Ayup. Another brick in the wall.

The Slender Reid has become the straw that broke the camel's back.

Ditto Pelosi.

If/When our best Republican-Lite candidate for Prez, Billary, ascend by popular acclaim for their third term, we will be truly screwed.

We need to either kiss the constitution goodbye forever, or get a reorg of leadership in both houses.

I know that the DLC bastids are among the most likely next-in-line, but neither leader has provided any evidence that it can get any worse under Rahm, Steny, Chuck, and the rest of the boyz.

It would be the worst kind of irony to see guys like Wyden and DeFazio become defacto minorities in their own party.

Complaint lodged. I think I'll even use some of my new stamps to send a few hand-written letters. A barrage of Oregon outrage sounds like a good idea to me. I tend to give Congress the benefit of the doubt (most of the time and Reid may or may not be a role-over to partisan administrative agendas, but he needs to know that Oregonians are not.

I emailed a friend of mine who lives in Reno and asked her to email Reid about her disappointment (since their websites are generally set up to accept email messages only from constituents).

Anybody else with friends in Nevada -- go for it.

I also suggest dropping a note to Mr. Wyden in case he needs a boost to call Reid on his actions.:)

I don't think holds ought to be automatic, but I certainly think the willingness to sustain a hold on Reid's part ought to be considered when it comes to determining where he stands on issues.

Although the same could be said of the senators who voted to approve him.

Not Surprised wrote: Oh and I forgot to mention, Reid did this even after Wyden voted "Nay" with him on Oct. 3 to reject Feingold's latest amendment to withdraw troops from Iraq. No honor amongst sold-out Democrats, I guess.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Wyden voted "Yea" to support the Feingold amendment to withdraw troops.

Here's the link.

Next time, do the research before you level your attack.

Kari, do you think that Reid's move might have been punishment for that vote?

Also, it appears that Wyden's hold was not about Laverty per se but about Bushite junk science/politicization of science in matters involving the Interior Department (as well as EPA and other entities, see the href= http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/>Union of Concerned Scientists' scientific integrity program).

One suspects that Reid has interests or shills for interests who benefit from politically distorted science and related bad policies with respect to lands and resources the Interior Department controls in Nevada, not unlike Gordon Smith here. It seems possible, even likely, that he is not just "caving" to Bush, but actively seeking favor with respect to influencing Interior actions affecting corporate parts of his constituencies that could or do benefit from Bushite land & resource policies.

It is not quite clear whether the ethics issues involved are simply about upholding laws that require action based on best available science, or if there are more material ethical issues, i.e. unethical actions, at stake. If the latter, it does not seem outside the realm of possibility that Reid is protecting friends and perhaps even himself, if only by association.

Well, at least it didn't bold everything. Let me try again.

Union of Concerned Scientists' scientific integrity program

OK, that's got it.

Actually, scratch the punishment for voting Yea on the Feingold amendment suggestion: Per Kari's link, not only did Wyden vote Yea, but so did Reid himself.

Well, it's nothing new; Eugene Debs said a century ago that the U.S. has one political party with two right wings.

The thing is, though, that there really are significant differences between the parties. The interesting thing is to look at where the differences are strongest, where they are least, and what issues are kept off the agenda entirely by common consent of the dominant forces in each party.

The differences are strongest, arguably, on issues involving human and civil rights. Since these matter a good deal, that difference matters.

The differences are weakest in certain economic areas, e.g. so-called free trade, big finance, intellectual property, and on assumptions of the rectitude of U.S. power and pretensions to a right to imperial hegemony in the world.

More generally they are weak in certain overarching economic principles (e.g. that we should avoid publicly funded health care at all cost, or that we should not critically examine the dysfunctions and mythological status of so-called free markets beyond a superficial level).

In the areas of weaker difference, the situation is like a Venn diagram with a lot of common area, but sections of each party who would be excluded from the other.

Karl Marx famously called the governments of capitalist countries "the executive committee of the ruling class." Part of what he meant was that the powerful economic interests actually need a significant degree of difference among governing parties. It has to be contained within limits, of course. But they need the flexibility such difference provides to regulate competition among sectors and entities, and to correct matters if overdominance of a narrow interest threatens the stability of the whole system.

Arguably the Bushite narrowness with respect to energy interests, with its domestic and even more its global policy consequences (including geostrategic but also ecological policies) poses such a threat, in combination with their ideologically driven fiscal recklessness and the historically deeper R efforts to cut off the DP from corporate funding through the K-Street Project.

Bartlett and Steele (sp?) the Baltimore Sun journalists, had a more prosaic take on the situation in the late 1980s that pretty much still applies. They argued that the Rs essentially got all of the their funding from the corporate sector, whereas the Ds got about half their support from the same range of sources and about half from organized labor, including both cash and volunteer labor. (NPR today reports that AFSCME has endorsed Hillary Clinton and has said it will commit $60 million to the campaign & mobilize 40,000 volunteers).

To Bartlett and Steele, this situation means that the R's have a greater capacity to be internally coherent and disciplined on economic policy matters, while we D's are structurally incoherent, especially in areas where the interests of labor and corporations conflict, & thus we see significant % of Ds peeling off to join Rs on such matters (e.g. Earl Blumenauer's unfortunate propensity to vote for bad "free trade" deals like the upcoming one with Peru). Insofar as foreign policy is conducted primarily in the corporate interest the same effect arises there.

Of course matters are a bit more complicated than that as both parties have internal divisions even at the national elected official and organizational level, and both have to manage the fact that they don't really operate primarily in the interests of the popular constituencies they mobilize. Part of the way they manage the attendant problems is through the local & state levels of the parties.

At present there seems to be some hope that the national D's have finally come to grasp that they have to reverse the massive tilt of the law against workers and their organizations, so that we might see some real labor law reform of Democrats continue to control Congress and manage to elect a president. But it's far from certain.

I really hope Mr. Wyden makes a statement of some kind about this. It's made the national blogs who are quoting Wyden's staff as saying that the issues that Mr. Wyden had with the nomination were never resolved, but they wouldn't second-guess Reid.

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