I’ve decided that I’ll make my fortune by creating a reality TV show based on a topic I’m positive will draw an immense audience- the opportunity to go find people who’ve made confounding decisions and ask them, after the fact – “What the **** were you thinking?”

“When you noticed the helicopter overhead and the nine police cars following your 1970 pickup truck loaded with gravel and bricks, and you decided not to pull over…just what the **** were you thinking?”

I know the show will be a hit, because everyone I talk to has the same question.It’s broadly applicable…when Gerard Levin swapped Time Warner stock for immensely overvalued AOL stock…”what the **** were you thinking?”

And you can go on.

Here’s a case where I really, really want to ask Bush – “When you nominated Harriet Miers – in the face of sagging popularity, a somewhat rebellious Congress, you nominated – who? To the Supreme Court? What the **** were you thinking?”

I have no doubt that Miers is a competent – possibly even an extremely competent lawyer. I know lots and lots of competent lawyers and Superior Court judges.

The fact that Bush is President and I’m not doesn’t make her more qualified than they are.

The reality is that there are probably a thousand or so lawyers and judges who figure in the public legal life of the country at this point. Before ideology, loyalty, or proximity, I’d suggest that as a basis for consideration. I’m hard-pressed to imagine why picking one of them wouldn’t have been a better choice, and why it won’t be a better choice after this nomination fails or is withdrawn.

So,Mr. President – what the **** were you thinking?

I was going to write about the LATimes op-ed by Ethan Rarik, acting director of the Center on Politics at the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies (echoed by Mark Kleiman) that would gladly sacrifice my rights as a California voter to the well-being of the Democratic Party.

I was pretty outraged when Rarik wrote:

The big problem with Proposition 77, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ballot measure to create a new system for drawing legislative and congressional boundaries, is that it’s much too fair.

…
Here’s why. I’m a Democrat, and while I don’t think that the nonpartisan redistricting would have much of an effect on the legislative majorities in the California statehouse (where Democrats are likely to keep control of both the Assembly and the Senate), I do think a nonpartisan redistricting could reduce the number of Democrats in California’s congressional delegation, lessening the chances that Democrats will ever be able to regain control of the House of Representatives.

If enacted, Proposition 77 would also rob California’s dominant Democrats of the power to dictate a partisan gerrymander after the 2010 census. I want Democrats to retain that ability, no matter how unseemly it is to say so. It’s not that I don’t want to be fair. I do. But why should California Democrats be fair to Republicans when they have no guarantee that Republicans in the rest of the country will behave likewise? I will support a nonpartisan redistricting of Democrat-dominated California on the same day I can be assured of similar fairness in Republican states.

Why am I outraged? Because Rarik is perfectly prepared to screw all California citizens rather than lose his partisan advantage. It’s not that we’re all in the same boat; it’s that he’d rather sink the boat than risk losing.

California politics is paralyzed (which is why we elected another B-movie star and keep doing these propositions) because we’ve institutionalized gridlock. Partisan gerrymandering has rendered the general election meaningless for legislators; the primary is what counts. And since the committed partisans – typically the most ideologically pure – control the levers of the local and state parties, the primaries are won by the most ideologically pure.

That’s why Brad Plumer’s criticism – while at least morally sound – is still off target.

This looks dubious. Under the second guideline there, the judges drawing the boundaries could end up packing the majority of urban voters into a few concentrated, ultra-Democratic districts. (The first guideline might, equally, pack Republicans into conservative “counties,” but I can’t tell without data, and am guessing this would be a smaller effect.) Schwarzenegger’s plan wouldn’t necessarily lead to more competitive districts either, as is widely hoped. Since “[j]udges must maximize the number of whole cities in each district,” you’d have a handful of ultra-safe single-city seats that would vote overwhelmingly Democratic. If you wanted more electoral competition, then you’d try to create a bunch of districts that, say, combined parts of “blue” urban areas with parts of “red” suburbs. Schwarzenegger’s plan does the exact opposite.

Now his plan would give representatives more “natural” regions to represent (i.e., it makes sense to represent a whole city rather than parts of two different regions), but that’s a different goal from either a) ensuring competitiveness or b) making sure that voters have anything like proportional representation in Congress, and should be sold as such. Plus it looks for all the world like a naked, calculated power grab, rather than a solid reform that just happens to hurt the Democrats. (I’d happily support the latter; not so much the former.)

The issue to Brad is that how many seats have a -D or a -R behind them is not only a consequence of fairness but is the primary metric of fairness. That seems senseless to me; I’m a Democrat, but I’m a Californian first.

The goal ought to be seats in which the ideologically pure are less likely to triumph. In which the compromisers, the folks who don’t think ‘moderation’ is a dirty word, have a chance to win.

I’m not at all sure I buy Plumer’s point that breaking district lines at existing political boundaries creates clear Democratic and Republican enclaves. I am sure that these will be less ‘ideologically pure’ than the gerrymandered seats we live with today – and thus that we will get more legislators who are familiar with the art of compromise. I’m equally sure that there is a way to model districts that would optimize the electoral balance between parties. But I’m equally sure that it would be incomprehensibly complex and opaque, and so as subject to manipulation as the BCS rankings.

Districts that reflect existing political boundaries are transparent and hard to manipulate; that’s a good thing.

I’ll be voting for Proposition 77; I’d like to bring actual politics back to California politics. Maybe we can start here and spread it around the country.

Update: Corrected the spelling of Brad Plummer’s name.

Constitutions matter, because they confer legitimacy.

Dan Darling talks below about the Iraqi constitutional referendum, and points out that while a success for the Iraqi political process, it certainly doesn’t mean that the terror will stop.

The war certainly isn’t over.

But we’re moving toward one of the key preconditions for it being over, both in Iraq and more widely.

And that is an increasing rejection of the legitimacy of terrorism, and even Islamist politics … within Iraq and the broader Arab world.

This is critical, because as commenter DJPR points out (in suggesting that the election wasn’t all that, with or without the bag of chips):

Max Weber stated that the monopoly on violence within a given delinated territory is the fundamental definition of a government.

In the mid-to-long term, can the Iraqi Government achive this in any sort of meaningful way?

DJ makes a common mistake (not unlike going against a Sicilian when death is on the line); he misquotes Weber.

What Weber actually said (as I discussed a while ago) was that:

Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

The question isn’t whether there is terrorist violence within Iraq, but whether that violence is perceived by a substantial part of the population as legitimate.

The recent Pew study (cited in the L.A. Times) suggests that terrorism is perceived by the Muslim world as less legitimate than it has been in the past:

The percentage of people holding a favorable impression of the United States increased in Indonesia (+23 points), Lebanon (+15), Pakistan (+2) and Jordan (+16). It also went up in such non-Muslim nations as France, Germany, Russia and India.

What accounts for this shift? The answer varies by country, but analysts point to waning public anger over the invasion of Iraq, gratitude for the massive U.S. tsunami relief effort and growing conviction that the U.S. is serious about promoting democracy.

There is also increasing aversion to America’s enemies, even in the Islamic world. The Pew poll found that “nearly three-quarters of Moroccans and roughly half of those in Pakistan, Turkey and Indonesia see Islamic extremism as a threat to their countries.”

Support for suicide bombing has declined dramatically in all the Muslim countries surveyed except Jordan, with its large anti-Israeli Palestinian population. The number of those saying that “violence against civilian targets is sometimes or often justified” has dropped by big margins in Lebanon (-34 points) and Indonesia (-12) since 2002, and in the last year in Pakistan (-16) and Morocco (-27).

The success of the elections in Iraq is independent of the outcome; what matters is that all parties – Sunni and Sh’ia alike are engaged in a political struggle over the direction of the state.

They are granting some measure of legitimacy to the state; that is exactly the outcome that the Islamists sought to block.

We’re not done yet. But the things that we need to see happen do, in fact seem to be happening.

In January of 2003, I said:

We’re in this for the long haul. We don’t get to ‘declare victory and go home’ when the going gets tough, elections are near, or TV shows pictures of the inevitable suffering that war causes. The Marshall Plan is a bad example, because the Europe that had been devastated by war had the commercial and entrepreneurial culture that simply needed stuff and money to get restarted. And while we’re damn good with stuff and money, this is going to take much more, and we’re going to have to roll up our sleeves, work, and be willing to sweat with this for some time.

There are no good examples of this that I can think of in history. The postwar reconstruction of Japan comes the closest, and it’s not necessarily a good example, because the Japanese by WWII were a coherent, unified, hierarchical society that could be changed by fiat from the top. I don’t think that Germany is a good example, because once we de-Nazified, there was some tradition of liberal politics to work with. The Robert Kaplan-esque world we’re moving toward doesn’t have any of that.

That’s true today as much as it was then.

I get email…this from the owners of the website www.democrats.com (note: they are not affiliated with the official Democratic Party)

Blogcall10 will feature David Swanson of AfterDowningStreet.org discussing the netroots-funded poll that found a virtual majority of Americans – 50% to 44% – want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush if he lied about the war in Iraq. Yet despite these astonishing results, the poll received absolutely no coverage in any mainstream media outlet – just one more example of rightwing media bias.

AfterDowningStreet.org commissioned the poll (by the non-partisan firm Ipsos Public Affairs) because the major media polls refused to include an impeachment question in their regular polls, citing various non-credible excuses.

AfterDowningStreet.org has a second poll in the works to keep up the pressure on the mainstream media. And Democrats.com is increasing its efforts to persuade one or more Members of Congress to introduce Articles of Impeachment.

While there is tremendous netroots support for Articles of Impeachment, there is also opposition from unexpected places. On Wednesday, Bob Fertik debated the merits of impeachment with Randi Rhodes during her show. Randi argued that House Democrats should not introduce Articles of Impeachment because they would fail and hurt Democratic candidates in the 2006 election; Bob argued that Articles of Impeachment would rally the Democratic base and help win those elections, even if the Republican majority defeated the Articles.

Join us for Blogcall10 as we discuss Impeachment Polls and Activism.

So the point of the open conference call is to let the blogging community know – and hopefully jump on and trigger a media push on impeaching the President.

Now I’m pretty comfy saying that this is a view pretty far out of the mainstream, and one that pretty much nails the basic points that I’ve been making for a few years and that Obama made in the Kos piece that I enthusiastically linked to.

And when I make the point that lots of serious Democrats hold looney positions like that, reasonable people take me to task and say “No real Democrats hold positions like that; that’s a strawman position; the mainstream of the party is much saner than that.”

Let’s go the resumes of the guys who launched this site:

Bob Fertik, President

Fertik created the Internet consulting firm I-Progress, which specialized in Internet development consulting for non-profits. He is the co-founder of the Pro-choice Resource Center, Eleanor’s List, Political Woman Newsletter, Women Leaders Online, and the Women’s Voting Guide.

David Lytel, Co-founder

Lytel was the co-developer and managing editor of the award-winning White House Web site, called in 1995 by Hotwired “easily one of the best sites on the Internet.” … Note: in 2003, Lytel left Democrats.com and launched the Committee to Re-Defeat the President (www.redefeatbush.com).

These guys aren’t running the DLC, but neither are they aggrieved grad school dropouts who work in a tofu factory in Bellingham, far from the levers of Party power.

Let me make another suggestion as a guy who’s made a buck or more selling a domain name, and who had dealt with issues around domain name vs copyright for a while; if the content of democrats.com was truly reprehensible to the Democratic Party, they’d shut it down.

They don’t, not because they legally can’t (see PETA v PETA), but because they choose not to – because the 400,000 pageviews the site serves up represent people whose loyalty they Democratic Party seeks.

And the site operator represents one of the political apparachniks who make up the apparatus of – and the substance of – the Party.

Kevin Drum riffs on a conversation we had (along with some other folks) at Brian Linse’s house over the weekend.

The basic question is “why do Democrats keep losing?” Kevin, of course, poses it better than I do:

…if all this stuff is so popular with the middle and working classes, how come we don’t have any of it? Can it really be solely because our positions haven’t been loud enough and forthright enough? Because we haven’t fought hard enough?

The issue is, simply, why it is that a number of American voters either vote against their expressed and actual interests, or don’t come out and vote for them?

The question, which is followed up in great detail over on Kevin’s site by authors and political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, who are pushing their new book “Off Center.”

The arguments seem to break out into three reasonable strands (and a bunch of unreasonable ones, which I’ll ignore):

* The policies aren’t good enough expressions of the principles behind them (the more-think-tank-money theory);
* The people expressing the policies aren’t tough enough advocates of them (the why-don’t-we-have-a-Lee-Atwater-let’s spend-more-think-tank-money-and-grow-some theory);
* The institutional process is stacked against us by (conservative think tanks, corporate media, election finance policy, the fact that we don’t spend enough on think tanks).

Hacker and Pierson vote for Door #3. I’ll guess that they do work with think tanks…

I’ll suggest something different, on a couple of fronts. Let me – to borrow a phrase – reframe the argument.

Instead of arguing from principles, and letting policies emerge, liberals tend to want to argue policy. I think this is partly institutional – liberals tend to come from places where policy is actively studied, argued, or practiced. Ideas are usually expressed in policy – it’s not concrete otherwise.

As soon as Kevin & I started discussing it, his issue was: “What would the winning policies be?” (and my responses, when pinned down like that, were relatively lame – as you can see on his blog).

It’s the wrong question.

The issue in politics ought to be “what are the principles” and “why do I trust you to carry them out?”

Let me get back to that.

The issue with policy is the belief that somehow, someway, if I locked myself in a room and took my meals while reading every book ever written on healthcare, and corresponding with everyone who knows anything about it, and getting my third doctorate in medicine, following the ones in public policy and business administration, that I could somehow sit down in front of my computer and walk out with a policy so perfect, so brilliant, so incontrovertibly right that the voting public would not only pass it, they’d etch it into stone tablets and erect them outside Alabama courthouses.

Wrong answer. Wrong belief.

It’s an answer that matters … good policies work better than bad ones … but the reality is bounded by two immutable limits.

The first is Horst Rittel’s “wickedness.” Sorry, this is a wicked – untestable, unsolvable through analysis – problem. There is no single right answer. All these issues of national policy are wicked problems. There are a series of answers, better and worse, that we evolve as we go. And helping good policies evolve is a cause, a calling, a good thing to do.

The other is to mistake that diligence and hard work and cogitating – working to approximate that unreachable “right” answer are what this is about. That we’ll be rewarded for our good homework by a teacher, who singles us out for praise. I’ll talk about that “good student” theme in liberalism sometime soon.

Look instead in Hannah Arendt’s direction.

The answer is praxis (quotes from “Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World” by Hill).

“For Arendt, the activities of labor, work, and action collectively constitute praxis. Each is indispensable. Without labor, neither the individual nor the species can survive; without work and the world it builds, man is lost in the cosmos and does not develop a distinctive human identity; without action, his life lacks meaning and he does not develop a sense of personal identity.”

Labor is, to Arendt, simple effort – dumb animal effort. Work layers technique (craft, technology) onto labor to create a ‘made world’.

Action is somewhat more complex. But it is the expression of agency through activity, and ideally, activity in the public sphere.

“…political action is its paradigmatic form, and the organized public space its ideal home. In political life man acts amongst his peers, whose very presence and critical judgement bring out his full potential.”

So I’m looking at two moderately obscure dead Germans and talking about Democratic politics. What exactly am I serving up?

Let me add another layer to the cake.

I manage projects (including software projects) for a living. My involvement with this blog came at a time when I was getting much more interested in “4th Generation warfare” as expressed in project management – agile processes.

There is a group of software developers who have created what is called the “Agile Alliance.” They have a manifesto, which I think has the right flavor:

We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

The ‘other side’ of the debate is the Project Management Institute, which has formalized and institutionalized policies around managing projects into the PMBOK – the Project Management Body of Knowledge – which is as you can imagine, big, and convoluted, and arcane.

A Guide to The Project Management Body of Knowledge – Third Edition (also called the PMBOK® Guide – Third Edition) identifies that subset of the Project Management Body of Knowledge that is generally recognized as good practice. “Identify” means to provide a general overview as opposed to an exhaustive description. “Generally recognized” means that the knowledge and practices described are applicable to most projects most of the time, and that there is widespread consensus about their value and usefulness. “Good practice” means that there is general agreement that the correct application of these skills, tools, and techniques can enhance the chances of success over a wide range of different projects. Good practice does not mean that the knowledge described should always be applied uniformly on all projects; the project management team is responsible for determining what is appropriate for any given project.

If I study it long enough and take a test, I can be certified as a serious practitioner of Project Management. The problem, of course, is that the guys running the Big Dig in Boston all passed that test.

The arcane and complex policies we suggest – like the ‘kludge’ that Hillarycare represented – are suspect by the American people, not because they aren’t smart enough to understand them, but because they are smart enough to be suspicious of this kind of effort. The track record for grand policy just isn’t very good. And average people may want more accessible health care, but they also don’t like the idea of Tom DeLay or Hillary walking into the Congressional clinic while they fill out the fiftieth copy of a nine-page form for the third time in order to see a specialist.

And so what I’m suggesting is simple. Shelve policy debate for a while. Simplify things.

Talk first about principles. Create a manifesto. Something vaguely like this:

First and foremost, the American principles of liberty, equality, freedom as have really not been enjoyed as well in any other place or time.

In the context of those principles, and not in lieu of them – there are other principles that defend the weak against the strong, the poor against the rich, the few against the many.

Those principles ought to be foremost. They should be coherent, clear, and compelling. Those are – in my belief – the “liberal manifesto.”

Then talk about how they get devolved into policy, and how – in dialog with supporters and opponents, in the messy, chaotic wonderful process that was created for us by our Founders, and which we intend to keep up and hand down to our children, we intend to create policies that meet those principles.

Let the policies emerge. Let leaders emerge who understand the principles, and can guide the creation of understandable, useful, workable policies.

Let them convince voters that they can uphold the principles because of their personal histories, their accomplishments, the ‘self’ they present in action in the public sphere.

Personally, I’m interested in some “4th Generation” social policies; ones that veer away from command and control, and from heavy-handed intrusion into people’s lives – and still meet the principles I set out; they help the weak, the poor, the few. What would a welfare program run along Special Forces lines look like?

To be honest, I think the GOP is far better at expressing principles over politics. They’re not necessarily better at translating those principles into policy…

…and if nothing else, there’s an opening for the Democratic Party.

This post was going to be titled “Terry Semiel Has To Cooperate With Local Laws.” and be about the beating death of a pro-democracy activist in China, as reported by a reporter from the Guardian who eyewitnessed it (I’ll post on that in a moment).

But first I’m sure there’s an innocent explanation for this, and would love to hear from someone what it might be. UPDATE: No, I don’t think there’s an innocent explanation. Go down and read the end of the post.

I was Googling for the CNN comment on their need to release information about an Internet user to the Chinese authorities, looking for this quote:

“Just like any other global company, Yahoo! must ensure that its local country sites must operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based,” Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako said in a statement e-mailed to Reuters by the firm’s Hong Kong arm.

And found it quickly enough, using the Google search “Yahoo China statement”

But it’s what I found next that’s interesting. Below the fold are two screenshots…and yes, I do use Pimpzilla…showing that CNN has removed the Reuters story cited.

Google still has the cache, which I show as well.

And of course, both of them clearly show the logo of CNN’s search partner.

Yahoo!

I’ve sent a message to the webmaster, asking why there is a missing page. I’ll share the response.

UPDATE: I followed some of the other related links in the search that led to CNN. Take a look:

and

Things have been fairly frantic in my nonblog life, which accounts for a big part of the rationale for lack of presence in my blog life.

The other part of the rationale has been a general sense of blog malaise, as I don’t see the Katrina response, the 83rd Airborne accusations, the ongoing struggle toward a civil society in Iraq, and the accusations of corruption by Abramoff triggering serious discussions about the state of U.S. infrastructure and disaster preparedness, how to treat captured guerilla soldiers and terrorists, the Islamist challenge and the specific challenges of how to deal with Iraq, or what to do about a deeply corrupt political culture in this country.

What I see instead is schoolchildren chanting “DID SO!” and “DID NOT!” And it comes down to how you feel about GWB, as some kind of icon for good or ill, rather than trying to figure out what we all have to do to move our problems toward solution.

I’m getting email traffic among a group of my fellow Democratic bloggers who are crowing about the Plame grand jury’s request that Rove retestify, with gleeful exhortations that celebrations will immediately follow the White House perp walks.

None of this has really put me in a mood to blog a lot.And when I look back over my recent blogging output, it makes me feel like I’m getting pulled toward one of the two shouting camps – neither one of which hold much interest for me.

But then, like poet Mark Doty’s train rider, trudging up the ramp from Grand Central to be reanimated by the city’s “angled attack on heaven,” I glanced up and saw some things that gave me pause and hope.

Over on “Screw ‘Em” Kos’ site, Barak Obama wrote a long, passionate post about what he thinks – and I think – is wrong with the Democrats’ conduct recently. I’m doubting that most of the readers here have read it, although you may have heard about it. You ought to. Two excerpts that caught my eye:

According to the storyline that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists – a storyline often reflected in comments on this blog – we are up against a sharply partisan, radically conservative, take-no-prisoners Republican party. They have beaten us twice by energizing their base with red meat rhetoric and single-minded devotion and discipline to their agenda. In order to beat them, it is necessary for Democrats to get some backbone, give as good as they get, brook no compromise, drive out Democrats who are interested in “appeasing” the right wing, and enforce a more clearly progressive agenda. The country, finally knowing what we stand for and seeing a sharp contrast, will rally to our side and thereby usher in a new progressive era.

I think this perspective misreads the American people. From traveling throughout Illinois and more recently around the country, I can tell you that Americans are suspicious of labels and suspicious of jargon. They don’t think George Bush is mean-spirited or prejudiced, but have become aware that his administration is irresponsible and often incompetent. They don’t think that corporations are inherently evil (a lot of them work in corporations), but they recognize that big business, unchecked, can fix the game to the detriment of working people and small entrepreneurs. They don’t think America is an imperialist brute, but are angry that the case to invade Iraq was exaggerated, are worried that we have unnecessarily alienated existing and potential allies around the world, and are ashamed by events like those at Abu Ghraib which violate our ideals as a country.

Now I don’t completely buy all of his specific claims, but I do buy the key point he makes. The driving strategy of the Democratic Left – that the masses will rise up when they see the purity and value of their intentions, and that rather than listening to the people they hope to lead, the liberal core just has to talk to them.

The first step in this is canning the “Screw Them” rhetoric, which is one reason I’m so happy to see this on “Screw ‘Em” Kos’ site (yes, those words will be tied together for the foreseeable future in whatever I write). It followed an earlier thread there, I’m told (haven’t found it, but would love to get a link in the comments for myself and others) on the issue of civility and humility in politics.

In addition the question isn’t means – more money and effort into existing programs or plans – but ends. How do we best accomplish the goals that we, as liberals, claim to stand for?

…to the degree that we brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, “true” progressive vision for the country, we risk the very thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas that are required to move this country forward. When we lash out at those who share our fundamental values because they have not met the criteria of every single item on our progressive “checklist,” then we are essentially preventing them from thinking in new ways about problems. We are tying them up in a straightjacket and forcing them into a conversation only with the converted.

…

…I do think that being bold involves more than just putting more money into existing programs and will instead require us to admit that some existing programs and policies don’t work very well. And further, it will require us to innovate and experiment with whatever ideas hold promise (including market- or faith-based ideas that originate from Republicans).

And suddenly I’m motivated to start blogging again. (Have to see what I can do about the whole overwhelming real life part…)

And no, I’m not signing onto the common wisdom that Iraq is a debacle and was a crime. More on that later.

Back in March, I wrote to the Democratic Party:

And how the hell could you have laid down and rolled over for the bankruptcy bill? If there was ever a bully pulpit to stand behind and use to point out the corporatist flaws of the GOP, this was it.

Note that I’m not opposed to government actions that help corporations; sometimes what’s good for G.M. is actually good for America.

But this was such a clear-cut case of taking from the weak and giving to the rich with no public purpose except giving more to those that have that my head is swimming.

And the missed opportunity for the Democrats to define themselves – by challenging irresponsible and rapacious lending as much as they are challenging irresponsible borrowing – boggles my mind.

And today, reader Robert Martin emailed me this story from the New York Times:

…four weeks after New Orleans flooded and tens of thousands of other residents of the Gulf Coast also lost their homes and livelihoods, a stricter new personal bankruptcy law scheduled to take effect on Oct. 17 is likely to deliver another blow to those dislocated by the storm.

The law was intended to keep individuals from taking on debts they had no intention of paying off. But many once-solvent Katrina victims are likely to be caught up in the net intended to catch deadbeats.

So thanks, Congressman Moran (D-MBNA), (along with Senator Mary K Landrieu (D – LA) – hat tip to commenter PD Shaw) – and the 72 others who voted for this bill:Andrews
Baca
Baird
Bean*
Berry*
Bishop (GA)*
Boren*
Boswell*
Boucher*
Boyd
Cardoza*
Case
Chandler*
Cleaver
Cooper
Costa*
Cramer*
Crowley
Cuellar*
Davis (AL)
Davis (FL)
Davis (TN)*
Edwards*
Etheridge
Ford
Gonzalez
Gordon*
Green, Al
Harman
Herseth
Higgins
Hinojosa*
Holden
Hooley*
Hoyer
Israel*
Jefferson*
Kind
Larsen (WA)*
Matheson*
McCarthy*
McIntyre*
Meek (FL)
Meeks (NY)
Melancon*
Menendez
Michaud
Mollohan
Moore (KS)
Moran (VA)
Murtha
Ortiz
Pastor
Peterson (MN)*
Pomeroy
Price (NC)
Rahall*
Reyes
Ross*
Rothman
Ruppersberger*
Salazar*
Schwartz (PA)
Scott (GA)*
Skelton*
Spratt
Strickland
Tanner
Tauscher
Taylor (MS)
Thompson (CA)
Wu
Wynn*

(the names with a * also voted to repeal the estate tax – hat tip to The Left Coaster)

Walking back to my bike, a brilliant trail advancing across the sky…must be a Vandenberg launch.

It’s 6:45 an there are maybe 150 people in the church; there weren’t enough people out front to leaflet…the three of us will try while folks are on the way out.

Our pewmates are unhappy with the turnout, but maybe Los Angeles is just fashionably late.

I’ll update as the evening progresses.

7:00 Now about 275…

7:15 Now about 350, and I just got an emergency call and have to bail. No choice…have to choose parenthood. Crap…Flap will report.