There is an important article in Rolling Stone,
The Worst Congress Ever by Matt Taibbi.
If you've been paying attention for the last sixs years, most of this stuff will not surprise you. But to have it laid out so succinctly packs a mighty wallop of disgust that will leave you reeling with a combination of white-hot anger and nausea. For example, what every liberal's been mad about since the Clinton impeachment, but reading it in Taibbi's inimitable style will piss you off all over again:
STEP THREE
LET THE PRESIDENT DO WHATEVER HE WANTS
The constitution is very clear on the responsibility of Congress to serve as a check on the excesses of the executive branch. The House and Senate, after all, are supposed to pass all laws -- the president is simply supposed to execute them. Over the years, despite some ups and downs, Congress has been fairly consistent in upholding this fundamental responsibility, regardless of which party controlled the legislative branch. Elected representatives saw themselves as beholden not to their own party or the president but to the institution of Congress itself. The model of congressional independence was Sen. William Fulbright, who took on McCarthy, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon with equal vigor during the course of his long career.
"Fulbright behaved the same way with Nixon as he did with Johnson," says Wheeler, the former Senate aide who worked on both sides of the aisle. "You wouldn't see that today."
In fact, the Republican-controlled Congress has created a new standard for the use of oversight powers. That standard seems to be that when a Democratic president is in power, there are no matters too stupid or meaningless to be investigated fully -- but when George Bush is president, no evidence of corruption or incompetence is shocking enough to warrant congressional attention. One gets the sense that Bush would have to drink the blood of Christian babies to inspire hearings in Congress -- and only then if he did it during a nationally televised State of the Union address and the babies were from Pennsylvania, where Senate Judiciary chairman Arlen Specter was running ten points behind in an election year.
The numbers bear this out. From the McCarthy era in the 1950s through the Republican takeover of Congress in 1995, no Democratic committee chairman issued a subpoena without either minority consent or a committee vote. In the Clinton years, Republicans chucked that long-standing arrangement and issued more than 1,000 subpoenas to investigate alleged administration and Democratic misconduct, reviewing more than 2 million pages of government documents.
Guess how many subpoenas have been issued to the White House since George Bush took office? Zero -- that's right, zero, the same as the number of open rules debated this year; two fewer than the number of appropriations bills passed on time.
And the cost? Republicans in the Clinton years spent more than $35 million investigating the administration. The total amount of taxpayer funds spent, when independent counsels are taken into account, was more than $150 million. Included in that number was $2.2 million to investigate former HUD secretary Henry Cisneros for lying about improper payments he made to a mistress. In contrast, today's Congress spent barely half a million dollars investigating the outright fraud and government bungling that followed Hurricane Katrina, the largest natural disaster in American history.
Brooklyn Law School hosts a lecture, called Art Isn't Easy: Protecting the American Playwright
by John Weidman, Esq., President of the Dramatists Guild of America tomorrow, October 25, 2006 12:30-2:00 p.m. at the Subotnick Center in Brooklyn Heights.
He will specifically discuss
The Strange Case of Edward Einhorn v. Mergatroyd Productions and there's a link to that site from the Brooklyn Law page.
Unfortunately I can't make it to the lecture because I have a 9 - 5 job. But Edward Einhorn doesn't, so I wonder if he will be there. The Brooklyn law page also links to his "director's copyright" page. My site provides the URL for that page too, BTW. Of course Einhorn's page doesn't even mention my site.
We've gotten overwhelming support for this case from so many people - on one web site I was called the Joan of Arc of playwrights. An actor in the midwest sent a check to help defray our legal expenses. I've yet to hear of any playwright, other than Einhorn himself, who supports the idea of a director's copyright. I even wrote to Vaclav Havel to find out what he thinks of it - Einhorn is doing some of his plays now - but I haven't heard back yet. If/when I do, I will certainly post it here. I can't imagine that Havel would want to have Einhorn try to claim royalty rights to HIS plays either.
Meanwhile, David Einhorn sent a very feeble excuse to the copyright office for why he and his brother wish to now de-register Edward Einhorn's exceedingly lame "blocking and choreography" script. He did not admit that they did not have my authorization to create the script, but rather explained that since they had no desire to sue me in the future, there's no point to having a copyright(!!!)
Apparently the copyright office isn't buying it, since
Einhorn's ill-gotten registration is STILL on the Copyright Office's web site. (Use the "Search Records" button.)
* Not really.
But hysterically funny.
Via Pandagon.
I like the fact that the third installment ends with Bush and other assorted assholes yukking it up at the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner back in 2004, when Bush did a standup routine about not finding weapons of mass destruction. That dinner will always represent the Bush administration to me. Bush and his rich pals, politicians and media people having a great old time, utterly oblivious to their own hideous obscenity.
The incident got a goodly amount of attention at the time, but in my opinion every American should be required to watch that performance at least once a year - and morons who voted for Bush in 2004 should be forced to watch it every single day - for the rest of their lives.
The unvarnished performance is ghastly enough all by itself, but this web site has a take on it that treats this mind-blowingly grotesque moment in American history with the scathing contempt it deserves:
Bush Joke Video
Good NYTimes article about the anti-abortion gang trying to kidnap Susan B. Anthony.
My favorite part is the ending:
For what it’s worth, Anthony has ceded her place on the dollar to another steely and resourceful woman, the face of manifest destiny, who — coincidentally? — appears always with a child strapped to her back, the original rendition of backwards-and-in-heels. Sacagawea may have been a crackerjack scout, but she left no paper trail. Who knows what she thought about white men or westward expansion? She’s up for grabs, an icon without a cause. Feminists for Life may want to hurry, before the logging industry gets there first.
Found through
Feminist Law Professors and
Pandagon.
Rosa Parks' mug shot
I caught the first installment of PBS's re-airing of the absolutely amazing series
Eyes on the Prize.
The Civil Rights movement had its big events, like the Montgomery bus boycott and the march on Washington, but there were so many other important events, and Prize covers them with fantastic archival footage. See it - you'll learn alot.
One thing I learned, although I admit it's not an especially elevated piece of knowledge - I learned that when he was in his 20s, Martin Luther King, Jr. was a fine fine fine looking man. And I don't just mean when he was orating, although as a genius of the art and the foremost orator of the 20th century, watching him deliver a speech certainly has a sexy charm. But I mean even just images of him sitting on a bus - if you didn't know who he was and you happened upon him on the street, you would say to yourself that this was a hot guy. It seems almost sacriligeous to say it because everybody's image of King is as the symbol of the civil rights movement, all austere and noble. But it certainly puts his infidelities in perspective - women were probably throwing themselves at him, and it was tough for him to resist the temptation.
But there's so much more to the series than my own cute-guy mania. You'll be astounded, appalled, heart-broken, exhilarated and riveted by this series. And you'll be amazed you didn't know half this stuff - especially if you consider yourself generally well-read and up on recent history. The web site I linked to above has video clips so you can get a sense of the mind-blowing footage of this incredible time period, some of which happened during my own lifetime.
The first part of the re-broadcast is playing on cable channel 13 in the NYC market. Check your listings if you live elsewhere. I think each installment gets a week of broadcasts.
But I swear, if I have to hear one more Southerner whine about how desegregation is going to destroy his precious white "heritage" I'm gonna reach through the TV, across the country and through time and smack the living shit out of him.
