Dog Woof, Cats Meow, Wags Tweet.

Hey all. As we approach the decade mark next month, the readership around here at GitM continues to dwindle, which is primarily my fault for not updating as much as I’d like. Nonetheless, if and when it gets quiet ’round here, I encourage you to also check out my Twitter feed, which is easier to update in the midst of more frantic weeks like last one. (Memo to myself: Columbus Day, and three-day-weekends in general, will mean a lot of speechifyin’ in Congress’ home districts.)

Yeah, I was skeptical about Twitter earlier in the year, but I’m definitely coming around. Within an hour of news of President Obama’s Nobel prize win, for example, (which I’m neither here nor there about — it seems goofy, yeah, but I was already down on Nobel anyway), there were dozens of wry and amusing quips going around the twitterverse. My favorite two were variations on “Obama, I’mma let you finish but Bono has been working his ass off for this!” and “Uh…did the Nobel committee just miss the fact that Obama bombed the f**king moon?!”

Another good example: the Baucus committee tanking the public option in late September brought on a similar flurry of bon mots: “Senators should be required to make the little cash register ‘ka-ching!” noise when they vote.” “Well the insurance Industry is looking forward to its Baucanalian Orgy.” “75% of Americans support #publicoption, but only 35% of the Senate Finance Cmittee support it.” “Health care industry must pay capital gains on Senate Finance Committee members this year as investment is cashed out.” Etc., etc.

Its immediate posting benefits aside, Twitter has definitely grown on me as a fertile hothouse environment for exactly this sort of choice, top-shelf snark.

Into this Neutral Air.

“The response from Net Neutrality opponents has been fast and furious — but short on facts. The arguments and rhetoric being pushed by the phone and cable industry mostly consist of long-discredited arguments and myths…this policy debate must be bound by facts and reality, not by misdirection and discredited falsehoods.” The Free Press‘s S. Derek Turner refutes ten lousy arguments against Net Neutrality (PDF).

Outrage, Bought and Paid for.

“The two primary groups — Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks — actually grew out of the 2003 breakup of an outfit called Citizens for a Sound Economy that had been integral in the fight against Hillarycare. Indeed, the same ‘Tobacco Strategy’ memo in which Philip Morris boasts of shaping McCaughey’s writings also reveals that the tobacco giant paid Citizens for a Sound Economy to engineer a “grassroots” revolt against health care reform by staging demonstrations in the home districts of key congressmen.“

In Rolling Stone, Tim Dickinson follows the money to expose the Republicans’ recent astro-turfing campaign against health care reform. In short, it’s the “Brooks Brothers Riot” all over again. In fact, “Americans for Prosperity, which has taken the lead in the current fight against reform, is a front group for oil billionaires David and Charles Koch, co-owners of the world’s largest private oil and gas conglomerate…Matt Schlapp, one of the original ‘Brooks Brothers rioters’…now serves as director of federal affairs for Koch Industries, orchestrating the firm’s political efforts in Washington.“

Prevent Defense.

“‘We must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded,’ he said at the time. ‘They can’t be based simply on what I or the executive branch decide alone.’” The Obama administration backs away from the new preventive detention law they’ve been floating in recent months. This is a clear victory for civil liberties advocates, but, as The Prospect‘s Adam Serwer makes plain, only a partial one: “‘It may be one of the better results we could hope for, but in reality indefinite detention continues,’ said Michael W. Macleod-Ball, Chief Legislative and Policy Council for the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office. ‘That’s antithetical to the American justice system.‘”

Indeed, the administration’s fallback position is one long held by Dubya — that the authority for preventive detention already exists in the post-Sept. 11 blank check written by Congress. That’s not change we can believe in. See also Glenn Greenwald today on this and recent developments on the state secrets front: “[T]he Obama administration has proven rather conclusively that tiny and cosmetic adjustments are the most it is willing to do. They love announcing new policies that cast the appearance of change but which have no effect whatsoever on presidential powers.“

In the NY Review of Books, meanwhile, Garry Wills takes the long view of all this: “[T]he momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush administration. The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch…Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941-2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order.“

Wills concludes his essay on a worthy, if fatalistic, grace note that holds for a lot of ideals in this troubled age: “Nonetheless, some of us entertain a fondness for the quaint old Constitution. It may be too late to return to its ideals, but the effort should be made. As Cyrano said, ‘One doesn’t fight in the hope of winning’ (Mais on ne se bat pas dans l’espoir du succes).”

Paean to Djarum.

“Anything that doesn’t taste like tobacco, other than menthol, is out. If you thought you could get around the ban by rolling your own cigs with flavored paper, sorry, that’s banned too.” The FDA ban on clove cigarettes goes into effect today. [Official statement.] Somewhere amid the stoops, corridors, and crannies of Adams House, the Djarum-stained ghost of my college self is now that much more disaffected.

The Trouble With Bazookas.

“The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to ‘any organization’ that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things. In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops.“

D’oh! As it turns out, the GOP’s ridiculous act of political gamesmanship last week may well cause some severe blowback for government-as-usual in Washington. “Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) picked up on the legislative overreach and asked the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) to sift through its database to find which contractors might be caught in the ACORN net. Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman both popped up quickly, with 20 fraud cases between them, and the longer list is a Who’s Who of weapons manufacturers and defense contractors.“

What this probably means is that the ACORN ban will be found unconstitutional sooner rather than later. After all, the spice must flow.

The Last Dog Diatribes.

“During the discussion, Clinton told his vice president that he was disappointed that Gore had not used him in the last ten days of the 2000 campaign in strategically significant states — Arkansas, Tennessee, New Hampshire, and Missouri…Clinton insisted to Gore that he hadn’t cared about how Gore had referred to Clinton — and his personal scandal — during the campaign. Paraphasing this portion of the conversation, Branch writes that Clinton told Gore, ‘To gain votes, he would let Gore cut off his ear and mail it to reporter Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, the Monica Lewinsky expert.’”

In Mother Jones, David Corn previews some of the interesting tales disclosed in historian Taylor Branch’s forthcoming The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President. “In 1997, after New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote an acerbic column about Clinton and golfer Tiger Woods — maintaining that the the two green-eyed hucksters deserved each other — Clinton told Branch, ‘She must live in mortal fear that there’s somebody in the world living a healthy and productive life.’“

CIA: Please don’t torture our torturers!

“Attorney General [Eric] Holder’s decision to re-open the criminal investigation creates an atmosphere of continuous jeopardy for those whose cases the Department of Justice had previously declined to prosecute.” An “atmosphere of continuous jeopardy?” Well, boo frickin’ hoo: Seven former CIA heads try to bigfoot President Obama (and not AG Holder, where jurisdiction resides) into stopping the — already purposefully hamstrung — investigations into Dubya-era CIA torture.

As usual, Salon‘s irreplaceable Glenn Greenwald is already on top of it: “Do leaders of organizations in general ever believe that their organizations and its members should be criminally investigated and possibly prosecuted for acts carried out on behalf of that organization?…What these CIA Directors are urging would be completely improper. In fact, one could plausibly argue that where (as here) the DOJ determines that serious crimes might have been committed and an investigation needed, it would constitute obstruction of justice for the President to intervene by quashing any possibility of prosecution.“

Gale in a Teapot (Dome).

“The criminal investigation centers on the Interior Department’s 2006 decision to award three lucrative oil shale leases on federal land in Colorado to a Shell subsidiary. Over the years it would take to extract the oil, according to calculations from Shell and a Rand Corp. expert, the deal could net the company hundreds of billions of dollars.”

Paging Albert Fall: Former Dubya Interior Secretary Gale Norton, whose office was heavily implicated in the Abramoff scandals, is now facing a Justice Department inquiry into a sweetheart deal with Big Oil. “The investigation’s main focus is whether Norton violated a law that prohibits federal employees from discussing employment with a company if they are involved in dealings with the government that could benefit the firm, law enforcement and Interior officials said.“

The Levee’s Gonna Break.

“‘The First Amendment, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, protects the right of individual citizens to spend unlimited amounts to express their views about policy issues and candidates for office,’ Kavanaugh wrote.” (And they’re about to do it again.) With Emily’s List v. FEC, a federal appeals court strikes down “soft money” regulations. [Opinion.] Sigh. This is all going to end very badly.