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I just heard about this via e-mail a few minutes ago:

An unusual coalition of antiwar Democrats and angry Republicans in the House today torpedoed a $162.5 billion proposal to continue funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into next year, eliminating, for now, the one part of the controversial bill that had seemed certain to pass.

Instead, House members voted to demand troop withdrawals from Iraq, force the Iraqi government to shoulder more war costs and greatly expand the education benefits for returning veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflict.

The surprise on war-funding left antiwar activists on and off Capitol Hill exultant and Democratic leaders baffled. House leaders had broken the war-funding bill into three separate measures, the first to fund the wars, the second to impose strict military policy measures opposed by President Bush, and the third to fund domestic priorities, including expanded education benefits and flood control work around New Orleans.

But that legislative legerdemain became the plan’s undoing. Democratic leaders knew that many members of their caucus, who have vowed not to approve another penny for the Iraq war, would reject the supplemental appropriation for the conflicts, but they expected Republicans to push it through. [Utterly despicable. —R.G.] Instead, 131 House Republicans voted present on the measure, incensed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and a few of her lieutenants had drafted the war bill largely in secret.

[…]

The House actions were a dream come true for the antiwar movement.

It is time now for Americans to be heard and for this Congress to move forward with the safe redeployment of our troops, exulted Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) who called on the House to use the $162.5 billion in war funds for domestic priorities.

For the first time ever, the U.S. House has now taken decisive action to bring this war to a close, declared Alan Charney, program director of the antiwar group USAction.

When the Senate takes up the bill, its version will include war funding, but prescriptions on troop withdrawals and torture will probably fall to a GOP filibuster.

—Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post (2008-05-16): War Funding Bill Stalls in House

I suppose what’s most likely is that the funding will be re-added in conference committee, or a new emergency funding bill will be thrown together while the party whips are lashed extra-hard and the warhawk Republicans kiss and make up with the doughface Democratic leadership. But there is a glimmer of hope today that there wasn’t yesterday, shining through the cracks in the both the War Party coalition (of leadership Democrats and warhawk Republicans), and in the ruling majority. I don’t know whether this is just a stumble, or the beginning of a real fall, for the bloody-handed, doughfaced Democratic leadership. I’m too cautious to expect a fall, but I do hold out a little hope. And when they do fall, you can expect them to fall fast and hard. Stay tuned on this one.

See also:

• GT 2008-05-13: Gosh that’s tough
• GT 2008-03-25: And now they bring up you.
• GT 2008-02-17: In ten words or fewer: brass tacks edition
• GT 2007-12-16: Reformist overtures

TPM.

How about some "straight talk" about this? I'd like to know what John McCain is about here.

Over in Washington, D.C., the usual bellowing blowhard brigade are bickering over what set of orders to give to airlines and airports about how best to run their own businesses. Here’s a little item that I noticed in the midst of it, which it may be interesting to consider in light of what I said the other day about cops and prison guards coming in many shapes and sizes.

I want the American people to understand this, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said at a news conference after the vote. The next time they’re stranded on an airplane and they’re wondering why they can’t get off, or why they don’t have food or water after four hours sitting there, it’s frankly because of Republican obstructionism.

No, it’s not.

Boxer sponsored a provision in the bill that would have required airlines to provide food, drinking water, cabin ventilation, toilet facilities and access to medical treatment for passengers on planes stuck on the ground for hours.

—James Hohmann, Los Angeles Times (2008-05-07): Aviation safety bill stalls in the Senate

Hey, I’ve got an idea.

Rather than trying to pass a new law requiring airlines to provide better prison conditions for passengers forced to stay on a plane while it’s grounded for hours, why not let people get off the damn plane while they wait?

If I’m in a restaurant for hours without getting any service, I can get up and leave, and get my dinner somewhere else. If I’m waiting for my car to be repaired and it’s taking too long, and the coffee is bad and the television is blaring Judge Judy (as it always is), I can get up and walk down the street or hop on a bus to go somewhere until my car is ready. If I’m on a bus and the bus breaks down and another bus won’t arrive for an hour, I can get out and walk or call a taxi. I don’t have to worry about angry fellow customers, or bad ventilation, or no food and water, or my medical conditions, or overflowing latrines, because, in any place of business except for those that operate under a special license from the government and its National Security apparatus, I am free to just turn around and walk away, if, when, and for as long as I’m tired of being there, without being locked in, without being threatened, without being tasered, and without being arrested.

But when a federally-licensed flight crew seals the doors of an airplane, even if you are sitting on the ground for hours, you are legally their captives and it is (as they will very quickly tell you as soon as they want to make you sit down and shut up) a federal crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison to interfere with the performance of their duties, which air marshals, the FBI, federal prosecutors and federal courts will happily interpret as meaning absolutely any disobedience to the the arbitrary orders of your smiling, uniformed captors.

If you don’t want people to face unbearable conditions on grounded airplanes, you don’t need to pass more laws and regulations to make their captivity less obnoxious. You just need to repeal an existing law and leave people free to go somewhere else when they don’t want to stay on the plane anymore. If you make flight crews and airport officials treat a grounded airplane as a prison, you shouldn’t act all surprised when passengers end up getting treated like prisoners. The obvious solution is to open the gates and break the chains.

See also:

• Austro-Athenian Empire 2007-01-16: F.—I.W.
• GT 2004-06-09: Airport! 2004

Did you know that your marriage license is a property title to your spouse’s body and affections? Just ask Jake Knotts, conservative Republican and arbitrary legislator over the state of South Carolina:

COLUMBIA — Men and women who seduce married people could be sued by jilted spouses under a proposal that won initial approval from S.C. lawmakers Thursday.

You know, we protect our automobiles. We protect our homes. There’s laws to protect everything, and we just need laws to protect the family, said the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Jake Knotts.

—Jim Davenport, Myrtle Beach Sun Times (2008-04-18): Bill aims at marriage interlopers

Here’s where the bill is at:

The S.C. bill says someone can recover unspecified damages if they prove wrongful conduct between their spouse and the defendant during their marriage and that the defendant caused them loss of affection or consortium of their spouse.

The bill was approved by a Senate subcommittee on the heels of a study this week that found divorce and out-of-wedlock births cost S.C. taxpayers $469 million each year and $112 billion overall for U.S. taxpayers. The study was done by groups that advocate more government action to bolster marriages.

The chairman of the subcommittee said failed marriages are damaging society and there should be repercussions for interlopers in marriages.

Whatever we can do to strengthen the bonds of matrimony, we ought to try, said Sen. Larry Martin, R-Pickens.

—Jim Davenport, Myrtle Beach Sun Times (2008-04-18): Bill aims at marriage interlopers

You might have thought that the best way to strengthen a marriage is to be kind and respectful to each other, to talk things out that need to be talked out, and generally to treat your spouse like a free and equal human being rather than as one of your precious possessions. You might also have thought that a husband or wife remains her own person after the wedding, and can do what she will, even if she makes choices that are foolish, hurtful or wrong, because her spouse has no enforceable claim on anything more than she freely gives of herself. But Knotts, Martin, and their colleagues think you ought to be able to call out the force of the State in order to punish interlopers, if you don’t want other people touching your things.

I’ve heard no word yet whether or not the South Carolina senators are considering an amendment to the criminal code for branding cheaters with a scarlet A.

On This Week, Republican candidate John McCain defends his flip-flop on the Bush tax cuts: He opposed them because they weren't combined with spending cuts.

But he would push through his own tax cuts, even without spending cuts.

Straight talk? Ha!

And you have to hear him defend his embracing of his own controversial pastor's endorsement. More straight talk there, too. Yep.

Yes I mock, though I think the nervous liar's giggle was probably genuine.

Video.

[Memo to George: I note that McCain isn't wearing a flag pin, either. So why didn't you ask that, too, if it's such an important issue?]

Maybe it's just how the NewsHour is selling the news, but here's what we see:

First we get John McCain, opponent of the King holiday, proponent of the Confederate flag over South Carolina, pretending to be a McCain admirer.

Then we get Hillary Clinton, talking about steps backwards and how it is just as hard for her as it was for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

And we want to just vomit. What dreck. (What's worse is that we know that somehow, in some way, Clinton really has a progressive racial conciousness, but she simply has a serious problem with expressing any sort of authenticity.)

And then we get a snippet of Barack Obama, who's talking not about how Dr. King was such a remarkable America (which he was), but about Dr. King's message -- and how we are or are not living up to it.

Two panderers eager to kiss a dead man's ass, and one leader who takes up the dead man's message and challenges us.

So which candidate is the most presidential here?

[No transcript or audio here, save for the discussion after.]

3 recessions under Bush presidents. (3 Republican recessions, many would say.) But this one is the worst since the post-War period [audio].

Should we really be surprised?

Here’s the opening of a MoveOn fundraising letter that I got just before going out of town last week. I’ve cut it off at the point where I stopped reading:

From: Nita Chaudhary, MoveOn.org Political Action <moveon-help@list.moveon.org>
Subject: 60 votes to win
Date: 3/19/2008 6:46 AM

Dear MoveOn member,

It’s happened again and again this year, on every issue we care about. Iraq. Health care. The climate crisis. Strong bills have sailed through the US House, only to stall in the face of Republican obstruction in the Senate. Republicans are on pace to double the Congressional record for the most filibusters.

Here’s the good news: Republicans are defending 23 Senate seats next year, compared to just 12 for the Democrats. Democrats could gain as many as 60 seats in the Senate, enough to break Republican filibusters and usher in a new era of progressive reform.

We’ve got a plan to take advantage of every seat that’s in play, make even more races competitive, and create a progressive majority that will last for a generation. But it’s going to take sustained support from you to pull it off and there’s no time to waste. Can you contribute $15 per month (you can cancel at any time) from now through Election Day?

Last year, the Senate Republicans obstructed numerous bills including stalling health insurance for the children who need it most and blocking a time-line to bring the troops home from Iraq.

Now look at some of the proposals from the Democratic presidential candidates that will almost certainly take 60 votes in the Senate to pass:

• No more blank checks in Iraq

[…]

I stopped reading here because this is a lie.

It does not take 60 votes in the Senate to pass No more blank checks in Iraq. It does not take a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate — any more than it takes a veto-proof majority in the House — to halt blank-check funding for the Iraq War.

It doesn’t take positive legislation of any kind at all to halt funding for the Iraq War; all that it takes is a lack of any more laws to keep on funding it, whether in the form of regular budget line items or in the form of the repeated off-the-ledger infusions of cash which go to fund the Occupation’s perpetual state of emergency. Republican Senators can’t filibuster a non-bill and neither can President George W. Bush — or any President who might succeed him — veto it. It doesn’t take 60 Senators or 290 Representatives to stop bills from passing. All you need is a simple majority, which the Democrats already have, and have had for the last year and a half, and with which they have done worse than nothing over and over again.

The reason that those blank checks keep getting written, with Democrat Harry Reid and Democrat Nacy Pelosi’s signatures right by the X, is because the Democratic leadership, so-called, doesn’t give enough of a damn about ending the war to take on the political costs of blocking funding for it. The only reason that they could possibly think that doing what they want depends on having a larger majority than they already have is if what they want to do is something other than halting war funding.

The Democratic leadership clearly wants a larger majority in Congress, and they are going to keep on giving George Bush every dollar he asks for unless and until they get that larger majority. They don’t need the larger majority to stop sending him the money, so one of two things must be true. Either the Democratic leadership is waiting until they consolidate more political power so that they can pass a plan which will prolong the war rather than ending it, or else they are waiting until they consolidate more political power because they don’t want to end the war until after they’ve fully exploited it as a campaign issue in the upcoming Congressional and Presidential elections. In either case, the strategy is despicable. And in either case, it’s shameful to see a putatively antiwar group repeating their opportunistic lies.

No union with war-mongers, spiritually or politically.

Further reading:

• GT 2008-02-17: In Ten Words or Fewer: brass tacks edition
• GT 2007-12-16: Reformist overtures

Snooping at the passport records of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain by the government a private company contracted by the government is a big deal, but it's the kind of thing that some politicians are pushing to make easier and more widespread. How? With "Real ID" -- the national ID card program that, once upon a time, was the kind of thing that Republicans and Democrats opposed, but now is the greatest new Big Brother kool-ade flavor favored by Republican politicians and neoconservative "thinkers."

From Ars Technica, we get the quote of the week:

As I've reported previously, the major problem with Real ID is that local DMV and law enforcement officials will have access to an unprecedented amount of sensitive information on anyone with a Real ID—scanned copies of any documents used to establish identity, like birth certificates, bank statements, pay stubs, property tax bills, and so on, not to mention driving histories from other states. Now imagine all of that data in the hands of a crooked sheriff who's fighting off a reformist challenger in a hotly contested election. Do you really want to live in that world?

No.

And maybe we should add to the scenario Jon Stokes paints: private companies contracted by governments. After all, the passport breaches were not done by government employees, they were perpetrated by private individuals working for a private corporation.

In this day and age where our government "outsources" (read: privatizes) so much of its own business, from school lunches to prisons to heavily armed mercenaries in Iraq, where is the line drawn on privacy in a Real ID world?

Time was that this was a country of people free to live their own lives. Now we have a government that seems bent on controlling and tracking us in all we do, as though we were guilty until proven innocent.

The tipping point for this political agenda was 9/11, when foreign nationals already on CIA watch lists managed to sneak in and skyjack their way into murderous infamy. The Bush Administration, with general Republican enthusiasm, reacted by pushing for radical new powers to spy not on foreign threats, but on Americans -- none of whom had anything to do with 9/11.

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

-1984, by George Orwell (Chapter 1)

100 years? 1000 years? 10,000 year? Is John McCain kidding? No. None of the Republicans (nor a few Democracts either) is kidding. America, to them, is to be a colonial empire.

Never mind how America was founded, as a rebellion against colonialism.

Iraq is to be an American colony, replete with military bases, a hand-picked government, and precious little involvement of the international community.

Unlike the British Empire, though, the American Empire is supported by mercenaries. The American military is not enough for Republican ambitions, so we have private mercenaries armed with superior weapons, with little oversight, being paid four times what our youngest and bravest adults are offered for putting their lives on the line.

It's like the Roman Empire, except that now our mercenaries collect booty not from the vanquished but from our own taxes. Both concepts are horrid. Both concepts are without honor, at least the honor that we talk about when we talk about it amongst ourselves.

John McCain supports colonialism. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at least claim they are against it.