Weekend papal retrospective
A busy week has drawn to a close for feisty Pope Benedict XVI, who on Tuesday informed a disbelieving world that "Orthodox churches were defective and that other Christian denominations were not true churches." Three days earlier he had revived the old Latin Mass.

Protestant denominations are apparently not "true" churches because they can't trace apostolic succession back to Jesus's times. Orthodox churches are OK on that score, but have a "defect" or a "wound" because they don't recognize the primacy of the pope. Other than that, sure, we can talk, Pope Benedict concluded:

Despite the harsh tone of the document, it stresses that Benedict remains committed to ecumenical dialogue.

"However, if such dialogue is to be truly constructive, it must involve not just the mutual openness of the participants but also fidelity to the identity of the Catholic faith," the commentary said.

Indeed, it would be simplest and best if participants simply adopted the Catholic faith, the commentary failed to add.

While many observers have expressed shock and disappointment, in all honesty the pope's views should not have come as a surprise. Looking back on this Benedict XVI ordination video, it was clear even then that a sterner, stranger era was dawning....

posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:52:00 AM -- |  

 
Weekend quiz section
Three quizzes provide you, my readers, with a window into my very soul -- and one gives you a chance to change it!

The first comes via the site for a book by Daniel Kurtzman, "How to Win a Fight with a Conservative." I think shying away from some of the ruder bumpersticker choices affected the result (my choice was "Evolution is just a theory... kind of like gravity," though I was tempted by "I'm already against the next war.")

I also rate as a "passionate foot soldier": "You readily engage in political debate but are apt to bail out before things get too testy." Hey, no I don't! Well, maybe I do.

Trouble was, one of those questions was about putting up an even bigger Hillary sign after a hypothetical neighbor puts up a Giuliani sign, and I'm just not there yet.

For "Which Founding Father Are You?" I guessed "Benjamin Franklin", but that choice came in third behind Jefferson and the number one choice, James Madison.

Tellingly, there was no "would you ever own a slave?" question. To be sure, Franklin owned two during his lifetime -- but became convinced that slavery was wrong later in his life, and by 1787 had become the president of a Pennsylvania abolitionist society. Jefferson sometimes talked a great game about slavery, but ultimately slaves were (1) the basis for his presidency* and (2) the capital that financed Monticello and his intellectual life; most were never freed, and were sold by his estate to settle debts incurred building the mansion, buying books, stocking the wine cellar, and so forth. Madison also owned scores of slaves, and never freed any of them. (George Washington did -- albeit posthumously and with the stipulation that manumission come after his wife's death. Then again, most had been hers** to begin with.)

Paging 'Mrs. Coulter" ("Republic of Heaven") -- it turns out one of my favorite books, Philip Pullman's "The Golden Compass," is coming out as a movie this December. My little girl is thrilled -- she's become a big fan.*** As with "Lord of the Rings," we're now reading the trilogy together at night, and are now halfway through "The Subtle Knife."

One of the key things about the alternate universe of "The Golden Compass" is that people there have something like external souls; called "daemons," they are constant companions or familiars in animal form that change during your youth depending on your state of mind, but settle into a permanent form reflecting your personality once you're an adult.

At the movie web site, you can take a kind of Myers-Briggs test -- e.g., "You generally go with the flow": strongly disagree, etc. -- to learn the form of your daemon. We seem to be a cat family: my little girl got a snow leopard and my wife got an ocelot.

In a kind of reflection of how daemons are initially changeable, you can click on the image to the left to influence the final form of my daemon. I got "tiger" two out of three times now, but the first time I got... a mouse. Given the rest of my family, that would just prove I like to live dangerously, so there.




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* According to Akhil Reed Amar ("The American Constitution: A Biography"), Jefferson would have lost to John Adams in 1800 without the electoral votes supplied by southern slave populations under the notorious "3/5" rule.
** I use simple possessives such as "hers" instead of "hers under prevailing notions of property rights at that time" for convenience.
*** She also wonders why anyone would pick Mrs. Coulter as a name. We haven't got that far yet.

UPDATE, 7/18: Interesting -- after reader input, my daemon has cycled from "tiger" to "mouse" and now "lion", but I remain "modest, responsible, shy, sociable, and solitary." Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:23:00 AM -- |  

 
Department of followups
...an occasional review of further developments in issues, news, or other items I've written about before.


Re Jackson Diehl's "The House's Ottoman Agenda", 03/05/07; 90 years ago: Armenian genocide begins, 04/25/05 --- Back in March, the Washington Post's Jackson Diehl wrote an exceptionally snotty op-ed deriding the value and wisdom of H.Res. 106, the Armenian Genocide Resolution, saying it "pandered" to Armenian Americans and was "almost comically heavy handed." Rubbish; see for yourself, and ask yourself what you would write if the murder of 1.5 million countrymen went unacknowledged for 90 years. Now the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) reports Majority of US House Members support Armenian Genocide Resolution (link added):

In gaining 218 cosponsors, we have demonstrated that a majority of the House strongly supports recognizing the facts of the Armenian Genocide," said lead sponsor, Congressman Adam Schiff. "While there are still survivors left, we feel a great sense of urgency in calling attention to the attempted murder of an entire people. Our failure to acknowledge these dark chapters of history prevents us from taking more effective action against ongoing genocides, like Darfur."

Bravo to Congressman Schiff and his 217 cosponsors, including Chris Van Hollen (D-MD-8) who, in an e-mailed response to my support of H.Res. 106, noted that he sponsored a similar measure in the Maryland legislature before coming to Congress. Meanwhile: House 218, Diehl 0.


Support the Employee Free Choice Act, 06/20/07 --- As is well known, the Employee Free Choice Act was defeated when Senate failed by 9 votes (51-48) to reach the 60 needed to end debate on the measure. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't thank the representatives and senators who supported it. Locally, it was a clean sweep: Representative Chris Van Hollen and Senators Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin all voted for the bill. At "Free State Politics," Isaac Smith provides a video clip of Senator Cardin's floor speech, in which Cardin rebutted the canard that the Act prohibited secret ballot elections. From the official transcript of Cardin's remarks:

"I listened again to what the Republican leader said about secret ballots, and I know there is a disconnect here, because, again, this legislation doesn't get rid of that. What this legislation tries to say is we want workers rights to be adhered to. If the majority wants to have a union, they should be able to have a union without intimidation from the employer. And if the majority does not want to have a union, they should be able to do that without intimidation from the union."

Earlier in his remarks, Cardin was also very good at spelling out what the stakes were for the country as a whole -- union and non-union:

Real wages for U.S. workers are lower today than they were in 1973, even though productivity has increased by 80 percent. We do pride ourselves that each generation of Americans will live a more prosperous life than in previous generations. That will not be true for a large number of Americans. Today, wages are not keeping up with productivity. There is a problem in the workforce, and it affects all of us in this country. We need to do something about it.

Real median household income in my own State of Maryland has declined by 2.1 percent from 2000 to 2005. We find a widening of the income gap in America, a widening of the wealth gap in America. We should be moving to narrow that gap, not to see it continue to increase. We have a problem we need to deal with, and this legislation, H.R. 800, gives us an opportunity to debate these issues and determine whether the decline of unionization is one of the factors in contributing to these difficult economic trends.

CEOs are now paid 411 times what workers are paid in America--411 times. In 1990, it was bad enough at 107 times--once again, a widening of the gap. I remember when I was in college talking about the strength of America. The strength of America was that in all the western economic powers we had the narrowest gap between wealth and income. Now we have the widest. We need to do something about it. Unionization helps bridge that gap.

What has happened to unionization? In 1973, 24 percent of Maryland workers worked in a company that offered union representation. In 2006, that number dropped to 13 percent.

Pay attention to the Smithfield Tar Heel walk-out, 11/17/2006; New ICE age for labor?, 02/02/2007 --- The Smithfield Tar Heel meat packing plant in North Carolina has been the scene of repeated walkouts and labor strife; the conflict has turned even uglier with Smithfield's apparent reliance on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to pressure immigrant workers in the midst of a labor dispute.* But what Smithfield, other employers, and their misguided Republican allies in Congress and the White House are likely to find out is that if you stonewall, punish, and harass your workers for trying to improve their appalling working conditions (according to a Human Rights Watch report), those workers just going to have to up the ante.

To wit, Justice at Smithfield and the Union of Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) are now calling for a kind of surgical boycott of Smithfield Tar Heel products. Consumers are urged to take a close look at Smithfield products, and if they're from the Tar Heel plant, contact the store manager and urge those products to be withdrawn. How can you tell it's a Smithfield Tar Heel product? Except for a "Queenella" brand, all carry the Smithfield label -- and all have a particular identification code. Justice at Smithfield:

You can identify the Tar Heel plant products with these codes:
EST 79C on bacon and EST 18079 on all other pork products.

(Red added to make you look.) The codes are part of the "use by" information and/or USDA inspection information on the meat packaging; see J-at-S's "Find the Meat" document for examples.


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* ICE guidelines supposedly preclude raids on workplaces in the midst of a labor dispute. That's sensible, since otherwise they'd be essentially encouraging employers to hire illegal workers, only to have ICE be their company cops once a strike is looming. But a recent study shows ICE's real attitude is "guidelines, shmidelines": fully 54% of ICE workplace raids take place at workplaces with active labor disputes.

EDIT, UPDATE, 3/10/08: 51-48 vote link added. Worth noting -- Obama and Clinton both voted to end debate on the bill, McCain did not.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:43:00 PM -- |  

 
Why we fight

So Sara Taylor took an oath to the President ... woops, to the Constitution, as Senator Leahy reminds her in this clip.

The White House and the executive branch aren't supposed to be partisan playgrounds for loyal Bushies, they're entrusted to them by the entire American people under the Constitution.

In theory, anyway. Notice Ms. Taylor's wandering attention as Senator Leahy explains all that to her. You could just about see Taylor thinking "blah blah blah what time is it anyway." She's a visible indicator of why impeachment is necessary.

Via Chris at Suburban Guerrilla.

 
Make the GOP really filibuster the next one
Writing at "The Next Hurrah," mimikatz notes that yesterday's 41-56 victory for Republican dead-enders allowed the GOP to avoid the inconvenience of conducting a filibuster -- to deny troops adequate rest. Having framed the story usefully, she draws the sensible conclusion:

What Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid needs to do now is to call GOP Minority leader Mitch McConnell's bluff and require the GOP to actually filibuster. Bring up Webb-Hagel again, or do it with Levin-Reed. But make them filibuster. Make it plain to the Senators that there will be no August recess until the Defense bill is done, and if the GOP doesn't want to face losing an upperdown vote, they can filibuster for the whole country to see. The TV stations will love the theater, and the GOP will look as stupid as they did when they staged Bill Frist's talk-a-thon on judges when the Dems wouldn't allow up or down votes.

Via hilzoy ("Obsidian Wings"), who provides a detailed catalogue of other measures Senate Republicans have blocked in this way -- just about everything Democrats have wanted, including the Employee Free Choice Act a couple of weeks ago. Hilzoy concludes:

The idea of taking a bill off the floor rather than forcing its opponents to keep talking until hell freezes over was a courtesy. In the face of Republican insistence on using the filibuster for everything, that courtesy should be withdrawn.

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UPDATE, 7/12: Via Nell's comment, Bob Borosage explains why Campaign for America's Future has set up a petition to Harry Reid to do just that:

These bills are overwhelmingly popular, and are simply common sense reforms. Yet every one of them—and many more—got held up in the U.S. Senate.

Conservatives boast about the “success” of their strategy in discrediting the new majority. As Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott, R-Miss., put it, “the strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail. So far it’s working for us.”

How is it working? It’s dragging the reputation of the Congress down to the level of the failed president. Conservatives lie in the road of progress and then complain that nothing is moving.

A while back, eRobin wrote that things start to get attention in Congress when phone calls on a subject exceed 200 a day. Harry Reid's office is getting one from me tomorrow. posted by Thomas Nephew at 7:09:00 PM -- |  

 
Supporting the hell out of the troops
41 Senators -- including alleged Iraq skeptics like Lugar, Domenici, and Voinovich -- blocked a vote on a bill sponsored by Senator Jim Webb that would have required lengthier rest periods for soldiers between deployments, essentially reducing the number of troops available at any one time for deployment to Iraq.

On the bright side, Republican senators Warner, Sununu, Collins, and Snowe were among the 56 votes to end debate -- meaning Webb was only 4 votes short of prevailing. Handicapping the prospects for Webb's bill and other Democratic efforts, Spencer Ackerman (Election Central, TPM Cafe) wrote on Monday, "Watch for what Webb's fellow Virginia senator, defense lion John Warner -- who's uncommitted as to whether he'll seek reelection next year -- says about Webb's bill as a barometer of GOP defection."

I guess Warner's seeking re-election. And I guess "slow bleed" -- the epithet applied to John Murtha's similar measure earlier this year -- is what's happening to Bush now. But that's all small comfort to soldiers like Eric Botta. The Miami Herald's Amy Driscoll reports:

Days after 9/11, as a young Army reservist, he volunteered to go to war. He was soon in Afghanistan.

The next year, he was sent out again, this time to Iraq, part of a Special Operations team.

In the next two years, he was sent to Iraq again. And again.

He thought he was done. But now, the Army wants Sgt. Botta one more time.

That will make 5 deployments in not quite 6 years. Sergeant Botta -- who remains proud of his service -- is suing the Army to protest and prevent his redeployment.

''The world pretty much stopped when I got the notice,'' said Botta, weighing each word. "I've sacrificed a lot for the military. I didn't want to end with litigation, but I feel I've done my service to my country. I've done what I signed up for in more ways than one.''

The "slow bleed" is happening already -- it's called exhaustion, and it's breaking our armed forces. We should not be asking soldiers to do this much, this often -- especially for a cause this nebulous, and with prospects this uncertain. The GOP senators who like to bray so loudly and so often about "supporting the troops" should think about Sergeant Eric Botta -- and shut up.


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UPDATE, 7/12 (via Eschaton) -- Senator Webb reacts to the vote:

Americans are tired of the posturing that is giving Congress such a bad reputation. They are tired of the procedural strategies designed to protect politicians from accountability, and to protect this Administration from judgment. They are looking for concrete actions that will protect the well-being of our men and women in uniform.

The question on this amendment is not whether you support this war or whether you do not. It is not whether you want to wait until July or September to see where one particular set of benchmarks or summaries might be taking us. The question is this: more than four years into ground operations in Iraq, we owe stability, and a reasonable cycle of deployment, to the men and women who are carrying our nation’s burden. That is the question. And that is the purpose of this amendment.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:30:00 AM -- |  

 
Srebrenica: 12 years on
As thousands watched, 465 newly identified victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre were reburied Wednesday, reports the Guardian's Almir Arnaut, bringing the total identified and reburied to over 3,000. For readers who may have forgotten, Arnaut explains:

Up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed by Serb forces who separated men and boys from women on July 11, 1995, and killed the males over several days. It was the worst mass slaughter in Europe since World War II.

Dutch peacekeeping forces assigned to guard the so-called "safe haven" of Srebrenica were arguably overmatched by besieging Bosnian Serb forces; at any rate, they certainly proved unwilling to continue to protect the community. Arnaut:

Some 15,000 men tried to escape the slaughter by fleeing over the mountains toward the safe town of Tuzla. They were hunted along their 65-mile walk and killed if caught. Hazim Mehmedovic was 3 years old at the time, and was carried along the path in his father's arms.

Hazim, now 16, arrived a few days ago from Copenhagen, Denmark, where he is living with his mother. Survivors today live in 107 countries around the world as refugees, he said.

For the past few days, he walked the escape route the other way from Tuzla to Srebrenica and arrived for the anniversary.

"I don't remember anything and wanted to see where it happened. The Serbs shelled our group and killed dad while he was holding me in his arms. Someone else, I don't know who, carried me the rest of the way to Tuzla,'' he says.

While the victims are dead and beyond caring, the story continues to enrage and disgust. Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic -- the military and political directors of the atrocity -- remain at large. And in February, the International Court of Justice reprehensibly absolved Serbia of responsibility for the massacre -- after refusing to subpoena documents plainly showing that the Bosnian Serb army was directed from and paid by Belgrade.


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MORE at this site:
06/04/2005: Video from Srebrenica massacre surfaces
07/12/2005: Srebrenica, 10 years later
02/26/2007: ICJ: Srebrenica was genocide. Serbian police were involved... ...yet Serbia cleared of genocide ("reprehensibly" link above).
02/28/2007: Where's Ratko? -- includes specific ICTY charges against Ratko Mladic.
05/14/2007: Department of followups: ...Bosnia ("refusing" link above)

UPDATE, 7/12: Mark Burgess (World Security Institute's WSI Brussels Blog) reported in early June: "Survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre are suing the United Nations and the Netherlands for what they say was a failure to protect civilians from Bosnian Serb forces."

NOTE: The June 4, 2005 post is one of the most frequently visited posts at this site (via a Google image search to the video still), and the "outclick" to the video linked there is by far the single site people visit most often from here. I hope it's not just rubberneckers or worse, but also people like Hazim who really need to know what happened.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:21:00 PM -- |  

 
How to pick apart a Snow job
Through the magic of online video, the Talking Points Memo media empire arranges for Tony Snow's desperate spin about Senator Lugar's (R-IN) skeptical position on Iraq to be rebutted by... Senator Lugar. A very nice piece of work.

 
digby, what is the alternative to impeachment?
Thinking about it a few days later, I suppose where I started seeing a little red in digby's controversial* "Impeachment" July 3rd post was when she wrote, "Elizabeth Holzman (sic) must be dreaming if she thinks her charges could ever get a majority vote ..." For all that digby has earned her many accolades over the years (including many from me), she has no business writing about Holtzman -- the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives, a key participant in the House Watergate hearings, a district attorney, and a comptroller for the state of New York -- as if she were some hand waving flower child from a commune somewhere. As Holtzman has argued, no one thought at first that the Nixon impeachment hearings would get as far as they did.

There are a number of highly arguable premises in the rest of digby's post as well. For instance, much of what's impeachable has been placed on the public record already, either by the administration itself, via ACLU and similar lawsuits, and reporting by journalists like Hersh, Priest, Marshall, and many others. More investigation and a clear constitutional discussion of what precisely does and does not merit impeachment will be good things, but there's no need to search for even more "smoking gun" evidence when we've seen so many already, and found so many hot bullet casings, as it were, littered on the White House lawn. We're also not necessarily running out of time. As Avedon Carol has pointed out, impeachment of these two men would be worthwhile even once they're out of office -- it would prevent them from ever taking federal office again.

All that said, it's important to stipulate (1) that digby's first sentence was "Was there ever a president who deserved it more?" and (2) that she has something of a point when she comments that many misconstrued her as merely being concerned about how impeachment would affect Democrats politically:

My question was whether a failed impeachment would actually end up exonerating Bush rather than holding him accountable. I'm not all that concerned about 08 in this, although public opinion is kind of important and we have to be concerned about it. I'm interested in what will stop this cycle of illegality.

Actually, she also said "it's about the political landscape," and that "the risks are high that if you don't have a specific (and somewhat simple) crime to point to and a good chance of at least getting a quick impeachment vote in the House, that it could blow back pretty hard on the Dems." For my part, I assume members of Congress can walk, chew gum, consider wide-ranging grounds for impeachment, and carry on the rest of their business all at the same time. While digby's right to anticipate arguments against a particular impeachment scenario, they don't deserve to be so central to her thinking.

But digby put her chief concern this way:

The consequences of voting impeachment out of committee and failing to get a majority in the House --- or if we get a vote, failing to convict in the Senate (which is inevitable) are what's really at issue. I'm willing to consider that it's worthwhile anyway. But regardless, everyone needs to decide this course based upon the reality that Bush will not be convicted and barring an untimely demise, will not leave office before January 20, 2009.

So the question I ask is this --- is a failed impeachment going to hold them accountable? If so, then I'm for it. But if it actually ends up getting them off the hook, then not so much. It's not such an easy call.

And then there's the bigger question. What's the alternative?

Any ideas?

OK -- what is the alternative to impeachment? As a strict logical proposition, the alternative is not to impeach the president and vice president. Despite presiding over and approving war crimes, despite admitting they broke laws directly infringing on the Bill of Rights and extremely specific congressional statutes, despite deceiving a country into believing a war was necessary.

It's hard for me to see how deciding not to even try to impeach could possibly be worse for accountability -- of this president and future ones -- than trying and failing to impeach, or subsequently trying and failing to convict. There may be more shouting, dancing, and triumphant hooting by the opposite side if the impeachment effort or trial goes down in flames, but the alternative -- slinking away without even trying to defend the Constitution, our democratic institutions, and our rights -- is worse. That includes half-hearted efforts at "censure" and the like; while they're fine as an interim, reconnoitering step, they're often dismissed -- and with some justice -- as "stunts" that don't demonstrate the courage of our convictions.

In my own comment about digby's post, I wrote:

I'm surprised you'd take this approach, digby. Isn't this the blog where I generally read that Democrats should surprise us and take principled stands -- that that will convince a country that they stand for something instead of that they'll go for anything?

Even just on tactics, impeachment is a winner. It dominates discussion, it drives investigations, it keeps the bad guys back on their heels -- and for a good cause this time, not for perjury about a marital infidelity.** Parties have generally done well after pursuing impeachment, regardless of the merits of the case.

But the merits of this case matter a great deal. It isn't just tactics. We have to defend the Constitution of the United States, it's the only good thing left in DC. Whether we win or lose, we have to say we tried to save what the Constitution is meant to do, or we don't deserve to have it. That's simply all there is to it.

That may seem to accuse digby of being overly concerned with consequences for Democrats, and not enough with consequences for the country. It also certainly takes up the political benefits for Democrats. But what I mainly meant was that worrying about the prospect of defeat is not how I remember she's argued in the past, from opposing Alito to supporting timetables for withdrawal from Iraq. (Also, while it may not speak precisely to digby's points, it's important to stress impeachment is long since not a fringe idea any more; pollsters are reporting strong support for Bush's impeachment and majority support for Cheney's impeachment -- far more support than was the case when Clinton was impeached for far less reason.)

I'm taking on digby (in what I hope would be received as a friendly challenge, should she read it) because while canvassing and petitioning about this I've sometimes encountered similar reservations about impeachment among precisely the last people I'd have expected to find them. I don't claim I've got a finely honed, prize-winning answer, but basically I think that not even trying to impeach Bush and Cheney -- especially in a House and Senate with majority opposition -- would say something far worse about this country, and have worse consequences, than trying and failing would.

We are the patriots in this fight. We, the people, are defending the Constitution of the United States of America -- still a legacy to the world and the future, and still our best defense against criminal rogues like Bush and Cheney.

That Constitution gives us a tool called "impeachment" to fight an overreaching, scofflaw executive more concerned about his political allies, his own hide, and his claim to act without constraint, than about the country or our rights. It's right to use this tool, we should use it, and I think indeed we must use it. Otherwise we essentially forfeit the Constitution as a dead letter -- something to be studied by historians, but no longer relevant to our country, our ideals, or ourselves.



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* 394 comments when I last checked, with most (at least early on) insisting on impeachment despite digby asking for alternatives.
** UPDATE, 7/9: Avedon Carol has also pointed out that Bill Clinton was never actually convicted of perjury, and that the single denial he made under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky went to his intent, not his acts; via the 2d link ("The politics of impeachment"), she provides a link to the sworn testimony involved. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:50:00 AM -- |