Breaking News: Senate Candidate Promises to Defend the Constitution By Any Means Necessary

On the advice of the Alternative Hippo, I called the Pennacchio campaign to get Chuck's reaction to today's news that the Senate would not be inconveniencing Dear Leader by doing their job and providing a check to his ever-growing executive power.  Lucky for me, Chuck picked up the phone so I ended up getting an interview with the candidate.   It was short and sweet because when it comes to upholding the Constitution, Chuck doesn't need a lot of time to think about what's the right thing to do: (emph mine)

eR: I saw the story today onine about the Senate's refusal to investigate the illegal and unconstitutional NSA wiretapping program running out of the White House.  If you were a Senator today, in the minority, what would you be able to do to fight this decision?

Chuck Pennacchio:  I wouldn't get any floor time, but I'd be able to do a lot.  I'd put out a press release.  I'd hold a press conference.  I'd build coaliton of progressive folks in Congress to fight this.  I'd go back to constituents to rally people around the cause.  I'd remind them that this  war is illegal and that the war resolution is unconstititutional. 

I'd  shame my leadership for not standing up to defend the Constitution, the right to privacy and due process. 

eR:  "Shame your leadership"?   You're on the record.  Do you stand by that phrase?

Chuck Pennacchio:  Yes.  Absolutely.  The Democrats are running scared, running away from this issue because they're running away from National Security and ceding it to the Republicans.  And the Republicans are beating them up on the very issue the Democrats fear losing the most.

Dems are looking to protect their shrinking island of political power, which every day gets further and further from the prospect of regaining  control.  They're playing into the hands of Republicans, who, and I've said this before, are not content with all power; they want absolute power.  And the Democrats are letting it happen.  I don't hesitate to use the word "appeasement."

eR: I love you.

Okay, I didn't say that last part.  But honestly, how can we  on the left - or even in the center - not support this man with every ounce of energy, every electron and every penny at our disposal?   

Chuck asked me if I had heard any reaction from Senate Dems.  Feingold in particular.  I told him that I haven't yet.  So far I can only find reaction from Rockefeller and it's comical:

Ranking committee Democrat Sen. Jay Rockefeller said the decision was influenced by the Bush administration.

"It is ... more than apparent to me that the White House has applied heavy pressure in recent days and recent weeks to prevent the committee from doing its job." (Full story)

He said the committee is slipping into irrelevance because it's not providing oversight of the program.

Someone should let him know that the Relevance Ship has sailed.  John Conyers did come through, as usual:

I was interested to read that Senate Intelligence Chairman Roberts had agreed to "fix" the NSA spying scandal -- see Americablog. That's nice. I'm used to being cut out of the conference meetings, but now they are cutting us out even before the bill's are written or either the House or Senate Acts. Thos 51 questions that Chairman Sensenbrenner submitted to the AG must not matter that much if the fix can be put in before we get a single answer.  Either way, I am going to continue to pursue this.

Leaders don't wait to be told what to do.  They don't complain that the White House is bigfooting all over they're responsibilitie.  They find a way to get their message to the people.  They come back home and talk to constituents.  They hold forums in basements if they have to.  They don't wait for permission to defend the Constitution because they remember that they swore an oath to do that already.

Chuck didn't ask me what Casey's position is on this, probably figuring as I do that since he supports Alito so fully, he must support the ever growing reach of this executive's power.  But I called the Casey campaign too.  The woman who answered the phone suggested that I use the website to send in the question.  I've been down that road. 
 

Comments

[KathyF]

You crack me up.

Fantastic job!

[DavidByron]

And it's cross-posted at dKos. I see you already got a few new people to donate there.

Obviously I have to bitch about something though, so I'm going to just say that Chuck 2006 logo would look great on your diary if you can figure out how to host it.

[eRobin]

I don't know how to do images there. It's hard work.

I'll try. I didn't put it here either, which I'll fix now. Thanks for the reminder.

[The Heretik]

Keep on it, eRob.

[DavidByron]

Yes it's hard because you have to sign up with a separate host and hopefully one where you don't have too small a limit. I don't know if you can get it for free even considering the number of page views at dKos. For a small number of views you could get a free account probably (though still have to sign up and everything).

Ok how about this for a positive reinforcement: if you figure out how to get images up in your cross-posted dKos diaries before this petition drive ends I'll make a donation (new money) of $50. A double investment as far as I'm concerned.

[eRobin]

There are other companies involved? That's so far beyond my capabilities that it is to laugh. You'll have to tape a picture of the graphic on your screen. Can Chuck still have the fifty bucks?

[DavidByron]

Of course not. It wouldn't be new money if I was going to give it to him anyway!

Oh btw don't miss this: US house representative claims Haiti election theft attempt.

"The anti-Aristide elites reacted to the news of Prval's decisive victory by trying to steal the election. Evidence of election fraud was abundant."

First half of the article is background -- skip towards the end.

[DavidByron]

Robin you have to be pulling my leg, right? To get this blog working you must already be dealing with all this bandwidth, uploading images, decisions over whether to use a free or paid account and so on.

(Besides which everyone knows that girls know all about how to host pretty pictures on web pages -- it's in their blood -- like boys and fiddling with cars).

I was curious so I checked what deal typepad offers. They have three rates starting from 2GB bandwith for $5/month one weblog option. Now you are currently getting 17000 page views per month (according to sitemeter) and the four photos you have on the main page currently add up to 300,000 bytes or 0.3 MB which would be 5GB @ 17000 views. At that rate you might exceed your typepad bandwidth... if they were there all month... which they won't.

(It's mostly that big picture of you in the snow btw).

Now the Chuck logo is tiny - less than 5,000 bytes. On the other hand I guess a dKos diary, if you had one every day for a month, would be hit say 100 times as much?

My wife uses photobucket. It looks like they give you a free account that has 2.5 GB/month bandwith and hope you will pay them $25 a year for upto 100GB/month. Even the free account would be enough to display an image the size of the Chuck logo 500,000 times per month.

You want to put an image in your dKos diary header so it stands out to the several thousand people per day who read all the dairies using the diary link (not the several hundred thousand who view the front page - that would completely blow your bandwidth)

At any rate it looks to me (and as a guy I really don't know what I am talking about here) that having a separate picture account with another company that has a free hosting or cheaper hosting than typepad (which obviously gives you more than mere bandwidth for your money) might be worthwhile. It would be cheaper than upgrading your typepad for example, if you ever had to do that.

Of course for just one diary you could probably filch bandwidth from your typepad account. I couldn't find anything in their terms of service to say you shouldn't (unlike Flikr).

A quick look at other dKos diarists suggests photobucket is a popular solution although others exist and some people just steal bandwidth from any site where they find a picture they like.

Maryscott O'Connor (she's a girl) uses photobucket -- a paid for account in her case. She uses it for all the pictures on her blog My Left Wing as well as her popular and colourful dKos diaries. at one point she even invited everyone to use it if they wanted. The HTML FAQ at MLW has an extensive section on posting and hosting images (written by another girl).

Currently I assume you've never had any bandwidth problems at Factesque itself but you are increasing your audience.

[KathyF]

So, maybe you can tell me how to upload the Pennacchio graphic they have on their website along with explicit instructions on how to do it. I've tried (you have to make it into a TypePad Typelist) but figured out I have to have an understanding of directories and web servers and I try not to use language like that.

[DavidByron]

Huh? But you always have a ton of photos on your site. Are you pulling my leg?

You just put up a map of Andorra which looks like you got it from the CIA's world factbook. It even looks like you reduced the size - or did typepad do that? And another image from Google Earth.

Do you mean how do you get typepad to make an image into a clickable link to another site? If you can add pure HTML code within one of the typepad templates then just save the Pennacchio graphic as normal and then use code like this:

<a href="http://www.chuck2006.com"><img src="http://whatdoiknow.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/WChuckBanner1.gif"></a>

Or instead of 'WChuckBanner1.gif' whatever the name of the picture file -- since he has 4 there. Number 1 is the yellow bell.

[eRobin]

David: I think Kathy wants to put an image in her sidebar.

Kathy: I can definitely tell you how to do that because I'm going to add it to mine for Monday. I'll write down what I do as I do it.

David again: This photobucket you speak of is an answer to a prayer. I think people are hotlinking my images and it's eating up my bandwidth. It's bugging me no end since I haven't been able to stop it, but I think that photobucket will take care of it for me.

[KathyF]

Yes, eRobin's right, it's the sidebar issue that is quite a different kettle of fish. But she talked me through it, so I now have a Chuck banner in my sidebar!

[DavidByron]

Although female genital mutilation has been outlawed in the US for some time, here's the first case contesting male genital mutilation which is popular in the US.

[eRobin]

Stop hijacking threads!! Blogger.com is where you want to go with that stuff.

[DavidByron]

Well would you prefer me to dig up a thread that it was more relevent to such as the last post you had under the "Women" category (you don't have a category for "men")? Or is this really just about the gender thing rather than posting in the wrong thread?

Because I posted the article link about Haiti above too and that was no more on-topic than this was, plus that was before all that chat about photobucket which was also OT and you seemed to appreciate it.

Do you want me to quit posting this sort of thing too? That's a story about a US soldier who is suing a minor that was kidnapped in Afghanistan and has been languishing in Gitmo. The soldier sucessfully sued the kid in a US court for $100 million for shooting at him in the course of the US invasion.

I figure some of these stories are things people might find interesting and haven't seen. Not saying either one will be true all the time, but some.

I have to disagree about Blogger. There's already FAR too many people doing their own thing all over the place. It's very inefficient.