Pardon the interruption

Waveflux needs a holiday, apparently. Not a lot to offer at the moment. I could tell from the recent subject imbalance here - political rants and not much else - that a break is called for. I will be taking an actual break from the day job starting this weekend, which I hope will recharge the batteries or refill the sails or whatever metaphor of rejuvenation seems suitable here. Same for the blog, I think. In the meantime…

Lauren at Feministe turned in an excellent piece on having been a teen parent - yet another pariah class in our culture of compassion - that touches on class and societal judgment.

Steve Clemons continues his peerless coverage of the John Bolton nomination. The news you’re not getting on Bolton from the networks or the dailies is all there at The Washington Note.

When critics are hailing the inevitable book and film on the seamy underside of the New York nightclub scene, you can say that you read the blog first - that is, Rob’s smartly-written Clublife.

If you’re a Missourian who hasn’t yet signed the Save the Katy Trail petition, do it today - unless, of course, you don’t mind that Matt Blunt has put the entire trail in danger to benefit his corporate patrons.

Okay, that’s enough. See you in a couple of days.

Jay Nixon moves to halt Matt Blunt’s bridge giveaway

Not so fast, Matt Blunt. The Missouri governor’s attempt to give away the rights to the Boonville bridge - a sweetheart deal for Union Pacific that would endanger the popular Katy Trail hike and bike route - has met an obstacle in the form of the state attorney general. As reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (link defunct), Jay Nixon has filed suit against the Department of Natural Resources:

Attorney General Jay Nixon sued the Department of Natural Resources on Thursday to try to stop the dismantling of an old Missouri River railroad bridge that historic preservationists hope could someday become part of the Katy Trail State Park.

The lawsuit contends the department had no authority to relinquish the state’s rights to Boonville bridge to Union Pacific Railroad Co. without getting specific approval from the Legislature.

It also contends the Missouri Constitution bars the state from giving its bridge interests to a private company without compensation. And Nixon claims that losing the rights to the bridge could open the entire 200-some-mile stretch of the Katy Trail biking and hiking path to legal challenges by private property owners.

If Nixon’s suit is successful, it stands to reason that Blunt would go to the General Assembly for approval to give the bridge away. It will be interesting to see if the Axe Gang - Blunt’s Republican allies in the Legislature - will back the governor. It’s one thing to give away state assets and endanger popular recreation facilities behind closed doors, and quite another to do so in the glare of public attention.

Fairly unbalanced, take two

Sooner or later, your biases betray you. Via Josh Marshall, Fox News natterer David Asman lets it slip while chatting with Trent Lott:

So, Senator, if we should have done it and if we had the votes to do it in the Senate — if you guys in the Republican Party did — then why did you need a compromise?

Surprising absolutely no one, of course.

Iraq: No exit for two hundred miles

George Bush’s “plan” for Iraq - insofar as he actually has one - seems best illustrated by the famous cartoon by Sidney Harris where two sections of a complicated mathematical formula are bridged by the hopeful phrase, “And then a miracle occurs.” Unfortunately for Iraq, America, and the world, Bush hasn’t been more explicit in step two of the equation. He and his administration sold the country one easy fix after another, and the war grinds on. Juan Cole warns today that, for a variety of reasons, America won’t be leaving Iraq anytime soon. The lowlights:

• The guerrillas have widespread popular support in the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq.

• The guerrillas have intelligence or military backgrounds and knowledge of weapons depot locations.
• The guerrillas are well-funded.
• The guerrillas are given tactical support by foreign jihadi fighters.
• There are too few US troops to fight the guerrillas, with no prospect of significantly increasing that number.
• The guerrillas know the lay of the land: clans and terrain and urban quarters. Plus they know Arabic in a country where Arabic is widely spoken. Plus they’re local Muslims in a Muslim country.
• The guerrillas are successfully, if slowly, fomenting civil war among Iraq’s ethnic communities.
• The American-trained Iraqi troops aren’t up to the job of quelling the insurgency, and won’t be for years.

There’s more, much more, at Cole’s post. Assembling a list of reasons why America probably won’t be able to leave Iraq until well after the president who started this war is out of office, is so troubling it’s understandable that the Bush administration and its supporters have resorted to vague cheerleading rather than blunt talk about the prospects for stability. But that doesn’t make it excusable. An honest assessment of Iraq is the least that George Bush owes the American public, which has given its sons and daughters for his war.

Voyager I approaches interstellar space; still no signs of WMD

Safe journey, brave little space probe.

Howard Dean on abortion: Credit where it’s due

Having taken the bat to Chairman HoDee yesterday, fairness demands that I give him props for a sensible take on the issue of abortion. The chairman, via Kevin Drum:

This is an issue about who gets to make up their minds: the politicians or the individual. Democrats are for the individual. We believe in individual rights. We believe in personal freedom and personal responsibility. And that debate is one that we didn’t win, because we kept being forced into the idea of defending the idea of abortion.

This fits precisely into the larger framework I advocated during the Terri Schiavo debacle: defending the sovereignty of the individual, the inherent right of individual citizens to make choices regarding reproduction and health care, end of life concerns, privacy issues. Government should tread lightly in such matters, if at all. And theocrat bullies like James Dobson don’t get a say at all.

People ask - sometimes despairingly - what does the Democratic Party stand for? Well, it had better stand for this - and had better start framing the message right now.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq

While the Senate has been tied up with Republican power plays, American soldiers keep dying in Iraq.

Eight American soldiers killed in Iraq

Insurgent attacks during the past 24 hours have killed eight U.S. soldiers in Iraq, the military said Tuesday.

Three soldiers died in a car bombing in central Baghdad on Tuesday and a fourth — who was manning an observation post — was killed by a drive-by gunman, Task Force Baghdad spokesman, Maj. Darryl Wright said.

Four other American soldiers were killed by a bomb on Monday, the military said. They were assigned to the 155th Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force.

The explosive “detonated near their vehicle” in fighting in Haswa, south of Baghdad.

The deaths bring the number of U.S. troops killed in the Iraq war to 1,643, according to U.S. military reports.

Juan Cole estimates that Monday alone saw forty-nine people - military and civilian - killed by car bombs and other attacks, with one hundred and thirty people injured.

In Talibiyah, in the poor Shiite Jamilah quarter of northeast Baghdad, guerrillas detonated an enormous bomb in front of the Haba’ibna ["Our Dear Friends"] eating complex, which had a restaurant, a cafe and a sweets shop. The explosion killed 10 and left 113 wounded. Some twenty-two automobiles were destroyed at the smoldering site. Police had for some time frequented the place, but the owners had recently asked them to stop coming, for fear that their presence might provoke such terrorism. I saw the footage on LBC, and it took a strong stomach to watch the wounded carried away. The bomb crater looked gigantic.

In Tuz Khurmatu south of Kirkuk, a suicide bomber killed 7 civilians and wounded 13 outside the governor’s mansion. Among the wounded was an official of the Kurdistan Patriotic Union.

In Samarra (an hour north of Baghdad), guerrillas set off two car bombs in front of the main gate to the US base, wounding 4 civilians and four Americans. A third man wearing a bomb belt blew himself up at the same site, but had been shot before he could get close enough to inflict casualties. Mortar shells also fell on the police station, killing 2 and wounding 21.

UPDATE: Make that nine American soldiers killed in Iraq in the last 24 hours. Sadly, the day’s not over yet.

No nukes, but inevitable fallout

By now everyone knows that the hands on the political nuclear clock have been pushed back to ten minutes to midnight. Those spoilsport centrists on both sides of the divide worked up a compromise to dismantle the Republican nuclear bomb that would have taken out the Senate as we know it. Kevin Drum says that Bush judicial nominees Owen, Brown, and Pryor will go forward and will certainly get in. He also says that Lindsay Graham (D-SC) apparently claimed that at least one of those three would be voted down on a bipartisan basis, but I haven’t seen that verified. Myers and Saad remain “subject to filibuster,” which means they’ll likely be thrown over the side. Two other nominees - Griffin and McKeague - haven’t been mentioned at all, which is very strange. As for the filibuster: The Democrats get to keep it…as long as they don’t use it…very often.

That about covers it, except for the shouting. There are a fair number of Dems lamenting the deal, but there seem to be even more GOPers gnashing their teeth and destroying their party membership cards and generally expressing their frustration on not being allowed to stomp Tokyo flat. And that doesn’t even include the various enraged and disappointed right-wing pundits. Or the sinister James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who is simply enraged that Bill Frist failed to deliver to the Christian right the entire judicial branch on a platter.

This Senate agreement represents a complete bailout and betrayal by a cabal of Republicans and a great victory for united Democrats. Only three of President Bush’s nominees will be given the courtesy of an up-or-down vote, and it’s business as usual for all the rest. The rules that blocked conservative nominees remain in effect, and nothing of significance has changed. Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Antonin Scalia, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist would never have served on the U. S. Supreme Court if this agreement had been in place during their confirmations. The unconstitutional filibuster survives in the arsenal of Senate liberals.

With so many on the Right bitter about the outcome, surely it can’t be all bad.

As for Majority Leader Bill Frist…well, he’s fristed, all right. He’ll be perceived as having failed to deliver the good with a clear majority ostensibly under his control. He may still run for president, but you can point to last night as the point at which he lost his party’s nomination.

The fact is that this compromise doesn’t solve the nuclear option problem so much as it delays it. When Bush sends up his first theocrat-approved Supreme nominee, some Democrat is likely to launch a filibuster. If that act is judged by enough Republicans to violate the “extraordinary circumstances” clause of the compromise, we’re right back where we started. That threat will hang like Damocles’ fabled sword over Senate Democrats at least until 2006, and likely longer. But if success can be measured in terms of blocking a bully of a political party from exercising untrammelled power - and making him feel bad about it in the process - then this is a fair outcome for the Democrats. As Josh Marshall puts it:

Having said all that, the whole tenor of the Republican ultras on the Hill today is to demand unimpeded power, to push past conventions and limits, to go for everything. And here they got turned back. A sensible Republican party might be satisfied to have gotten three of its nominees — numerically speaking, they did fairly well. But this whole enterprise was based on wanting it all, on not accepting limits, on rejecting government by even a modicum of consensus with a sizeable minority party. They got stopped short. And the senate Republican leadership is undermined.

So this isn’t a pleasant compromise. But precisely because the Republicans — or their leading players — are absolutists in a way the Democrats are not, I think this compromise will batter them more than it will the minority party, which is after all a minority party which nonetheless managed to emerge from this having fought the stronger force to something like a draw.

I was spoiling for a fight as much as anyone. But there’ll be other opportunities - better ones, perhaps - for that.

UPDATE: Kos lays out the bare facts for those on the left calling the compromise a sellout. I think he’s largely right.

There are those who think any compromise is a sign of weakness, and there’s little that can be said to change their mind.

But here are the plain, unspun facts:

• Democrats hold 44 seats in the 100 seat Senate. One independent sides with the Republicans, giving Dems a 10-seat deficit.

• Reid had 49 votes. He needed 51 to defeat Frist’s nuclear option.
• Reid needed at least two of four undecided Republicans.
• Had Reid come up short, the filibuster would be dead in judicial matters.
• If the filibuster was dead, Bush would’ve been able to put anyone on the Supreme Court. Anyone.
• Radical Christian Rightist James Dobson is demanding the right to choose the next Supreme Court nominee.
• Dobson’s biggest enemy is the filibuster. Hence, he forced Frist to engage in the nuclear option.
• Because of the deal, Dobson can’t choose the next Supreme Court justice. Bush’s choice, if too extreme, faces the prospect of a filibuster.

In order to save face, Republicans have gotten up or down votes on most of the handful of judges who are currently being filibustered. It’s a price, but a relatively small one to pay to protect the filibuster during the next Supreme Court battle.

Given that we have a 10-seat deficit in the Senate, that’s no small feat.

HoDee, HoDee, ho

I missed Howard Dean’s latest turn on Tim Russert’s show yesterday. From what I’ve read of it, I’m glad I did - otherwise, I’d probably be sayin’ stuff like this:

Co-opting extremist rhetoric for the sake of grabbing headlines is a game that panders to the very same class of citizen that the Republican Party panders to: the most politically childish among us, those for whom all citizens exist in the abstract, and those in political disagreement should simply be locked up without trial. Sure, DeLay is likely to deserve jail time, but if this kind of dangerous rhetoric is representative of the “new” Democratic Party, I doubt it will be very long before Howard Dean’s fabled Democratic Wing starts murmuring about finding either a new head–or a new home.

Sing it, sister.

Those worries about Dean that I had before? Still got ‘em.

One talking point, gift-wrapped

From mcjoan at DKos:

Today brings the first whispers of “what if?” from the far right in this debate. Today’s Roll Call (sorry, I can’t provide the link as it’s behind my Lexis/Nexis log in) features an article about how this fight will shape the future of the Republican party.

Buried at the bottom of the story is this extremely intriguing nugget:

A senior Senate Republican aide said Frist needs to spend the next 24 hours deciding if it is worth it personally to move forward with a vote even if he knows it will fail.

“If you go for this and lose, you have to say, ‘What is the political fallout,’” said the aide to a conservative Senator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Does it substantiate the Democrats’ [argument] that we were overreaching and our own moderates proved it?”

Now who would ever believe that?

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