Alito Filibuster Update and What the Hell is Going On Here?

Well I've been calling and writing my senators about the Alito thing and heaven knows that its a long shot that the Democrats will get it together to filibuster this guy, even being led by Kerry, Clinton, and Kennedy. The lilly livered way that most of these Dems act is just sickening, really, and I'm disgusted as I watch them watch themselves as if to say "how does this look on me?" They all wait to see what everyone else is doing and none of them seems to have an original bone in their bodies. What ever happened to leaders who believed in things and tried to do what is right? What happened to people with the guts to go the other way and work towards the good of all people?

Well, most of those leaders were shot, I guess, and the people grew up and now have mortgages to pay and grandkids. I guess I would just like to see someone, anyone, with some real values and ideas about the world and all people. Maybe its a generation of relative peace and prosperity that does this to us. We have to find what we believe in again and it has to be more important than anything. Its just too passive to let a God or a President decide what is right. Its an abdication of the responsibility of being human in this world and its also a slippery slope because everything is open to interpretation.

To vote no on the guy but not to support the filibuster is such a passive aggressive move. The fact that Kerry even came out with a filibuster...And call me jaded or whatever...Seems to be to be in large part due to Gore's fiery speech and the cold fact that Kerry stands no chance of furthering his political career unless he stands up and starts making waves or doing something different. Someone, maybe Kerry, (probably not Kerry,) could make history in this administration by doing a little yelling and screaming. The thing is, whoever it is has to have the real honest conviction to fight to the death for what is right. I don't buy that Kerry cares more about these issues than how he looks among his peers or how his townhouse cocktail parties come off in the power elite. I think that he views street fighting as unseemly and rude, and I don't know if he has what it takes to really do this. I cant ever get over how quickly he gave up on the election. Hell, at least Gore dragged it out to the supreme court! I just don't know if Kerry has it! (and I didn't vote for him in the primary!) The look on John Edwards face was one of disappointment and surprise when he had to come out so soon after his heartfelt speech about "hearing us" and all.
So, I'm happy to see a little ripple on the surface of things, but I'm the one who has had an IMPEACH BUSH sign on my front lawn since midway through the first term! I'm the one who wore my buttons and bumper stickers even when everyone was too scared to talk much about things for fear of looking unpatriotic. Now, I get comments all the time on my Bush LIAR button (actually this is the one I wear and really is my favorite, but I cant resist the "fucktard" one!)and everyone wants to talk about how bad things are and what a shit Bush is! Even people in Greenwich feel this way! The people who don't feel that way are keeping quiet. Of course, this is a blue state so I doubt Ill get shot or anything...But, you never know! I am the liberal elite afterall!

Where have these people been all these years? Why haven't they been standing up and screaming? Because it isn't politically expedient? We hardly have a party anymore! The country is falling apart and none of us should want to have anything to do with a country that is behaving like this. America doesn't attack other countries with no cause! We don't torture people or keep people in jail for years with no charges.
The Guantanamo hunger strikers are close to death according to this report. Imagine being picked up for some reason and transported to a prison somewhere and questioned and tortured with no lawyer or due process of any sort! Even if you were a bad person and doing bad things you would deserve some sort of recourse. I can't imagine how horrible and frustrating that would be. Imagine not being able to get word to your family or to call for help? ...And 3 or 4 years go by. The truth seems to be that only 20% of the people picked up and held like this have any ties to crime at all. So 80% of those people maybe know someone who knows someone who maybe did something bad or said the wrong word on the phone tap, or has done something stupid, or was at the wrong place at the wrong time.
I would hunger strike too! 3 or 4 years with no due process? This is not American...And offshoring it doesn't make it better!

The thing that makes us human and that makes America great is being able to look at the least of us, the poorest or sickest in our society, and realize that we are all the same as that person. One false step and that could be any of us. If we lose that empathy towards humanity at its weakest to the ideas being spewed at us by liars who say what they say to profit, then we have allowed the worst in our society to manipulate our values. To me, what is being said by the right doesn't sound correct anyway. It has always made me want to go out and find out more information. But, I know too many people who are too busy or lazy who say "why would they lie to us?" Maybe this sort of thing brings out the worse sides of people. Maybe they count on those people. Maybe the manipulation of the common man's anger away from the rich and down to the poor is falling on a group that somewhere deep down wants to believe that line of thought. The direction of anger in a society is actually a studied sociological phenomenon, and what makes sense is that anger should be directed towards the rich. The game is to redirect it to the poor: the welfare queens, the people who just cant pull themselves up by their bootstraps, the immigrants.... The feeling is that "if I ever didn't have a job I would go and get one!" well, what if there were no jobs? What if you got so sick that you could never work again? What if your kid needed a transplant and you used up your lifetime allotment of health insurance and then couldnt declare bankruptcy...Hell, what if a hurricane swept through town and took everything and the insurance agency wouldn't cover it?! What if anything...? The truth usually is that a few publicized cases end up representing maybe 1/10th of 1% of whatever it is that has been blown up all out of proportion in order to make people mad about it. The media is key in this...As are people who love a good story. But its important to realize that most of it is just not representative of what is going on. And if even 1% of welfare recipients were cheats would you condemn a whole group for the bad actions of that small percentage. Remember we are talking about a group that is made up of mostly white women and children who just cant make it. So if it was even 10% what then? We have to consider that these are real people and that most of them are children! That is just one example of the misinformation out there and the willingness of people to believe the worst and condemn now, ask questions later!

Its so sad that we cant trust the people in power...And maybe we never could...But we have now entered a time that is so dark and so evil that it may approach some of the darkest times in history.
I cant get over how BAD these people are and how easily the American people have been pulled into the thought processes that have been created by spin professionals just for this purpose. How can people be employed specifically to paint things a certain way? I keep asking myself, how can that be? Does the person who has that job and spends time on the phone all day and putting out press releases and planting information, does that person sleep at night? Does that person go home and kiss their kid goodnight and sit and read a book?

The thing about the Alito thing is this: Maybe its politically expedient to know when you're beat and to choose your battles in government. Maybe nothing gets done if the gentlemen and gentlewomen of our House and Senate are slinging mud...And maybe we have to be disappointed in someone while they make tiny gains towards taking back power. There is a slim chance that a filibuster can go on without the majority stopping it, and we have to be painfully aware that we, the American people and the Democratic party, gave them this majority because of our laziness and shortsightedness.
Maybe us activist people don't have a clue as to what is necessary to move towards the midterms and to take over again, but I'll be damned if I'm ever again going to put my trust in what any of these people says is right without questioning and second guessing everything.
The important piece of this for me is that these Senators work for US! They have to get the message that we are out here yelling and that if they don't represent us in the government they will be out of a job!
So, I love to hear that the faxes had to be turned off and the voicemails are full. I love to hear that so many millions of Americans are voicing their opinions.
We are entering a time when it will be more and more important for us to be heard, and when we will have more, not less, choice in what happens in the world. This is because of the incredible technical advances that seem to come so quickly, and our ability now to communicate with our leaders so efficiently.

So, if the filibuster fails (and it very well may,) all is not lost. The exercise of the American people speaking out is an important one. It may never pop the President's bubble, but it will let all the rest of the denizens of Washington know that we are taking our voices back. And it will let the rest of the world know that we don't agree with what is happening here.

...And You Smell Like One Too!!!

FILIBUSTER!!!!

The confirmation of Alito will mark the start of an era in which the settled law regarding the medical privacy of women is chipped away at, the executive branch gains power and upsets the checks and balances necessary for this government to work, and a continuation of the growth of strength of big business. We know this because O'Conner was the deciding vote on a large majority of cases before the court and We know Alito's record.
We have also seen Alito lie and skirt the truth...and he clearly wont state that Roe V. Wade is settled law.
I urge you to call and write to your senators and the senators linked below and tell them to support Kerry and Kennedy in their filibuster of Alito.
Let the chips fall where they may...at some point we have to stand up and start fighting for our country and our constitution. This administration is aggressively moving against the checks and balances of our system, the privacy and rights that the constitution affords us, and the settled law of the land regarding the rights of women. Make no mistake that a pro big-business supreme court will ensure the continuation of super untaxed compensation packages for CEO's while workers lose their jobs, Outsourcing of jobs that are replaced by jobs at McDonalds if they are replaced at all, the continued deregulation of not only environmental controls, but also of fair practices in business.
Go to www.nocrony.com to find your senator's Fax, phone, and email addresses. Calls are probably best at this point and they have kids taking the information....emails to back this up are also good.
Your voice counts in this battle!

It is also important to contact these Senators no matter where you are from:
: http://morningseditionists.com/msblog/?page_id=69
…and encourage them to support the filibuster.
All of these senators work for us...and they all took an oath to protect the Constitution. Its time that these politicians began to understand that they represent the American people and that this Alito nomination not only doesn’t represent the mainstream of America, but it doesn’t even represent the conservatives of America. This nomination represents a small fringe element...and our highest court should not be influenced by such a small element when it serves all of the people! We have a fairly conservative court as it is. Lets not allow it to go over the edge!

When the gang last made a deal on the filibuster they said that they would only use it in the case of an emergency. Well, if this isn't an emergency then what is? The nuclear option be damned, someone has to stand up and say NO MORE!

If we don’t start taking action now we will have no one to blame for the decline of this country but ourselves.

Thanks for your action,

Melina




“On some positions…cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediencey asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it Popular?’ But, Conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because one’s conscience tells one that it is right.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.
March 1968
California Democratic Council

just us and Coco...a while back 

Baby I'm Only Society's Child

I finally got to Frank Rich’s op-ed in the Sunday NY Times from over a week ago about Brokeback Mountain. It was piled along with all of the assorted things that I’m always trying to catch up on and lugging around with me in the hopes that I can sit in a waiting room somewhere and just read. I actually had a Heckle and Jeckle moment with another traveling mom at the chiropractor’s office the other day, when we both really wanted to sit and read…”you go first”…”, “No, you”…, “No, really, after you…I’ll just sit here and READ!”….
Anyway, I was thinking about his idea that Brokeback is the movie that, with such a strong per screen showing, will in wide release, open up the heartland to the idea that gays are real people who can feel love just like anyone else. Apparently, the movie, which I haven’t seen yet, is a real tearjerker, and acted so well that it’s hard not to get into it and really feel the heartache of these guys. The idea that even a few folks in the red states might shift a little and feel for those that might otherwise be freaks to them, is a big turning point in the culture of the other 50%, if they ever even knew what they were terrified of in the first place; wasn’t it the terrorists and the gays that Bush was gonna protect them from?

So, it’s taken Ang Lee, a guy from Taiwan who somehow has his finger on the pulse of America better than any western director I have seen, to plumb that vein of emotion that is out there but easily manipulated by the conservative Christians who are overrunning our country. If you look at Lee’s credits he has traveled such an interesting path to get to this subject, but somehow it makes sense when you look at someone who has shot movies such as The Hulk, Crouching Tiger, and The Ice Storm, that he would end up right up against us with a mirror.

I love the idea that confused Midwesterners might find themselves in a dark theater not wanting their neighbors to know that they are weeping at this story and understanding a love that can never be…Like The Notebook with two guys…or a Lifetime movie; maybe the L word? Nah, that’s too hip and sharp for the rest of the country, except for the Jerry Springer TV crowd who want to catch a little girl on girl action.

Which brings me back to Bush and how out of touch he is. I keep seeing snippets of a speech from the other day where he was asked if he had seen Brokeback and he gets all flustered and strange, like he is some stupid frat boy who might make a dumb joke but holds back because he’s in mixed company. I’m in awe of how unaware he seems to be of the mainstream of America and the cultural drift back to a more realistic state.

It almost gives me hope to think that maybe with Katrina and all of the revelations of lies and corruption, his stock has fallen enough so that people have lost the knee jerk of following blindly out of fear; fear of being attacked themselves (what I refer to as general fear of death…like lightening might strike you too!) or the social fear of appearing not patriotic enough.

So, I’m gonna try to see Brokeback, even though I don’t go to many movies these days, preferring to wait and rent ‘em or just not to bother at all when life feels too short for anything less than American Beauty. I hope that there isn’t any sex in that sort of thrusting way that they show it lately in these newfangled movies. I don’t like that with hetero movies and I’m sure I don’t want to see Heath or Jake bent over a horse or whatever…ugh…but its not a gay/straight thing. I just don’t like to see people having sex in general. I’d prefer to have it fade to a picture of the incoming tide, lapping waves, opening butterflies, and all that…

Frank Rich has gone on vacation until spring and I’m really going to miss him. I’m trying not to be too mad about him leaving right now because I guess we will need him more in the run-up to the midterms than we do now for downward spiral of this administration….Only a few voices really give me hope: Frank Rich, Jon Stewart, Bill Mahr, Marc Maron….and I suppose that it can get draining to live in the middle of writing about the ever growing corruption over and over…And it must be also a bit of a no brainer these days because we’ve got a president who will actually confess in a speech and then aggressively claim that he didn’t break the law (yes you did, no I didn’t, yes you did, no I didn’t…) And, as usual they feel that if they say it enough, it will become true…..though I would feel rather vindicated, were I Rich or Dowd or any number of these writers. Come to think of it, I do feel vindicated after being one of the few who believed that this stuff would come to this extreme!...and heaven knows that I’ve had my *Impeach Bush* signs out there on the driveway since midway through his first term!…it’s very tiring and it gives me pause about what is inside of people and what they are capable of. The lack of empathy that these guys exhibit and what they are able to bring that out in scared constituents just floors me!

So, hopefully this Brokeback Mountain will stir a bit of empathy in people who might normally look at differences as aberrant behavior rather than just really the same thing, love that everyone maybe might be lucky enough to feel at some point in their lives.