AddieStan

From Tim Caggiano , your blogstress's comrade in creative chaos, comes this missive, written in response to last Sunday's Spirit feature , which focused on Curtis White's genius piece in the April issue of Harper's , titled "The Spirit of Disobedience: An Invitation to Resistance." On the extreme right we have the fear-mongering people of the word -- the church, the legal dogmatists and fundamentalists avec/sans head wrap. Take B-16 [Pope Benedict XVI],who early in his reign took troubles to denounce situationalists or anyone else with a little intellectual imagination. On the liberal left we have rationalist, humanist, big-D Democrats with utopian sugarplums a-dance in their heads. Some good ideas -- but, oh, those pesky unforseen circumstances. What's a mother to do? Well why not dredge the Bible, starting from jump. Adam and Eve get the boot from Eden for being too big for their intellectual britches. Trying to play God, for God's sake. Would that ...

Earlier this week, the Comedy Central satirist Stephen Colbert brought a tear to your blogstress's eye as he finished a New Testament quotation begun by his guest, former Secretary of State Madeliene Albright. If you've managed to escape seeing Albright interviewed this week, you are surely not watching political TV, mon ami , and are probably doing something quaint like reading a newspaper or watching Spike. As you may have guessed, Albright is promoting her new book, The Mighty and the Almighty , a tome about religion and the state. In this role, Albright has proven herself to be as charming as she is quick on her feet, and her dance with Stephen Colbert on last Thursday's Colbert report was one of the most entertaining bits of television your cybertrix has seen in some time. Your Webwench invites you to watch the video on the Comedy Central site. Herewith, your net-tête 's very own transcription of her favorite bit from the interview (what your écrivaine won...

In a day as filled with spying and intrigue as this, your blogstress finds herself loosening her stays so as to avert a case of the vapors. The Washington Post is reporting that the FBI conducted, this morning, a search of the home of Dusty Foggo , the CIA big caught up in the defense contract bribery (with a side of hookers and tobacco) scandal. If Patrick FitzGerald wants to get some TV glory for his said-to-be-impending indictment of Karl Rove, he'd best wait until next week, n'est-ce pas ?

Most disturbing, thinks your blogstress, is today's news from the Washington Post that a majority of Americans appear to be down with the NSA's snooping of their phone traffic. In writing his piece on the poll, reporter Richard Morin is careful to note the results as an initial reaction from the public. However, still to be determined is whether the poll would have a different result if the public was aware that the snooping is being done without court warrants in apparent violation of the Fourth Amendment. In earlier polls on the program -- before yesterday's revelation of the full scope of the spying on regular Americans -- respondents said they approved of the NSA's domestic spying. But when asked if they were okay with it being done without the required warrants, the public said it was not .

Your blogstress's pretty head is spinning, what with the torrent of revelations of executive-branch intrigue and corruption filling the front pages of the nation's newspapers today. So vast is the conspiracy landscape that what would have been, on another day, an A-list story -- the tale of the CIA's former No. 3 involved in what appears to be a bribery scandal involving prostitutes and cigars (did they learn nothing from Bill Clinton about the dangerous combination of sex and cigars?) -- has been pushed down on the list by the story of the Bush administration's spying on virtually every American. However, a brilliant bit of writing on the Goss scandal legacy in today's New York Times should not be missed. Herewith the opening graf of the article, from reporter Mark Mazzetti, Career C.I.A. Figure Is at Eye of Scandal : In a scandal featuring a cast of characters with nicknames like Nine Fingers and Duke, a former C.I.A. undercover operative called Dusty has becom...

Gen. Hayden just uttered his first public words since news broke in USA Today of the NSA's spying on virtually every American whose phone records it could access -- phone records that now comprise what is described as the largest database in the world. Emerging from a meeting with Sen. Mitch McConnell, Hayden was asked by an offscreen reporter to speak to "the legality of the measures taken by the NSA" in its domestic spy program. Hayden abruptly shut the reporter down, saying that everything the NSA does is legal -- perhaps, following the Nixon adage, because the president says it is. Meanwhile, as your blogstress toils over her iBook, President Bush is addressing the graduating class of Biloxi's Gulf Coast Community College. During the course of his speech, Mr. Bush lauded a mother-and-son team who are both graduating today, and who lost a respective son and brother "while fighting terrorists over the Horn of Africa." Your cybertrix had missed the U.S....

Your blogstress agrees with Matt Stoller that Qwest Communications deserves to be rewarded for its lonely position as the one telecom that refused to provide the National Security Agency (NSA) with the customer information the agency was demanding for the domestic spying program it conducts for the White House. Qwest is traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Here's its latest earnings report . (Do be aware, dear readers that the company is not entirely pristine. The last CEO left after admitting that he had misrepresented earnings.) Depending on where you live, you may also be able to procure your long-distance service from Qwest , or use them as an ISP.

At Americablog, John Aravosis calls our attention to the revelation, unveiled last night by USA Today , that the White House domestic spy program, conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA), is worse than most have feared, and its scope stands in direct contradiction to President Bush's assertion that only calls and e-mails that involved one overseas party were targeted. Non, mes amis, non! Qui est le target de ce programme? Vous, mes amis, vous! That's right, darlings, there's not an American who's not in the NSA's sights. And it's all been done with the cooperation of telephone service providers -- with one notable exception: Qwest, the Colorado-based telecom. However, if your service is provided by AT&T, Verizon or BellSouth, you're totally screwed. As part of his post, Mr. Aravosis provides handy links to instructions for encrypting your e-mail. It's really come to that. Can't wait to find out what Gen. Michael Hayden, who oversaw...

The Associated Press (AP) is reporting on some juicy e-mails between the convicted felon Jack Abramoff, once the GOP's uberlobbyist, and the indicted former White House aide David Safavian. The unprecedented removal of Safavian, by then administrator of federal procurement policy at White House Office of Management and Budget, from his office in handcuffs has received scant attention compared to the sexier Rove and Abramoff stories, but this week the media seem to be connecting the dots to find the three all tied together. According to the AP, on the very day that the Washington Post broke the Abramoff story, Safavian reached out to the black-hatted-Jack with offers of help: 'Let me know if there is anything I can do to help with damage control,'' David Safavian, who is now under indictment, messaged Abramoff on Feb. 22, 2004. At the time, Safavian was working at the White House Office of Management and Budget. He later became administrator of federal procurement po...

Just posted at The New York Times online edition : Fed Raises Key Rate to Highest Level in 5 Years By VIKAS BAJAJ Published: May 10, 2006 The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rates to 5 percent today, from 4.75 percent, and said that it may need to raise borrowing costs further in the coming months to contain inflation. [...] The Fed, whose chairman Ben S. Bernanke recently told Congress that policy makers might take a break in an effort so it can gather and analyze more economic data, was more equivocal today about its inclinations but tried to leave its options open. To understand exactly what that means, your blogstress suggests you check out this post from the Mogambo -- the favorite writer of your cybertrix's foxy friend, Glenn Kellis of Ob:Blog. Mogambo on today's move by the Fed: The Federal Reserve is still increasing Total Fed Credit, which increases credit in the banks, which increases loans, which increases the money supply, which increases prices, ...

In Newark, New Jersey, the largest city in your blogstress's home state -- and the nation's second poorest, according to The New York Times -- change has trumped prejudice with the election of Corey Booker as mayor, withstanding homophobic, anti-semitic and anti-intellectual goading from Newark's longtime mayor and godfather, Sharpe James. In an attempt to exploit against Baker, a Rhodes scholar, prejudices he presumed to be common among the city's denizens, Newark's 20-year leader had accused the Baptist, African-American and apparently heterosexual Baker of being Jewish, gay and not black enough. Kudos to the good people of Newark for not buying into this basest of appeals. The 37-year-old Booker, whose record of political accomplishment is thin, has quite a job ahead of him in a city blighted by poverty, corruption and a 40-percent high-school drop-out rate. But Newark is truly one of the nation's great cities -- full of beautiful buildings, active church...

From the BBC we learn: France is holding Europe's first national day of remembrance for the victims of slavery. [...] But the president [Jacques Chirac] says he is not just looking to the past. He has promised to fight modern forms of slavery, allowing companies that knowingly use forced labour anywhere in the world to be prosecuted in French courts. Cities across France will hold ceremonies and activities to mark the day. The city of Nantes on the Atlantic coast, where many of France's slave ships originated, will hold a moment of silence. The French, as demonstrated by recent unrest in immigrant neighborhoods, have yet to fulfill their self-proclaimed destiny as an egalitarian society. However, it's hard to imagine a measure such as France's day of remembrance making its way into the American culture, n'est-ce pas ?

Your blogstress has been struggling mightily all day with the Blogger.com program via which she builds the breakaway republic, so she asks the forbearance of her devotees.

What the corporate consolidation of media has failed to do in killing free speech, the government has taken up the charge of finishing up. Over the course of the last five years, the numbers of reporters brought before courts under the demand of revealing their sources has surged. It could be argued -- an argument your blogstress rejects --that in matters in national security, such demands are justified, as was the rationale for dragging reporters before the grand jury in the CIA leak case (for which, if there is a God, Karl Rove will be indicted this week). However, this week, reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle have been subpoenaed to reveal the sources in their reporting on the Barry Bonds baseball steroids case, in which they revealed the actions of a federal grand jury. While grand jury deliberations are secret-secret, it is not illegal for a juror to speak with reporters after the jury's work has been concluded. And that is what appears to have taken place with th...

While the network bigs at CBS may have been too squeamish to run the United Church of Christ's paid spot about inclusiveness, the editors of the network's Web site have displayed a bit of moxie in running your blogstress's essay , commissioned by the American Prospect Online , about the flap.

If you thought your civil liberties were in peril now, mes amis , just wait until Gen. Michael Hayden becomes the director of central intelligence. The general has been reported as President Bush's likely choice to fill the spot from which Porter Goss was pushed on Friday. And if he name is unfamiliar to you, that's just the way the administration would like it, since he's the man who has done its dirty work in the spying on Americans conducted -- without warrants -- by the National Security Agency (NSA) which, until recently, was led by Hayden. ( Media Matters has done some in-depth work on the nature of the scandal and its misreporting by many of the major news outlets.) Then there's the idea of having a military man lead a civilian spy agency. The Pentagon already has its spy shop, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), not to mention the off-the-shelf operations created by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during his tenure. Oh, yeah -- and the NSA itself is...

Living the busy blogstress life, your cybertrix is prone to fall behind on her reading, as she did over the course of the last month -- which explains why, today, she offers her devotees a glimmer from a most fascinating essay that appeared in the April issue of Harper's magazine. Curtis White , a professor at Illinois State University, uses the forum to call for, in exceptionally beautiful prose, a movement of civil disobedience that would manifest itself at the most personal and individual level. Yet, in order to make his case, White jumps off from a profound question and then exposes it as one that can only lead to untrue answers: Are we fundamentally a Christian or an Enlightenment culture? No one gets off easy in White's treatise (except, perhaps, Henry David Thoreau) as he asks the following: Do Democrats really imagine that they can articulate a compelling moral vision for the United States or for the democratic West without a spiritual foundation? ...[D]o Democrats ...

Josh Marshall has some goods on the hookers-and-defense-contractors scandal that reaches into the CIA. Our Nation's Capital is abuzz that the scandal may be the reason for today's resignation of Porter Goss.

While your blogstress could not get herself exercised about the "special treatment" afforded Kennedy after he crashed his car into a Capitol Hill barricade, she is saddened by the Rhode Island congressman's handling of his situation. While Kennedy has displayed a certain courage in speaking frankly of the fact of his addiction problems and his manic depression, much appeared to be missing from his explanation of just what addictive substance caused his recent run-in with the law. (Ambien? Painkillers? Alcohol? Nausea meds?) And his revelation today that he spent his Christmas vacation in rehab seems to be news to his constituents, long past Easter. Your cybertrix was pleased that Kennedy took the opportunity to call for parity for mental health coverage in insurance plans, but would have been happier had he taken a question or two. Now, that would have been courage.

Your blogstress invites her readers to visit The American Prospect Online, and while there, she invites them to read her piece on the paid advertisement by the United Church of Christ that has been rejected by the networks, apparently for drawing a contrast between itself and churches that reject gay people as full participants in their congregations. After that, do stroll, dear reader, through the Prospect Web site, where you will feel much to admire. For eggheads, there's a wonderful conversation between Bernard-Henri Lévy and Anatol Lieven. For distraught Democrats, there's Tomasky on ideas . And there's a swell blog called Tapped . So, get, get!