Clinton Will Be Present To Vote Against Cloture Tomorrow

Jane Hamsher at FireDogLake has received confirmation from the Clinton campaign that Senator Clinton will be in the Senate to vote “no” to cloture on the bad Intelligence bill tomorrow. This is welcome news.

Hopefully she will be able to bring along other Senators and ensure that the Republican obstructionism is defeated.

~~No word yet from the Obama campaign.~~

Jane’s updated her post with this line: “The Obama campaign confirms that Senator Obama will be there too, and voting “no.””

Again, this is very good news and certainly brings us closer to defeating cloture on the Intel bill.

Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.

Future Majority

In a post titled, “Souther Carolina: Youth Turnout Triples. Again.” young voter guru Mike Connery has a great break down of how the youth vote turned out in South Carolina.

Turnout in the Democratic Primary in South Carolina almost tripled yesterday. According to CIRCLE, 74,245 young voters went to the polls, 19 percent of eligible young voters. In 2004, only 26,181 voters aged 18 to 29 participated. As a share of the electorate, young voters made up 14 percent of the electorate, an increase of 5 percent over the previous cycle.

This is great news for Democrats, both in the short term and long term. Young voters are one of the few demographics that we can look at and see room for major growth of Democratic voters. What makes this cycle so special is that we are growing in that demographic in huge numbers. The sooner people start voting Democratic in their life, the more likely it is that they will become life-long Democratic voters.

Plus Connery, citing a Maureen Dowd comment, notes that the press is noticing the huge Democratic gains in the youth segment. “As youth turnout has continued to rise in each contest, the pundits are sitting up and taking notice, and something of a new conventional wisdom seems to be forming.”

A narrative developing that says this is an election where young people are turning out in huge numbers has the potential to be self-fulfilling. Voting validates voting and I can think of few pieces of conventional wisdom that would be more beneficial for Democratic prospects than the story line that this will be an election where young voters have a huge impact.

Patriotism

Keith Olbermann has it.

KURTZ: But in a sense, the Bush administration has been very, very good for Keith Olbermann.

OLBERMANN: Honestly? No. I’m an American citizen, I think this has been a disastrous presidential administration. I would have given what I have, in terms broadcasting success in the nature of this newscast, I would have easily said…if I were given the choice of this or some responsible presidency in the last four years or eight years? I would have taken a responsible presidency.

I agree.

I probably wouldn’t be a blogger today if George W. Bush hadn’t been re-elected in November, 2004. I started blogging about a month later with some friends at The Baltimore Group (later renamed Emboldened). Blogging has brought me a great many opportunities, including the chance to work for Chris Dodd and his presidential campaign. And while I can’t say that I’ve benefited in as high profile or lucrative a way Keith Olbermann may have over the course of the Bush administration, I’d be much happier if we were living in a healthy democracy where peace and prosperity held the day.

Hopefully the next administration will be better than the last and there won’t be the need for people like me to continue to work for a more progressive America because it will have been achieved. I’m not optimistic.

Other Wars

John McCain really is insane.

Sen. John McCain told a crowd of supporters on Sunday, “It’s a tough war we’re in. It’s not going to be over right away. There’s going to be other wars.” Offering more of his increasingly bleak “straight talk,” he repeated the claim: “I’m sorry to tell you, there’s going to be other wars. We will never surrender but there will be other wars.”

As I keep telling people, if you like neoconservative war mongering under the Bush administration, you’ll love a McCain administration.

People like McCain should be marginalized for their crazy ideas, not considered as potential choices to run the world’s sole super power.

Thank You Dodd

A number of progressive activists in New York, lead by RagingGurrl and Jay Ackroyd of the NY Roots Project, put together this video, thanking Senator Chris Dodd for his work to stop retroactive immunity for big telecom companies. It’s a great show of support for one of the few real leaders we’ve seen during this fight to defend the rule of law.

Will They Do the Right Thing?

Wolfrum at Shakesville seems to be drinking the same tea as I am on the FISA fight and expectations for leadership from our Democratic presidential candidates.

Senators Clinton and Obama, your country needs you. Right now. Because civil liberties matter. Because laws matter. Because retroactive immunity from lawbreaking is not an American trait. Because having a government that can and will spy on its own citizens with no authorization is the antithesis of a free country.

Later in the same post, Wolfrum makes clear how he will view Clinton or Obama missing the cloture vote on the Intel bill on Monday.

If Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are unable and unwilling to go do their job and fight for what’s right, neither of them has any business being President of the United States. Both will have proven themselves as unfit employees who will let down their employers when they’re needed the most.

Clinton and Obama should expect a vocal backlash against them if they fail to attend Monday’s cloture vote. And rightly so.

Separate from what it will mean for our country, this would be a deeply troubling turn of events for me as a progressive Democrat and a patriotic American. It’s safe to say that no Republican presidential candidate will stand up and defend the Constitution in an age where each tries to one-up the other on how much more of a security state they will create once they succeed Bush in office. I do not trust the GOP to defend the Constitution.

But where will we be, where will I be, if our two leading Democratic candidates place themselves on the side of apathy and cynicism and absenteeism on what I believe is the most important issue facing our country right now? Terrorists will not destroy our republic. Insurgents in Iraq will not march through our cities. But if our Congress fails to defend the Constitution against an administration that gives it no regard, then we must recognize that America faces an existential crisis.

We will know in less than thirty-six hours whether or not Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will man the ramparts and defend the Constitution, or if we must pass judgment on their failure to do what our country needs.

Tapping A Journalist’s Phone

Via Christy Hardin Smith, Jeff Stein of CQ Politics has a must-read article of a prominent American journalist being eavesdropped by the government. Below is a lengthy excerpt of the piece, which leaves me very concerned about the ability of Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell to ensure that the intelligence community follows the law when it comes to spying on Americans.

U.S. intelligence tapped the telephone calls of Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, starting in 2002…

The encounter came, mind you, amid the constant assurances from the Bush administration that the U.S. has not, and is not, “spying on Americans” or running a “warrantless domestic spying program.”
“Totally untrue!” McConnell told Wright, insisting that the conversations of American citizens with no connections to terrorists would be immediately discarded. U.S. intelligence is after al Qaeda, McConnell and others have repeatedly pledged, not innocent Americans.

“I’m telling you,” the former Air Force general said, “if you’re in the United States you have to have a warrant. Authorized by the court. Period!”

But Wright then told McConnell he had a more-than-professional interest in electronic surveillance.

“Let me make a disclosure,” he told the spy boss. “I have been monitored.” Continue reading “Tapping A Journalist’s Phone” →

Luddism in “Lost”

Brad Reed, writing at Network World, documents the case that ABC’s Lost has a Luddite strain. In short, technology is a harbinger for death on the hit TV show (which, incidentally, is one of the few network TV shows that I closely follow).

Characters who use network technology in ABC’s hit mystery drama Lost are a lot like silly teens who attempt having sex in horror movies: for it seems that anyone who engages in either seems to have a cloud of doom hanging over them. Indeed, the mere presence of network technology anywhere on the show is a harbinger of destruction and chaos, whether it comes in the form of imploding electromagnetic research labs, exploding communications centers or flooded sonar stations.

I wonder if this thread will continue and if the series will ever elucidate why technology on this island kills.

Petitioning When You Should Be Leading

I think it would have been much easier for Harry Reid to use his powers as Majority Leader to stop bad FISA legislation from having a shot at passing than asking Democratic supporters to petition the caucus on to do the right thing on our own.

Joshua Wyeth at Lead or Get Out of the Way has much more righteous indignation than I’m going to muster now on the eve of a FISA vote where a degree of unity is needed. But I absolutely feel his outrage on this.

Will Hillary Show?

Matt Stoller at Open Left reports on a conversation he had with Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton yesterday in South Carolina on FISA. Stoller writes:

I talked to Bill first, and asked him for help on the FISA fight. He very lawyerly asked me if they need 60 votes for cloture, and I said ‘yes’. He knows that this means Clinton’s vote isn’t necessary, since it doesn’t matter if the vote total is 59-41 or 59-0.

Then I spoke with Hillary, and she said she has assured her colleagues she will go back to the Senate if they need her vote. She though that we have already lost, alluding to the Judiciary version of the bill which was voted down on Friday. I urged her to speak out publicly and she said she intends to say something on Sunday. [Emphasis added]

Bill Clinton is right to point out that blocking cloture on the Intelligence bill Monday doesn’t take Democrats finding 41 “nay” votes, but the Republicans finding 60 “yea” votes. And Hillary Clinton’s statement that she’ll speak out on this issue and vote if needed is a marginally positive note.

But let me say this: If Hillary Clinton does not show up to vote against cloture on the Intel bill, a vote that will take place while she is in Washington on Monday, it will tell us a great deal about Hillary Clinton’s priorities as a Senator and presidential candidate and an equally great deal about how Harry Reid is running the Democratic caucus. If Clinton doesn’t show up for this vote, according to this statement, it will be in large part because she was given a pass by Reid to miss it. Reid will have told her that her vote was not needed and Clinton will have taken that opportunity to continue campaigning.

I know that presidential candidates miss a great deal of votes while they’re campaigning. I lived with that reality while I was working on the Dodd campaign; as the campaign went on, his missed vote totals rose and it was an issue that we were always well aware of. A lot of the time it is hard both from a cost and a time standpoint to move a candidate from one side of the country to DC in time for a vote. Some campaigns have more money than others, but even when cost is no expense, nothing is a guarantee. I get that.

But Senator Clinton (and Senator Obama) will be in Washington on Monday. And DC isn’t that big of a city, yet neither have committed to be in attendance for the cloture vote. Taking the handful of minutes or even hours that will be needed to vote against cloture on a horrible piece of legislation which strikes against the rule of law should be requisite for every single Democratic Senator and whole lot of Republicans, too. It will be very hard for me to look at this cloture vote as anything other than a statement about how much these senators care about the US Constitution; missing it will tell me that they just don’t care about the Constitution.

The same goes for Majority Leader Reid. If he can’t crack the whip over his caucus and make sure that Senators Clinton and Obama aren’t there to make crystal clear that they stand with the American people in support of the US Constitution, I’ll read that as a statement about how much Reid cares for fully shutting down the Republican Party’s attack on the rule of law.

Our chances of winning the cloture vote on the Intel bill Monday may be good, but it takes more than one vote to stop the Republican Party’s assault on the Constitution. That makes the actions of the people that want to be our leaders in regard to this vote even more important. To jam Kia Franklin’s line yesterday about the best way for telecoms to avoid being liable for breaking the law, the best way for our presidential candidates to avoid criticism for failing up to stand up for the Constitution would be to stand up for the Constitution.