By David Swanson

Let me get this straight. The Senate will pass a public option if the House will. And the House will, because it already did. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi won’t allow it. So the mortal enemy of public-option backers is . . . Dennis Kucinich.

Why? Because when Congressman Kucinich said he'd stand for a public option he stupidly thought he was supposed to mean it.

Let's review a brief history of the disease known as "health insurance reform."

When the president and the speaker of the House thought it would be strategic to censor any talk of single-payer healthcare, almost every member of Congress and almost every astroturfing party-before-country activist group and labor union, and almost every follower of those groups, fell obediently into line. "We'll open the debate with the least we'll settle for, a pathetic token public-option," they thought cleverly, rubbing their hands together. "Then we'll compromise down from there."

But after demanding the "public option," too many people refused to toss it overboard, and public pressure grew to keep it in. So 60 congress members signed a letter to the speaker last summer insisting that they would not settle for a health insurance bill that lacked a serious public option. When they were presented with a bill that did not meet their demands, almost all of them voted for it anyway.

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By David Swanson

As long as we're going to dump most of our money into wars and the military and Wall Street and health insurance bailouts, students are going to have to go into debt to afford college. But it would cost the students less and the government less, if private companies were not permitted to act as middlemen profiting off public loans to students.

One of the companies so profiting, Sallie Mae, is based here in Virginia and funnels millions of dollars from its profits into lobbying to make sure the free money keeps flowing. Senators Warner and Webb have chosen to side with the parasites rather than the students, but disguised their choice as one of concern for jobs, the jobs of the loan sharks who could find respectable work in a better educated society. I grew up in Reston, where Sallie Mae's jobs are, and I know there are people there who will find a way to publicly say thank you for Sallie Mae's help in driving our nation deeper into ignorance and debt.

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By David Swanson

Sixty-five congress members, including 60 Democrats and 5 Republicans, voted to end the occupation of Afghanistan on Wednesday. But 356 congress members, including 189 Democrats and 167 Republicans voted to keep the war going. The vote followed three hours of debate created by Congressman Dennis Kucinich's introduction of a privileged resolution.

The debate featured three leaders from three groups of congress members: the war opponents (almost all Democrats), the pro-war Democrats, and the pro-war Republicans. Given this alignment, which has existed for nearly a decade now, is there any reason for supporters of peace and justice to take heart? I think so. Here's why: If the 60 Democrats acted in good faith and would have voted the same way even if the bill had a chance of passing, or even if that could be said of only 38 of them, then we may very well see funding of the wars dry up. If the leadership includes unrelated measures in the next war funding bill ($33 billion coming in April or May), measures that lead all the Republicans to vote No (as happened last July), then only 38 Democrats have to vote No to block the bill.

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Harry Hanbury has a story that any videographer or blogger would love. He created a video of Congresswoman Donna Edwards taking steps to amend the Constitution to restore our democracy following assault by the Supreme Court. A woman you've never heard of named Jessica Sharp saw the video and decided to take action herself. She had never organized a rally or even attended many, but she put together an event at the state capitol of Maryland that inspired every interested activist group and state legislator to join in. Jessica has sparked a movement in Maryland that is inspiring others around the country. So, Harry made a new video, about Jessica:

While the tea party movement and the coffee party movement are impressively mean and nice, respectively, the movement to restore human rights to human beings and dethrone the corporate rulers of our land is, in this collection of new movements led by new heroines, uniquely substantive.  It has a goal and concrete steps needed to reach it.

Of course, this means that we won't be able to claim success simply by holding rallies or getting on TV or becoming a factor in an election cycle.  To succeed we will actually have to change the country.  But we can do so one step at a time, and the tools we need have been made available at Free Speech for People.

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By David Swanson

We're about to witness the pretense of war lawyer hearings without the war lawyers (commonly known as torture lawyers by those willing to ignore their role in "legalizing" aggressive war). This may highlight for many observers the little-known fact that Congress no longer has the power of subpoena.

During 2007-2008 Democratic congressional committees subpoenaed dozens of Bush officials, who simply refused to comply. Although any committee has the undisputed power to use the Capitol Police to enforce its subpoenas, none did. They asked the Bush Justice Department to do it. They sued the Bush Justice Department in court. But, with the exception of a weird deal for partial and secret compliance by Karl Rove in 2009, not a single one of the scofflaws has been compelled to show up.

During 2009-2010 none of the subpoenaed officials have been re-subpoenaed. When torture memos were made public in April 2009, Senator Patrick Leahy, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked memo author Jay Bybee to testify, and Bybee declined. Leahy did not issue a subpoena. Congressman John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, in 2009 and 2010 has impeached a judge for groping and another for petty corruption, but has not so much as asked Bybee (or Yoo) to appear.

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By David Swanson

On Friday afternoon, I posted the following announcment online:

CONTEST: Obama Calls War on Iraq "A New Dawn" -- What Do You Call It? (Limit 8 Words)

I'll start the entries:
Operation Funnel Unlimited Cash to Killing (OFUCK)

The winner will be announced on an aircraft carrier with a banner! Plus job offer possible for video editing work to insert "rename" in place of "end" in campaign speeches.

Winner gets signed copy of Daybreak, latest issue of Humanist magazine, a bucket of snow, and anything else I can find.

**

Perhaps not the most tempting offer ever, but here it is Saturday afternoon and I'm scrolling through hundreds of creative and provocative contest entries, and I'm keeping the contest open and hunting for more prizes, so that more people can enter. I'd also like to encourage people to post comments on their choices thus far for winning entries.

Here are some that have caught my eye (not a list of finalists, just a sampling):

A New Pawn
A New Drain
Bloody Fingered Dawn
An Old Quagmire
Operation WTF???
Operation Bombs USA Military Madness Everywhere Redux (OBUMMER)
Operation Flush More Lives Down the Toilet

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By David Swanson

I'm not a big fan of post-partisan America, a notion that seems to amount to running the government through two political parties but taking care that one of them not perform in any significant way better than the other one. But I am a fan of the idea, which nobody ever seems to consider, of actually disempowering parties.

That idea has a precedent in the first dozen years or so of our republic whose Constitution never planned for party rule, although nonpartisanship would obviously have to look very different today. I suspect we could imagine ways of making party-free government work if we tried. At the moment, however, Americans' political thinking is so party-saturated, that any talk of opposing parties is met with the question "Which one?" or with the statement "Yeah, I'm for a third party too!"

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By David Swanson

Answer: They get around the pesky will of the majority of the American people.

Here's a lovely post from the DailyKos praising the president of the AFL-CIO for encouraging the president of the United States to appoint officials during a recess in order to get around the Senate.

We've grown used to hearing "progressives" urge Obama to make laws with signing statements and executive orders. The treaty he's using to occupy Iraq never went to the Senate for ratification. His list of Americans to assassinate was never authorized by Congress. The Fourth Amendment and habeas corpus are not as dearly treasured as people pretended they were when doing so could make a Republican president look bad. But recess appointments is a new one.

When it comes to unconstitutional senate rules like the filibuster, progressives and the president consider them sacrosanct. It's far more important not to question a rule that lets senators representing 11 percent of Americans block all legislation than it is to pass any of the horrendously bad bills under consideration. One must uphold the rules, be principled, fight fair with "the other side." The other side is, of course, one of the two parties, even if both parties are opposing the will of the people.

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"Prophecy" is the title of a new play by Karen Malpede, and I'm here to attempt the unamerican task of telling you to see it without telling you it's a comedy. In fact, I'm going to confess that I had to take a break from it and recover before I could write about it. I felt like I'd taken a blow with an enormous sledge hammer, even though I knew that a whole orchestra of smaller instruments had produced what I was feeling.

It was not a bad feeling, not an undesirable feeling. The play is a thing of beauty, and not all beauty fits into that Hollywood sensation of wouldn't-such-a-thing-be-sweet-but-I-bet-they're-divorced-in-a-year-and-I-shouldn't-have-had-that-last-gallon-of-coke.

There was also comfort in the fact that someone had written this play and understood the grief that we all know is real even when we avoid it. And I merely read the play. If a group of actors can successfully perform something with this much emotional intensity (far more just in reading it than in any antiwar movie I've seen), I think there will be more comfort in that, and in the solidarity of feeling in the audience, many of whose members will probably go home without imagining the play to be at all political.

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