Prairie Weather

97 to 1 vote in the Senate

The question is, will Bush veto this?

The Senate voted on Tuesday to suspend oil deliveries to the country's Strategic Petroleum Reserve until crude prices fall below $75 a barrel, repudiating the Bush administration's policy of boosting the stockpile at time of record oil and gasoline prices.

The proposal to halt shipments to the emergency oil reserve, which cleared the Senate in a 97 to 1 vote, was tacked on to a flood insurance reform bill.

The House of Representatives was expected later on Tuesday to vote on a similar measure that supporters believed would put more oil supplies in the market and help lower energy prices.

Yeah.  He's bound to veto.  But when was the last time we saw a 97 to 1 vote in the Senate?  And who was that single holdout?  Wayne Allard.

Obama, Clinton, McCain: what their handwriting shows

The LA Times brings in three experts.

Despite the charges of elitism flying around, none of the 2008 presidential candidates is a snob. Equally encouraging, all of them appear intelligent and driven.

But two, the experts said, strive to remain opaque amid the public glare. Two are reluctant to embrace their family legacies. One lacks warmth, whereas another can talk to almost anyone. One is flexible, another controlled, the third a loose cannon....

Despite vast policy differences, McCain and Obama have something in common signature-wise -- illegibility, which suggests a need for privacy or an aversion to transparency.... "There is a lot about John McCain he doesn't wish to share openly," said Roger Rubin, a New York graphologist with three decades of experience. ...Both men's signatures also reflect a desire to distance themselves from their fathers, the experts said. ...

Clinton's signature is readable, but lacks emotion and warmth -- the two Ls in Hillary are sticks rather than loops. The simplicity shows intellect and forcefulness. Her husband's signature, a bulbous, curvaceous scrawl, is rounder and more feminine. (Hence the gender-reversal thing.) ...

... Clinton's style is upright and controlled. The I's are dotted and the Ts are crossed. "She can see both sides and would be good at sorting out conflicts," said Sheila Lowe, a Ventura graphologist and author of "Handwriting of the Famous and Infamous." Clinton reduces things to their simplest form, Rubin said. "She goes easily to the core of a subject. But she can be impolitic and impatient with people who don't get it," he said.

A thank-you note written by Obama after his win in Iowa reflects intelligence, Rubin asserted, but with emotion and a capacity for conversation. The letters connect fluidly without interruption; words end with lines that reach out. "That's why the guy can stand up on a podium and talk extemporaneously. It reflects in his writing -- the ability to think many thoughts ahead," Rubin said.

Whereas Clinton's writing is disciplined, Obama's is flexible. (Her universal health insurance plan is mandatory; his is optional.) His more limber style suggests a desire to deal with different people. (He favors open dialogue with America's enemies; she doesn't.)

By contrast, McCain's writing is disconnected, forceful and intense. The letters change direction unexpectedly -- fitting for a loose cannon, the Republican Party maverick who bucked the establishment. "The writing leans to the right. But he does it in his own way. He doesn't do what is expected," Rubin noted.  The H in John stands tall, a sign of pride, idealism and ambition. "He pushes very hard to get what he wants," Imberman said. "Look at the comma: It's a slash. There is his temper."

So if the experts are right, Clinton really is smart and tough and stays until the last dog dies, Obama is an engaging bridge-builder, and McCain takes charge, and does it his way.

Hurrah for women! They've finally dropped through the glass floor.

One of the more soft-headed beliefs out there (¡ay, mamacita!) is that women are inherently more moral than men.  Yup.  Kinder, more giving, considerably more decent than the other gender.  If you believe that, well, Hillary Clinton has ruined the rest of your life.  If you never believed it, you just nod your head quietly as Clinton lies and plays dirty and you say something like, "Yeah, just like my first wife!"

Of course, this belief set belongs for the most part to knuckle-draggers of both sexes who remain aggravated by the differences but blind to similarities in general.  The rest of us were educated by Lucy and Charlie Brown.  We knew the score all along.

For Barbara Ehrenreich, the wake-up calls were Abu Ghraib and Hillary Clinton's campaign.

In Friday's New York Times, Susan Faludi rejoiced over Hillary Clinton's destruction of the myth of female prissiness and innate moral superiority, hailing Clinton's "no-holds-barred pugnacity" and her media reputation as "nasty" and "ruthless." Future female presidential candidates will owe a lot to the race of 2008, Faludi wrote, "when Hillary Clinton broke through the glass floor and got down with the boys."

I share Faludi's glee--up to a point. Surely no one will ever dare argue that women lack the temperament for political combat. But by running a racially tinged campaign, lying about her foreign policy experience and repeatedly seeming to favor McCain over her Democratic opponent, Clinton didn't just break through the "glass floor," she set a new low for floors in general, and would, if she could have gotten within arm's reach, have rubbed the broken glass into Obama's face.

Apparently Francis Fukuyama still thinks wimmins are not suited to the presidency, being less willing to rush into war.  But he's wrong. Hillary is fully prepared.

Far from being the stereotypical feminist-pacifist of your imagination, the woman to get closest to the Oval Office has promised to "obliterate" the toddlers of Tehran--along, of course, with the bomb-builders and Hezbollah supporters. Earlier on, Clinton foreswore even talking to presumptive bad guys, although women are supposed to be the talk addicts of the species. Watch out--was her distinctly unladylike message to Hugo Chávez, Kim Jong-Il and the rest of them--or I'll rip you a new one.

Oo0-ee!  That's so exciting.   Doesn't that turn you on?  Ehrenreich rightly points out that women have never been given credit for aggression.  It always gets written off as less potent "bitchiness."

...Men get angry; women suffer from bouts of inexplicable, hormonally-driven, hostility. So give Clinton credit for defying the belittling stereotype: she's been visibly angry for months, if not decades, and it can't all have been PMS.

If you've been clinging to the notion of women's moral superiority, you managed to close your eyes -- as Ehrenreich points out -- to Lynndie England, Condi Rice and other recent perps.  Abu Ghraib was what ended the myth of women's moral superiority for Barbara Ehrenreich.  Others among us have lived with the hard truth for years:  we learned early on that you can't make sweeping, silly generalizations about any group -- ethnic, religious, national, gender, class.   We shouldn't even have to say that.

Hillary Clinton smashed the myth of innate female moral superiority in the worst possible way--by demonstrating female moral inferiority. We didn't really need her racial innuendos and free-floating bellicosity to establish that women aren't wimps. As a generation of young feminists realizes, the values once thought to be uniquely and genetically female--such as compassion and an aversion to violence--can be found in either sex, and sometimes it's a man who best upholds them.

Plug in

Nissan's got a zero-emissions electric car coming on the market in a year.  Well, not totally zero.

Nissan, which a decade ago was on the brink of bankruptcy, is the first manufacturer to say it will sell mass-market all-electric vehicles worldwide. The zero emissions refers to those from the car’s tailpipe and not those from the production of electricity used to power the car. ... G.M. plans to start producing the Chevrolet Volt in 2010, while Toyota expects to offer a similar so-called “plug in” hybrid around the same time.

Israel is responsible for encouraging the development and sale of the cars, lowering its tax rates on electric cars below the taxes of gas-power cars.

The company plans to introduce 60 models worldwide by 2012. Several new products are planned for the United States market, including a new Maxima sedan, the Cube small car and a new version of the Z-family sports cars.

Renault and Nissan have also joined with an Indian carmaker,  Bajaj Auto, to produce a $2,500 car by 2011.

Hillary:  Das finale

Hat tip to Ken Silverstein at Harper's.

Burma.

Re: Plan to continue restriction on freedom in the US

The White House last week issued a long-awaited policy on “controlled unclassified information” (CUI) to provide a uniform government-wide system for safeguarding unclassified information that is deemed sensitive.

The CUI framework is supposed to replace the numerous individual agency control markings — “sensitive but unclassified,” “for official use only,” and over a hundred other designations — and thereby to overcome barriers to information sharing within the government.

But the new policy will do nothing to restore public access to government records that have been improperly withheld. ...

In other words, restrictions on freedom of access to unclassified government documents will continue under new rules -- billed as "reform" -- which simply extend those unreasonable restrictions.

It establishes a single CUI framework, with three graduated levels of sensitivity and security. But the definition of what information may qualify as CUI, which includes anything that “under law or policy” requires protection from unauthorized disclosure, is vague and expansive.

To put it another way, the CUI policy does not exclude anything that is currently controlled as Sensitive But Unclassified.

"Sensitive But Unclassified" is one of those Orwellian labels which, if you were to probe its application, would turn out to cover things like "embarrassing to Rove," or "bad public relations for the Office of the Vice President."

More details can be found at Secrecy News.  In a commentary at Daily Kos, Smintheus notes that "this new memo represents the opposite of reform."

In a related development, noted by Steve Aftergood at Secrecy News, the Washington Times has an editorial from Nat Hentoff which rightly questions the virtual absence of attention to a Senate Judiciary Committee a couple of weeks ago about these very issues or, more to the point, about the administration's abuse of the Constitution.  Hentoff writes:

So important was an April 30 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution that it should have been on front pages around the country. Titled "Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic and Accountable Government" and chaired by Sen. Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat. it focused on an issue ignored by the presidential contenders that has deeply weakened our rule of law.

Said witness Steve Aftergood, secrecy authority at the Federation of American Scientists: Growing use of secret law "is implicated in fundamental political controversies over domestic surveillance, torture and many other issues directly affecting the lives and interests of Americans ... Secret law excludes the public from the deliberative process, promotes arbitrary and deviant government behavior, and shields official malefactors from accountability."

At this very Senate hearing, John R. Elwood, the Office of Legal Counsel's deputy assistant attorney general, provided a startling example of the Bush administration's justification for the imperious essence of secret law. As reported in the May 1 New York Times, Mr. Elwood "disclosed a previously unpublicized method to cloak government activities."

The Bush administration believes, he said, "that the president could ignore or modify existing executive orders that he and other presidents have issued without disclosing the new interpretation."

Vladimir Putin would agree with that — but is this America?

Here's where we, the supporters of candidates and the voters, come in.  Here's where it's up to us.

This is also a central question for Sens. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain: Is the next president willing to continue this degree and extent of kingly secrecy, in which the Justice Department will be deeply complicit?

And my direct question to Mr. McCain: Will he continue Mr. Mukasey as U.S. attorney general, who has yet to utter a critical word about President Bush's unprecedented expansion of presidential powers that is nurtured by "secret law?"

If anyone wants to know why Bob Barr would appeal to those on the right, left and center, the answer lies in the silence from presidential candidates of both major parties on these crucial issues.

Good. A three-way race. Not Nader.

...The end of freedom predicted in George Orwell's "1984" has arrived, "not in the form of a brutal dictatorship but in the guise of modern governments using the tools of digital technology and the fear of terrorism to take away what vestiges of privacy remain to our citizens."

Bob Barr has entered the presidential stakes as a Libertarian.  He only needs the blessing of the Libertarian party.  The convention is in a couple of weeks.

The great thing about Bob Barr is his intransigence in the matter of government power and civil liberties.  Neither of the two presumed nominees has dealt with that issue -- an issue which the behaviors of the Bush administration have pushed into the forefront but which has been with us for decades. 

The Washington Times reports that the Republican party is not particularly thrilled with the prospect of Barr's candidacy.  But some Republicans are quietly patting him on the back.

The former Republican congressman from Georgia formed an exploratory committee last month and told The Washington Times that he has since been subjected to the behind-the-scenes pressure from Republicans not to run.

Mr. Barr says even people who have tried to dissuade him understand why he thinks it important to raise issues from what he calls a "genuinely conservative" perspective and to offer alternatives to the positions of the two major-party candidates.

"In the month since we formed our exploratory committee, not a single Republican who has spoken with me to try and convince me not to seek the Libertarian nomination has disagreed with my reasons for considering a run," Mr. Barr told The Times yesterday in an e-mail exchange before leaving London on a flight to Atlanta.

Most Republicans who asked him not to run "also said they understand why I'd run and why John McCain is not conservative and will not seriously tackle the growth in government power and spending," he said. "Some said they would vote for me if I ran, but for the sake of the Republican Party, they would prefer I didn't."  ...

...To the dismay of some Republicans who consider the ACLU a champion of liberal causes, he has consulted for the civil liberties group on informational and data privacy issues on which many liberals and conservatives see eye to eye.

Even a Democrat might vote for a candidate who runs on that issue.

Not allowed to vote

If passed this week, the amendment clears the way for a pending bill that would require some kind of identification in order to prove citizenship and to register to vote. But many questions about the bill — like whether current registered voters will have to obtain a new form of identification — have not been resolved.

  Lillie Lewis, a voter who lives in St. Louis and spoke at a news conference last week organized to oppose the amendment, said she already had a difficult time trying to get a photo ID from the state, which asked her for a birth certificate. Ms. Lewis, who was born in Mississippi and said she was 78 years old, said officials of that state sent her a letter stating that they had no record of her birth.

“That’s downright wrong,” Ms. Lewis said. “I have voted in almost all of the presidential races going back I can’t remember how long, but if they tell me I need a passport or birth certificate that’ll be the end of that.”  ... New York Times ...

The Missouri amendment will sweep away the voting rights of many Americans.  They will simply be unable to produce required documents that were never provided to them, often for racist reasons.  Can we allow that to happen? Look at the face of Lillie Lewis and you may see, as we think we did, someone deeply and obviously American-born.  Perhaps we can also see traces of ancestry in that face which suggest a, American heritage which goes back before the "Founders," back before Columbus, and probably well beyond the ancestry of any member of the current Supreme Court.

A group called VoteBoth has been leading the charge for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to team up on the Democratic ticket.

But the people behind it come from just one of those camps — Clinton's — and one of their goals may be keeping Clinton's White House prospects alive. ... Chicago Trib ...