H-Town lefty blogger's luncheon

I'm under the weather again this week so I'm late in posting a wrap-up of our monthly get-together.

This month's soiree last Friday featured a few first-timers you may have heard of: Hubert Vo, Scott Hochberg, and Joe Jaworski.

Melissa Noriega (wife of Rick), Karen Loper, a longtime pol around these parts, and Katie Floyd from the Radnofsky campaign -- along with the usual online suspects -- made an appearance. Jim Dallas of BOR also showed up early and stayed late.

These are organized by Charles Kuffner, who also has a post today pointing out the shortfalls in the Chronic's political coverage. It must be getting embarrassing for the Leading Information Source to be scooped on a regular basis by us bloglodytes.

They link to us (well, me at least) on almost a weekly basis through this page, so I know they're reading. It would be nice to see them keep up with us once in awhile.

To honor Dr. King today

Here is some prescient advice he gave us nearly 40 years ago:

"We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered. A nation can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy."

That's from his speech entitled Beyond Vietnam, which he delivered in April of 1967. You can hear excerpts of other speeches in his own voice by clicking here (broadband and Flash necessary) and you may read the full transcript of Beyond Vietnam and hear additional excerpts of it here.

Another favorite (this one is a little unsettling in light of the current state of world affairs; spoken at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church also in 1967):

"Don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman for the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, 'You are too arrogant. If you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name.'"

If you have any favorite quotations of Dr. King, please post them in the comments.

MLK Day Parade in Houston is a long-running feud

Last week, the Harris County Democratic Party managed to negotiate itself into participating in today's Martin Luther King Day Parade in downtown Houston.

Here you can read about the terms of the "agreement". It would be important to note that without these terms, the HCDP would have been disallowed from participating.

Well, late yesterday, the Democrats were uninvited anyway.

It probably has nothing at all to do with the fractious rivalry that's been going on for ten years between competing supporters.

But it's a big stinking mess, nevertheless. And I hope we find out more about the backstory, so this dirty laundry can get cleaned soon.

Cheney: Katrina was "a distraction"

Don't you just hate it when your nation's citizens start inconveniently dying as a result of a natural disaster when you're trying to focus on killing the citizens of another country?

In an interview with U.S. News, Cheney said, "You do have to keep a sustained campaign going. There's no question about it. Last fall, obviously, there were a lot of other items on the agenda. We went through the whole exercise with Katrina and the hurricanes and disaster relief and so forth that was, I suppose, a bit of a distraction. But it is important to try to maintain public support for what we're doing out there."

Here's the Moneyshot Quote.

Arlen Specter thinks Bush should be impeached

He just won't come right out and say so. Of course, Arlen Specter also claims to be pro-choice, and has said he will vote for Scalito the Woman-Hater.

Here's what the senator from Pennsylvania said. I wonder if he really means it:

STEPHANOPOULOS: There was a lot of talk about that at the Alito hearings, and listening closely to you I certainly seem to take away that you believe the president does not have the right, does not have the inherent power under the Constitution to circumvent a constitutional law, and as far as you are concerned, the FISA law is constitutional, isn’t it?

SPECTER: Well, I started off by saying that he didn’t have the authority under the resolution authorizing the use of force. The president has to follow the Constitution. Where you have a law which is constitutional, like Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, there still may be collateral different powers in the president under wartime circumstances.

That’s a very knotty question that I’m not prepared to answer on a Sunday soundbite. But I do believe that it ought to be thoroughly examined. And when we were on the Patriot Act and found the disclosure of the surveillance, I immediately said the Judiciary Committee would hold hearings, and I talked to the attorney general, and we’re going to explore it in depth, George. You can count on that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, if the president did break the law or circumvent the law, what’s the remedy?

SPECTER: Well, the remedy could be a variety of things. A president — and I’m not suggesting remotely that there’s any basis, but you’re asking, really, theory, what’s the remedy? Impeachment is a remedy. After impeachment, you could have a criminal prosecution, but the principal remedy, George, under our society is to pay a political price.

To be clear, Specter did stammer a lot through that last bit.

"The President is not entitled to his nominee"

Bravo, georgia10:

The mantra that "a President is entitled to his nominee" will be repeated many times as Senators decide how to cast their votes. The premise stems from the notion that it is he who has a vested appointment power, and that the Senate should accord the President a high degree of deference when he makes he choice.

The question is this: Does this theory of entitlement prevail when the President has abused the trust of the American people?

Here is a president who has misled our nation into war, abrogated the laws duly enacted by Congress, and violated our constitutional and civil rights. He's drudged through scandal after scandal, but has yet to be held accountable. Where is Phase II of the pre-war intelligence investigation? Where is the outrage over the fact he nullified Congress' ban on torture? He violated his oath to protect the Constitution when he issued his royal edict to spy on us outside the law. Yet who will hold him responsible? A Republican Congress?

The president, exhibiting the theory of the unitary executive that Alito endorses, has snubbed the legislative and judicial branches of government and has declared himself above the law. And now, Senators will claim with straight face that he is entitled to his nominee?

The man is entitled to nothing from the Congress he has abused and misled. The man is entitled to nothing from the American people he has betrayed. It is us, the citizens of this country, who are entitled to the truth. And until we receive that truth, this nominee should not pass.

(standing and applauding)

Read all of it.

Update (1/15): This is strikingly blunt:

Mr. Bush, however, seems to see no limit to his imperial presidency. First, he issued a constitutionally ludicrous "signing statement" on the McCain bill. The message: Whatever Congress intended the law to say, he intended to ignore it on the pretext the commander in chief is above the law. That twisted reasoning is what led to the legalized torture policies, not to mention the domestic spying program.

Then Mr. Bush went after the judiciary, scrapping the Levin-Graham bargain. (...)

Both of the offensive theories at work here - that a president's intent in signing a bill trumps the intent of Congress in writing it, and that a president can claim power without restriction or supervision by the courts or Congress - are pet theories of Judge Samuel Alito, the man Mr. Bush chose to tilt the Supreme Court to the right.

The administration's behavior shows how high and immediate the stakes are in the Alito nomination, and how urgent it is for Congress to curtail Mr. Bush's expansion of power. Nothing in the national consensus to combat terrorism after 9/11 envisioned the unilateral rewriting of more than 200 years of tradition and law by one president embarked on an ideological crusade.

Samuel Alito as "Diamond Jim" Brady