Unilaterally bipartisan

Click on graphic for article.

To paraphrase a song from my youth: "Oh, when will Dems ever learn? When will they ever learn?"

--the BB

Message to the Dems in Congress

This is NOT a family blog, so I just wanna say FUCK THE BLUE DOGS! Corporate-owned swine.

Y'all had the chance to stand up for the middle class and folded. Again. Disgusting.

If there are any Blue Dogs with chairmanships, they should be stripped of them yesterday. Where the hell is party discipline?

--the BB

Dear Senator Reid

Now would be a good time to enforce some party discipline in your caucus. If you cannot, why not just fucking resign?

Love and kisses,
the BB

Jane Hamsher puts it more politely:

Either you’re going to enforce caucus discipline or you don’t have a party. You have instead a collection of self-interested narcissists, each one with the ability to derail any legislation they don’t like. Every Senator who derives their political power from membership in the caucus is thereby granted the power to torpedo any piece of legislation from coming to a vote, with no consequences. It’s an outrage.

Damn, damn, damn caving Dems! - Updated

OK. Nancy and Steny didn't vote for the damn thing, but they let it come to the floor. What is the point of being Speaker of the House if you can't keep something like this from passing? Remember that oath to uphold and defend the Consti-fracking-tution?

Phillip Carter at the WaPo:

Republicans and Democrats in Congress reached a breakthrough compromise yesterday on a bill that would dramatically revamp the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Most significantly, the draft legislation makes legal the president's probably previously illegal National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program. If signed into law, the new bill would also immunize telecommunications companies from individual lawsuits over surveillance. (More than 40 such suits have been filed already.)

[Emphasis mine, of course]

There was and is no reason to grant immunity to telcoms and certainly not to provide wiggle room for the lawbreaking thugs in charge of the executive branch.

I feared this was coming and it has. I am furious with the Dems in the House of Representatives and, if I had the power, would vote every compromiser out in the next election. No mercy, no excuses, no exceptions.

Nancy, you're back high on my shit list. You could get off it by putting impeachment back on the agenda. Short of that, you're probably going to stay there. I expected more of a grandmother. Just saying. I don't even need to get started on Steny and Rahm. Grrrrrrrrr.

Addendum:
In my book, voting to violate the Constitution is difficult for me to distinguish from treason. Also just saying. Who needs to aid and abet enemies when we're destroying ourselves from within?

Asshats. The lot of them.

UPDATE:
So, I get to see headlines like this first thing in the morning:
Democrats Have Legalized Bush's War Crimes
AlterNet - 3 hours ago
Essentially, Bush was betting that even if his warrantless wiretap program was disclosed -- as it was in December 2005 -- that he could trust his Republican congressional allies to protect him and could count on most Democrats not to have the guts to ...
--the BB

41 folks that need to be replaced

Kagro X provides this update at Daily Kos:

In rejecting the Feinstein "exclusivity" amendment to the FISA revision considered on the Senate floor today -- an amendment that failed by a vote of 57 Ayes to 41 Noes, thanks to another "painless filibuster" of precisely the type we were promised would not be tolerated on this bill -- the Senate has voted to say that although they were passing a law governing surveillance, it was OK if the President decided that he really didn't like the law very much and wished to make up his own instead.

Exclusivity -- the purpose of the amendment that "failed" -- meant simply this: that the law they were passing was the law, and it was the governing authority for how surveillance could be conducted in America.

The Senate just rejected it, so that means that they're passing a law, but if a president decides later on that he thinks there's really some other controlling authority besides the law, that's OK.

As I was speculating earlier, might we not have been better off if the earth had opened up and swallowed all current office holders during the SOTU speech? Then we could start over again with a Constitution and new folks to uphold it.

WTF is with these "painless filibusters" where the Senate Majority Leader allows 41 folks to stymie legislation without actually forcing them to filibuster. If they are going to obstruct, goddammit, make them do it publicly and with real effort so the whole nation can see what assholes they are.

If things move forward as they are now likely to do, the President will have nothing standing in his way when he wants to play games and ignore laws. As Kagro X said in conclusion: "I don't know why these people come to work at all."

Oh, and here's a bit from Update 3 of mcjoan:

Dodd/Feingold on amnesty fails, 31-67. 67 Senators think telcos deserve more protection than U.S. citizens. Or the Constitution. Nice.

You may fill in your own expletives.
--the BB

Another vote tomorrow

Check out mcjoan's post today with comments by John Dean (with Keith Olbermann) and an update on where we stand. We are on the brink of destroying another bit of our checks and balances and we're not optimistic about how the Senators will behave. We might not perform a blood eagle on caving Dems (though it is very tempting) but we should make it as painful for them to cave as we can.

How about pillorying Dems who cave? I think it would be an edifying spectacle if Dems who cave to the White House were shackled to a post in the public square where the populace could mock them, maybe toss a few rotten vegetables, and the elements could have their way.

Hell no, I'm not gonna be nice about this. Not when my nation is at stake. And I sure as hell want all the DINOs and Blue Dog dems voted out of office ASAP.
--the BB