Meet the new math, same as the old math.

(Bumping this back to the top, as TPM and CQ are reporting that Majority Leader Reid is planning to break with Senate protocols and IGNORE DODD’S HOLD, bringing the bill to the floor in mid-November. This is the same Reid that has let similar GOP holds go unchallenged.

The best option is magnify the hold by getting our own Senators to sign on. Leahy has spoken out strongly against the bill, let’s encourage him and Bernie to join Dodd in going the extra mile. Contact info at the bottom of the full diary. This is a full-blown red alert, folks… – promoted by odum)

The House FISA bill is dead in the water.

The Senate FISA bill will have retroactive immunity for the people who sold you out:

Senators this week began reviewing classified documents related to the participation of the telephone carriers in the security agency program and came away from that early review convinced that the companies had “acted in good faith” in cooperating with what they believed was a legal and presidentially authorized program and that they should not be punished through civil litigation for their roles, the official said.

Only here's the thing: on what planet did the telecom companies here act in “good faith?” There's every indication that those who agreed to go along with the spying scheme were rewarded with free passes on regulatory issues like mergers and acquisitions, while the one company that actually asked questions and insisted on listening to their lawyers got shut out of the booming mergers market, and found their CEO sentenced to six years in prison.

Sounds like maybe something the Senate Judiciary Committee should look into. And I'm sure they will.

Which means you, as Vermonters, have a special ability to influence the process. 

How badly does it need to be influenced? Well…

Look at this:

It will include full immunity for those companies that can demonstrate to a court that they acted pursuant to a legal directive in helping the government with surveillance in the United States.

Such a demonstration, which the bill says could be made in secret, would wipe out a series of pending lawsuits alleging violations of privacy rights by telecommunications companies that provided telephone records, summaries of e-mail traffic and other information to the government after Sept. 11, 2001, without receiving court warrants.

Immunity for companies that can demonstrate they acted “pursuant to a legal directive.”

What kind of “legal directive” are we talking about? Well, consider that this immunity is intended to be retroactive, to cover the activities these companies have already engaged in. There haven't been any court orders issued that authorize such activity. If there had been, the companies wouldn't need this bill. So we must be talking about some other kind of “legal directive.” The kind that gets written in the executive branch. The kind that the executive branch keeps secret. The kind the executive branch tells Congress they're not entitle to see.

These “legal directives” are really just “legal opinions” drafted by the “administration.” They're untested in any court, because they won't allow any court to see them, and any case that tries to test them gets blocked, usually when the “government” invokes the “state secrets” doctrine, or some other claim that national security or executive privilege would somehow be compromised.

So what we're saying here is that secret memos can now be drafted (retroactively and be backdated if necessary?) that purport to be “legal directives” upon which the telecom companies can claim to have relied in “good faith.” Or worse, they may even be able to say they received nothing but oral assurances that their activities were “legal.” And if you want to see these “legal directives,” it just so happens that since they've been prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel or some other close advisors to the president, executive privilege may just prevent you from doing so.

Or “national security.”

Or “I just don't feel like it, and you can't make me.”

And that's the real problem here. How is anyone to tell the difference between law that meets the commonly accepted definition we all work with every day on the one hand, and “whatever the hell the president says” on the other?

What is “law,” anyway? Is it the stuff that Congress passes in public and that you can read in order to be able to obey it? Or is it just anything that can in practice frighten you into obeying? If you can be sent to jail, or immunized from suit, or whatever, based on a secret showing that you relied in “good faith” on a memo an “administration” official gives you (and literally nothing more — and perhaps even a lot less), you really have to ask yourself that question. What. Is. Law?

And if nobody knows what “law” is, one might just as well ask what the point of being in Congress is. After all, it's purported in our Constitution that Congress has the prerogative to make the laws. But now it's making laws that say things other than what it passes can substitute for law — specifically anything the White House puts on in a memo, or whispers to you in a meeting.

That's a gut punch directly to the very foundation of western civilization. And we worry whether talking about it will jeopardize our chances in the next election.

Shall we maybe have a discussion on this?

Senators (if that's what you are, anymore)?

UPDATE: Senator Chris Dodd has announced he's going to put a “hold” on the bill, and Pat Leahy has started staking out an aggressive position of his own.

UPDATE 2: Here is the contact information for Leahy's and Sanders's offices. Please contact them and encourage them to join Dodd in the hold. Please spread the word to others…

Leahy:

Bernie:

District Offices:

Pam Spaulding just posted about a piece from Christian News Wire with five “reasons” that same-sex marriage is bad for kids. Just to keep things honest, I wrote up a rebuttal to the wingnut idiocy that is Trayce Hansen

One at a time:

…mother-love and father-love–though equally important–are qualitatively different and produce distinct parent-child attachments. Specifically, it’s the combination of the unconditional-leaning love of a mother and the conditional-leaning love of a father that’s essential to a child’s development. Either of these forms of love without the other can be problematic. What a child needs is the complementary balance the two types of parental love and attachment provide.

“mother love” and “father love” are fabricated concepts. They’re this woman’s assumptions about how mothers and fathers form attachments, yet she presents no evidence to support these assumptions. Even if she’s right about a child needing that combination of the two types of love, there’s no evidence that women are incapable of conditional-leaning love or that men are incapable of unconditional-leaning love.

…children progress through predictable developmental stages. Some stages require more from a mother, while others require more from a father. For example, during infancy, babies of both sexes tend to do better in the care of their mother. Mothers are more attuned to the subtle needs of their infants and thus are more appropriately responsive. Fathers are generally needed later when they play a restraining role in the lives of their children. They restrain sons from acting out antisocially and daughters from acting out sexually. When there’s no father to perform this function, a boy is more likely to become delinquent and incarcerated and a girl is more likely to become promiscuous and pregnant.

This is, again founded on that same assumption about parental behavior, making assumptions about gender roles which do not necessarily play out in reality.

Third, boys and girls need an opposite-sexed parent to help them moderate their own gender-linked inclinations. As example, boys generally embrace reason over emotion, rules over relationships, risk-taking over caution, and standards over compassion, while girls generally embrace the reverse. An opposite-sexed parent helps a child keep his or her own natural proclivities in check by teaching–verbally and nonverbally–the worth of the opposing tendencies.

Once again, she’s working with assumptions here and, more importantly, presenting no evidence that there’s anything worth with girls adapting behavior she associates with boys or vice versa. That’s because children are individuals and that even if (and I’m not saying it’s true) most girls tend to be interested in emotion over reason and caution over risk-taking, that doesn’t mean that girls who don’t exhibit those behaviors have problems. What she’s trying to do here is to pathologize human behavior and she’s doing a piss-poor job of it.

Fourth, same-sex marriage will increase sexual confusion and sexual experimentation by implying all choices are equally acceptable and desirable. So, even children from traditional homes–influenced by the all-sexual-options-are-equal message–will grow up thinking it doesn?t matter whom one relates to sexually or marries. Holding such a belief will lead some–if not many–impressionable young people to consider sexual and marital arrangements they never would have contemplated previously. And children from homosexual families, who are already more likely to experiment sexually, would do so to a greater extent, because not only was non-traditional sexuality role-modeled by their parents, it was also approved by their society.

This is a common tactic of the right: make assumptions about the cause of sexual orientation and then extract an argument based on it. Of course, this is entirely absurd. No one’s demonstrated any evidence that children raised by same-sex couples are more sexually experimental than those raised by non-same sex couples. Furthermore, if a child is gay, it’s probably a lot healthier to for that child to have adult role models who can demonstrate that being gay is not the end of the world.

This, of course, is really the point of pieces like this: having gays walk around proud is dangerous because it will suggest to other gay people that there’s nothing wrong with them. The horror!

Anyway…

Human sexuality is pliant. Consider ancient Greece or Rome–among other early civilizations–where male homosexuality and bisexuality were nearly ubiquitous. This was not so because most of those men were born with a “gay gene,” rather it was because homosexuality was condoned by those societies. That which a society sanctions, it gets more of.

So… what she’s saying is that it is natural for people to be gay? That unless we have an iron fist determined to block gay at every turn, that a whole bunch of people who wouldn’t otherwise be gay would suddenly start acting all gay? I know a lot of women who would really like to be attracted to women and not men because they think it would make their life easier (I’m not even going to try to explain this) but none of them seem to be able to actually find themselves attracted to women.

And fifth, if society permits same-sex marriage, it also will have to allow other types of marriage.

Right. Because it always goes in that direction. If you allow men to sleep together, then you have to allow goats to sleep with cats. If you allow same-sex couples, you have to allow Rick Santorum to have sex with a dog. If you allow allow women to have sex with one another, you have to allow the lion and the lamb to lie down together and… hmm… never mind that last bit. I think God’s given the OK on that one.

Sorry, I can only read so much of this stuff before I get punchy.

So a week or two back, the playing field for Democratic gubernatorial candidates seemed to only contain a crowd of folks pleading former Lite Guv candidate Matt Dunne to run for the top job, rather than go for round 2 against the Dubester (and please, folks… he is so NOT getting that FAA job. We're stuck with him.) Then, the Pollina for Governor crowd hit the Dem scene and media hard, making their case for Pollina to be the Democratic candidate, running as a P-D (it should be noted that Pollina has yet to make this appeal in person, and I'm still dubious as to whether he would ever accept a D by his name).

Today, via Louis Porter, we have two new names; author, foreign policy expert, former Ambassador, and former Democratic State Chair (1977-1979) Peter Galbraith, currently being discussed in Greenvtster's diary below, and Windsor County Senate powerhouse John Campbell.

So – whereas a couple weeks ago, we were looking at a barren wasteland, into which no one could blame Dunne for not wanting to venture, it's now morphed into what will be in effect – if likely not in actuality – a political primary among an array of candidates appealing not only to a broad ideological spectrum, but an institutional one as well. There's the third party firebrand, flirting with the idea of reaching out his hand to those he has made a career of scorning, an economic moderate/social liberal with strong connections across the political spectrum, and an in-state political outsider with international credentials and a reputation as a serious intellectual with a considerable pedigree.

On paper, you've got to give initial polling advantage to Pollina, but Pollina would be unlikely to be able to redefine himself quickly enough to close the deal. Campbell obviously has more electoral deal-closing potential, but the business interests that Campbell has made inroads with are going to be surprisingly unwilling to ditch their buddy Douglas, even with a Dem they find more palatable. The underdog has to be Galbraith, but the notion of a political outsider and intellectual running the state is definitely appealing in theory (and I do think someone with zero name recognition could beat Douglas… the problem is that he or she would have to start on a serious ground game last May…)

So it's back on (especially when you consider that Dunne may still wanna go for it, although I'm betting not). Conventional wisdom says a crowded field is a bad thing, and I suppose the ideal would've been to have a consensus candidate back in the Summer. But given the perception of weakness the lack of a candidate has created, and the negative impact that would clearly have had going into the next legislative session, I'll take a crowded field any day. In fact, some sort of horse race may well be the only way to get the media to sit up and take notice of electoral opposition to the Governor. Lord knows, after the last couple times around, little else has seemed to do the trick.

Vote Now!

With the first votes for the presidential nomination officially starting in less then 90 days, it’s time for DFA members to make sure America knows where we stand.

Vote for your candidate right now and let your voice be heard!

http://www.Democracy…

Is there a consensus candidate that can get more then 66% of your vote and earn the DFA endorsement? Will Senator Obama beat Senator Edwards again by just a few percentage points? Will Senator Clinton pass up Congressman Kucinich and move into the top three? Will our members still vote to draft Al Gore even this late in the race?

Help us answer all these questions by getting out the vote for your candidate right now!

On November 6, exactly one year from Election Day, we will announce your winner and ask all of our members to join the winning campaign¹. Please vote today:

http://www.Democracy…

You already have access to videos recorded by five of the candidates created just for DFA members on Iraq and Global Warming². Over the next three weeks…

( – promoted by odum)

The Rutland Herald had an article today about 2 possible Dem candidates for Governor; Peter Galbraith and John Campbell. This post is to discuss Galbraith.

I don’t know anything about him. Your turn.

OK, I googled him and see he will probably be pretty effective at keeping VT out of a war with Iraq, or say… Newfoundland.

I did find one YouTube clip of him to put a face with the name.

Did he give a big speech or forum in VT recently? I also see that he has a number of upcoming VT appearances:

KEENE, N.H., 10/11/07 – Keene State College will launch an Annual Genocide Awareness Lecture Series on Monday, October 22, with Peter W. Galbraith’s “Preventing Genocide in the 21st Century: Lessons from Iraq, Bosnia, and East Timor,” at 7:30 p.m. in the Mabel Brown Room.

Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia under President Clinton, will offer his views on the current conflict in Iraq in a talk at the Middlebury Union High School auditorium on Nov. 7. His talk, “The End of Iraq,” is part of the Vermont Humanities Council’s first Wednesdays lecture series and takes place at 7 p.m.

That Middle East stuff is all well and good, but can he pronounce Calais?

TomP at dKos also has an environmental diary contrasting the three big candidates views on Nuclear, with Edwards being the only one clearly opposed (check out the Clinton administration's history with Entergy).

I'm definitely feeling better and better about supporting this guy. Here's a big chunk from the diary:

1.  Hillary Clinton.

What about nuclear power?

I am agnostic about nuclear. I am very skeptical that nuclear could become acceptable in most regions of the country, and I am doubtful that we have yet figured out how to deal with the waste. But I keep being given information about research that is being done to resolve the waste problem. I know that will continue because that has a lot of economic power and resources behind it. But until we can figure out what to do with the waste and overcome the political objections, we should not be putting a heavy emphasis on nuclear.

Grist

  a.  Bill Clinton (for background. Hillary Clinton's agnostic position is a bit inpenetrable.  Give this history the weight you think it deserves, which may range from none to a lot)

Bill Clinton backed the Entergy Corporation's outrageous plan to soak Arkansas ratepayers with the cost overruns on the company's Grand Gulf reactor which provided power to electricity consumers in Louisiana.

The Clinton years indeed saw an all-out expansion of nuclear power, not only in the US, but all over the globe. First came the deal to begin selling nuclear reactors to China, announced during Jiang Zemin's 1997 visit Washington, even though Zemin brazenly vowed at the time not to abide by the so-called “full scope safeguards” spelled out in the International Atomic Energy Act. The move was apparently made over the objections of Clinton's National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, who cited repeated exports by China of “dual use” technologies to Iran, Pakistan and Iraq. The CIA also weighed in against the deal, pointing out in a report to the President that “China was the single most import supplier of equipment and technology for weapons of mass destruction” worldwide. In a press conference on the deal, Mike McCurry said these nuclear reactors will be “a lot better for the planet than a bunch of dirty coal-fired plants” and will be “a great opportunity for American vendors” — that is, Westinghouse.

Counterpunch

2. Barack Obama.

Obama also refused to commit to a ban against using nuclear power, when asked by a young voter. In his speech in Portsmouth yesterday on renewable energy, Obama said that development money should be spent on researching safe ways to use and dispose of nuclear power. He reiterated that stance today.

General Electric/Microsoft Wholly Owned Corporate Media (msnbc)

During a Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works hearing in 2005, Obama, who serves on the committee, asserted that since Congress was debating the negative impact of CO2 emissions “on the global ecosystem, it is reasonable — and realistic — for nuclear power to remain on the table for consideration.” Shortly thereafter, Nuclear Notes, the industry's top trade publication, praised the senator. “Back during his campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2004, [Obama] said that he rejected both liberal and conservative labels in favor of 'common sense solutions.' And when it comes to nuclear energy, it seems like the Senator is keeping an open mind.”

Counterpunch

Safe and Secure Nuclear Energy: Nuclear power represents more than 70 percent of our non-carbon generated electricity. It is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power from the table. However, there is no future for expanded nuclear without first addressing four key issues: public right-to-know, security of nuclear fuel and waste, waste storage, and proliferation. Barack Obama introduced legislation in the U.S. Senate to establish guidelines for tracking, controlling and accounting for spent fuel at nuclear power plants.

barackobama.com

3. John Edwards.

Q: What about nuclear power as an alternative energy source?

A: Wind, solar, cellulose-based biofuels are the way we need to go. I do not favor nuclear power. We haven't built a nuclear power plant in decades in this country. There is a reason for that. The reason is it is extremely costly. It takes an enormous amount of time to get one planned, developed and built. And we still don't have a safe way to dispose of the nuclear waste. It is a huge problem for America over the long term.

Source: 2007 YouTube Democratic Primary debate, Charleston SC Jul 23, 2007

Also from Opensecrets.org…. A little different than the Vermont totals. At least Chris Dodd doesn't owe anything…

Democratic Candidates
Candidate	Home State	Q3 Raised	Q3 Spent	Total Raised	Total Spent	Cash on Hand	Debts
Clinton, Hillary	NY	$27,859,861	$22,623,680	$90,935,788	$40,472,775	$50,463,013	$2,347,486
Obama, Barack	IL	$21,343,292	$21,519,790	$80,256,427	$44,169,236	$36,087,191	$1,409,740
Edwards, John	NC	$7,157,233	$8,271,938	$30,329,152	$17,932,103	$12,397,048	$0
Richardson, Bill	NM	$5,358,585	$6,666,681	$18,699,937	$12,878,349	$5,821,588	$75,222
Dodd, Chris	CT	$1,522,061	$4,025,458	$13,598,152	$9,723,278	$3,874,874	$0
Biden, Joe	DE	$1,757,394	$2,635,896	$8,215,739	$6,329,324	$1,886,340	$128,210
Kucinich, Dennis	OH	$1,011,696	$888,774	$2,130,200	$1,803,576	$327,094	$0
Gravel, Mike	AK	$130,510	$99,866	$238,745	$207,604	$31,141	$64,716

Republican Candidates
Candidate	Home State	Q3 Raised	Q3 Spent	Raised	Spent	Cash on Hand	Debts
Romney, Mitt	MA	$18,396,719	$21,301,756	$62,829,069	$53,612,552	$9,216,517	$17,350,000
Giuliani, Rudy	NY	$11,624,255	$13,300,650	$47,253,521	$30,603,695	$16,649,826	$169,256
McCain, John	AZ	$5,734,478	$5,470,277	$32,124,785	$28,636,157	$3,488,628	$1,730,691
Thompson, Fred	TN	$12,828,111	$5,706,367	$12,828,111	$5,706,367	$7,121,744	$678,432
Paul, Ron	TX	$5,258,456	$2,169,644	$8,268,453	$2,824,786	$5,443,667	$0
Brownback, Sam	KS	$925,745	$1,278,856	$4,235,333	$4,140,660	$94,654	$0
Tancredo, Tom	CO	$767,152	$1,209,583	$3,538,244	$3,458,130	$110,079	$295,603
Huckabee, Mike	AR	$1,034,486	$819,376	$2,345,798	$1,694,497	$651,301	$47,810
Hunter, Duncan	CA	$536,357	$618,117	$1,890,873	$1,758,132	$132,742	$50,000
Keyes, Alan	MD	$21,218	$10,139	$22,768	$10,139	$12,629	$12,876

Here, once again, is Douglas outside of Vermont, in an interview this month in Health Affairs (major hat tip to Nancy Remsen for this) basking in the accolades and credit for the Catamount Health Plan he fought tooth and nail:

Catamount Health is a premium subsidy program that allows the uninsured to purchase affordable coverage through their employer or directly through Catamount. These reforms are a key part of my strategy to make Vermont a more affordable place to live, work and raise a family. The reforms are part of my Affordability Agenda .

And here he is not even two weeks ago (ht VDP) in Milton on the same Catamount Health Plan (after saying last week in the Barton Chronicle he would've vetoed it… not sure what was stopping him at the time…):

“It’s not working,” he said. “It’s not an effective plan.”

And this guy is supposedly unbeatable? Good lord.