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Yesterday, all 29 cargo ports on the West Coast were shut down, although it wasn't terrorism that did it. It was the longshoremen, in a one-day strike. Media coverage, beyond some local newspapers, was almost completely non-existent.
Back in the dim and distant past of this presidential campaign (i.e., February), I wrote a pre-debate column listing questions I would like to hear both Democratic candidates answer. Today's column is a revision of this original. Many of the questions I have are the same, for which I apologize. I don't normally recycle my own material in this fashion, but unfortunately these questions remain largely unanswered, almost two months after the last debate.
Since the campaigns of both Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama have seemingly taken my advice earlier this week, and are both concentrating on attacking Senator John McCain rather than each other, we have the luxury of getting away from the campaign trail this week and focusing on a few other things -- the biggest of which is the upcoming testimony before Congress by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker on the situation in Iraq. More on that in a moment.
While much attention has been paid to the newly-released 81-page memo written by John Yoo which defines torturing prisoners in U.S. custody as "self-defense," within the memo is reference to another secret Yoo memo, one with even further-reaching consequences for the Constitution. According to Yoo (and the Bush administration in general), because we're "at war," the United States military is allowed to completely ignore the Fourth Amendment -- on U.S. soil.
We haven't done a contest here in a while, so I'm going to open the betting window today on the outcome of the Democratic race. To play, just post a comment with the date and the outcome you predict will happen.
As Robert Anton Wilson pointed out (or William S. Burroughs, if you prefer), hexagram 23 of the I Ching is "breaking apart." Anyone who subscribes to his "23 enigma" theory will note that this is the twenty-third installment of this column. If you throw hexagram 23, the I Ching cautions: "the roof is shattered, the house collapses." I leave you, dear reader, to draw your own conclusions as to how this relates to Democratic politics for this particular week.
...The New York Times has a piece this week on exactly why letting the government powers that stretch the Fourth Amendment beyond recognition is always a bad idea -- because what is introduced as "emergency, extraordinary" powers always devolves in the blink of an eye into just a standard tool for law enforcement (to use for whatever reason they see fit). National Security Letters (or, in the original Louis XVI French, lettres de cachet) are an outright insult to the Constitution and should be stopped. I'm still waiting for a hard promise from either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama that this practice will end, on Day One. Or for that matter, a speech in the Senate right now from either of them. They're running to be leader of our country, so how about showing some leadership when it counts?
Happy Leap Day! Because we are given an extra day this year, I would like to spend it in a good old fashioned Bush-bash. Maybe it's because everyone's focused on the election, or maybe the entire country just doesn't want to think about President Bush anymore, but I feel that he hasn't been getting the attention he deserves of late. And what better way to spend the extra day we get this leap year?
A strange thing is going on in the flow of money into Washington politicians' coffers these days -- most of it is going to the Democrats. While Democrats and Republicans alike have noticed this effect (to their respective joy and horror), nobody ever points out that the system itself is designed around a fundamentally flawed principle: positive feedback. This may be part of the inherent nature of the system, meaning any proposals to fix it are going to be a radical re-thinking of the whole campaign donation system. But the process itself needs more attention, I think.
Because watching a televised debate is really the only chance most voters have to see the candidates answer questions and have to think on their feet in a live format. Which means that the more debates that happen, the more people get to see the candidates. And that is indeed a good thing, because it informs the electorate about the candidates to a certain degree.