What comes after farce?

Kagro X, via Greenwald:

In rejecting the Feinstein "exclusivity" amendment to the FISA revision considered on the Senate floor today -- an amendment that failed by a vote of 57 Ayes to 41 Noes, thanks to another "painless filibuster" of precisely the type we were promised would not be tolerated on this bill -- the Senate has voted to say that although they were passing a law governing surveillance, it was OK if the President decided that he really didn't like the law very much and wished to make up his own instead.

Exclusivity -- the purpose of the amendment that "failed" -- meant simply this: that the law they were passing was the law, and it was the governing authority for how surveillance could be conducted in America.

The Senate just rejected it, so that means that they're passing a law, but if a president decides later on that he thinks there's really some other controlling authority besides the law, that's OK.

Marx:

The Party of Order proved by its decision on revision that it knew neither how to rule nor how to serve; neither how to live nor how to die; neither how to suffer the republic nor how to overthrow it; neither how to uphold the constitution nor how to throw it overboard; neither how to cooperate with the President nor how to break with him. To whom, then, did it look for the solution of all the contradictions? To the calendar, to the course of events. It ceased to presume to sway them. It therefore challenged events to assume sway over it, and thereby challenged the power to which, in the struggle against the people, it had surrendered one attribute after another until it stood impotent before this power. In order that the head of the executive power might be able the more undisturbedly to draw up his plan of campaign against it, strengthen his means of attack, select his tools, and fortify his positions, it resolved precisely at this critical moment to retire from the stage...

Seriously, when the legislative body of a nation is insufficiently bold to declare that its laws are, indeed, the laws, and that, therefore, anyone who contravenes those laws is, indeed, breaking the law, then what's the point?

Owning a TV doesn't mean you're not poor

This is a good bit of ideology critique from Pandagon. The notion that consumption is a good indicator of economic well-being is, of course, quite old. That it has been repeated a thousand times since Hume doesn't make it a good argument.

The Power of Form

I recommend reading this post over at Unemployed Negativity.

Now, the revolution developed the executive power...

From TPM:

Attorney General Michael Mukasey is back on the Hill today, testifying to the House Judiciary Committee. Paul Kiel is covering it at TPMmuckraker.

So far, he's dropped two big bombshells. DOJ will not be investigating:

(1) whether the waterboarding, now admitted to by the White House, was a crime; or

(2) whether the Administration's warrantless wiretapping was illegal.

His rationale? Both programs had been signed off on in advance as legal by the Justice Department.

Cynics may argue that those aren't bombshells at all, that the Bush Administration would never investigate itself in these matters. Perhaps so. But this is a case where cynicism is itself dangerous.

We have now the Attorney General of the United States telling Congress that it's not against the law for the President to violate the law if his own Department of Justice says it's not.

It is as brazen a defense of the unitary executive as anything put forward by the Administration in the last seven years, and it comes from an attorney general who was supposed to be not just a more professional, but a more moderate, version of Alberto Gonzales (Thanks to Democrats like Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer for caving on the Mukasey nomination.).

President Bush has now laid down his most aggressive challenge to the very constitutional authority of Congress. It is a naked assertion of executive power. The founders would have called it tyrannical. His cards are now all on the table. This is no bluff.

I saw Susan Buck-Morss give a paper in 2002 entitled "The Eighteenth Brumaire of George W. Bush." 2002. The joke was already obvious then. What comes after obvious?

Marx's Futures Market

Jim Devine analyzes Brad deLong's musings on Marx here. I wold like to say a thing or two about this, but class prep comes first. Maybe this evening...

Fun Lenin Quotes

From State and Revolution (I.4):

We are in favor of a democratic republic as the best form of state for the proletariat under capitalism. But we have no right to forget that wage slavery is the lot of the people even in the most democratic bourgeois republic.

Whatever you have to say about the man, that's a good line.

On the other hand, selling the dictatorship of the proletariat as "the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!" (same, V.4) ... eh, not so much...

Creeping Corporatism Watch

Some dimwit spokesperson for the "Third Way":

"We thought it would be a bad idea to allow these companies to be held legally liable for cooperating with the government ... you want to encourage the cooperation of not just the telecom industry, but all other industries in the future."

Great. Heaven forbid that companies might fail to cooperate with illegal directives from the government!

It's the dawning of the Second Empire in America...

(...and it's funny to see a nice Leninist argument being made on Daily Kos: There is no third way!)