When George W. Bush was re-elected President in 2004 (assuming that you believe that he actually was honestly re-elected, something I've never become sanguine about where Ohio was concerned), he strutted around like a peacock, telling reporters glibly at his first post-election press conference that

Let me put it to you this way:  I've earned capital in this campaign.  Political capital.  And now I intend to spend it.

So tell me, Mr. President:

How does it feel to be BROKE?

About 6 months ago, Maryscott O'Connor of My Left Wing fame wrote a brilliant analysis of the potential for a United States slide into fascism in an essay entitled Slouching Towards Kristallnacht.  Her essay focused on the quiet frightening power of our national transformation by degrees, rather than in the "Big Bang" everyone just assumes will mark a sea change in our country and in our culture, much the way that the German nation and its peoples were drawn by Hitler's machinations, slowly by degrees towards the "moment of clarity" that Kristallnacht represents.

(This tome is also subtitled "Shanikka's Sort-Of Response to Armando's Call to Discuss Racism)."

I want to talk about El Hajj Malik el Shabazz.  Friday was his birthday.  He would have been 81 years old, had he not died 41 years ago.  I wrote some of what follows as a passing comment on My Left Wing on Friday.  Someone said that it should really be made a diary.  The result herein is an apt example of "be careful of what you ask for, because you may get it", given its length.  But my apologies, as usual, for that fact.  Chalk it up to this being only the 2nd diary I've written in a month.  On the other hand, this is bad even for me - I've had to cut out in the interests of mercy on the reader, much of what I have written.  So think of this, I guess, as the first part of a series.  A series that, hopefully, will further a conversation about race, mainstream politics, and the role of African-Americans in each from a different perspective than has been discussed in most leftist political blogs before.

Anyhow, let's start with what may some day be called "Part I."

I laughed.

I cried.

I argued.

I raged.

I cried again.

I helped a child.  One who had made a childish mistake, trying to be responsible.  A childish mistake which her undocumented mother would otherwise pay for dearly.  A child, the age of my child.

I was not on strike.

Front paged at My Left Wing, and cross-posted to Political Sapphire and Booman Tribune.

As that great rhetoritician Thomas Paine is reported to have cautioned those who had misgivings about the revolutionary principles that had created America:

A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.

Those Democratic Senators still on the fence or opposed to Judge Alito's cloture vote today would do well to heed our Founding Father's caution about the ills of moderating one's stated principles at 4:00 PM today, when the cloture vote on the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the US Supreme Court begins.

One of the most frustrating aspects of this Samuel Alito juggernaut bearing down on us is the failure of most Democrats to challenge the idea that Senators are behaving "outside the norm" or "beyond the pale" by raising vociferous objections to Alito despite the fact that he is facially "qualified" to hold the office of Associate Supreme Court justice:  the failure to directly challenge, using history, the idea being sold to the American public by the Administration, the Republicans and the media that any objection to Judge Alito's elevation that is not based on irrefutable evidence of a formal disqualification based on (a) legal reasoning skill, (b) ethics or (c) judicial temperament is unfair to both the nominee and the President.

As a disclaimer, I am not a constitutional scholar, even if I have been told that I am otherwise a decent enough lawyer.  But this idea that the Senate has the burden to prove why a nominee should not be appointed appears to be utter nonsense even to the Constitutionally ignorant like myself.

(With thanks to SusanG, whose frontpage use of the words "a line in the sand" at DailyKOS today inspired me to write this).

100 years from now, historians will hopefully say that the day on which the people of the United States shifted their focus from the phantom War on Terror to the real War on American Freedoms was December 16, 2005 - the day on which the New York Times announced the following news:

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Taking the advice of a woman far smarter than I where blogging is concerned, I'm posting this -- a comment that I left on the smart person's great left wing blog here and in several other places to hopefully spur others to serious thought about what happened yesterday at Miami International Airport - the killing, in the name of safety, a man named Rigoberto Alpizar by members of the United States Federal Air Marshal Service.

I noticed a funny thing, right before I left for New York at the beginning of November, to bury my mother.

The price of gasoline had plummeted by $0.10/gallon in 2 days.  When I say plummeted, I don't mean "edged down" "trickled" or "decreased".  I mean plummeted.  From $3.27/gallon for Supreme Unleaded (what I put in my little toy, my 2005 Honda Accord Hybrid named Sheena) to $3.17.  The adjective is apt, given that it had, in all the years I've been buying gasoline, gone down by as a high a percentage in my memory.  It had not even increased by $0.10 in two days - that took almost a week, even during the worst of the Katrina days.

When I returned home a week later, on the 19th, it had gone down another $0.20, to $2.99/gallon.  Tt has gone down each day since.

Today, less than a month later, the price of gasoline is, at my neighborhood Shell and neighborhood Chevron, $2.63/gallon.

A $0.64 reduction in less than 3 weeks.  A reduction of 20%.

OK, I was going to blow my one diary today on something lighthearted and (although not officially so) insight producing entitled "The Soundtrack of Your Life" but surfing on over to DailyKOS this morning, it seems that a diary of a more political nature is in order.

So here it is:

When are the thousands of writers/commenters at DailyKOS going to stop, once and for all, piling on like a train wreck and stirring up shit when arguments erupt between diarists, whether in the comments or, worse, by creating separate diaries not to explore larger messages that can be gleaned from the conflict, but to simply take one side or the other and explain why one party is "wrong" for feeling as they do? When are folks unwittingly going to stop making things a thousand times worse than they might have been if EVERYONE participating in the pile-on with an approach of "She's right~! NO - SHE's right!" stepped back and tried to develop just a bit more empathy (not just sympathy) for the other side's point of view?????

MediaGirl has written a comprehensive diary on the case of Gabriela Flores that is on today's recommended list, as well it should be.  In the comments, Moiv mentioned the case of Regina McKnight in passing.  Someone else expressed surprise, saying that they did not know about the McKnight case.  The rest of the discussion was more of the same old same old argument about Republicans, women hatred, pro-lifers, politics in the name of God, Casey's pro-life stance, and how the country is in the hands of a cult ever since the ascension of George W. Bush.

I admit that my reaction to all this was anger.  Angry at the expressed suprise.  Angry at the fact that we're still saying all the same things and spouting the same party lines, all focused on abortion.  And angry that the only thing that even generates this much rage in progressives where women's reproductive rights are concerned is abortion.

When in fact Ms. Flores' abortion dilemma would likely not exist at all had we just gotten 1/2 as mad, 1/2 as determined, and 1/2 as dogmatic about Regina McKnight and another woman named Cornelia Whitner.

According to a CNN television news report that I just heard, Robert Bonner has just resigned as head of the CBP (Customs and Border Protection) arm of Homeland Security.

(I didn't see a diary about this in a search, but apologize and will delete if there is already one.)

This started as a comment in response to one made in a diary thread at Street Prophets about Meteor Blades' post on DailyKOS (a post with which I agreed) asking folks (nicely) to stop with the carping over this past Saturday's Anti-War March in Washington and the role of ANSWER.  In response to a comment that nobody really listens to the podium speeches at these marches, someone raised the possibility that in the ideal world there would be just a few speakers to "inspire" people, a la March on Washington, and suggested that nobody would have admitted to having not thought it important to listen to Dr. King's speech that day.  

I found that comment interesting, both in light of what actually happened that long-ago day in August, 1963 and what happened just this past Saturday and the resultant hullabaloo over ANSWER's role.  To me, both what happened then and what is happening now merely reflect the ugly downside of coalition work - a downside that it seems folks really don't want to accept as part of making meaningful change.

So here are my thoughts on it, starting from the past.

Lord have mercy.

From today's New York Times, the White House letter that makes clear why Bush is scrambling so hard to show his face in N'Awlins after he let it drown -- his party's entire "Nigra strategy" is falling apart.  Well, except for that part of the strategy that involves bribing our ministers, all of whom should quake in fear at the prospect of having to answer to the Almighty for whoring out their own people in a time of crisis.

I have a billion diaries to write about the events of the last two weeks, but fiercely overwhelming emotions combined with body-slam work levels has prevented them all.  But I couldn't overlook this gem buried in today's NY Times story ("Casualty of Firestorm:  Outrage, Bush & FEMA Chief") about the shitcanning (banishment is a more accurate descriptor) of Michael D. Brown aka Brownie aka So-called FEMA Director:

No she didn't no she didn't NO SHE DID NOT.

Condoleeza Rice did NOT actually think that pulling out that she was from Alabama actually made up for the fact that here it is, the end of the 5th day of horror in New Orleans for citizens largely comprised of her own people, and she is JUST NOW (at 4:15 Central) showing up on television to talk about the fact that:

I have just heard two things that have left me so angry that I am shaking as I type this.

The first is that FEMA has suspended all boat rescue operations, citing the dangerousness of the situation on the ground in New Orleans.  The same source hinted that all local and state based boat rescue operations are either imminently being ceased, or already have been,for the same reason.

The helicopers lifting out folks are almost certainly next, as there are reports of gunshots being fired upon the craft as they hover to lift folks out of the Superdome.

The second is that sheltered pasty faced SOB Scott McClellan lecturing folks stealing survival items that "help is coming "soon"....looting is not the way."

Cross-posted at Political Sapphire

All those in the liberal and progessive world who keep insisting that racist hatred of Black folk is "in the past" need to spend more time mining the news.  I wrote about the "Whites' Only" signs at Tyson Chicken in Alabama last week.   Here's some more fun in the news:

Hangman's Noose at Black Man's Door