Gutless Dems

Schumer, Feinstein Timed Mukasey Announcement To Avoid Liberal Anger
Schumer, Feinstein ‘surprise’ thwarts efforts on Mukasey
By Manu Raju
November 06, 2007
The coordinated statements released late Friday afternoon by two Democratic senators that they would break ranks and support President Bush’s attorney general nominee largely muted opposition from a Democratic base that has become increasingly frustrated with Congress, activist leaders said Monday.
Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) effectively thwarted plans by the activist left to use the weekend to mobilize ahead of Tuesday’s Judiciary Committee vote and pressure wayward senators to reject the nominee, activists said. “It was a surprise attack,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office for the American Civil Liberties Union, which wants the Judiciary Committee to defeat the nomination. “There was a limited opportunity to say much about what Schumer and Feinstein had done because the timing was very cleverly calculated to avoid scrutiny
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Despite Rhetoric, Dems Poised To Give Bush A Blank Check For Iraq

Despite their rhetoric about not wanting to hand President Bush another "blank check" for the Iraq War, Democrats appear poised to give him exactly that -- enough cash to keep the war going full steam for as long as six months, no strings attached.
Democratic leaders continue to fear GOP attacks that cutting off or slowing funds would hurt the troops, despite anger among the Democratic base over the party's failure to use Congress' power of the purse to end the war.
And while House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) have said they have no intention of bringing up Bush's almost $200 billion supplemental war funding proposal this year without a timeline for withdrawal, Democrats are quietly preparing to give the president enough spending flexibility to keep the war going anyway.
After Republicans repeatedly rebuffed Democratic attempts to adopt war restrictions in September following Army Gen. David Petraeus' testimony to Congress, Democrats began approving billions in extra funding, starting with the first stopgap spending resolution. Next up will be the regular Defense spending bill, expected to go to conference committee Tuesday. Although the bill is not expected to include funding specifically targeted to Iraq, Democrats plan to allow much of the funding to be diverted from regular Defense accounts to the war. Democratic Defense appropriators also are separately eyeing adding tens of billions in war funds, either in a small separate supplemental or attached to the next must-pass stopgap continuing resolution. They had sought to include $50 billion or more in such supplemental funding in the Defense bill itself, but leadership overrode that idea after the party's most ardent war foes complained.
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It's Hard to be a Democrat
Nora Ephron

It's hard to be a Democrat, don't you think? There's no alternative, of course, but it's hard. Someone asked me the other day to write something about why I was a Democrat, and I had no trouble making a list of 10 reasons. Of course, five of those reasons were the Supreme Court, and the other five were more or less historical -- reasons like FDR, which is not meant to mean Franklin Delano Roosevelt exactly but some fantasy blob of Democratic values that are a distant racial memory.
But it's hard. It's especially hard to remember that the real enemies are the Republicans, when the Democrats tend to break your heart and the Republicans are just the boys you'd never go out with anyway.
It's hard when you watch a debate and decide that in the end you're probably going to throw your vote away in the primary and vote for someone who doesn't have a chance, like Dennis Kucinich. I mean, look at them, look at the front runners: Hillary Clinton, who can't help being Hillary Clinton; Barack Obama, who was a disappointment from the beginning and whose new-found attack mode is as dispiriting as his low energy level used to be; John Edwards, whom I am afraid I will never be able to think of again (after this week's Peggy Noonan column in the Wall Street Journal) as anything but a desperate furry little woodland animal.
And then there are the Democrats in the Congress. What a bunch of losers, hiding behind the fact that it takes 60 votes to shut down debate and 67 to override a presidential veto. So what? So pass a law and make Bush veto it. Make him veto something every single day. Drive the guy crazy. What have you got to lose? And meanwhile what have you done? You've voted for the surge, you've voted to authorize a war against Iran, and you're about to vote in favor of an attorney general-designate who refuses to call waterboarding torture.
Which brings me, I'm afraid, to Chuck Schumer. I can't honestly say that Chuck Schumer broke my heart last week, because he's never really had my heart. He's Captain Bromide. And I can't even look at him without being reminded of an old radio-and-television show called Quiz Kids, which featured a boy genius named Joel Kupperman who was always waving his hand wildly whenever a question was asked and shouting, "I know! I know!" In addition, and because he happens to be my Senator, I have watched Schumer transform himself: he used to be a schlepper (as they say in Schumer's former congressional district) and now he's groomed to a fare-thee-well. I salute any man who takes charge of a thinning hairline with so much product, but Schumer's makeover always seemed to me a worrisome sign, and not merely a symptom of my own shallowness: it seemed to me to show that he had left Brooklyn and New York, in some fundamental way, for the Beltway -- which is not to meant to mean the Beltway exactly but instead a nonstop series of cable and network television appearances that add up to very little in the way of action and a great deal in the way of bluster.
Nonetheless, when I read on Friday that Schumer had decided to support Michael Mukasey for attorney general, thus making Mukasey's confirmation by the Senate inevitable, my heart sank. I read his justification of his vote. He said that Mukasey was the best we could hope for from this administration. He said the Justice Department needed to be rebuilt. He said that no nominee for attorney general was ever going to come out against waterboarding, and that Mukasey at least promised to follow the law if (somehow) the Senate passed an anti-waterboarding law (that survived a Bush veto). It's probably unfair to blame Schumer entirely for this; after all, Dianne Feinstein made the same decision. And more than half the Democrats in the Senate are apparently prepared to vote for Mukasey.

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From Paul krugman's Column

Fears of betrayal are often focused on Hillary Clinton. Some people who raise The Question cite an article in The Nation from last summer, which suggested that Hillary Clinton’s commitment to change is suspect. "Not only is Hillary more reliant on large donations and corporate money than her Democratic rivals," warned the article, "but advisers in her inner circle are closely affiliated with unionbusters, G.O.P. operatives, conservative media and other Democratic Party antagonists."
O.K., some perspective. I sometimes hear people say that there’s no difference between Democrats and Republicans; that’s foolish. Look at the fight over children’s health insurance, and you can see how different the parties’ philosophies and priorities really are. All of the leading Democratic candidates are offering strongly progressive policy proposals; the Republicans are, if anything, running to the right of the Bush administration.
Also, even history’s greatest progressives had to make compromises to win their victories. F.D.R.’s New Deal depended on the support of Southern segregationists. Compared with that, Senator Clinton’s acceptance of lots of corporate donations doesn’t look so bad — though I’d be reassured if she made her views on tax reform clearer, and matched John Edwards’s focus on corporate reform.
Still, I am worried.
One of the saddest stories I tell in my book is that of Al Smith, the great reformist governor of New York, who gradually turned into a narrow-minded economic conservative and bitter critic of F.D.R. H. L. Mencken explained it thusly: "His association with the rich has apparently wobbled him and changed him. He has become a golf player."
So, how wobbled are today’s Democrats? I guess we’ll find out
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By The Way, I hope you all are not buying USA Today newspaper?
Here are their columnists
Most Viewed - Opinion
Pat Buchanan
Ted Rall
James Kilpatrick
Ann Coulter
Brent Bozell III