How long has this been a 'Constitutional Crisis'?

The Bush administration came clean this week and told us that they had been spying on us.

As you may remember, they had previously denied doing so, then said it was only international calls, then finally admitted it was all calls. Your calls, my calls, the calls of politicians, of reporters, of government officials, tens of millions of landline and cellular phone calls and probably our e-mail communications as well. Purely between Americans. They're all stored by a government agency in an attempt to "mine" that information for, they tell us again, “potential” ties between you and the terrorists. But don't worry, the president says, the government would never misuse the data they've collected on us.

Three telecommunications companies – AT&T, which recently changed its name from SBC, and is headquartered in San Antonio; and Verizon and BellSouth – apparently allowed the NSA to monitor all calls passing through their lines. One company, Qwest, declined to participate. They thought that it might be illegal.

Republicans expressed as much shock and outrage as Democrats. Senator Dianne Feinstein said: “We are approaching a constitutional confrontation.”

Well, if the Washington politicians had been paying attention a few months ago, they could have heard David Van Os say that. In fact, David was calling it a “Consitutional Crisis” even before Al Gore was. And in February, David challenged incumbent attorney general and corporate shill Greg Abbott to protect Texans against illegal federal wiretapping:

“I think this is a matter where the people of Texas have a right to know your views. They have a right to know if their elected attorney general views such important issues the same way Alberto Gonzales and George Bush do, or if he will stand by their fundamental rights to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into their personal phone calls.”

The Attorney General is given broad power in the Texas Constitution to bring marauding corporations to heel. He can file a lawsuit on behalf of all Texans restraining their activities which are in violation of the law. And every legal expert agrees that wiretapping without a warrant is against the law.

So is there anything can you do to prevent your government from continuing to spy on you? Sure is. First, contact AT&T and Verizon and BellSouth if you’re their customer and tell them to stop sharing your information with the feds. Second, call Greg Abbott’s office and ask him when he intends to do his job and demand that the big phone companies stop breaking the law.

And third, you can vote in November for an Attorney General who will fight to protect your civil rights from a federal government and big companies who want to keep taking them away.

Full disclosure (for those who weren't already aware): I am the statewide coordinator for the Van Os campaign.

714 and 31 (26, actually)

Two examples of recent good reading on unrelated subjects:

In the hallowed company of Ruth and Aaron, Bonds is treated as the punchline to a joke, like the one in left field that said, "For Sale: Life-Sized Bobblehead. See Leftfield." Or the one in the upper deck with an enormous asterisk-marked head drawn over a small body that said, "Life Size. Shrink This." Or the faux Giants jerseys that say "Cheater" on the front and "Juiced" arched over a No. 25 on the back. Or the people dressed in giant cardboard juice boxes marked "100% Roids." Or the "Got Juice?'' signs. Or the skinny guy with the T-shirt that said "Barry With Pirates" while his buddy, dressed in an inflatable sumo costume, wore one that said "Barry With San Fran." Or the sign that simply said, "Fraud*.' On and on it goes, the majesty of history trumped by lowbrow humor.

"Cheater."

That simple sign may be the worst of it. An athlete being labeled a cheater is worse than being called soft or a loser or even a jerk. And yet that is the verdict on Bonds, a player once gifted with as great a package of all-around baseball skills the game had ever seen. And that, really, is why this tour toward history is so sad.

I think Barry ought to be in the HOF. After all, baseball has been rife with cheating from the beginning, from spitballs to corked bats. Gaylord Perry, who won Cy Youngs in both leagues, was never reticent in talking about his tobacco juice and emory boards and sandpaper.

But Barry will never get to the HOF because the writers who do the voting despise him, and not just for cheating but for his obnoxious attitude going back to when his hat size was still a 7 1/4.

Now then, about that other number:

(T)he rise of the immigration debate was the single worst thing, at the single worst moment, that could have happened to the GOP coalition. It is the San Andreas fault line between the business conservatives and the movement/fundie conservatives. When this issue came up, that fault line slipped, and we are still rocking and rolling from the aftershocks.

The business conservatives, of course, want an ocean of super-cheap labor they don't have to offer health care bennies to, so they wanted the Senate bill. The movement/fundie conservatives want a thousand-foot wall built around the country and every undocumented worker sent away in leg irons, and so they backed the Sensenbrenner bill in the House. These two positions are totally irreconcilable, and unutterably dangerous to the GOP.

The business conservatives provide the cash, so they are essential to the coalition. The movement/fundie conservatives provide the blood, sweat and fanatacism that has helped a minority party achieve near-total political dominance, so they are essential to the coalition. Now they are at each other's throats, and Bush's weirdly aerobic straddle on the issue pacified neither side.

There's more, including the NYT graphic which explains the numbers in the headline, but there's enough known to reveal the simple truth: the GOP can't make a move on immigration without screwing about 40% of its base. If they pick the rich side, then the fundie base stays home on Election Day or votes Libertarian. And the DC pols can't get off the crack -- err, corporate money.

But it still remains to be seen how it plays out in November.

For now, just pop some corn and watch the Republican Party crumble.

You better watch out. Fitzmas is nearly here.

MSNBC's David Schuster, as interviewed by Keith Olbermann and transcribed at Raw Story:

Olbermann: What are you gathering on these two main points. Is the decision by Mr. Fitzgerald coming soon, would it be an indictment?

Shuster: Well, Karl Rove's legal team has told me that they expect that a decision will come sometime in the next two weeks. And I am convinced that Karl Rove will, in fact, be indicted. And there are a couple of reasons why. First of all, you don't put somebody in front of a grand jury at the end of an investigation or for the fifth time, as Karl Rove testified a couple, a week and a half ago, unless you feel that's your only chance of avoiding indictment. So in other words, the burden starts with Karl Rove to stop the charges. Secondly, it's now been 13 days since Rove testified. After testifying for three and a half hours, prosecutors refused to give him any indication that he was clear. He has not gotten any indication since then. And the lawyers that I've spoken with outside of this case say that if Rove had gotten himself out of the jam, he would have heard something by now.

And then the third issue is something we've talked about before, and that is, in the Scooter Libby indictment, Karl Rove was identified as 'Official A.' It's the term that prosecutors use when they try to get around restrictions on naming somebody in an indictment. We've looked through the records of Patrick Fitzgerald from when he was prosecuting cases in New York and from when he's been US attorney in Chicago. And in every single investigation, whenever Fitzgerald has identified somebody as Official A, that person eventually gets indicted themselves, in every single investigation. Will Karl Rove defy history in this particular case? I suppose anything is possible when you are dealing with a White House official. But the lawyers that I've been speaking with who know this stuff say, don't bet on Karl Rove getting out of this.

I've got cards to mail, presents still to buy, I have to get tinsel and lights for the tree, decide on turkey or ham ...

Finally. A frame that fits my portrait of Jesus.

Or more specifically, the snapshot of the practice of American politics and religion.

From now on, as Andrew Sullivan has established and Phillip Martin has advanced, "Christians" will be replaced with Christianists and "Christianity" is discarded in favor of Christianism.

You're going to have click on the links to get the frontstory. Here's my summary: the new words most accurately describe the co-optation of selected religious tenets by (mostly -- well, virtually exclusively) the Republican Party and their various acolytes in order to advance their political agenda, but which betray the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Christianists, in short, are hypocrites, and I believe Jesus would have spit them out of his mouth.

Here's a few examples of what I'm talking about:

• Christianists like Bill Frist -- and his buddy James Dobson -- really don't give a cat's ass about domestic animals -- or poor people, for that matter.
• Christianism is Tom DeLay grinning through his mugshot, letting us "see Christ through him", while lobbyists pour champagne on his daughter in a hot tub.
• Christianists like Rick Perry go to church to sign a bill that outlaws marriage except between heterosexuals while our children go without the proper schoolbooks to pass the state-mandated tests to advance to the sixth grade.
• Christianism is when Greg Abbott argues before the United States Supreme Court that a monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state Capitol doesn't violate the First Amendment. And a majority of Justices agree.
• A small group of Christianists gathered just this past weekend in Pasadena to choose the man -- sorry, Dr. Sekula-Gibbs -- who will try to fill the golf shoes of The Hammer. The Seven District Twenty-Two Apostles, minus the Sugar Land mayor who was saved from the dead by prayer, dutifully answered their questions (.pdf).

Gee, I'm sure there's more examples of Christianism but I haven't even Googled yet.

Can you think of any?

Porter de Mayo

It wasn't the resignation I was hoping for, yet in a development mentioned here last week, The New York Daily News has a good summary of the GOP's latest scandal, this one involving hookers and Texas Hold 'Em and the now-former CIA director:

Porter Goss abruptly resigned (Friday) amid allegations that he and a top aide may have attended Watergate poker parties where bribes and prostitutes were provided to a corrupt congressman.

Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, the No. 3 official at the CIA, could soon be indicted in a widening FBI investigation of the parties thrown by defense contractor Brent Wilkes, named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the bribery conviction of former Rep. Randall (Duke) Cunningham, law enforcement sources said.

A CIA spokeswoman said Foggo went to the lavish weekly hospitality-suite parties at the Watergate and Westin Grand hotels but "just for poker."

Intelligence and law enforcement sources said solid evidence had yet to emerge that Goss also went to the parties, but Goss and Foggo share a fondness for poker and expensive cigars, and the FBI investigation was continuing.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA operative and a Bush administration critic, said Goss "had a relationship with Dusty and with Brent Wilkes that's now coming under greater scrutiny."

Most of the rest of the corporate media is tap-dancing around the salacious allegations, so we'll see if they intend to report the full story or gloss over it a la Jeff Gannon.

Why do you suppose prostitutes -- even male ones in the White House press corps -- don't seem to find any media traction in the new millenium? How is that "a blue dress and some DNA" -- as Goss indicated would be enough to launch an investigation (but not the felonious leaking of an undercover CIA agent to the press) -- could have attracted so much outrage just ten years ago? Were we -- well, the Republicans, anyway -- really that prudish then?

Is this just points on the scoreboard, or losing one's "mojo", as Josh Bolten pointed out? Or is it something more, such as the decline of our democratic republic?

How can it be that the man who is on the front line for our nation's security is so ethically compromised and the news is so slow to come out?

But then, how is it that a President who lied about WMDs in Iraq is joined in laughter by the press corps at their annual dinner when he portrays himself looking under his Oval Office desk for said weapons, but if a comedian likens his administration to the Hindenburg it's "not funny"?

And does this have anything remotely to do with the fact that the company that builds the machines that process our ATM transactions with an accurate receipt every single time cannot do the same for our ballots? And nobody reports the story?

Is our media just as broken and corrupt as the ruling party? You think they'll ever wake up and start doing their jobs and you know, save democracy and maybe the Constitutiton?

Or is it too late already?

Greg Abbott referees a catfight between Grandma and MoFo

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott took a break from the weighty responsibilities of protecting Texas consumers this week and provided a constitutional opinion on the catfight between the Governor and the Comptroller.

Specifically, on the legality of the investigation by Carole Strayhorn's office into the viability of Rick Perry's Texas Residential Construction Commission. Strayhorn had taken a look into the TRCC (pronounced 'trick'), called it a 'builder protection agency' and declared, "If it were up to me personally, I would blast this Texas Residential Construction Commission off the bureaucratic books."

Abbott said Strayhorn had no business investigating the TRCC unless Perry asked her to do so -- which he hadn't. Both grandstanding Republicans claimed that members of the Lege asked them to look into TRCC, and Strayhorn challenged Abbott to sue her: "(I)f the attorney general wants to take me to court, let's go," she said.

Texans already knew that the two Republicans running for Governor don't have anything more important to do than trade petty insults, but the real shocker is that our Attorney General has inserted himself in the political one-upsmanship. After all, it's not like the man who went to the United States Supreme Court to argue the case for a monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state Capitol has a political agenda or anything.

And that's when Abbott can be bothered to do anything at all on behalf of Texas consumers.

John Cobarruvias, President of HADD Texas (Homeowners Against Deficient Dwellings) said, "I find the Attorney General's opinion hollow at best. If his office had investigated the homebuilding industry when asked by consumers, the Commission wouldn't have been necessary, much less the Comptroller's investigation of it." Cobarruvias claims to have personally delivered complaints to the AG's office and was greeted with profound indifference.

Is anybody else -- such as you conservatives lurking -- fed up with this crap?

Six months to go before we get the chance to elect responsible representation in Austin.

This makes a lot of cents

This afternoon a handful of Texas Progressive Alliance bloggers got on a conference call with Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, who has proposed a summer-long gasoline tax holiday for Texas drivers.

Last week DallasBlog published his op-ed where he laid out the program:

HB 120 would impose a 90-day moratorium on the fuel taxes collected on every gallon of gasoline and diesel in Texas. At .20 cents a gallon, HB 120 takes $4.00 off your gas bill on a 20-gallon tank. That’s like getting 1 1/3 gallons of free gas. If you own more than one vehicle, your savings doubles.

The money -- around $700 million -- does not come from the state's budget surplus, nor does it short-change other highway projects. It comes from a projected increase in Federal Highway Adminstration funds, already approved but not earmarked, of $788.1 million (according to his website, GasTaxCut.com) .

This isn't a lot of money, and it's short-term relief for a long-term problem, but other than that I can't find fault with this idea. Go sign the petition if you agree.

Stirring the Mierda

llegal immigrants made their point Monday: Without them, Americans would pay higher prices and a lot of work wouldn't get done.

As nationwide demonstrations thinned the work force in businesses from meat-packing plants to construction sites to behind the counter at McDonald's, economists said there can be no dispute within the context of the contentious immigration issue that the group wields significant clout in the U.S. economy.

"If illegal immigration came to a standstill, it would disrupt the economy," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. "It would lead to higher prices for many goods and services, and some things literally would not get done. It would be a major adjustment for our economy, for sure."

This remains an issue that many Republicans (not the ones hiring the cheap labor, but the racists commenting in online forums) fail to comprehend.

This is a profound division between factions of the GOP: the so-called "country club Republicans" and the Southern, mostly fundamentalist conservatives. They continue to feed the hate, using the same tired labels and name-calling, but it's failing to find its purchase.

71% of Americans now believe the country is on the wrong track. (The link shows 69%, but Bob Schieffer just announced the new figure a moment ago.) That's the highest percentage since that poll began.

We only have to endure this for a few months more, and in November can begin the process of getting things turned around.

Nobody seems to want a hundred bucks

Well, this is too bad. They probably won't go through with it now. I was planning on sending my rebate check to my favorite Democrat:

The plan by Senate Republicans to mail out $100 checks to soothe taxpayers' misery about gas prices is drawing scorn from the very people it was intended to help.

Aides for several Republican senators reported a surge of calls and e-mail messages from constituents ridiculing the rebate as a paltry and transparent attempt to pander to voters in advance of the midterm elections in November.

"The conservatives think it is socialist bunk, and the liberals think it is conservative trickery," Don Stewart, a spokesman for Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said, noting the criticism came from across the ideological spectrum.

This is the first time I have seen Senator Box Turtle's office even acknowledge receiving phone calls or e-mail messages. What could be next; actually responding to them once in awhile?

John Kenneth Galbraith, 1908 - 2006

Nearly 40 years after writing "The Affluent Society," (economist John Kenneth) Galbraith updated it in 1996 as "The Good Society." In it, he said that his earlier concerns had only worsened: that if anything, America had become even more a "democracy of the fortunate," with the poor increasingly excluded from a fair place at the table.

Galbraith likely was distressed, as much as any of us, by the kudzu-like spread of the most obnoxious and appalling aspects of conservatism across the American political and social landscape.

A major influence on him was the caustic social commentary he found in (Thorstein) Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class." Mr. Galbraith called Veblen one of American history's most astute social scientists, but also acknowledged that he tended to be overcritical.

"I've thought to resist this tendency," Mr. Galbraith said, "but in other respects Veblen's influence on me has lasted long. One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read."

I'll pause for a moment while you acquaint (or re-acquaint) yourself with Veblen. He's worth a post all to himself, but I try to keep it light around here.

Galbraith's seminal work was written the year I was born:

"The Affluent Society" appeared in 1958, making Mr. Galbraith known around the world. In it, he depicted a consumer culture gone wild, rich in goods but poor in the social services that make for community. He argued that America had become so obsessed with overproducing consumer goods that it had increased the perils of both inflation and recession by creating an artificial demand for frivolous or useless products, by encouraging overextension of consumer credit and by emphasizing the private sector at the expense of the public sector. He declared that this obsession with products like the biggest and fastest automobile damaged the quality of life in America by creating "private opulence and public squalor."

Almost fifty years ago, and before that by Veblen 107 years ago. How far we have come.

And the call to arms:

"Let there be a coalition of the concerned," he urged. "The affluent would still be affluent, the comfortable still comfortable, but the poor would be part of the political system."

Rest in peace, Mr. Galbraith.

This Week in Felons

-- I've been remiss in following the trials of the two Enron scoundrels Skilling and Lay. You've got many sources who have been doing the yeoman's task, and I trust you're already aware that the two men have employed the Sergeant Schultz defense, which I believe will be a losing one.

Update (5/2/06): Houstonist summarizes Lay's bipolarity.

-- Karl Rove is on the verge of indictment for perjury. Will he resign if he is, or continue working to repair the GOP's political fortunes for November? I suppose Fitzo de Mayo sounds as good as Fitzmas.

-- Rush Limbaugh made an arrangement to avoid his drug charge. He smiled broadly for his mugshot, as did Tom DeLay. This appears to be an extraordinarily lax penalty: 'stay clean for a year and a half and we'll drop the charges', essentially. Does it seem as if the state of Florida has really lenient narcotics law enforcement -- or does this only apply to Republican addicts?

-- Finally (for the time being), the Republican lobbying mega-scandal seems to have lately taken a sexual turn. Who could the "one person who holds a powerful intelligence post" be?

Porter Goss, CIA director, whoremonger? What's that likely to mean for national security? If you recall, Goss (in refusing to investigate the Plame leak case) said, "Somebody sends me a blue dress and some DNA, I'll have an investigation." So I suppose we can anticipate a potential case made on the basis of hands-on physical evidence.

You know, photos, call logs, credit card transactions, that sort of thing.

Who cares about $3 gas? The Texans drafted WHO!?!

Bob McNair better hope Mario Williams is real good, real fast, or there will be blood in the streets of H-Town, and not over trivial matters such as immigration or the legislature failing to fund public education or even the exorbitant price of gasoline.

Osama ain't got nothin' on Casserly if this turns out bad.