You know, when liberal talk radio hosts make sweeping statements about Republicans, they better watch out... Just beat the crap out of them. If you can do it with a keyboard, fine. If you need to do it with a sword, fine. If you need to do it with the sword, that's ok, too. You know it's said that the pen is mightier than the sword... that's fine. Just cut off their heads and piss down their necks. Maybe drive stakes in their hearts as well... after all, it's the only way to be sure.

House Republicans rejected an effort Tuesday to name a post office in Berkeley after longtime Berkeley Councilwoman Maudelle Shirek after a conservative lawmaker questioned whether the 94-year-old activist represents American values.

Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, has been trying for more than two years to name the city's main post office on Allston Way for Shirek, a civil rights leader and peace activist who served on the Berkeley City Council for 20 years.

But House Republicans have sought to block the effort, mostly through a whisper campaign about her reported past ties to communist leaders and left-wing causes. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, objected Tuesday to Lee's proposal and rallied Republicans to defeat the measure in an unusual roll call vote.

Lee, who said Shirek helped inspire her to run for elected office, was furious after the House defeated her measure on a mostly party line vote of 215 to 190. The measure needed two-thirds support for passage.

[ . . . ]

The decisions to name post offices and federal courthouses are so routine in Congress that they typically are approved by a voice vote that signals unanimous consent. But Lee's bid to name the post office in Berkeley for Shirek has been controversial from the start.

In March, a group of California Republicans blocked Lee's measure by refusing to co-sponsor it. The House Government Reform Committee generally will not move a bill to rename a federal building unless all the state's members agree to the request.

Mr. Speaker, just to make a couple of gentle points, the effort has been, at least on the record, as not, I do not want to say fighting against injustice, but a record of fighting against justice, particularly in the case of the effort to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. I think most of us know about that particular case. And I am concerned about a role model. I am concerned about young people a generation or two from now. When they go back by that post office in Berkeley and look at the name on the post office, they are going to ask what were the principles that brought this about? And I contend that those principles would be running contrary to American values.

This the equivalent of New York responding to the attacks on the World Trade Center by insisting upon a federally financed stadium in Brooklyn.

The Louisiana delegation has apparently devoted little thought to the root causes of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. New Orleans was flooded not because the Army Corps of Engineers had insufficient money to build flood protections, but because its money was allocated by a system of political patronage. The smart response would be to insist that, in the future, no Corps money be wasted on unworthy projects, but the Louisiana bill instead creates a mechanism by which cost-benefit analysis can be avoided. Equally, Katrina was devastating because ill-conceived projects have drained coastal wetlands and caused their erosion, destroying a natural buffer between hurricanes and human settlements. The smart response would be to insist that future infrastructure projects be subject to careful environmental review. But the Louisiana delegation's bill would suspend the environmental review process. Rather than grappling with the lessons of Katrina, Louisiana's representatives are demanding an astonishing $40 billion worth of Corps of Engineers projects in their state. That is 16 times more than the Corps says it would need to protect New Orleans from a Category 5 hurricane.

To speak once again of the defector issue, the government clearly opposes organized defections. For the people in the North to live their lives in the North with their families is necessary both for individuals and for co-existence and co-prosperity. The policies of reconciliation and cooperation call for humanitarian aid to the North along with strengthening of economic cooperation, and continuous pursuit of North Korea's participation in the international community.

North Korean State Safety & Security Agency personnel welcomed her [Park] back [after a first, unsuccessful attempt] by poking her frostbitten feet with a rusty iron skewer and mercilessly stamping on them with their boots. Her feet began to discharge bloody pus. Security personnel kept up the torture, though, telling her that only if her legs rotted away to the thigh would she be unable to flee to the South. This apparently made Park even more determined to get out. A month later, she was freed, and in September 2004, she fled across the border to China again.

Starving and with a pair of crutches, she made it to China. When she met her son, he hardly recognized her, her face mashed from the beatings and her body reduced to skin and bones. In February, she underwent surgery in China to amputate her feet. In June, she left Changchun again for Manzhouli to take the train to Mongolia, but when help disappeared following a strengthened Chinese crackdown on North Korean defectors from May, she had to change her plans.

[ . . . ]

In a letter to the Citizen’s Coalition for Human Rights of Abductees and North Korean Refugees, Park said, "The screams I cried and my moaning was not mine, but the screams and moans of our parents and brethren currently living in the North… Please pray so that they may come to South Korea."

Some say that the President is entitled to deference from the Senate in nominating individuals to high office. I agree that such deference is appropriate in the case of executive branch nominees such as Cabinet officers. With some important exceptions, the President may generally choose his own advisors.

In contrast, the President is not entitled to very much deference in staffing the third branch of government, the judiciary. The Constitution envisions that the President and the Senate will work together to appoint and confirm federal judges. This is a shared constitutional duty.

[emphasis added]

But might not his nomination be overruled? I grant it might, yet this could only be to make place for another nomination by himself. The person ultimately appointed must be the object of his preference, though perhaps not in the first degree. It is also not very probable that his nomination would often be overruled. The Senate could not be tempted, by the preference they might feel to another, to reject the one proposed; because they could not assure themselves, that the person they might wish would be brought forward by a second or by any subsequent nomination. They could not even be certain, that a future nomination would present a candidate in any degree more acceptable to them; and as their dissent might cast a kind of stigma upon the individual rejected, and might have the appearance of a reflection upon the judgment of the chief magistrate, it is not likely that their sanction would often be refused, where there were not special and strong reasons for the refusal.

To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. In addition to this, it would be an efficacious source of stability in the administration.

Upon a comparison of the plan for the appointment of the officers of the proposed government with that which is established by the constitution of this State, a decided preference must be given to the former. In that plan the power of nomination is unequivocally vested in the Executive. And as there would be a necessity for submitting each nomination to the judgment of an entire branch of the legislature, the circumstances attending an appointment, from the mode of conducting it, would naturally become matters of notoriety; and the public would be at no loss to determine what part had been performed by the different actors. The blame of a bad nomination would fall upon the President singly and absolutely. The censure of rejecting a good one would lie entirely at the door of the Senate; aggravated by the consideration of their having counteracted the good intentions of the Executive. If an ill appointment should be made, the Executive for nominating, and the Senate for approving, would participate, though in different degrees, in the opprobrium and disgrace.

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan said Tuesday she was hurt slightly in a scuffle that erupted when police broke up a rally as she was at the microphone.

[ . . . ]

"I was speaking and someone grabbed my backpack and pulled me back pretty roughly," Sheehan said, describing the scene at Manhattan's Union Square on Monday. "I was shoved around."

Sheehan, the grieving mother whose vigil near President Bush's Texas ranch sparked anti-war protests around the country, said [she] wasn't roughed up by police, but was jostled when officers broke up the rally and arrested organizer Paul Zulkowitz.

"I think their use of force was pretty excessive for someone that didn't have a permit," Sheehan said.

[emphasis added]

This WaPo article provides a fair overview of just some of the costs of Katrina. Apparently, Rove Bush has decided to throw money at the problem hand over fist, in an attempt to deflect criticism over his administration's unforgivable bungling in the most critical days after the storm. But the last sentences of the article are so spectacularly representative of the entire new-conservative movement that they really stand as a monument to the whole disaster:

To reach $62 billion in savings, Cato Institute analysts Chris Edwards and Stephen Slivinski have proposed cutting NASA in half, slashing energy research and subsidies just as Congress is gearing up to increase them in the face of soaring gasoline prices, cutting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' budget by $4.6 billion after its levees failed to protect New Orleans, and eliminating $4.2 billion in homeland security grants while lawmakers are debating the nation's lack of preparedness.

A younger me would have marveled at the level of sheer square-headed poindexterism required to propose that, in order to finance the reconstruction of New Orleans... we further cut funding for the levees.

Since Katrina struck, Congress has already spent $62.3 billion, dwarfing the inflation-adjusted $17.8 billion that Congress spent on hurricanes Andrew, Iniki and Omar, which struck in 1992, and the $15.2 billion emergency appropriation for the Northridge, Calif., earthquake of 1994. The entire Persian Gulf War of 1991 cost less than $83 billion in today's dollars.

Against calls to trim spending elsewhere to accommodate the emergency, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) did little to close those floodgates when he suggested this week that the Republican-controlled Congress had already trimmed all the fat from federal spending. "My answer to those that want to offset the spending is 'Sure, bring me the offsets,' " he said. "I will be glad to do it, but no one is able to come up with any yet."

SPECTER: [ . . . ] Do you think that the cases which have followed Roe fall into the category of a "super" stare decisis designation?

[a few moments later...]


And I don't want to coin any phrases on super-precedents -- we'll leave that to the Supreme Court -- but would you think that Roe might be a super-duper precedent in light of...

(LAUGHTER)

... in light of 38 occasions to overrule it?

In my view, over the past 60 or 70 years, maybe longer, three legs have sustained our constitutional rights: the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantees of equal protection and substantive due process; the right to privacy; and a broad delegation of authority to Congress to pass legislation -- usually under the commerce clause -- necessary to protect our nation's security, the environment, Americans' health and workers' civil rights.