Dear Mr. ---:Thank you for writing about Judge Michael Mukasey's nomination as Attorney General.
After doing my due diligence and carefully reviewing Judge Mukasey's record, I concluded that he will be a strong and independent leader of the Justice Department. I believe that if he was not confirmed, an acting Attorney General, who would not be confirmed by the Senate, would have led the Department for the remainder of the administration. The Justice Department is too important for that to happen.
Therefore, I supported Judge Mukasey's nomination and voted to confirm him. I made a statement on the Senate floor explaining my decision which I have enclosed, along with an op-ed I wrote and op-eds from several newspapers on the importance of confirming Judge Mukasey.
Please know that I appreciate your opinion and hope that you will continue to inform me of your views. If you should have any other comments you want to share with me, or if you have a question I can answer, please feel free to contact my Washington, D.C. staff at (202) 224-3841. Best regards.
I do not understand why people in her position still fail to see that this is not business as usual. She is aware that the President, like a petulant child, would have likely refused to send up another nomination if he did not get his way, and she doesn't see anything out of the ordinary in this. She is like an indulgent parent of a spoiled child.
In fairness to Senator Feinstein, she has spoken out recently on the subject of torture and made concrete proposals. I hope that she continues to pursue the topic. I hope too that she comes to see before its over that the President does not acknowledge the rules of the game in Washington.
- J
A harrowing movie about divorce from the view of the children. I kept thinking about the child actors playing the sons of the self centered and hopelessly misguided (in short, normal) divorcing parents. They did excellent work, but this was a big movie to carry on one's shoulders.
We have yet to see the end of what has become known as the Subprime Mortgage Scandal. There are apparently many more rocks to turn over. Already, though, the dollar amounts are huge. This is the latest in a series of Liquidity Bubbles: lots of cash with no place to go until someone figures out a way to rationalize very bad investments. The first liquidity bubble in modern times, I think was the Savings and loan scandal of the 80's. To a degree, the dot-com bubble was a liquidity bubble.
I am no economist, but it seems pretty plain to me. Starting in the Seventies we turned over to the Fed virtually all the management of economic cycles. At the same time we began a legislative trend that has had the effect of increasing opacity of economic transactions. "Deregulation" and "Free Trade" are opacity increasing activities. What is the economic value of moving manufacturing oversees? To make invisible exploitation of workers and trashing of the environment.
So when the economy slows down we pump more cheap money into it. This is intended to encourage innovation and new enterprise, and it does, but it also encourages fraud. Especially in a loosely regulated environment, old ideas, like pyramid schemes and ponzi schemes are easy to dress up as new, easier than real innovation. So we have bubbles, ordinary citizens are victimized and the government bails out the villains. And so it will go.
- J
#!/bin/sh
# Backs up a Blogger blog.
# Should work in any suitably equipped unix-like environment. Requires the
# following programs:
#
# 1. wget
# 2. tidy
# 3. xsltproc
# 4. xargs
PROGNAME=`basename $0`
DIRNAME=`dirname $0`
function usage() {
echo "usage: $PROGNAME [blogURL]"
exit 1
}
TMPFILE=/tmp/$PROGNAME-tmp-$$.html
XSLFILE=/tmp/$PROGNAME-xslt-$$.html
if [ "$1" = "" ] ; then usage; fi
URL=$1
# create xslfile from here-document
cat > $XSLFILE <<- "END-HERE" <?xml version='1.0'?> <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0"> <xsl:output method="text" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" /> <xsl:template match="/" > <xsl:apply-templates select="//html:ul[@class='posts']/html:li/html:a"/> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="html:a"> <xsl:value-of select="@href"/><xsl:text> </xsl:text> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> END-HERE # get the index file of the blog # clean it up with tidy in case it has bad xml syntax. Blogger uses xhtml. # write to a temporary file. wget -O - $URL | tidy 2>/dev/null > $TMPFILE
# read from temporary file.
# extract from a list of individual posts.
# get each post and all the files needed to render them locally.
xsltproc $XSLFILE $TMPFILE |
xargs wget -E -H -k -K -p
# remove the temporary files.
rm -f $TMPFILE
rm -f $XSLFILE
Dear Senator Feinstein
I read in the paper this morning that you intend to support immunity for phone companies that are facilitating the government spying on ordinary Americans. I urge you to reconsider. In the article you are quoted as saying the phone companies should not be held liable for complying with requests from the government, that those in government should be held liable. But the effect of this immunity bill is that the facts surrounding the cases will be suppressed. This bill will permit the criminals in the Bush administration to get away scott free. There are so far unchallenged allegations that the Bush administration approached the phone companies long before September 11 about installing the equipment that is at issue. The argument that the parties were motivated by the need to respond to al Qaeda is therefore bogus.
Please reconsider your position Senator Feinstein.
(Image: from wiki commons. The Letter Writer by David Roberts)
Dear Senator Feinstein,
I know you will say that your vote on the Mukasey nomination does not mean you endorse the use of torture. I think you believe your vote was practical and pragmatic; making the best of a bad situation. If not Mukasey, Bush could send up somebody worse.
I think you are wrong. The citizens of California, the citizens of this country, and the citizens of the world are waiting for our government to stand up and begin to restore some of the ideals that we once stood for. Our president says we do not torture but has not disavowed memos that define torture so narrowly as to be meaningless. A number of your fellow Judiciary Committee members stood together to make a clear statement about torture, to draw a line. You would not stand with them. You stood with the president. You stood for torture.
K and I saw "After the Quake" at Berkeley Rep last night, a play based on two stories by Haruki Murakami. It was structured as, and by all outwards appearances, a children's story, but was completely engaging for adults.Apropos of yesterday's post came this poem, "Men at the Gates" by Gary L Lark. Its about men waiting for a closed factory to open, men who see themselves as builders and cannot adjust to how the world now sees them. I am not sure how much of a poem comprises fair use, so I will only quote its ending:
They wait for the world
to make sense again,
where calluses grow on your hands
and the soreness in your back
means you're worth a damn.
Read the whole thing.
- J
And change is a semi with smoking wheels filling the rear view mirror.
I think this is a good deal of what gives work meaning; shared purpose and shared values. I think this is a lot of what has been missing from my work. My company was gobbled up by a larger company this year and my new company is a wholly owned subsidiary of a multinational corporation of very dubious reputation. The new company is based elsewhere and they appear to have a paternalistic patronizing attitude towards employees. We know them, so far, mostly through the policies that come down or the marketing campaigns that are tried out on employees first. I have always worked mostly alone, staring at a screen all day, but I have not always felt alone.A Tuft of Flowers
Robert Frost - A Boy's Will (1913)
I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.
The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the leveled scene.
I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.
But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,—alone,
‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’
But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a ’wildered butterfly,
Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night
Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.
And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.
And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.
I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;
But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,
A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.
The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.
The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,
That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,
And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;
And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.
‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’
