"Mimsy" Only Half Covers It!
If only a departure from the humdrum reality-based world could be counted on to be as entertaining and relatively pain-free as a mirror-passage or tumble down a rabbit-hole. The ride we've been abducted on by these me-first, greed-uber-alles warmongers just doesn't have that dreamy, memorable quality for me.
But Senator Feingold deserves major kudos for making the censure hearing come to pass today. I've not had a chance to thoroughly comb the proceedings, but what I have seen confirms for me that the call for a censure hearing was a great move. I'm wholly unbiased about this. The President has de facto admitted he has been breaking the law. What's to debate? Check your partisanship at the door!
From the NY Times:
President Bush's once-secret surveillance program sparked a bitter debate today before the Senate Judiciary Committee over what kind of president George W. Bush has become and how he stands in history.
The committee met to consider a resolution by one of its members, Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, to censure the president over the surveillance program. The resolution was not voted on and is almost surely going nowhere, but it still had the power to ignite feelings.
Under Mr. Bush's theory of government, Mr. Feingold said, "we no longer have a constitutional system consisting of three co-equal branches of government. We have a monarchy."
Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the panel's ranking Democrat who was congratulated on his 66th birthday today in a rare moment of bipartisan friendliness, sided with Mr. Feingold, although stopping short of saying he would vote for censure.
The Congressional resolution of force passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, makes no mention of surveillance, Mr. Leahy said, yet "the administration claims now that Congress unconsciously authorized warrantless wiretaps."
"This is 'Alice in Wonderland' gone amok," Mr. Leahy said. "It is not what we in Congress said, and it certainly was not what we in Congress intended."
But Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said Mr. Feingold's move was "completely without merit," and he spoke contemptuously of one witness, John Dean of Watergate fame, as "a convicted felon" bent on publicizing his books.
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I can't resist noting that there does seem to be a mote-in-eye glass-house factor here for Senator Cornyn, as from what I recall he is a merely not-yet-indicted close chum of DeLay and possibly Abramoff, a swine from the same cloth one could speculate. Somewhere down the pike one could fantasize that he and Mr. Dean will make up over amusing shared incarceration annecdotes. I wonder how his negotiations with publishers are coming along . . .
And then, filed here under You Can Learn a Lot of Things From the Flowers, there's this piece, inevitably misting vision briefly for we sentimental slobs:
The roses kept coming - and coming - and coming - to the Hearst Newspapers office in downtown Washington on Thursday, until they filled a large conference room to overflowing.
By the time the Federal Express delivery was complete, there were 108 dozen roses, nearly 1,300 in every color. They were the result of an e-mail campaign to show support for Hearst columnist Helen Thomas after she grilled President Bush about his Iraq policy at last week's White House news conference.
The campaign was the brainchild of Clarity Sanderson, a 31-year-old Democratic activist from Sandy, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City, who was motivated by the sharp exchange between Thomas and Bush, and by an op-ed article Thomas wrote about the exchange in the Salt Lake Tribune.
"Those two things set me off," Sanderson said in a telephone interview Friday.
Sanderson, a work-at-home web designer and mother of two who is co-chairwoman of the Utah Democratic Progressive Caucus, said she saw a note on the website democraticunderground.com suggesting that people e-mail Thomas to thank her for asking Bush "the questions all Americans want answered about Iraq."
"I thought, 'Let's take it a step farther," she said, and sent an e-mail asking people to donate to her Pay Pal account to send roses to Thomas.
That was last Friday. By Monday she'd received more than $2,200. She ordered the roses and 100 glass vases from an online floral service in San Francisco, Organic Bouquet, and they were delivered Thursday.
Thomas, the 85-year-old veteran White House journalist whose outspoken criticism of the Bush administration has drawn much hate mail from Bush supporters in recent years, said Friday that she was overwhelmed by the avalanche of roses.
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But Senator Feingold deserves major kudos for making the censure hearing come to pass today. I've not had a chance to thoroughly comb the proceedings, but what I have seen confirms for me that the call for a censure hearing was a great move. I'm wholly unbiased about this. The President has de facto admitted he has been breaking the law. What's to debate? Check your partisanship at the door!
From the NY Times:
President Bush's once-secret surveillance program sparked a bitter debate today before the Senate Judiciary Committee over what kind of president George W. Bush has become and how he stands in history.
The committee met to consider a resolution by one of its members, Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, to censure the president over the surveillance program. The resolution was not voted on and is almost surely going nowhere, but it still had the power to ignite feelings.
Under Mr. Bush's theory of government, Mr. Feingold said, "we no longer have a constitutional system consisting of three co-equal branches of government. We have a monarchy."
Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the panel's ranking Democrat who was congratulated on his 66th birthday today in a rare moment of bipartisan friendliness, sided with Mr. Feingold, although stopping short of saying he would vote for censure.
The Congressional resolution of force passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, makes no mention of surveillance, Mr. Leahy said, yet "the administration claims now that Congress unconsciously authorized warrantless wiretaps."
"This is 'Alice in Wonderland' gone amok," Mr. Leahy said. "It is not what we in Congress said, and it certainly was not what we in Congress intended."
But Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said Mr. Feingold's move was "completely without merit," and he spoke contemptuously of one witness, John Dean of Watergate fame, as "a convicted felon" bent on publicizing his books.
[clip]
I can't resist noting that there does seem to be a mote-in-eye glass-house factor here for Senator Cornyn, as from what I recall he is a merely not-yet-indicted close chum of DeLay and possibly Abramoff, a swine from the same cloth one could speculate. Somewhere down the pike one could fantasize that he and Mr. Dean will make up over amusing shared incarceration annecdotes. I wonder how his negotiations with publishers are coming along . . .
And then, filed here under You Can Learn a Lot of Things From the Flowers, there's this piece, inevitably misting vision briefly for we sentimental slobs:
The roses kept coming - and coming - and coming - to the Hearst Newspapers office in downtown Washington on Thursday, until they filled a large conference room to overflowing.
By the time the Federal Express delivery was complete, there were 108 dozen roses, nearly 1,300 in every color. They were the result of an e-mail campaign to show support for Hearst columnist Helen Thomas after she grilled President Bush about his Iraq policy at last week's White House news conference.
The campaign was the brainchild of Clarity Sanderson, a 31-year-old Democratic activist from Sandy, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City, who was motivated by the sharp exchange between Thomas and Bush, and by an op-ed article Thomas wrote about the exchange in the Salt Lake Tribune.
"Those two things set me off," Sanderson said in a telephone interview Friday.
Sanderson, a work-at-home web designer and mother of two who is co-chairwoman of the Utah Democratic Progressive Caucus, said she saw a note on the website democraticunderground.com suggesting that people e-mail Thomas to thank her for asking Bush "the questions all Americans want answered about Iraq."
"I thought, 'Let's take it a step farther," she said, and sent an e-mail asking people to donate to her Pay Pal account to send roses to Thomas.
That was last Friday. By Monday she'd received more than $2,200. She ordered the roses and 100 glass vases from an online floral service in San Francisco, Organic Bouquet, and they were delivered Thursday.
Thomas, the 85-year-old veteran White House journalist whose outspoken criticism of the Bush administration has drawn much hate mail from Bush supporters in recent years, said Friday that she was overwhelmed by the avalanche of roses.
[clip]
posted by Sir Gumbo at 10:53 PM
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