I didn’t think anybody except maybe Russ Feingold had the balls to do this:

  Dodd will send a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid this afternoon informing him of his decision [to put a hold on the Senate FISA renewal bill because it reportedly grants retroactive immunity to telephone companies for any role they played in the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program].

  …By doing this, Dodd can effectively hold up the telecom immunity bill, because bills are supposed to have unanimous consent in the Senate before going forward. One Senator can make it very difficult to bring a bill to the floor by objecting to allowing it to go to a vote.

  Dodd’s planned action comes amid reports that the Senate Intelligence Committee has reached a deal with the White House on the legislation that would give telephone carriers legal immunity for whatever role they played in the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping program, which was approved by President Bush after 9/11. The White House and the phone companies have been lobbying aggressively for immunity, and the announcement of the immunity deal today dismayed many opponents.

AlterNet reports that this is no attempt to rescue a struggling presidential campaign.  Dodd is serious:

  The Military Commissions Act. Warrantless wiretapping. Shredding of Habeas Corpus. Torture. Extraordinary Rendition. Secret Prisons.

  No more.

  I have decided to place a “hold” on the latest FISA bill that would have included amnesty for telecommunications companies that enabled the President’s assault on the Constitution by illegally providing personal information on their customers without judicial authorization.

  I said that I would do everything I could to stop this bill from passing, and I have.

Thank you, sir.

Ever the statesman, Senator Kit Bond is now, in the wake of the failure to override Bush’s SCHIP veto, urging compromise.  He has signed a letter to congressional leaders, urging consensus.

Bond surprised me by voting for the bill in the first place and urging Bush not to veto it:

“SCHIP is a valuable safety net for needy children in families who don’t have the means to purchase affordable health care. Millions of children receive the vital well-child and preventative care, vaccinations, and emergency care they need to grow, learn and thrive thanks to the SCHIP Program. I am proud of my votes to create SCHIP in 1997 and to reauthorize the program today.”

Can this be the Kit Bond we know and love to hate?  Having seen him be such a Republican for his entire career and such a godawful one under Bush, it’s not easy for me to believe he has any good impulses at all.  One part of me interprets his actions in the most cynical light:  he knows what a loser voting no on SCHIP is and knew it from the beginning.  See?  No need to give him any credit for humanitarian concerns. 

But in general he isn’t smart enough to back away from losing policies.  He still supports Bush’s addle pated  policy in Iraq.  So I have to say, that he might be acting on conscience here.  Even if he’s not, at least he’s smarter than Sam Graves, Todd Akin, Roy Blunt and Kenny Hulshof.

Certainly he’d like compromise because it would make Republicans look less like monsters.  But it is possible that he feels uneasy about depriving millions of kids of health care.  Just sayin’.

Still, even if Bond’s concern is genuine, I’ll bet he wouldn’t approve of this snarky video. In it, a comedian impersonates a smug George Bush, in all his malapropistic glory, gloating about the SCHIP veto.

On October 16th SurveyUSA released a 600 sample poll taken in Missouri from October 12th through the 14th which shows that dubya  still has an abysmal approval rating. The margin of error is 3.9%.

The poll was sponsored by KCTV in Kansas City.

Do you approve or disapprove of the job George W. Bush is doing as President?

All
31% – approve
66% – disapprove
2% – not sure

Democrats [37% of sample]
10% – approve
89% – disapprove
1% – not sure

republicans [25% of sample]
71% – approve
27% – disapprove
1% – not sure

Independents [29% of sample]
27% – approve
72% – disapprove
1% – not sure

Very interesting. His approval rating is worse among people who regularly or occasionally watch Law and Order as opposed to those who never watch it. Isn’t that a Fred Thompson thing?

A bare majority (51% to 47%) of anti-stem cell folks give him approval. He’s losing gun owners, Evangelicals, and church goers. But, he still has the unbelievers of global warming.

ProVote only gives Rodney Hubbard a 44 percent rating on his votes on progressive issues.  Why is that? I asked him, when I interviewed him last Monday.  He answered that it was because his pro-voucher stand had created friction between him and local labor unions.

His pro-voucher position (which, in and of itself, would have lowered his ProVote score) had offended the unions as well, he said, and they had threatened to raise $100,000 to come after him.  The threat made him angry enough to lash out at them when a workmen’s comp bill came up in the legislature.  When it did, they came asking for his vote, but he was ready to show them that there was a price to pay for their threats, and he voted against it.

“Would you have voted for it, if the friction hadn’t been there?” I asked him.  “Yes,” he told me. 

He also holds a grudge against local unions for refusing him support in his most recent primary contest.  He says that they told him they don’t intervene in contests between two Democrats.  But Hubbard is quick to point out that they supported Matt Muckler, who is white, when he ran for a state rep seat from Ferguson against John Bowman, an African-American candidate–even though Muckler had $40,000 before the race started and hardly needed their support.  (Bowman is, by the way, currently under indictment for bank loan and credit card fraud.)

Despite the low rating from ProVote, Hubbard is proud of the strong approval he has within his community as a result of working to help his constituents.  He learned the importance of helping people, he says, from his parents.  His mother worked for thirty years in the Department of Corrections and is now a probation and parole officer.  His father ran the Carr Square public housing project.

Rodney spends a good deal of his time helping this constituent or that find a job, or figure out, say, how to pay for a cousin’s funeral.  “My blessing in politics is that I’m blessed to be involved with the people who put me in office,” he says.  He believes that people would vote him out of office if he wasn’t there for them.

He also works for them in the corridors of power.  He has been coordinating with Rodney Boyd and the mayor’s office to put another 3,000 jobs on the table for his constituents in the next three years.  And he points out that this year he successfully lobbied Alan Icet, (R-Wildwood) chairman of the House Budget Committee, to move a million dollars into a re-entry program for ex-offenders to give them the skills they need to make the transition from prison to working life.

Hubbard manages such feats, he believes, by working successfully with Republicans.  He and Ted Hoskins (D-Berkeley) are the only two Dems in the House with committee chairmanships, he says with pride.  It is unheard of for the majority party to give committee chairmanships to members of the minority party.

Some within the Democratic caucus view his relationship with Republicans with a jaundiced eye.  They complain, for example, that he and Hoskins have their offices on the third floor of the Capitol building.  That’s where the plum offices are, and all the other reps on that floor are Republicans.  They distrust someone who hangs with the opposition. 

Hubbard is well aware that some refer to him as Republican lite, but as far as he’s concerned, if he’s working for the poor people that make up most of his constituency, then he’s a good Democrat.

(I’ll be interviewing Robin Wright Jones next Monday.  Tune in Tuesday for the posting.)

The SCHIP veto override failed in the House 273-156 just a little while ago. Had it passed, the expansion of the SCHIP program would have provided thousands of middle class families who currently squeezed out of insurance with access to health care.

Sam Graves was one of the 156 who voted against the override. Kay Barnes is going to have a field day with that one.