instead of moving up the ladder of seniority in the House, he gravitated to the Executive Branch, where he could deliver orders of a kind that he could not give, as a legislator.

IIRC, he did move up, and was minority whip when he resigned his seat to become SecDef in the Bush 41 administration.

Malevolence In Mississippi

did anyone read about this anywhere?

Was I so disspointed that Edwards fell prey to his own ego and selfish needs. You betcha. Do I still have respect for his stance on many issues. Health care, poverty, no lobbyist in a Presidential administration. You betcha. I still want to witness John Edwards become U.S. Attorney General.

With reference to the other: Douglas Feith was in the early Reagan administration, and then left the government, but lobbied the administration very hard not to request ratification of the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions (the ones which define other kinds of conflicts and treatment of people like insurgents and terrorists as prisoners). At the time, the Israelis were very much against the protocols because the Palestinian Liberation Organization had declared it supported them, and that it intended to be a signatory to the Geneva Conventions (it actually did sign, but wasn’t regarded as a legitimate High Party). Feith’s business partner L. Mark Zell, who is a settler in the West Bank, has been on record as saying that Palestinians deserved no rights to anything at all, because they settled on land that God gave to the Jews.

Feith was very proud of having convinced the Reagan administration to ask Congress to reject ratification, which it did in 1987. If you look at charts of human rights declaration ratifications subsequent to that (on the U.N. site), you see that subsequently, the U.S. established a pattern of signing but not ratifying them. This became much less effective after the Vienna Convention, because that convention is regarded as settled law in the U.S. (the courts have cited it), and it says that an international law treaty that is signed and not ratified still compels the signatory to comply with the treaty in all aspects except apprehending and prosecuting violators. This last is why the Bush people withdrew the signature from the Rome Statute.

For sources, start probably with the Wikipedia entry on Feith or google his name and the 1977 protocols, although the sources at the end of the entry on the additional protocols are useful in determining the Senate ratification history for the 1977 protocols. There isn’t much dispute that he was instrumental in getting the Reagan administration to recommend rejecting ratification.

My point was that the forces which converged in the Bush administration included this man who made a life long enterprise out of trying to put “terrorists” beyond the reach of Geneva. He did so because he doesn’t like Palestinians, but the consequences are that many holes and gaps that were supposed to be closed thirty years ago on the status of non-state actors can be argued to be ambiguous by current neocons and sovereigntists in and out of the Bush administration. So this thread, which was running parallel to the Cheney/Addington one in the Reagan years, is another causal factor to the current mess.

I understand that Obama has made a surprise pick for VP and it’s Diane Feinstein!

Eeeekkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk!!
(Dives under the desk…)

Democracy is meant to spread dissent throughout a population faster than violence can be used to counter that dissent. Thus are people forced to find consensus through negotiation and argument. The Rovian era exists because of intellectual isolation; the system is being gamed to amass power without having to resort to the historical methods of totalitarian systems.

When people watch teevee, when people hang out on the Internet, when people think of politics as ’sport’ — they only want to know ‘the winners’ without any true grasp of what future has been obliterated (ie, Al Gore and what he would have accomoplished on Climate Change between 2000 and today), as opposed to what we actually end up stuck with (ie, being lied to, having the armed forces used on behalf of Oil Majors) things come undone.

Having watched people who had such low opinions of their own worth that they didn’t feel they could stand in a public meeting and provide testimony about why their streams should not be pollluted and why their lands should not be flooded by overlogging, in many respects I think that it comes down to some kind of workshop mechanism.

If people are able to get help with basic skills: ‘let’s go over what you want to say… now practice… now refine… now you’re ready…’ then they can be extremely effective and surprise themselves. And then they make a difference, and it changes them.

Getting that started strikes me as fairly difficult for many of the reasons you state.
Social isolation is one big piece of the puzzle.

127/130 – The weird phrasing about “chain of command” from Richer and Maguire in the press release hit me as kind of like having some kids standing, frantically pointing at one guy, behind his back, while saying “I can certify that no one standing behind me was involved” OVP wouldn’t be in CIA’s chain of command, would it? And both Libby and Hannah are getting requests to appear. But in the end, it won’t amount to much. The desperation to keep St. Nancy cleansed in the blood of the lamb apparently will trump even the politically (as well as legally and morally) sound approach of ramping up a big investigation into the widely disliked Cheney and tieing the Republican to anything and everything about him going into the elections.