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Persuasive political writing (of a kind I am able to stomach these days) appears toward the end of Rory Stewart's, The Places in Between.  Bookended by his personal testimony of walking through Afghanistan only two weeks after the new (US puppet) "government" had been established, this passing indictment of the window-dressing/McEnlightenment model of international intervention casts a far longer, darker shadow than it would have otherwise.  Readers are invited to read my quasi-review (of the phenomenon of "maverick" journalists) at pas au-delà.

Happy New Year to all, but especially to Nick.

Over on Long Sunday, to much delight, fierce allegoric battle with the work of Carl Schmitt waxes, wages on. There where nothing less than "the political" itself would seem to be at stake, you are free to join the fray, at the very least in your silent skimming millions upon millions way. "If I were to write two lines and by chance they rhyme, that would be a blunder." -Wittgenstein, roughly, and a little jealous of musicians

It's Thursday night, but the caesura at Long Sunday is still open. Really, we're that good.

Long Sunday.

We're staying up late just for you.

Statement of Jeff Chester, executive director, Center for Digital Democrac, 9 April 2005

The ideologically driven majority on the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) now has the perfect apparatchik to run its zealous campaign to promote conservative/GOP-approved public broadcasting programming. Ken Ferree is now its “acting president.” That spells trouble for those who care about the fate of PBS and NPR--with a capital F.

As radical right-wingers in Congress continue to tee off against federal judges, the Senate is considering moving forward with the "nuclear option" for confirming the president's judicial nominees. The tactic, which would eliminate the judicial filibuster, would end years of tradition, create even more rancor in an already divisive Senate and, ultimately, would likely lead to more radical judicial nominees.

• The right-wing is wrong when it says judicial filibusters are unconstitutional. In fact, despite what Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist says, there is nothing in the Constitution that requires the Senate to "confirm or reject appointments by a simply majority vote." Frist and other Republican senators-many of whom are usually strict constructionists-should know that the Appointments Clause of the Constitution requires the consent of the Senate on judges and empowers the Senate to determine the method of this consent.
• Frist and his allies are wrong when they say judicial filibusters are unprecedented. In 1968, Senate Republicans used a filibuster to block President Johnson's nomination of Abe Fortas to be chief justice of the Supreme Court. More recently, Senator Frist himself took part in a judicial filibuster. In 2000, Frist participated in the filibuster of Richard Paez, President Clinton's nominee to the Ninth Circuit. Records show that the right-wing led at least six judicial filibusters during the Clinton years.

• Many of the president's judicial nominees are out of step with the American people. If President Bush truly wants to have more of his judges confirmed, he could nominate better candidates. As Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) recently said, President Bush would be wise to "pick up the phone" and consult with Democrats on judges, noting that when it comes to judges, "there is a much broader base in America than the far right."

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Listen to Tom Fenton on this morning's Diane Rehm show.

It strikes me that blogs could be working a lot harder here, giving essential context to international news events. One reason why Juan Cole and Daniel Brett are so worth reading.

From Socialist Worker and via 'lenin':

In some places we found bodies of fighters, dressed in black and with ammunition belts.

But in most of the houses, the bodies were of civilians. Many were dressed in housecoats, many of the women were not veiled—meaning there were no men other than family members in the house. There were no weapons, no spent cartridges.

It became clear to us that we were witnessing the aftermath of a massacre, the cold-blooded butchery of helpless and defenceless civilians.

Nobody knows how many died. The occupation forces are now bulldozing the neighbourhoods to cover up their crime. What happened in Fallujah was an act of barbarity. The whole world must be told the truth.

And then there is this part:

This day the Justice Department has done a great injustice, not just to Lynne Stewart, but to our entire system of justice, to our country, and to our democracy.

Chris Hedges:

Abu Ghraib is the natural consequence of war and has happened in every single war that has ever been fought. <!--break-->

What you are doing in war is turning human beings into objects either to provide gratification or to be destroyed, or both. And almost no one is immune from that — the contagion of the crowd sees to that. In wartime, perversion and hedonism spiral out of control. The comradeship of soldiering seeks to turn the very act of love into something akin to defecation. This is because the great “that which cannot be subsumed into communal life” is love. (full interview, Dec. 13, 2004)

A.K. wrote the following:

Every local evening news program is basically the same. Certain canned stories tend to recur at set intervals, not only on slow news nights but on very active news nights. Even if the mayor is being impeached, even if somebody poisoned the waterhole, local news programs must include something that causes us to ask momentarily, "Is this really news?" Yet another thing is going to cause cancer; yet another government agency or corporation is destroying our health; yet once again we are reminded that yes, we all do have very busy (or stressful, or both) lifestyles and are given hints for how to deal (or cope) with it. These non-news items are revelatory. In their very obviousness, they remind us again and again of key features of the American experience. An American is a busy person who is afraid of dying of cancer or some other incurable disease. An American is also a person who must deal constantly with traffic congestion. Once a week at least, a story will air about the problem of congestion, sometimes highlighting the attendant road rage, always focussing on the wasted time. They tell us what we already know, that commutes are getting longer, and they reassure us that we are normal for wishing that all those other little people would just die. Because where the hell are they going anyway?

The Democrats' Da Vinci Code

By David J. Sirota, The American Prospect.

Encrypted within the 2004 election map is the Democrats' road map to political divinity. It is time for the party's centrists to make way for the economic populists who racked up wins on Nov. 2.

As the Democratic Party goes through its quadrennial self-flagellation process, the same tired old consultants and insiders are once again complaining that Democratic elected officials have no national agenda and no message.

Yet encrypted within the 2004 election map is a clear national economic platform to build a lasting majority.

Don’t be shy, folks. Much gratitude to Nick Lewis and friends for setting up what will no doubt become quite an interesting, and exciting space. From a new forum on The Nation website: Looking Back, Looking Forward:

BY RICHARD RORTY:

MOST AMERICANS FIND IT INTOLERABLE to think that our soldiers were sent abroad to die for no sufficient reason. They are still unwilling to admit that those who fell in Vietnam lost their lives in vain. So half the electorate managed to keep on believing both that Saddam Hussein was preparing to use weapons of mass destruction and that he was somehow linked to 9/11. They did so because, in their minds, to abandon those beliefs would be to withdraw support from our troops. So Senator Kerry did himself little good with the voters by demonstrating that President Bush had deceived the nation in order to invade Iraq. But he was boxed in. He could not ignore the issue without alienating his own base, and could not speak frankly about it without further alienating his opponent’s.