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good luck getting Feinstein to filibuster Mukasey........ she's voting FOR him......

agreed - Feinstein has been a BIG disappointment on this issue.

agreed, all (although frankly surprised that the first comment was not a disheartened "good luck with Gallegly"). :)

however, as Citizens, we often have little else but our own voice and the responsibility to use it. i called all three offices this morning and left pleasant but firm messages with the friendly staff. when voting time comes, my representatives cannot say that they moved forward without knowing my will.

besides, we're talking about TORTURE here. how can any of us afford to be silent?

It was Admiral Poindexter who summarized best the views of Bush, Cheney, Gallegly, Feinstein (though I don't think Boxer) on the effectiveness of your and our voice of dissent. In 2004, he was asked about protesters who had picketed outside his home to protest his being appointed to some high Homeland Security post by Bush to implement domestic spying. To paraphrase: "They can protest all they want. Just so they keep paying their taxes."

(Poindexter was the convicted Iran-Contra criminal who was pardoned by Bush senior.)

As long as the money keeps flowing from us to them - in the form of our taxes awarded in no-account, no-bid contracts for war, death and destruction - we will be free to talk all we want. And they will feel free to ignore us. They are in power to deliver the funds.

If you want Gallegly to listen to you and act on your request, I suggest calling his office to tell him that you've got a company here in Ojai that will build some bombs and could use an Iraq contract. Make sure you've seeded the path with plenty of campaign donations to Republicans across the land first. Then you will get to see just how effective Gallegly can be. You'll be rich in no time!

Don't have the cash to spread around? Well, then, you don't have a "stake". So your views really aren't worth listening to anyway. Get yourself fully invested, get with the program, and then you'll see: Feinstein and Gallegly can be your kind of people. (If only you will become their kind of people first.)

i've seen the quote attributed this way:
"Let them march all they want, as long as they continue to pay their taxes."
-Alexander Haig, U.S. Sec. of State, June 12, 1982

your analysis is ominous and disheartening, Anonymous, but that doesn't make it untrue. time for a post on war tax resistance?

when i was (quite a bit) younger, (materially) poorer, and (perhaps a bit) more innocent, the worst thing a member of the establishment could say to me is "America- love it or leave it"

Now that I sleep on clean sheets, can choose which restaurant i can go to for lunch (dinner is still a bit away), and have been to Europe, India and Africa, I am innocently and sincerely curious why Anonymous 01:26 PM (does "01:26 PM really exist?) and even peaceful evan and his lovely family continue to live in Ameri(k)a?

Except for my highly developed neuroses, I feel totally free, really enjoy the weather (except of course the scorching summertime- gotta remember to head to Alaska for a few months) and never complain about food, people or the poor quality of TV programs.

Have I been totally co-opted??

El Anonimo is joshing I think.

Leaving is probably the only moral option for those with young children or those with means. Today we have no problem recognizing that the true "good Germans" of the Nazi era were the ones who refused to be a part of it and left. The rest of that fine country has been struggling to regain their moral bearing ever since.

History will not treat us differently.

But leaving is also of course all wrong. And it ain't the American way. Anonimo, haven't you seen any of those old Westerns? The bad guys get themselves entrenched for a while - but finally, a sheriff with the balls and skill to face up to them comes in and takes them out.

When bad people get in power in your country, are the only choices to either love them or leave?

I don't think so. The better answer is: They have to go. Not us. Not you, not me.

Anonimo, if you can't get off your ass and do your part to get rid of these chumps, then yes, you should consider leaving. At the very least, remove your money and productivity from their enterprise. There are plenty of places in the world where you can work, live and earn well, without being complicit in the murder of hundreds of thousands.

Though I think that it is easy to become skeptical regarding the actual and direct efficacy of our voice, I politely disagree with the assumption that our voice has no effect. Letters written to the senate appear on their desks. We have the power of our vote, and if we voice our concern and voice the importance of the action of elected officials regarding certain political issues, it is difficult to imagine that we have NO effect upon their decisionmaking. It is within our power to initiate change. Calling or writing to a senator may not have immediate and tangible effects, which many American people need to see to become involved, but I vehemntly believe that these initiatives do elicit change and have an impact. Senator Barack Obama stated,
"A friend of mine who is no longer here, named Paul Simon (former Illinois senator) served for a time in the United States Senate. And he said something that bears on today. During the Rwanda crisis he said , 'If a hundred people in every single congressional district had written to their senators and written to their representatives, then the atrocities that happened there would not have happened.'…

I know that if we care, the world will care. If we bear witness, then the world will know. If we act, then the world will follow. And in every corner of the globe, tyrants and terrorists, powers and principalities, will know that a new day is dawning and a righteous spirit is on the move, and that all of us, together, have joined hands to ensure that never again will these kinds of atrocities happen again."

Perhaps some claim that these simple actions do not actually instigate real change to justify their inaction. I believe, however, that it is within our power to have an impact upon the way our history unfolds. If we do not put pressure upon our elected officials to change our policies, what incentive will they have to change? It is therefore our responsibility as constituents to use the power that we have to influence the way in which public decisions are made.

Anon 11:58 PM

I am not joshing.

I don't "feel" "complicit in the murder of hundreds of thousands"

That's quite a burden.

Getting back to Mukasey..... what follows is the first half of Senator Charles Schumer's editorial in the New York Times this morning regarding why he has agreed to support the nomination:

I AM voting today to support Michael B. Mukasey for attorney general for one critical reason: the Department of Justice — once the crown jewel among our government institutions — is a shambles and is in desperate need of a strong leader, committed to depoliticizing the agency’s operations.

The department has been devastated under the Bush administration. Outstanding United States attorneys have been dismissed without cause; career civil-rights lawyers have been driven out in droves; people appear to have been prosecuted for political reasons; young lawyers have been rejected because they were not conservative ideologues; and politics has been allowed to infect decision-making.

We are now on the brink of a reversal. There is virtually universal agreement, even from those who oppose Judge Mukasey, that he would do a good job in turning the department around. My colleagues who oppose his confirmation have gone out of their way to praise his character and qualifications. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, for one, commended Judge Mukasey as “a brilliant lawyer, a distinguished jurist and by all accounts a good man.”

Most important, Judge Mukasey has demonstrated his fidelity to the rule of law, saying that if he believed the president were violating the law he would resign.

Should we reject Judge Mukasey, President Bush has said he would install an acting, caretaker attorney general who could serve for the rest of his term without the advice and consent of the Senate. To accept such an unaccountable attorney general, I believe, would be to surrender the department to the extreme ideology of Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington. All the work we did to pressure Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign would be undone in a moment.

I deeply oppose this administration’s opaque policy on the use of torture — its refusal to reveal what forms of interrogation it considers acceptable. In particular, I believe that the cruel and inhumane technique of waterboarding is not only repugnant but also illegal under current laws and conventions. I also support Congress’s efforts to pass additional measures that would explicitly ban this and other forms of torture. I voted for Senator Ted Kennedy’s anti-torture amendment in 2006 and am a co-sponsor of his similar bill in this Congress.

Judge Mukasey’s refusal to state that waterboarding is illegal was unsatisfactory to me and many other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Congress is now considering — and I hope we will soon pass — a law that would explicitly ban the use of waterboarding and other abusive interrogation techniques. And I am confident that Judge Mukasey would enforce that law.

On Friday, he personally made clear to me that if the law were in place, the president would have no legal authority to ignore it — not even under some theory of inherent authority granted by Article II of the Constitution, as Vice President Cheney might argue. Nor would the president be able to evade a clear pronouncement on the subject from the courts. Judge Mukasey also pledged to enforce such a law.

I have been cautioned by a friend that by posting Schumer's editorial without comment it may appear I am endorsing his view. I am not. Personally I consider that he has capitulated to Bush's bullying tactics (threatening to appointment an interim Attorney General for the duration of his term). But I thought some of you might be interested in Schumer's rationalization.

In the meantime, thanks to Schumer and Feinstein, the Judiciary Committee has just now approved Mukasey's nomination.......

In the meantime, thanks to Schumer and Feinstein, the Judiciary Committee has just now approved Mukasey's nomination.......

New day, same old shit.

Meanwhile, an uncomfortably large segment of the public is Googling "Britney Spears".

"if the law were in place, the president would have no legal authority to ignore it"

oh really? since frickin' WHEN?
c'mon, Chuck....