Jesse Taylor at Pandagon had a remarkably insightful piece today about the wingnut carping over the Barack Obama speech in Berlin, the media reaction, and his popularity generally.  I really think this is important to understand.  The right has always held a goal of minimizing political participation; normally this is done through voter suppression, onerous voter ID or ballot access laws, and generally disenfranchising those for whom it is hardest to engage in the process.  Now they've taken it a step further, basically planting the seed that ANY participation whatsoever, not just voting but showing up for a rally or working a phone bank or donating money, is toxic and inherently fascistic.  Because their deficit in this election year is enthusiasm, they're trying to make such support and excitement untenable.  Behold:

This is really good to see.

Alaska’s U.S. Senate race between Republican incumbent Ted Stevens and Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich has been a toss-up for several months now, but the Democratic challenger is now ahead 50% to 41%. When “leaners” are included, Begich leads 52% to 44%.

Begich began running his first television ads of the campaign on July 8 and the survey was conducted nine days later.

You may know that Bob Barr has arrived at Netroots Nation.  He bought a one-day pass and decided to mingle with the assembled conventioneers.  And he drew a crowd.  I first spied him when Kate Sheppard of Grist was interviewing him about his environmental policies (a lot of "we don't know if man is causing global warming, we need further study, etc).  All of us wanted to talk to him, but we didn't quite know what to ask.  But after a couple of minutes it hit me, and my good buddy clammyc lent me his voice recorder and I sidled up to Barr to ask my first question.

Me: Rep. Barr, do you believe the impeachment of President Clinton was a good deterrent to the expansion of executive power and the establishment of the rule of law for the executive branch?

answer on the flip...

I have a ridiculously long post on torture and some of the revelations we've seen this week, in the Jane Mayer book, the Omar Khadr tape, etc.  Those who have been paying attention know what has been done in our name.  Much of the torture and abuse was subjected on people who had no intelligence value and were never credibly charged with any crime.  The methods were based on decades-old survival techniques produced by the Navy to resist torture, and a manual from the Chinese that used torture to elicit false confessions.  They used psychologists to develop a program of "learned helplessness", reverse-engineered from the SERE techniques.  In the end, not one terror suspect has been convicted of anything since 9/11.  The "intelligence" gained from the likes of Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was of the wild goose chase variety.  Evidence of torture inflamed the Islamic world and became a recruitment poster for Al Qaeda.  And on and on.

I wanted to reiterate some of it here, because it's indicative of the fundamental rot at the heart of the American system these days, and why we'll forever be diminished until we cut the rot away.

Judging from the last couple days on the site, and the endless stream of diaries about how to properly imagine  other people's opinions of cartoons, or how to properly eulogize a political opponent, I think it's more proper, actually, to recognize this editorial opinion from Elizabeth Edwards on the death of Tony Snow.  Edwards and Snow are linked by virtue of being diagnosed with recurrences of their cancer within days of one another in 2007, and the news of his death clearly came to her as chilling and sad.  In the article, Edwards reveals some universal, human truths, which often get lost in the clatter of political warfare, not limited to this site.  I want to excerpt a bit:

There have been a lot of incidents of appallingly bad journalism over the past eight years: those relentlessly focused on trivialities, stories inventing fake scandals out of whole cloth, the ones amplifying Bush lies and cheerleading for war.  Yet for some reason, this story by Dan Eggen and Paul Kane in Sunday's Washington Post strikes me as the most unbelievable, factually incorrect and just plain stupidest article of the Bush era.

Headline:

Recent Political Wins Smell of Compromise

Lately, President Employs a Little-Used Tool

I don't know if you're aware of it, but getting full immunity for lawbreaking, expanded unchecked surveillance powers, and no-strings funding for endless war in Iraq is the result of compromise!

There's obviously a lot of noise about Barack Obama's "shift to the center" inside the blogosphere, and today it bubbles up into the mainstream.  The LA Times thinks that most Democrats don't care (based on nothing but anecdotes from insiders), while the Washington Post thinks his ideology is problematic, saying that liberals are calling him a centrist and Republicans are calling him a liberal, so who knows???

I think these thumbsucker pieces offer little in the way of identifiable information.  Then again, so does the blogosphere, increasingly.  That herd mentality we've all noticed in the traditional media has definitely migrated over, and the narrative has definitely hardened.  There is perhaps no bigger critic of Obama's vote on the FISA bill than I.  At the same time, I can't believe that this wasn't a far bigger story, particularly in the blogosphere.

Now that Iraq's national security adviser has joined the Prime Minister in calling for the US-Iraq status of forces agreement to include a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops, it's time to place these remarks in context.

Nouri al-Maliki is trying to win an election.  He wants to outflank the Sadrists who have been resisting the US occupation for some time.  There have been massive demonstrations among the Shiite community to drive the occupiers out.  It's significant that the NSA, Mouwaffak al-Rubaie, made his comments in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, and after discussions with the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, no less.

But the actual withdrawal proposal put forth by Maliki and the Iraqi government is far less than it seems.

Conservative apologists are perplexed.  They can't seem to understand why Americans are so worried about their economic struggles.  After all, unemployment is down from historical highs, we haven't had a quarter of negative economic growth yet, the Dow is still high relative to prior downturns, so what's the problem?

Maybe if they actually listened to just one average American instead of figuring out ways to place the numbers in the right combination to make all look well, they'd get their answer.  Hint: it has nothing to do with what they hear on the nightly news.

Ann Shea, 47, an attorney who lives in Butte, said the nation faces hardships that trump patriotism.

"The issue is, we're paying almost five bucks a gallon in gas, we're in a war we shouldn't be in, and the current administration, which is the one McCain will carry on, is just lying to the American people to get what they want," she said. "Obama's not about that."

Chris Satullo, a writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, made the suggestion in his column the other day that, instead of Fourth of July celebrations this year, we should sit in quiet contemplation of the plain fact that our country over the past seven years has engaged in torture, indefinite detention without charges, rendition, and other unspeakable acts.  It was a clear and provocative call to stand up for liberty in the face of fear, for honest criticism of our leaders as an act of patriotism.

We have betrayed the July 4 creed. We trample the vows we make, hand to heart.

Don't imagine that only the torturer's hand bears the guilt. The guilt reaches deep inside our Capitol, and beyond that - to us.

Our silence is complicit. In our name, innocents were jailed, humans tortured, our Constitution mangled. And we said so little.

Today, Satullo wrote a follow-up column, explaining the authoritarian response to his initial offering.  

I want to share something that hit me today in the midst of my July 4th.  It's not particularly profound or revelatory but I think it is, however flawed, important - an important lesson about how we are witnessing something truly different in this country this election year.

Have you ever tried to recite the names of the Presidents in order?  Somehow I've managed to shoehorn that into my brain.  After reading a little Presidential puzzler that came in my morning LA Times, I decided to run through the list again.

As we all know, we're in kind of a holding pattern while we wait another week until the Senate is likely to lay down and give Bush more than he expected on warrantless wiretapping and immunity for lawbreaking.  I know many of us are calling representatives and talking to them when they come in our communities and even organizing inside Barack Obama's social networking site (9,300-plus strong now).  But the reality is that we're likely to come up short.  The Beltway elites are determined to bury their sins and make sure nobody finds out about the extent of this illegal and unconstitutional spy program.

So what do we do?  There's a lot of outrage and energy around this issue, certainly it needs to be channeled.  I think there are a number of options.

Boy, the wingnuts really don't know what to do about this North Korea situation.  It's really a foreign concept based on "diplomacy" and "incentives for compliance" and other fantasyland hippie stuff they must have come up with on the pot-smokers lawn in the Haight-Ashbury.  Real men know that such multilateralism is excessively dangerous and will cause all of us to be blown to bits.

HEWITT: By the way, I -- I'm still trying to find two tickets to the Ohio State-USC game. And none of the USC people will give up their tickets to me. I'd pay fair price. They -- they know Ohio State's gonna slaughter the Trojans. They know that they're gonna slaughter the Trojans, and therefore they do not want me there at the bloodbath, since it's probably the last football game we'll ever get to see before the United States gets blown up by the Islamists under Obama.

Over the last week, this very odd circumstance has occurred where Barack Obama is universally chastised for rejecting public money in the general election, yet John McCain is not touched for accepting public money to gain ballot access and get favorable loans, then dropping out of the system without a ruling from the FEC and spending unlimited amounts in the primary.

Part of this was a total ignorance of campaign finance laws from the punditocracy, but also the silence from the top of the opposing organization.  The DNC has filed a number of lawsuits, but Team Obama had yet to break the silence over McCain's illegalities and gaming the public financing system.

Until today.

(the operative word here is "may".  It's entirely possible that the Senate could finish all of the bills they want to push out by Friday.)

Anyone watching C-SPAN?  Senator Reid just informed his colleagues that, because of all the other bills in the queue (like the housing bill, and the Iraq supplemental), FISA may not get a vote until after the July 4 holiday recess.

This is honestly the best we can hope for with this bill.  Sens. Dodd, Wyden and Feingold are ready to filibuster and gamely trying to get colleagues to do the same (Sen. Dodd's speech tonight was a bravura performance), but realistically there aren't the numbers to stop cloture.  However, that could change if the delay continues.  And getting this to the recess means being able to get in a lot of Senator's faces on their trips back home.  In addition, there's going to be a very short window in August where a ton of must-pass bills have to get through Congress, and throwing FISA in with that mess means that anything can happen.

Like most Villagers wishing to supplement their income, David Broder has taken tens of thousands of dollars, if not much more, in speaking fees from corporate groups and organizations.  As Ken Silverstein at Harper's thoroughly documented, lots of these events were for groups that lobby Congress, like the National Association of Manufacturers' annual meeting and  a fundraiser for a PAC for the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors.  There are plenty more at the link.  

This is part of the Village merry go-round, but Dean Broder has a history of tut-tutting at those journalists who collect substantial fees from industry.  He actually said this: (over)

UPDATE: The best information I have is the Rules Committee is acting on the FISA bill right now, and they're waiving the requirements that would conceivably allow them to act on both war funding and FISA as soon as tomorrow.  However, war funding may happen tonight, with FISA tomorrow.  I apologize for trying to get this information out swiftly.  It's still possible but not a done deal.

Here it is.  The final indignity.  Funding for endless war AND etching out the 4th Amendment will be combined into the same bill to force enough compliance from Bush Dogs to get this bill passed.  "By any means necessary" for Hoyer and his corporate lobbying buddies.

The House Rules Committee is meeting at this hour on the "FISA Amedments Act."  Later today, they'll be meeting on a technical fix that allows them to waive PAYGO rules and waive consideration of a bill within 24 hours of its rules being set.

The plan is to put the two together.

Al Gore endorsed Barack Obama yesterday, and in his remarks he was fairly subtle in stressing the need for a Democratic President to solve the climate crisis and mitigate the worst effects of global warming.  In fact, he gave muted praise to John McCain on this front:

...as Senator Barack Obama has said, John McCain is deserving of that respect. He has demonstrated bravery in war and as a prisoner of war, and has served in the House of Representatives and in the Senate for many years. Moreover, he has demonstrated a willingness to debate some critical issues, including the climate crisis, that many Republicans have refused to discuss at all.

But even as we acknowledge his long experience, we must and we will make our case that America simply cannot afford to continue the policies of the last eight years for another four.

This kind of statement in stuck in the mindset of the 1990s, when just "speaking out" about the environment, regardless of your policy proposals, is as important as any meaningful action.  And it's what McCain himself is hoping to capitalize on in November.