Why I'm (not) Voting Republican

Here's hoping I remember how to embed YouTubes properly...

www.ImVotingRepublican.com

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Getting Lit At a Protest

Tim McCarthy just continues to gallivant around this campus indoctrinating us with his liberal homosexual agenda. Actually, he is the man, and his piece in the Harvard Voice this week was pretty awesome as was his speech at the anti war rally in March. Anyhow, as part of his brainwashing techniques, he had Will Houghteling '09 go around talking to folks about this voting business that everyone seems to think is such a big deal. This is what will found.

Harvard Dems Gala 2008

Buy your ticket to the gala at www.harvarddems.com

deceptacon

so last night sometime this morning, as i was preparing for bed, my eyes happened upon a little-read development that negatively effects more than half of the united states. the title of the article says it all: "senate republicans block unequal pay bill." and i was so furious, so OUTRAGED, that i had to put on some le tigre to get in the mood to break shit---namely, the backs of every republican (and democratic) senator who voted to enshrine unequal pay for equal work.

 even more grating? the article is nowhere to be seen on cnn's politics page, even though it was published yesterday. (articles on tuesday's primary are still up.) the new york times didn't cover it, though they did write about barack obama's abercrombie boys. for what it's worth, the washington post did publish an article, and it's on the main page.

the point? gender discrimination is so rarely talked about. and it's so omnipresent.

i decided to search for videos tagged as "feminist" on youtube, and i found a pro-feminist video entitled "this is what a feminist looks like." and then i read the comments. 

IndianObserver writes,

 

 

Spread The Word 2

So, enough bickering, and let's realize what is really important - hating on the Republicans!

Hillary is F*cking Obama???

It's clear that there has been a wave of infidelity in our society. Ex-governor Eliot Spitzer. Current governor David Paterson (and his wife). Even two of our favorite celebrity couples, Jimmy Kimmel/Sarah Silverman and Matt Damon/Ben Affleck have failed to be faithful to each other.

Well now it has become evident that the two contenders for the Democratic Presidential Nomination, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, are closer than we may have thought...

How we ended up with the Republicans' FISA bill

Everybody pretty much guessed that the White House put out a bunch of really scary, frightening 'intelligence' to try and manipulate the Democrats who are still (ridiculously) afraid that if they don't give the White House unlimited power, they'll be blamed for a future terrorist attack.

Today's NY Times article confirms that that's what happened:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 — At a closed-door briefing in mid-July, senior intelligence officials startled lawmakers with some troubling news. American eavesdroppers were collecting just 25 percent of the foreign-based communications they had been receiving a few months earlier.

Congress needed to act quickly, intelligence officials said, to repair a dangerous situation.

Some lawmakers were alarmed. Others, jaded by past intelligence warnings, were skeptical.

The report helped set off a furious legislative rush last week that, improbably, broadened the administration’s authority to wiretap terrorism suspects without court oversight.

...

“There was an intentional manipulation of the facts to get this legislation through,” said Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, a Democrat on the Intelligence Committee who voted against the plan.

The White House, Mr. Feingold said Friday in an interview, “has identified the one major remaining weakness in the Democratic Party, and that’s its unwillingness to stand up to the administration when it’s making a power grab regarding terrorism and national security.”

...

Democratic leaders did not demand that the security agency seek individual court warrants for eavesdropping. But they did want the court to review and approve the agency procedures soon after surveillance began.

The administration, however, wanted the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to approve the surveillance, with the court weighing in just to certify that no abuses occurred, and only long after the surveillance had been conducted.

The talks intensified in the days before the recess last weekend, highlighted by proposals and counterproposals in calls between Mr. McConnell and the Democratic leadership.

By Aug. 2, the two sides seemed relatively close to a deal. Mr. McConnell had agreed to some increased role for the secret court, a step that the administration considered a major concession, the White House and Congressional leaders said.

But that night, the talks broke down. With time running out, the Senate approved a Republican bill that omitted the stronger court oversight. The next day, the House passed the bill.

 

If the White House was really so concerned about this gap in the FISA law, they should've been sharing this intelligence consistently instead of doling it out in driblets, and only the bits likely to get the Democrats to do what they want. Any Democrat in Congress who honestly thinks that this was an emergency that just happened to come up right before the August recess doesn't deserve to be in the Congress.

It isn't the Democrats that were endangering national security, it was Republicans who were willing to risk the non-passage of changes to the FISA bill that both sides agreed were necessary, for the sake of grabbing more power for the President.

And tell me, how in the hell did these Democrats decide that it was a good idea to give oversight privileges to Alberto Gonzales, instead of a court?

The Democrats that voted to continue Bush's reign of fear were played for fools. And Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid showed a distinct lack of leadership. If they'd wanted to, they could've stopped this; but obviously the continuing erosion of our Constitutional rights wasn't a big enough deal to inconvenience anyone with.

Gyah.

Truman III: Jim Webb Edition

Ah, the third coming of the Truman Committee, this time with Jim Webb at the helm. The second, of course, was the Lyndon Johnson version during the Korean War. Johnson didn't actually care about finding profiteering or inefficiency; the committee was a vehicle for him to produce headlines.

Johnson got himself on the cover of Time over the headline 'Too Much Butter, Not Enough Guns,' and the magazine referred to him as 'Watchdog in Chief.' Of course, hardly any of Johnson's allegations stood up to hard examination, and yet Time reported them uncritically, apparently failing to read more than the first couple pages of each report.

The difference between then and now is that there obviously has been waste on a humongous scale. But is this really going to turn up crimes by Bush Administration officials? Because if all we get is the CEO of Halliburton on a spit, then I'm not really all that interested.

And if the Democrats in Congress aren't willing to stand up to Bush and drag Harriet Miers in front of the Judiciary Committee, then they might as well just stop investigating and roll over until Bush has left office. The all-night session was alright, but if it isn't the start of a new 'get tough' attitude on the part of the Dems, it's just going to end up making it easier for Republicans to portray them as weak-willed.

Calm Down, Stoller

Matt Stoller's feeling bad at MyDD this afternoon, complaining about the Iraq capitulation and the continuing omnipresence of sellout DLC Dems. It's the usual stuff, the same cognitive dissonance any progressive Democrat runs into, and I think we all understand his frustration. But Stoller has a bit of a lapse this time and takes his logic in a very destructive direction. Read:

Progressives are in a bit of a bind these days. The Republicans are still sadistic extremists, and with the challenge to Hagel in Nebraska, they will remain that way for at least another few cycles. Despite the victory in 2006, liberal Democrats are still cut out of power and policy-making... [many valid examples...]

Now, this might sound depressing, and it is. But it's also a reality of politics these days, and it's the consequence of 35 years of organizing by the right wing and only around eight years on our side. The people in charge of the political system are the swing votes and the people that those voters want to work with. Steny Hoyer and Rahm Emanuel have positioned themselves to be this swing vote, and they have chosen to basically throw some crumbs our way (minimum wage) while voting with the Republicans on the big issues, like Iraq...

The ultimate point here though is that we are not a partisan movement and should no longer think of ourselves as such. We are an ideological movement. We have ideas, and want to see those ideas driven with power. This means that we need to get down to the hard work of disabusing ourselves of candidate-centric politics, and work to create primary challenges wherever possible, as well as keep building forums for the dissemination of new ideas.

I respect Matt Stoller immensely, but this is horseshit. First: modern progressivism, i.e. the ideology espoused by the blogs and many young/outsider Democrats, would be suicidal to reject partisanship. The only way progressives have ever managed to claw their way into power has been on the backs of people like Howard Dean or the 2006 netroots candidates (Tester, Webb, etc); the only way we have made any difference has been through Democratic-led legislation.

Second: a pragmatic partisanship is at the very core of this progressive belief system. For Stoller to call for a transformation to "ideological movement" is nonsensical and redundant -- our ideology holds that ideas are useless until they're implemented, and as a result we focus on results as the ultimate source of value, hence our interest in political gamesmanship and the destruction of conservative infrastructure. A puritan idealism would be totally in contradiction with our ideals.

(This, after all, is how progressives strive to avoid the marginalization that ruined the 1960s New Left -- we come down hard on the Kucinich-vintage flower children who present ideas without regard for their practicality. One must keep one's eye on the ball.)

Third: we obviously need to protect and promote our ideas, and obviously the results of the Democratic Congress thus far are unsatisfactory, but there is no equivalent need for a departure from "candidate-centric politics". What other type of politics does Stoller have in mind exactly? You can't pry a person's leadership apart from their principles, and you can't keep ideas in a vacuum -- attempts to do that have led to the mute, soulless centrist technocracy that I always thought we opposed.

Ultimately: To reject partisanship is to neuter the progressive movement.

I'm troubled that Stoller, one of the leading lights and sharpest minds of online progressivism, would find himself going down this kind of alley. It speaks to an exhaustion, almost a giving up of hope; a retreat into the easier territory of wonky debate or (at best) interest-group-style scratching at the shins of political leaders. And I can understand why that's tempting given the shock of the Iraq defeat, the crushing vapidity of the presidential race thus far, and all the other things that embitter us daily; I can understand wanting to get away from the Democratic Party and all the problems it entails.

But what this proposal amounts to is a reach for the ceremonial hara-kiri sword. We can't give up on partisanship any more than Harry Reid can give up on legislating -- it's a dirty job, but it's our duty to our beliefs and our country. And Stoller (who incidentally is a Harvard grad, and a resident of my proud Mather House) needs to clear his head, man up, and get back to work.

Fox "News" Boycott

What does everyone thing of '08 candidates Clinton, Edwards and Obama's decisions not to participate in a debate on Fox News, which they are justifying by saying that there's simply no point, given the obscene biases of the channel?

On the one hand, I think it's a bit childish, and only adds fuel to Fox's fire. Biased or not, Fox is still one of America's primary news sources, and Democrats aren't winning any swing votes by cutting them out.

But on the other hand, now that nutjob Michelle Malkin is on the airwaves, I think they have a point. Watch this priceless exchange between the pundit and the General Counsel of the Black Panther Party (Malkin quips: "how many members do you have sir? Fifteen?" What grade is she in?), They proceed to call one another whores, and the segment ends with Malkin's sarcastic "uh huh, okay, bye now.. buh-bye..." She then moves into reporter mode.. "now onto reports..."

That's fair and balanced.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9vadcdgzjI&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwonkette%2Ecom%2F%3FrefId%3D252555

 

Did we really think we'd be off the hook that long?

Jack Abramoff heads to jail tomorrow-- for six years so far, other charges pending, but according to ABC News, the carnage isn't over. He's been speaking "almost daily" with Justice Department prosecutors, and will continue to meet with them from a minimum security prison in Maryland. ABC reports he's allegedly spoken to them about Rove and "six to eight seriously corrupt Democratic senators." The honeymoon might be over if this blows up. But oh to get Rove in the process...

See the story on ABC's the Blotter:http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/11/abramoff_report.html 

Turnout Among 18-24 Year Olds Could Break Records, IOP Survey Released

The IOP has just released the results of its Fall 2006 Young Voter Survey.

For the first, time we polled college students AND non-college 18-24 year olds.

LINK: http://www.iop.harvard.edu/

HIGHLIGHTS

• Midterm election turnout among 18-24 year old could reach record levels in 2006.

• A strong majority of likely young voters favor Democratic control of Congress.

• A near-majority of young people favor total troop withdrawal from Iraq within the next year.

• 18-24 year olds trust the military and the United Nations more than Congress and the federal government.

• President George W. Bush gets “C-” grade on seven key issues.

• President Bush’s handling of Iraq, clearly the issue that is driving this election and the President’s second-term agenda, is viewed by more than two-in-five (43%) young Americans (and 67% of young African Americans) as a
  failure or “F."

Obviously, this is big. Youth voter turnout for midterm elections is usually very low. High turnout next week would represent both an individual record-breaking event as well as reveal a trend of increased youth involvement in politics.

Also, as the poll clearly shows that young people are strongly siding with the Dems, high youth turnout could confound the pollsters who always weight their polls based on expected demographic participation.

Check out the rest of the poll results. It's a treasure-trove of interesting data. For one, I can't get over how much young Americans HATE the media.