8:49 PM - Happy mother’s day!!
Current mood: hungry
Category: Games

Had a nice chat with moms and my two sisters today, wished them well, sent them my love, and regretted that I couldn't be down in L.A. with them today. But it was hard to make it down this weekend because yesterday we hosted (and I organized) a Stanford poli sci grad student team versus Berkeley poli sci grad student team in a game of softball. The visitors brought two torpedo kegs of Pyramid brew (Berkeley native) and we hosted a BBQ immediately following the game.

Although the beer made the time fly by, it was a real yawner of a game. Low scoring and little action kept us tied 2-2 until the 9th inning. After Berkeley failed to score in the top of the last inning, we started the bottom-half with NV, a female, as lead batter, with me following and then BP who was at the top of our lineup. NV hit a blooper over the first baseman that found grass but when she ran into first (without running through it), she also exchanged bumps with the first baseman. NV's husband, DS, happened to be first base coach at the time and went berserk, getting so heated that he threw punches at the hapless Berkeley grad student playing first. I missed seeing the action directly (on purpose), but it's been confirmed by both sides. I did eventually interfere and played peacemaker, although I only agreed to eject DS from the game and not "send him away" like one Berkeley grad insisted. I suggested to this grad student that squashing this meant reaching out by both sides. Regardless, NV was on first and I was up to bat with zero outs in the bottom of the 9th inning with the score tied 2-2.

I watched the first pitch go by. Also watched the second one pass high. The third one was a bit low--but just a bit on the outside for me to turn and pull it into right field, where the opposing team had stuck another hapless Berkeley grad student wearing a McDonald's t-shirt. It was more than he could handle and I had an easy double with NV, the winning run, now on third. BP, who played D1 baseball for West Point, hit a ground ball to the short stop, hard, that kept NV and me at our bases but also got BP onto first. Bases loaded, nobody out.

For every two men in our lineup, one woman would bat so JK followed BP. She also hit a grounder but this time Berkeley was able to force NV out at the plate. One out and I was now the winning run on third, bases load and 1 out. RB, a crazy Canadian ex-hockey and softball enthusiast batted next and rather quickly hit a line drive just past a diving short stop who missed it... and for me, it was an easy jog to the plate. We had won! 3-2 over Cal poli sci for the second year running.

The BBQ also went off excellently (DS and NV left immediately after the game), with one of our social chairs really pulling through on the BBQ and grilling activities. We got through one and almost the second t. keg, ate as much as we could want, made a few professional connections and called it a successful day. Afterwards I hit the hay for almost 2 hours but managed to rally again for dinner and drinking in downtown Palo Alto with some other poli sci grads. Nola's to Rose&Crown to Rudy's---all lame bars in their way, but TB and MA were pretty sloshed from having drunk previously at an Int'l House BBQ *after* our softball BBQ that they also attended, so it was pretty fun hanging out with them. Other peeps came as well although most were gone before midnight. I was out with TB and MA until 2am at Rudy's, only the three of us left from the group, hanging with 2 undergrads that MA had met. He always seems to make those connections; I wonder when he'll be too old to escape the flak. Maybe at 25 he already is?? But they're at least 21 so seems reasonable to me... although my view on this subject might not be the most unbiased. ;) Either way the night ended tamely: TB and MA rode their drunk asses home on their bikes and I got picked up by my v. own and v. sweet RMS who was up late prepping for her comprehensive exam next weekend. I live so close that I was halfway home on foot by the time she pulled up in the car. I told her about the night and we crashed out soon after getting home.

...

Today, Sunday, was mother's day and happy mother's day to all the moms out there. You are raising our future, so kudos to you if you can do it well.

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1:27 PM - Update: Spring Q, 2008
Current mood: lazy

Some of you may remember that i used to do this blogging stuff much more frequently, back when MySpace had a blog feature but Facebook did not. Facebook now has an equivalent feature, but mostly I use it to post snippets of news, video or other web media to share with friends. (Facebook's generalization of the post concept is a significant improvement that MySpace has yet to match.) I don't really know if ppl see the snippets I post (although I imagine that some do), but it's kind of been a lazy way of "updating" my peeps--at least providing a view into the ideas and public goings-on that are keeping my attention.

This is a shift, though, from when I wrote more personally, about the things happening in my life, sometimes connecting them to the wider world (but usually not). One friend remarked that it was a view into life as a grad student. Which, since I'm in grad school, in fact it was. For whatever reasons--I'll say mostly time constraints--I stopped blogging. Even as things carried (and keep carrying) on in my life at an exciting pace! Since I reconnected with old friends at a (not quite "my") 10-year reunion, maybe now is a good time to also reconnect with... blogging. [That word, "blogging", for me conjures up a self-indulgent sort of process, and although there is something to that view which may be part of my hesitation to pick this up again, I also hope to go further with it this time than I have before.] It's good practice, regardless, something my dear cousin EM pointed out that I need more of--so I can "talk about [my] PhD stuff to non-academics."

Still, I'm not entirely sure any more about this process--blogging--because I'm not entirely sure about my goals for its content. Though I do have ideas about that (else why pick it up again?). My Facebook postings, and my research work and interests, probably point up one obvious area that I'd like to focus on. Since I hope eventually to be a part of the public discourse through my research, why not start that process with friends, family and colleagues through this medium? The ivory tower has no monopoly on good ideas and I think we all should to be imagining creative ways to use the technologies at our fingertips in productive and novel ways.

NOVEL. So for example, I just recently had the opportunity to lead a 60-min. discussion among Stanford Latino undergrads in the pre-law society here about political / electoral participation and Latino voting in 2008. It was the second time in as many months that I participated in this kind of event. So because of their interest in the subject--and the interest that other students in my classes, for example, expressed with their frequent questions about the election--it occurred to me that there might also be interest in forming a reading group on areas of research related to elections, campaigns, Latino voting, etc. No idea if that's true but if there is interest, I'd be enthusiastic but hesitant to try and organize such a thing because of the extra workload. Unless the work of coordination could be taken up by the undergrads using email, for example, or the group feature of Facebook.

To catch up: It's spring quarter of my 3rd year and I'm a degree candidate now, with my dissertation prospectus due at the end of the year. Which means that I need the approval from X professors on a written document that outlines a research idea, argument (theory), and set of research tasks to bring evidence to bear on the argument. It's essentially a proposal for answering a related set of questions, or distinct questions in some cases. But I think typically people address 2-3 identifiable questions as 2-3 separate papers ("articles") that maybe turn into chapters in a larger project. Sometimes people write many separate and unrelated papers. The current draft of my prospectus is looking like a related set of questions that could be a book-length project, though that might be overly ambitious. It (the prospectus) is still a ways out from being finished. Before that can happen I need to finish a first draft of a paper that my brother and I are working on together. I'm presenting the draft next Friday at the University of Washington so it will be done soon.

Speaking previously about productive, I better go, I want to finish this first draft of the UWash paper before tomorrow night. I'll share the abstract when the draft is finished, or maybe explain in regular terms what we're trying to do. :)

a

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5:37 PM - MySpace is dead.

Did anybody else catch the latest "updates" on MySpace? These all were implemented on the home page that, as I'm looking at it, is filled with no less than seven advertisements somehow flashing or showing me obscene images of single women or telling me that their search is powered by Google. (The singles' service really is a nuisance, I never open up MySpace while I'm in class for fear of some buxom and nubile young thing beckoning me to chat in the middle of class and having my students see.)

MySpace "updates":

1. They highlighted My Myspace URL (number of lines of code to edit: one);
2. They doubled the number of idiotic bulletins that are displayed on my homepage (number of CHARACTERS to edit: one);
3. They added miniature little icons for "mail" and "new comments", etc., to display next to the same text that used to pop up as an underlined link telling me that I had mail or a new comment (number of lines of code: maybe 6);
4. I think they updated their picture uploader? I don't know if that was just a couple days ago or a long time ago; I haven't switched my picture on that thing in a long time, either.
5. Tom appears every now and then reminding us that they're not closing, not to click on spam, to be patient about their uploader problem, and otherwise to announce very loudly how much MySpace SUCKS MAJOR ASS.

Did I miss anything here?

Facebook on the other hand just released their nifty new platform that allows 3rd party developers to plug right into the framework that runs the site. Anybody can do this and program one of those (usually) simple applications that integrates seamlessly into the site.That's why there are suddenly so many of these suckers. And can you say "viral marketing"? (I loathed it initially but their Newsfeed really was genius.) With outside developers and their platform, FB really is at a new level.

Way to go, Facebook team. I hope you rot in hell, Tom.

a

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11:38 PM - Oops.

From the NYTimes.com:

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who announced his candidacy on Wednesday with the hope that he could ride his foreign policy expertise into contention for the Democratic nomination, instead spent the day struggling to explain his description of Senator Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat running for president, as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

...

Mr. Sharpton said that when Mr. Biden called him to apologize, Mr. Sharpton started off the conversation reassuring Mr. Biden about his hygienic practices. "I told him I take a bath every day," Mr. Sharpton said.

hahah: Biden Unwraps His Bid for '08 With an Oops!

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1:21 PM - The Unmarried American Male.

Hah. Where do *you* (or your man) fit? (Mr. Hookup's question is particularly appropriate!)

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1:09 AM - Shallow Musings of a TiVo Junkie

You know, The O.C. and Smallville still keep me hooked.

Smallville, in the 11/2 episode, created for itself an interesting, many-episodes-deep story line about Clark Kent's eventual development into Superman (that's an exciting development!).

And The O.C., in my view, continues to have an entertaining and well-developed story line for the adults that has the parents confronting seriously difficult challenges (just got through the Thanksgiving episode!). It's what keeps me hooked since Summer's tree-hugging is annoying and hottie Marissa is dead.

If only the papers I have to grade had this much drama!

EDIT: Okay, okay, I'm a geek, but what top 2-3 TV shows do YOU watch and what makes 'em so great??

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1:29 PM - What a week indeed! NYTimes OpEd: "Year of the ..Macaca.."

This week was truly momentous, not for the realization of personal satisfactions, but for the collective accomplishment of Tuesday's election results. Politicians' speeches may not move you, campaign advertisements may not sway you, the details of policy may bore you---say what you will about politics, but it is ultimately them (they?) that make the world go round.

In this TimesSelect Op-Ed, Frank Rich nails a number of important observations about the past year or two of American politics. My comparative politics professor made the same observation on Wednesday about the effect that Bush's failed response to Katrina did to Americans' perception of Bush's presidency. Since then, everything that he has done or tried to do has inevitably been viewed through a prism of incompetence. Iraq was no longer about evil terrorists but incompetent war execution. The economy--seemingly on the mend but showing little of this improvement to the middle class--was not about structural forces beyond Bush's control, but incompetent tax policy. Soaring gas prices, immigration reform stalemate, North Korea's nuclear declaration, prescription drug benefit problems, Israel/Palestine/Hezbollah response, corruption in Congress, pedophilia----all of it now seems to be a reflection of the same vacuum of leadership that was so clearly on display during and in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. (Incidentally, the lower 9th ward, to this day, remains a ghost town littered with garbage heaps, overturned cars, and homes off their foundations.)

Those who assert that race in politics is a vestige of a bygone era are deluding themselves and acting as enablers to those who would continue to run our country aground.

(PS: There are many links in this article that I did not duplicate. Such as one to the Allen "macaca" YouTube clip. If you have access, it may be worth checking the original.)


NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist
TimesSelect 2006: The Year of the ..Macaca..

By FRANK RICH
Published: November 12, 2006

OF course, the ..thumpin.. .. was all about Iraq. But let us not forget Katrina. It was the collision of the twin White House calamities in August 2005 that foretold the collapse of the presidency of George W. Bush.

Back then, the full measure of the man finally snapped into focus for most Americans, sending his poll numbers into the 30s for the first time. The country saw that the president who had spurned a grieving wartime mother camping out in the sweltering heat of Crawford was the same guy who had been unable to recognize the depth of the suffering in New Orleans..s fetid Superdome. This brand of leadership was not the ..compassionate conservatism.. that had been sold in all those photo ops with African-American schoolchildren. This was callous conservatism, if not just plain mean.

It..s the kind of conservatism that remains silent when Rush Limbaugh does a mocking impersonation of Michael J. Fox..s Parkinson..s symptoms to score partisan points. It..s the kind of conservatism that talks of humane immigration reform but looks the other way when candidates demonize foreigners as predatory animals. It..s the kind of conservatism that pays lip service to ..tolerance.. but stalls for days before taking down a campaign ad caricaturing an African-American candidate as a sexual magnet for white women.

This kind of politics is now officially out of fashion. Harold Ford did lose his race in Tennessee, but by less than three points in a region that has not sent a black man to the Senate since Reconstruction. Only 36 years old and hugely talented, he will rise again even as the last vestiges of Jim Crow tactics continue to fade and Willie Horton ads countenanced by a national political party join the Bush dynasty in history..s dustbin.

Elsewhere, the 2006 returns more often than not confirmed that Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, are far better people than this cynical White House takes them for. This election was not a rebuke merely of the reckless fiasco in Iraq but also of the divisive ideology that had come to define the Bush-Rove-DeLay era. This was the year that Americans said a decisive no to the politics of ..macaca.. just as firmly as they did to pre-emptive war and Congressional corruption.

For all of Mr. Limbaugh..s supposed clout, his nasty efforts did not defeat the ballot measure supporting stem-cell research in his native state, Missouri. The measure squeaked through, helping the Democratic senatorial candidate knock out the Republican incumbent. (The other stem-cell advocates endorsed by Mr. Fox in campaign ads, in Maryland and Wisconsin, also won.) Arizona voters, despite their proximity to the Mexican border, defeated two of the crudest immigrant-bashing demagogues running for Congress, including one who ran an ad depicting immigrants menacing a JonBenet Ramsey look-alike. (Reasserting its Goldwater conservative roots, Arizona also appears to be the first state to reject an amendment banning same-sex marriage.) Nationwide, the Republican share of the Hispanic vote fell from 44 percent in 2004 to 29 percent this year. Hispanics aren..t buying Mr. Bush..s broken-Spanish shtick anymore; they saw that the president, despite his nuanced take on immigration, never stood up forcefully to the nativists in his own camp when it counted most, in an election year.

But for those who..ve been sickened by the Bush-Rove brand of politics, surely the happiest result of 2006 was saved for last: Jim Webb..s ousting of Senator George Allen in Virginia. It is all too fitting that this race would be the one that put the Democrats over the top in the Senate. Mr. Allen was the slickest form of Bush-Rove conservative, complete with a strategist who..d helped orchestrate the Swift Boating of John Kerry. Mr. Allen was on a fast track to carry that banner into the White House once Mr. Bush was gone. His demise was so sudden and so unlikely that it seems like a fairy tale come true.

As recently as April 2005, hard as it is to believe now, Mr. Allen was chosen in a National Journal survey of Beltway insiders as the most likely Republican presidential nominee in 2008. Political pros saw him as a cross between Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush whose ..affable.. conservatism and (contrived) good-old-boy persona were catnip to voters. His Senate campaign this year was a mere formality; he began with a double-digit lead.

That all ended famously on Aug. 11, when Mr. Allen, appearing before a crowd of white supporters in rural Virginia, insulted a 20-year-old Webb campaign worker of Indian descent who was tracking him with a video camera. After belittling the dark-skinned man as ..macaca, or whatever his name is,.. Mr. Allen added, ..Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia...

The moment became a signature cultural event of the political year because the Webb campaign posted the video clip on YouTube.com, the wildly popular site that most politicians, to their peril, had not yet heard about from their children. Unlike unedited bloggorhea, which can take longer to slog through than Old Media print, YouTube is all video snippets all the time; the one-minute macaca clip spread through the national body politic like a rabid virus. Nonetheless it took more than a week for Mr. Allen to recognize the magnitude of the problem and apologize to the object of his ridicule. Then he compounded the damage by making a fool of himself on camera once more, this time angrily denying what proved to be accurate speculation that his mother was a closeted Jew. It was a Mel Gibson meltdown that couldn..t be blamed on the bottle.

Mr. Allen has a history of racial insensitivity. He used to display a Confederate flag in his living room and, bizarrely enough, a noose in his office for sentimental reasons that he could never satisfactorily explain. His defense in the macaca incident was that he had no idea that the word, the term for a genus of monkey, had any racial connotation. But even if he were telling the truth .. even if Mr. Allen were not a racist .. his non-macaca words were just as damning. ..Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.. was unmistakably meant to demean the young man as an unwashed immigrant, whatever his race. It was a typical example of the us-versus-them stridency that has defined the truculent Bush-Rove fearmongering: you..re either with us or you..re a traitor, possibly with the terrorists.

As it happened, the ..macaca.. who provoked the senator..s self-destruction, S. R. Sidarth, was not an immigrant but the son of immigrants. He was born in Washington..s Virginia suburbs to well-off parents (his father is a mortgage broker) and is the high-achieving graduate of a magnet high school, a tournament chess player, a former intern for Joe Lieberman, a devoted member of his faith (Hindu) and, currently, a senior at the University of Virginia. He is even a football jock like Mr. Allen. In other words, he is an exemplary young American who didn..t need to be ..welcomed.. to his native country by anyone. The Sidarths are typical of the families who have abetted the rapid growth of northern Virginia in recent years, much as immigrants have always built and renewed our nation. They, not Mr. Allen with his nostalgia for the Confederate ..heritage,.. are America..s future. It is indeed just such northern Virginians who have been tinting the once reliably red commonwealth purple.

Though the senator..s behavior was toxic, the Bush-Rove establishment rewarded it. Its auxiliaries from talk radio, the blogosphere and the Wall Street Journal opinion page echoed the Allen campaign..s complaint that the incident was inflated by the news media, especially The Washington Post. Once it became clear that Mr. Allen was in serious trouble, conservative pundits mainly faulted him for running an ..awful campaign,.. not for being an awful person.

The macaca incident had resonance beyond Virginia not just because it was a hit on YouTube. It came to stand for 2006 as a whole because it was synergistic with a national Republican campaign that made a fetish of warning that a Congress run by Democrats would have committee chairmen who are black (Charles Rangel) or gay (Barney Frank), and a middle-aged woman not in the Stepford mold of Laura Bush as speaker. In this context, Mr. Allen..s defeat was poetic justice: the perfect epitaph for an era in which Mr. Rove systematically exploited the narrowest prejudices of the Republican base, pitting Americans of differing identities in cockfights for power and profit, all in the name of ..faith...

Perhaps the most interesting finding in the exit polls Tuesday was that the base did turn out for Mr. Rove: white evangelicals voted in roughly the same numbers as in 2004, and 71 percent of them voted Republican, hardly a mass desertion from the 78 percent of last time. But his party was routed anyway. It was the end of the road for the boy genius and his can..t-miss strategy that Washington sycophants predicted could lead to a permanent Republican majority.

What a week this was! Here..s to the voters of both parties who drove a stake into the heart of our political darkness. If you..ll forgive me for paraphrasing George Allen: Welcome back, everyone, to the world of real America.

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10:06 AM - What's this strange feeling?

Oh it's electoral victory!

This is the first national election since I became eligible to vote in 1998 that we (Democrats) have actually won. Yes, *my* specific House member, two Senators, and state legislative representatives have all always won. But I'm from L.A. so that's unsurprising. Nationally, '98, '00, '02, and '04 were all hard losing years for Democrats.

2004 was especially difficult for me because of my academic interests, a situation exacerbated by the fact that I was enrolled in a political psychology / elections course with David Sears at UCLA at the time of the election. Let me just say that for maybe a week I was depressed and had a crisis of conscious about whether I really wanted to pursue political science for the rest of my life if after everything I knew about politics, Bush was still able to win reelection. I likely would have felt the same thing today if the Demos had not won the House.

But they did!

And they might still take the Senate!

It's only too bad that Lieberman won reelection...

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3:22 PM - Election '06 and American Democracy

Good analysis in this NYTimes op-ed below.

First a little commentary:

- ensuring competitive elections is def. a good thing; the Times' emphasis on bipartisanship is important.
- self-perpetuation is characteristic behavior of ALL power-holders but systematically eliminating the opposition from legislative participation is not just bad policy (i.e. bad in the sense that Republicans will not produce policy that I, personally, am in favor of) but bad for democracy generally. When only 50%+1 (if that) of the population is being represented legislatively, problems abound.
- as sadly out of touch (read: idealistic) as this sounds, ethics in politics is important. the means to an end DO matter.
- what the Times identifies as their "breaking point"--the willingness of the Republican Congress to diminish the power of their institution vis-a-vis the Presidency--is, indeed, a deadly serious failure of leadership. They're also right that unified control (House, Senate, Presidency) is unproblematic----SO LONG AS each branch vigorously upholds its institutional prerogative. The relative power of the branches has waxed and waned over the years so there's reason to believe that, with a change in leadership, Congress will reassert itself.
- a similar point can be made about the Judiciary and the new terrorist interrogation / adjudication law. Except I'm not sure how likely the Supreme Court is to intervene and overturn the thing. Usually, if I remember correctly, when the Congress is explicit and clear about grants of Presidential authority, the Court lets it stand.

So, when you're thinking about voting on Tuesday, remember that it's not about partisan politics. It's not about Kerry's gaff or Bush's idiocy. It's not even about Iraq or N. Korea or the economy--all of those policy areas are pretty firmly under the president's direction.

No, it's literally about the future integrity of American democracy as we've come to know and enjoy it. And more, it's about making sure we keep those bitches in Washington in line with the only mechanism we've got: throwing 'em out of office.

Agree with the Times, agree with me, or follow your conscious. But really: vote Democratic. Or just vote for Christsake.


NYTimes Editorial
The Difference Two Years Made

Published: November 5, 2006

On Tuesday, when this page runs the list of people it has endorsed for election, we will include no Republican Congressional candidates for the first time in our memory. Although Times editorials tend to agree with Democrats on national policy, we have proudly and consistently endorsed a long line of moderate Republicans, particularly for the House. Our only political loyalty is to making the two-party system as vital and responsible as possible.

That is why things are different this year.

To begin with, the Republican majority that has run the House .. and for the most part, the Senate .. during President Bush..s tenure has done a terrible job on the basics. Its tax-cutting-above-all-else has wrecked the budget, hobbled the middle class and endangered the long-term economy. It has refused to face up to global warming and done pathetically little about the country..s dependence on foreign oil.

Republican leaders, particularly in the House, have developed toxic symptoms of an overconfident majority that has been too long in power. They methodically shut the opposition .. and even the more moderate members of their own party .. out of any role in the legislative process. Their only mission seems to be self-perpetuation.

The current Republican majority managed to achieve that burned-out, brain-dead status in record time, and with a shocking disregard for the most minimal ethical standards. It was bad enough that a party that used to believe in fiscal austerity blew billions on pork-barrel projects. It is worse that many of the most expensive boondoggles were not even directed at their constituents, but at lobbyists who financed their campaigns and high-end lifestyles.

That was already the situation in 2004, and even then this page endorsed Republicans who had shown a high commitment to ethics reform and a willingness to buck their party on important issues like the environment, civil liberties and women..s rights.

For us, the breaking point came over the Republicans.. attempt to undermine the fundamental checks and balances that have safeguarded American democracy since its inception. The fact that the White House, House and Senate are all controlled by one party is not a threat to the balance of powers, as long as everyone understands the roles assigned to each by the Constitution. But over the past two years, the White House has made it clear that it claims sweeping powers that go well beyond any acceptable limits. Rather than doing their duty to curb these excesses, the Congressional Republicans have dedicated themselves to removing restraints on the president..s ability to do whatever he wants. To paraphrase Tom DeLay, the Republicans feel you don..t need to have oversight hearings if your party is in control of everything.

An administration convinced of its own perpetual rightness and a partisan Congress determined to deflect all criticism of the chief executive has been the recipe for what we live with today.

Congress, in particular the House, has failed to ask probing questions about the war in Iraq or hold the president accountable for his catastrophic bungling of the occupation. It also has allowed Mr. Bush to avoid answering any questions about whether his administration cooked the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. Then, it quietly agreed to close down the one agency that has been riding herd on crooked and inept American contractors who have botched everything from construction work to the security of weapons.

After the revelations about the abuse, torture and illegal detentions in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Congress shielded the Pentagon from any responsibility for the atrocities its policies allowed to happen. On the eve of the election, and without even a pretense at debate in the House, Congress granted the White House permission to hold hundreds of noncitizens in jail forever, without due process, even though many of them were clearly sent there in error.

In the Senate, the path for this bill was cleared by a handful of Republicans who used their personal prestige and reputation for moderation to paper over the fact that the bill violates the Constitution in fundamental ways. Having acquiesced in the president..s campaign to dilute their own authority, lawmakers used this bill to further Mr. Bush..s goal of stripping the powers of the only remaining independent branch, the judiciary.

This election is indeed about George W. Bush .. and the Congressional majority..s insistence on protecting him from the consequences of his mistakes and misdeeds. Mr. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 and proceeded to govern as if he had an enormous mandate. After he actually beat his opponent in 2004, he announced he now had real political capital and intended to spend it. We have seen the results. It is frightening to contemplate the new excesses he could concoct if he woke up next Wednesday and found that his party had maintained its hold on the House and Senate.

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1:12 PM - "Secret Service Questions Sacramento Teen Over Bush Threats on MySpace"

Secret Service Questions Sacramento Teen Over Bush Threats on MySpace

From Associated Press
12:23 PM PDT, October 14, 2006

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Upset by the war in Iraq, Julia Wilson vented her frustrations with President Bush last spring on her Web page on MySpace.com.

She posted a picture of the president, scrawled "Kill Bush" across the top and drew a dagger stabbing his outstretched hand. She later replaced her page on the social-networking site after learning in her eighth-grade history class that such threats are a federal offense.

It was too late.

Federal authorities had found the page and placed Wilson on their checklist. They finally reached her this week in her molecular biology class.

The 14-year-old freshman was taken out of class Wednesday and questioned for about 15 minutes by two Secret Service agents. The incident has upset her parents, who said the agents should have included them when they questioned their daughter.

On Friday, the teenager said the agents' questioning led her to tears.

"I wasn't dangerous. I mean, look at what's (stenciled) on my backpack -- it's a heart. I'm a very peace-loving person," said Wilson, an honor student who describes herself as politically passionate. "I'm against the war in Iraq. I'm not going to kill the president."

Her mother, Kirstie Wilson, said two agents showed up at the family's home Wednesday afternoon, questioned her and promised to return once her daughter was home from school.

After they left, Kirstie Wilson sent a text message to her daughter's cell phone, telling her to come straight home: "There are two men from the secret service that want to talk with you. Apparently you made some death threats against president bush."

"Are you serious!?!? omg. Am I in a lot of trouble?" her daughter responded.

Moments later, Kirstie Wilson received another text message from her daughter saying agents had pulled her out of class.

Julia Wilson said the agents threatened her by saying she could be sent to juvenile hall for making the threat.

"They yelled at me a lot," she said. "They were unnecessarily mean."

Spokesmen for the Secret Service in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., said they could not comment on the case.

Wilson and her parents said the agents were justified in questioning her over her MySpace.com posting. But they said they believe agents went too far by not waiting until she was out of school.

They also said the agents should have more quickly figured out they weren't dealing with a real danger. Ultimately, the agents told the teen they would delete her investigation file.

Assistant Principal Paul Belluomini said the agents gave him the impression the girl's mother knew they were planning to question her daughter at school. There is no legal requirement that parents be notified.

"This has been an ongoing problem," said Ann Brick, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union in San Francisco.

Former Govs. Pete Wilson and Gray Davis vetoed bills that would have required that parents give consent or be present when their children are questioned at school by law enforcement officers. A similar bill this year cleared the state Senate but died in the Assembly.

Julia Wilson plans to post a new MySpace.com page, this one devoted to organizing other students to protest the Iraq war.

"I decided today I think I will because it (the questioning) went too far," she said.

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