Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

Congressman John Garamendi’s district is strongly progressive, having re-elected Ellen Tauscher repeatedly. So, you’d think that Garamendi, a new member of the House of representatives, just elected a couple months ago in a special election, would try to follow in Tauscher’s progressive footsteps.

Not so. Last week, Representative Garamendi voted to extend the Patriot Act’s worst spying abuses against Americans without any reforms at all.

What was John Garamendi thinking, giving his endorsements to one of the most flagrant violations of the Constitution under George W. Bush? Did he think his vote would escape attention? Did he think no one would protest, just because he’s a Democrat?

Will Garamendi’s calculation end up being correct? Will Democrats simply vote for Garamendi because he’s a Democrat, no matter how anti-progressive his voting record in Congress turns out to be?

Congressman Michael Arcuri is asking Democrats in New York’s 24th district to re-elect him again this year, but really, why should Democrats bother to support Arcuri?

Mike Arcuri has opposed climate legislation, and worked to help the Republicans block health care reform last year until the Tea Party movement could sink it. Last week, Congressman Arcuri voted to extend George W. Bush’s Patriot Act, without any reforms whatsoever.

Blue Dog Arcuri is no friend of the causes that Democratic voters care about. Why should Democrats help him keep a hold on his seat in Congress?

It’s disturbing to me to see that there are still a huge number of people who believe that the only way they can feel secure is to have their government aim thousands of nuclear missiles, ready to strike at a moment’s notice, at foreign cities filled with millions of civilian human beings. Still others say that the only way that we can reduce America’s nuclear weapons arsenal is to make a new generation of nuclear weapons that are even deadlier than before.

It’s time for us to end this insanity. With Barack Obama in the White House, we finally have the chance for an American President to end the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, and clear our nation’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

We can have a world free of nuclear weapons, but we have to be willing to speak out for what we believe in. Do you part, spreading the message of an end to nuclear weapons wherever you go, wearing this tshirt: Nuclear weapons? This is not security!

Last year, we warned about the electoral implications of the nomination of Martha Coakley to the U.S. Senate. Coakley supported the Patriot Act, alienating the progressive base of the Democratic Party. Mike Capuano, who was one of the few to vote against the Patriot Act back in 2001, would have been a much better choice, and could have rallied Democratic voters to beat Scott Brown.

All that’s history now. What’s not history is the Patriot Act.

Just last week, the House of Representatives voted to pass an extension of the Patriot Act without any reforms at all, sneaking the vote in as an approval of an unspecified amendment to a Medicare bill.

Two-thirds of the House Democrats voted with the Republicans to approve the reform-free extension of Patriot Act spying powers that the government uses against Americans. Mike Capuano was not one of them. Capuano voted against the perpetuation of George W. Bush’s spying programs.

“You may recall that in 2001, I voted against the Patriot Act because I strongly believed that it did not do enough to protect our cherished civil liberties. I continue to have serious concerns about some of its provisions,” Capuano wrote, explaining his vote. “I want to be clear that it is important to give law enforcement the tools they need to pursue criminals. However, there is a way to do that and still recognize the importance of civil liberties – and such a solution is not currently being pursued by the House and Senate.”

Thank you, Representative Capuano, for taking a stand against the politics of fear.

A new social scientific study has found that higher intelligence is correlated with:
- monogamy among males
- liberal political identity
- atheism

If you can’t figure out why that correlation makes sense, why then, you must be a right wing fundamentalist who likes to sleep around.

The re-election campaign web site for Congressman John Conyers claims that Conyers stands against the Patriot Act. It tells how Conyers has reacted to the Patriot Act in the past, reading, “The Bush Administration was not satisfied with a bill that gave it everything it needed; it sacrificed his good faith negotiations and bipartisanship for a bill that had everything it wanted. What the Administration wanted was the ability to conduct secret searches of suspects (also known as “sneak-and-peek” searches), to monitor our reading habits by getting records from libraries and bookstores, and to detain non-citizens indefinitely. To accomplish this, the Administration and the House Republican leadership threw away the bipartisan bill from the Committee and wrote a new one in secret; the new bill, known as the USA PATRIOT Act, was given to the Congress the very morning it was voted on and was not disclosed to the public until much later. The secrecy in which it was written and the extreme provisions it contained were what called for Mr. Conyers to vote against the frightfully-named USA PATRIOT Act.

Unfortunately, the Administration’s war on terrorism proved that his vote was the right one. When Mr. Conyers asked the Justice Department how it has used its sneak-and-peek authority, it cannot tell of one act of terrorism that has been prevented. When Mr. Conyers asked the Department how often it has sought patron records from libraries and bookstores, it responds by saying the very number of times is classified so that the information cannot be disclosed to the public.”

That sounds like a strong stand in opposition to the Patriot Act, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, making sounds is one thing. Action is another.

Yesterday, John Conyers voted to extend the Patriot Act without reforming it at all.

Big oil companies, and their political lackeys in Congress, are always going on about how oil spills aren’t very common. But then, oops, reality comes along, as it did yesterday for the Contango Oil company, which had to shut down 6 oil wells when one of its pipelines started leaking petroleum into the Atchafalaya River down in Texas.

Never worry. It’s a rare thing. Really.

Hey, can anyone tell me what city this is?

Still think everything is local?

The big coal industry is busy putting a lot of advertisements on TV telling us how great clean coal is. Why, you’d think you could use it to wipe your kitchen countertops with, it’s so clean.

And then, reality intervenes, like an explosion… or as an actual explosion. In Turkey, 13 coal miners were killed this week when methane leaking into their coal mine exploded. Many other coal miners were sent to the hospital with severe injuries.

Is that coal that they brought out of the ground along with their blood clean?

Back in the 1980s, the United Kingdom went to war against Argentina in the Falkland Islands. Both nations claimed ownership of the islands, which are used to farm sheep and to drill oil. Hint: It wasn’t for the sheep that the British pushed their claim of ownership of the Falklands. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was even drawing up plans to drop nuclear bombs on Argentina in order to win the conflict.

A generation later, the United Kingdom is starting the escalation toward war again by moving an offshore drilling rig into the waters around the Falklands, with the intention to drill there starting today.

For more news from the Falkland Islands, visit:

- Falkland News Network
- Penguin News