush’s View on Wiretaps

WASHINGTON — A federal judge in California said Wednesday that the wiretapping law established by Congress was the “exclusive” means for the president to eavesdrop on Americans, and he rejected the government’s claim that the president’s constitutional authority as commander in chief trumped that law.

The judge, Vaughn R. Walker, the chief judge for the Northern District of California, made his findings in a ruling on a lawsuit brought by an Oregon charity. The group says it has evidence of an illegal wiretap used against it by the National Security Agency under the secret surveillance program established by President Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The Justice Department has tried for more than two years to kill the lawsuit, saying any surveillance of the charity or other entities was a “state secret” and citing the president’s constitutional power as commander in chief to order wiretaps without a warrant from a court under the agency’s program.

But Judge Walker, who was appointed to the bench by former President George Bush, rejected those central claims in his 56-page ruling. He said the rules for surveillance were clearly established by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the government to get a warrant from a secret court.

The implication of this ruling, it seems to me, is that Congress should not be falling all over itself to provide legal coverage for the Bush administration’s illegal activities. As the Times article concludes:

The ruling comes as the Senate is overhauling the foreign intelligence law. The measure would reaffirm FISA as the exclusive means for the president to order wiretaps through court warrants, but it would also provide legal immunity to phone companies involved in the eavesdropping program. A vote could come Tuesday.

The immunity issue would not directly affect this lawsuit because Al-Haramain is suing the government, not the phone companies. But the nearly 40 other lawsuits against phone companies that Judge Walker is overseeing would almost certainly have to be dismissed if immunity is signed into law, legal analysts say.

But there is more than just retroactive immunity at stake here. It is bad enough that we have to have a “secret court” but the government should not be allowed to spy on whomever it pleases with no oversight and no accountibility. That is absolute power and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

It isn’t as if all this illegal spying has gained us much. The Bush record on arrests, convictions, is pathetic, al Qaeda is still active, and Osama bin Laden is still at large.

By now you’ve no doubt heard that Obama supporters are making a concerted effort to change the Senator’s stand on this issue. Currently, as The Falcon’s Gyre points out:

Barack Obama has been moving to the right since the middle of June. He’s always advocated Social Security “reform,” and several times he has praised Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party as “the party of ideas,” but now he’s folded on FISA along with most of the so-called Democratic Congress.

That’s right. Barack Obama, right now at least, has no use for the Fourth Amendment. Furthermore, he’s basically promised to use his powers to spy on us without warrants only for good.

The Falcon provides a link where you can join this effort to get Obama to support the filibuster of the bill.

Added: More on this.

Chris Dodd is seeking signatures, too.

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.”

Here’s Charlie’s poem that he left in the comments. I thought it maybe ought to get more air, being’s it’s relevant to our current weather situation and also, perhaps, to our great Indian Rock controversy.

FLOOD STAGE

Stealthily, the river slips
Among the barren willow tips,
And bends them with the current’s swirl
At every ripple, roll, and curl.

Through apprehensive, April eyes
I stop to watch the steady rise,
And see the lines that separate
A liquid earth from solid state.

The river comes as if designed
To seek the treasures left behind
Another year in early spring
When warm rain sent her pummeling.

Legends tell of nature’s schemes
Bizarre as any midnight dreams
That what the river leaves on high
She will return for, by and by.

— Charles M. Whitt

Well, it broke yesterday anyway. That’s good enough for this blog. Always up to the minute.

A correspondent has sent me this item from WLEX-TV news in Lexington:

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) - A Kentucky grand jury has indicted an Ohio historian who led efforts to pull an 8-ton boulder from the Ohio River.

Greenup County Commonwealth’s Attorney Cliff Duvall says a local grand jury indicted Steve Shaffer of Ironton, Ohio, on Thursday for allegedly breaking Kentucky law by removing a protected archaeological object from the river. The charge is a Class D felony, punishable by one to five years in prison.

If you’ve been reading here, you know that we’ve been following the story of Indian Head Rock for over a year now.

Things is getting serious.

If you ask a, shall we say pleasantly rounded, woman aged in the low-sixties to eat a heavy meal, then climb about a furlong or so of hill at a 45° angle with the temperature and the humidity both in the low nineties, well, it’s not a pretty picture.

Lincoln Memorial University is a picture pretty campus nestled in the valley just east of Cumberland Gap in Harrogate, Tennessee, and the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival 2008, as I experienced it, was 36 hours of intensive intellectual stimulation and unprecedented exercise. Factor in the campus-wide air conditioning problems, and you will understand why I’m just wanting to sit quiet this morning and practice my calming breath.

More on this later, but for right now, let me say that Maurice Manning is not only an world-class poet but he is also a great teacher, a rare and valuable combination. If you have a chance to experience a workshop led by Maurice, grab it.

I’m off to attend the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival at Lincoln Memorial University:

We believe that LMU is at the epicenter of the Appalachian literary movement. Situated at the historic Cumberland Gap, we have our feet firmly planted in the fertile soil of the past and the other in the promise of the future (sic). Our festival not only celebrates the rich history of Appalachian literature, but also offers a guiding light for a new generation of writers who have been inspired by the writers who come from LMU and other writers of the Appalachian South. The Mountain Heritage Literary Festival celebrates our living history while also providing master classes, workshops, lectures and readings to entertain and inform writers of today’s generation.

Besides the literary tradition that is still thriving at LMU, we also offer an amazingly beautiful space for writers to find inspiration. This is a festival that is completely down-home, accessible and fun– traits that Appalachians have rightly been known for. Instead of fancy meals, at the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival you’ll be fed the food your grandmother might have prepared for you. You’ll breathe in the crisp air of the Cumberland Mountains and be treated to traditional music strummed on an autoharp. There will be plenty of music to be heard, plays to be seen and good fellowship to be had.

Back Sunday morning.

Meanwhile, let’s celebrate this and this.

Speaking of voting for Dennis Kucinich, which I was yesterday in the comments, look what our boy got up to last night:

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who introduced legislation last year to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney, is now aiming higher.

On the House floor this evening, the Ohio Democrat proposed impeaching President Bush. In language similar to that in the articles of impeachment he raised against Cheney, Kucinich sought support for a 35-count indictment charging Bush with misleading Congress and the American people into war with tales of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Democratic House leaders have opposed impeaching Bush or Cheney as an unhelpful distraction. They were nearly embarrassed last year when Republicans voted to take up Kucinich’s effort against Cheney in order to force a debate; they are unlikely to let the matter get so far this time.

Bob Fertik, president of Democrats.com, one of the groups pushing for impeachment congratulated Kucinich on his “historic leadership.”

“We’ve waited seven years to find one Member of Congress brave enough to stand up for our Constitution, for which generations of Americans have fought and died,” Fertik said. “We are thrilled and honored that Dennis Kucinich has chosen to be that one genuine patriot.”

Gotta love him.

I wish I could think this was more than just a Quixotic effort, but I give Kucinich great credit for at least getting this stuff into the record!

Link complements of Sarah at Corrente.

More coverage and C-Span video at Raw Story.

Meanwhile, Melissa is still keeping score: Obama Racism/Muslim/Unpatriotic/Scary Black Dude Watch Part Frigging Fifty

The Worst Offense Is Intelligence by Molly Ivors at Whiskey Fire:

Living here in upstate New York, we see a lot of Huck Fillary sorts of things from the bumper-sticker-and-bar-sign crowd. And it strikes me as weird, because she’s been an objectively good senator, domestically speaking. Aside from the war (which her haters around here generally support), she’s been right on a lot of things, or at least not more wrong than anyone else. And she’s brought the first jobs to come to this area in literally years. But the hatred continues.

It’s been especially perturbing to see the same lines of attack coming from the right and the left. One friend even said “Gee, I wonder if she really did kill Vince Foster?” in a bizarre recursion that proves that, if you dislike someone, no attack is off limits. I see sneering at those making less than $30K a year, at those without educations, even though they’re registered Dems voting in huge numbers in the primaries, because they happen to support the “wrong” candidate, for what must be the wrong reasons. I see regular abuse of women, particularly older women, from people who know better: sly comments about the “Menopause Caucus” and idle banter about “The Pantsuit Riots.” And I’m not getting into the accusations of racism, which started long before there was any actual evidence to support them. But then maybe I’ve been to too many rock shows to hear all those imaginary dog whistles.

I’m not a person who looks to be inspired or emotionally connect with a candidate: I want administrators, not heroes, running my government. (And no, I’m not using words like “cultists,” though I do think it’s a little weird that some Obama supporters cannot brook even the slightest bit of critique of their guy, whether from me or Paul Krugman.) I think there are genuine reasons to view Obama with caution, not least his cultivation of religious support which I, like anyone, would like to see on the side of progressive politics, but which all too often comes with the baggage of a Donnie McClurkin. And I want universal health care. And I don’t think one person should centralize all the fundraising for all the candidates on their side of the aisle through their personal campaign. It’s a bad precedent, even worse than the DLC, and yet no one wants to talk about this issue except to praise the amount of money being raised.

But even sensible caution about these issues is likely to get one tarred as a vaginista, and I admit, I’m becoming quite shy about sharing my primary support with those who don’t already know it, and that I’m genuinely surprised when people express a preference for Clinton out loud to me. It’s become like a secret vice, discussed on an as-needed basis, but otherwise not. And when we find each other, we all sigh in relief. Finally, we can talk about issues and not personalities.

…

I’ll support Senator Obama when he becomes the candidate. I’ll do so more enthusiastically if his VP choice indicates that he understands the frustration of my various demographics: as a working woman in my forties, a mother and wife, two generations removed from Appalachia, one from the factory, with family in a wide range of blue-collar professions. I’ve seen all of these demographics trashed at various points in the last six months, because we tended to vote “wrong.”

Read all of this excellent long post, which I found by way of Suburban Guerrilla. I left out some really good parts.

And then there’s Anglachel:

In The Satanic Verses, Rushdie asks a question of the leaders of Iran’s Islamic revolution - what kind of idea are you when you win? It was a way to ask how a winning faction establishes and maintains legitimacy in an environment where they are not numerically dominant and may not even be a majority. The same question needs to be asked of the Obama campaign.

What kind of an idea, at this point, is Barack Obama?

…

The way in which a candidate or faction handles a victory tells us important things about how they will govern. At present, the parallels between Obama’s claim of a nomination victory and George W. Bush’s claim of victory in Florida are shocking.

Here’s the thing. I’ve said it before. After 2000, it is exceedingly tone deaf for a Democratic candidate to even appear to seize the nomination through voter suppression and legalistic appeal to a stacked court, in short through a power grab.

And I say this not just as a Hillary Clinton supporter, but also as a Democrat. The Republicans are not going to let us forget that the DNC took delegates away from Hillary Clinton and gave them to Barack Obama. Look at this Chip Bok cartoon.