Okay, I've read Jane Harman's (D-CA) official biography

[Skidmore]

and basically all it told me was that she's interested in the environment and intelligence. I'd like to hear from some of her constituents, if we have any here. At a gut level, she just totally creeps me out. I know she is probably a perfectly nice lady, but something about how gungho she is on these security issues and how willing she is to take people like Negroponte at his word, just totally creeps me out. DOes anyone else respond to this woman in that way?

[Lexingtonian]

1. it's a little like Feinstein, Lantos, Lieberman

She was out of office while I lived in LA, so I have here is pieced together from what I've seen on TV and read. But it's really not complicated.

Too much fear for and uncritical support and prioritization of the interests of the government(s)/state of Israel lies at the bottom of what you observe. To get material compromises in favor of the S.o.I. out of the neocolonial/militarist people who run American foreign policy, these Friends Of Israel collaborate in the neocolonialist game in the Third World. It's way too Stuck In The Sixties & Seventies for me (and a lot of other people) to support, but there are plenty of people who do because they share in that condition. It's also painfully contrarian/pathetic at the times it doesn't pretend to superiority- look at what Feinstein supposedly said when she voted for the Iraq War Resolution.

I don't know about the intelligence angle. I'd guess they put her on that committee because she's sufficiently politically invested/compromised in a diminished ethics, it gives her something to tout, and it makes the committees look a little different from just pasty men with bad hair and suspect integrity and a desire to appear important.

The environmentalist focus is that getting Santa Monica Bay cleaned up is a major concern for her district (a very white, 3 mile wide, strip of swing voter beach communities from Venice to Palos Verdes). SMB has a hugh amount of contaminating effluent in its sediments which is a legacy of western LA south of I-10 having been an very industrial area from ~1920 to ~1980 and just flushing all its wastes into the Pacific. El Segundo is probably the major leftover. I always felt so sad for the people fishing off the piers- those fish are horribly contaminated with mercury and PCBs. 'Cleaning up' SMB is one of those projects that always gets talked about and a lot of money goes into committees and studies, but doing the dredging involved and such is way too expensive. The cost is simply beyond countenancing to the millions of people who live in poverty in the twenty miles east of her district.