• He's more principled than Obama, so that corrupt or hateful people will have less incentive to try to remove Obama from office
• He's a fearless, head-on attacker of Bush/Cheney/McCain Republcanism, not a fear-and-trepidation compromise candidate like Lieberman (ugh) was
• The Vice Presidency is typically a launching pad for the Presidency, and I would be overjoyed to see "Dean in 2016!"
• He's a white male, so any persuadable closeted bigot voters can rationalize that it'll really be the white guy behind the scenes pulling the strings*
• He could do more good than harm in terms of popularity with moderates
• It would signal an end of fear of the corrupt national press
• He was a governor, so he has executive experience
• He isn't in Congress, so we wouldn't be risking a seat
• His policies have been some of the best things to happen to the Democratic Party in a generation

I get ideas and jot them down.

I find it hard to block off time and to self-motivate to compose essays, yet I want to get the ideas out there.

Consequently, here's a "brain dump" of conceptual seeds on the topic of impeachment.

I've put up a few posts on the topic (maybe I'll pick up a few of the ideas below later).  That said, I have been pessimistic that Bush, Cheney, or any of the other tyrants will see real accountability.  The projection around here, such as that Pelosi didn't mean "off the table," baffled me.

Yet impeachment is the logical and appropriate means within our system of government to deal with tyrannical executive branch officials and to restore Congress's and the people's rightful power.  So long as I am to be honest in representing myself, and so long as I care about my life, liberty, and livelihood, I must advocate impeachment.

Impeachment is dead.  Long live impeachment.

Brain dump commences in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

A really sharp friend of mine gave me permission to post this essay.

Why I Support Barack Obama

Here are the reasons I support Barack Obama, in no particular order.

HE HAS SUBSTANCE AS WELL AS STYLE. Despite claims to the contrary, Obama actually has a lot of substance, including many policy proposals (see the links on his website, including on the economy, foreign policy, education, health care, civil rights, energy, and balancing the budget, which are some of the topics I care about most).

On the New York Times politics blog today, commentator Matt Bai pens an article in which he reflects a bit, reaches mightily for a point of clarity and perspective... and promptly (and perhaps not so reluctantly) falls back into the formless goo of American political journalism propaganda.  What makes the article approach perfection is that the subject is the (neglected) seriousness of Senator Joe Biden.

Mr. Biden’s supporters will tell you that this is all the media’s fault for not covering him more — much the same argument you hear from Bill Richardson and Christopher Dodd’s supporters, too. This has some validity, but personally, I think Mr. Biden is less a victim of the media itself than of the distinct political culture that we in the media have wrought.

Kucinich, his H. Res. 333 co-sponsors, several other Democrats, and most of the Republicans threw a wrench into the Democratic political strategy for winning the 2008 elections for federal office, with their vote against tabling the resolution.

:: ::

Good.

So far as I can tell, the Democratic Congressional leadership's plan for the 2008 campaign is to complain about how mean and awful the Republicans are.  They figure most persuadable voters are motivated by things that get them angry, not things they are in favor of.  They want things in November 2008 to be just like they are today.  They pass legislation on pet issues but capitulate on our most important principles.  They want to appease Republicans such that no one will say nasty things about them.

This is a strategy worthy of exposure and evisceration, for their own electoral good and for good governance.

A 100-watt light bulb just went on in my head.  Y'know what sounds like a truly grand idea right about now?  Take the already ownership-monopolized, massively conglomerated, centrally controlled, corrupt traditional media...

...AND CONSOLIDATE IT SOME MORE!

Plan Would Ease F.C.C. Restriction on Media Owners
By STEPHEN LABATON
October 18, 2007, New York Times

WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 — The head of the Federal Communications Commission [contact] has circulated an ambitious plan to relax the decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city.

Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the commission, wants to repeal the rule in the next two months — a plan that, if successful, would be a big victory for some executives of media conglomerates.

Hooray!  Oppressed mega-media owners rejoice!!!

What does should the Democratic Party stand for, as determined by you and me, the users of the liberal/progressive blog The Daily Kos?

There are issues, and then there are principles.  I'm a principles and process person, so this post is about principles.  (It's okay, you can put the stem cell research funding on the entry table, it'll still be there for you on your way out.)  Of course issues are hugely important, since they're what impact people's everyday lives.  To have a coherent platform — to have something which the whole party stands for — I believe those positions on issues must flow from our principles.  I want you to question the biiiiiiiiiiig, obvious ones.  I want you to ask "Why?" ad nauseam, like a seven-year-old child questioning a parent.

What principles of government can we all agree upon?  Pointedly, I am not saying, "Why can't we all get along?"  If you disagree on a point, I want to hear why.  If there's nothing you disagree with off the bat, I challenge you to find something.  What is missing or miscategorized?  If you think something is of core importance, even if it's blindingly obvious, I want to hear about that most of all.

First, retroactive immunity turns the "rule of law" into an even greater mockery than it has been for the last six years. The central premise in granting immunity is that telecom companies did nothing wrong -- even if they violated the law -- because they cooperated with warrantless spying at the behest of the President.

But we don't actually live in a country where private actors are permitted to commit crimes and violate laws provided that the President tells them that they should. The President has no greater power to authorize others to break the law than he does to break the law himself. Quite the contrary, Article II of the Constitution imposes the opposite obligation: "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Lawbreaking is still illegal even if George Bush says it should be done. Does that principle really need to be explained?*

Yes.

(This has been another edition of Atrios's Easy Answers to Easy Questions.)

Sargent Binkley, a captain in the United States Army Rangers, served as a peacekeeper in Bosnia and as a drug warrior in Central America.

At one point he was ordered to open fire on a truck that contained a civilian teenage boy, an act that haunts him to this day. While on duty in Honduras, he fractured his pelvis and dislocated a hip. This injury was consistently misdiagnosed by Army physicians over the next several years, resulting in chronic pain and an addiction to prescription painkillers.

Support Sargent Binkley
Justice, not Blindness

To satiate his drug addiction, he held up two drugstores with a gun he says was unloaded.  He then turned himself in, and he faces sentencing on Thursday next week.

Because Binkley used a gun, and not a sword or grenade or some other weapon, California law mandates that the prosecutor set the sentence rather than the judge, and recommends that the sentence be twelve years in prison.  Twelve years.

You can help.

For the moment, the historic burden rests most heavily on the House of Representatives, and with special force on Congressman Thomas P. ('Tip') O'Neill Jr., 61, the floor leader of the Democratic majority in the House and the man responsible for ensuring the fairness of the impeachment process. "The main thing is getting the show on the road," says O'Neill.

Judging Nixon: The Impeachment Session*
TIME, Monday, Feb. 04, 1974

"Impeach now" means exactly this:

Next Tuesday, the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee opens a debate regarding the "possibly" unlawful actions of George Bush, Richard Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, or another executive branch official.

In the opening statement, Chairman John Conyers explicitly states that, at the end of the deliberations, he will hold a vote on whether to open impeachment hearings, which, if successful, would then be subject to a full House vote.  The chair also declares that any obstruction of the hearing process is immediate grounds for impeachment.  Then the deliberations begin and run their course, and the Representatives vote.

That's it.

Why freedom?
Freedom is part of the meaning of life.  Freedom means one can use one's mind.

Why the consent of the governed?
Consent is an expression of free will.  Without free will, one is not fully alive.  The violator of consent reduces the governed to mechanical cogs in the violator's machine of self-aggrandizement.  Consent is not agreement to every policy; it is our agreement to have a government.

Why have law?
Law is the specifics of the agreement we make with each other to obtain our freedom.  Just law either constrains everyone such that people do not take away each others' freedom, or it provides equality of opportunity to enhance freedom for a greater portion of the population.

Why have a constitution?
A constitution is the core agreement we all make to secure our freedom.  It defines the power of the government to make and enforce law, and it limits that power such that government does not take freedom away.

Why ask government officials to take an oath or affirmation to uphold the Constitution?
That is the agreement they make in exchange for the consent of the governed.

Dear Senators and Representatives:

I heartily applaud the fact that you are finally going to hold a senior administration official responsible for his actions, actions which undermine our lawful, Constitutional, representative form of government.

It is fairly clear that the Attorney General of the United States of America advised the President to dismiss US Attorneys in order to obstruct justice, to block a Justice Department investigation into his own prior and ongoing acts.  Beyond that, he lied about the matter before Congress.  You are now starting to hold Alberto Gonzales to account.  He may resign to avoid further damaging the administration's reputation (such as it is), or if he does not, you may impeach him to remove him from office before he can do any more serious harm to our nation and the principles for which we stand.  In either case, he may (and I sincerely hope he will) subsequently face criminal prosecution.

Now:  don't you dare stop there.

Back in December, in the middle of the "impeachment wars," there was a compelling "cooler heads" argument against calling for impeachment.  The crux of it was that Congress didn't have sufficient grounds to impeach the President because Congress hadn't tried to take back the powers the President had stolen and abused.  That, and to ask Congress to impeach before trying to reassert its constitutional role was to set a precedent for hair-trigger impeachments in the future.  

It's a process argument, and I'm all about process.  But what rankles in my brain is the denial of the logical end of the process.

Today, right now, members of our political leadership are holding hostages.

The President, the Vice President, and the Republican members of Congress are ransoming our soldiers for one hundred billion dollars.

The entire idea that curtailing the war funding will somehow hurt the troops follows from the premise that Bush would keep them in Iraq even if supplies and equipment stopped coming,* and even if Congress curtailed the authorization for their mission.

There's a question that's been stuck in the back of my head for the past few weeks, ever since I talked it over with a friend.  Many Senate Democrats consciously did not campaign for Ned Lamont, the Democratic Party candidate in the Connecticut U.S. Senate general election, so that Joe Lieberman wouldn't caucus with the Republicans if he won.  Putting the primary aside, the odds were against Lamont, and the bulk of the Democrats played the safe bet (as always).  Lieberman won by a significant margin, and he went on to caucus with the Democrats, handing them control of the Senate.

Really it comes down to power versus principle.  It can happen that sometimes you accomplish more in the end by going with power and compromising principle.  I'd postulate that most of the time it doesn't work that way, and that the power corrupts the principle so much that the principled stand would have gotten you the most positive result in the long run, but sometimes the power play is worth it.

"Impeachment is off the table."

“I don’t support impeachment, and I don’t support impeachment hearings, even though I think the president has probably committed an impeachable offense.”

"And Bush? He's going down as the nation's Worst President Ever. We don't need 'impeachment' to make that case, Bush has done a great job of it all by himself."

So, here's a serious (if hypothetical) question:  What would the President have to do for you to support a Democratic campaign to impeach him?

That's what I want to ask everyone who opposes impeachment, especially our elected representatives.  Because they can't answer that.  For almost any line you can draw, Bush has already crossed it.

For your consideration this evening/morning, here are two short, tangentially interrelated essays.  One revisits "On Bullshit," an essay by Harry G. Frankfurt, professor of philosophy emeritus at Princeton University.*  The other looks at the phenomenon of the "black box" in our society.

"On Bullshit" Revisited

A liar intentionally attempts to convince his audience of untruths.  A bullshitter attempts to convince his audience of something without regard for truth.

A bullshitter cares not what is objectively true.  In fact, bullshit is most effective when the audience doesn't believe that there is objective truth at all, that whether the earth takes the shape of a plane or a sphere depends only upon what you decide to believe, and how hard you work at believing it.  Or upon how loyal you are to the bullshitter, which consequentially amounts to the same thing.

A liar cares what is true and endeavors to make his audience believe otherwise.  The concept of a lie relies upon the validity of objective truth.

Here's a simple way for one to express how he thinks the Democratic Party ought to conduct itself:

Replace "Democrats should" with "Democrats are."

In one fell swoop, your favorite Democratic leader can go from this cringe-inducing AP quote:

"What Democrats have to do is to close the deal," said Obama, the keynote speaker at Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin's 29th annual steak fry. "We have got to show we have a serious agenda for change."

To this stirring one:

"Democrats are closing the deal with the American voters," said Obama, the keynote speaker at Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin's 29th annual steak fry.  "We are proving our serious agenda for change."

(Assuming the AP would ever print such a thing.)  Oh, and then do it.