I have some ideas on what's going on with Dianne Feinstein...

[cascadiance]

Do others have comments to fill in what I have here?

Consider the following time line:

Most recently through to the past:

Now - Dianne Feinstein looks to be giving approval to Bush's choice of Mukasey against the wishes of other Democrats.
Why?

Late January 2007 - Dianne Feinstein removed herself from the military construction appropriations committee when there were ethics questions surrounding conflicts of interests of contributions to her husband's company.
http://www.metroactive.com/feinstein /

Early January 2007 - Dianne Feinstein was pretty much THE first Senator to expose and make a big deal of the attorney scandal when her very vocal concerns were expressed when it was announced that Carol Lam was being asked to resign then. Note that this was AFTER the election that she got reelected for another six years.

November 2007 - Both Dianne Feinstein and Arnold Schwarzenegger get reelected for new terms of office.

August 11, 2006 - Dianne Feinstein's campaign co-chair, Angela Bradstreet, endorses Arnold Schwarzenegger over Democrat Phil Angelides.
http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/8/11/141636/252

Putting these facts together you have to ask yourself the following questions:
1) Why would Feinstein be so eager to support Mukasey, who's likely to do the same things that Gonzales did as AG as a Bush appointee and also be one of the first to go after the Justice Department's "purge" at the beginning of the year?

2) Might she be concerned that if the new attorneys were allowed to be completely shifted or if they were caught and needed to show that they were "doing their job", that she'd likely be one of the first targets of prosecution by U.S. Attorneys? Especially if she had something to hide given her resignation from that committee as indicated by that story above. Given that Arnold would replace her, that would be a quick way to shift power to the Republicans by him appointing a Republican to replace her for the next 5-6 years. She might have been reading between the lines.

3) Before the election, if she were concerned about the potential wrongdoing that she was doing might get exposed, that a Democratic Governor like Angelides might be a means for Dems to "dump" her later if she were exposed so that they could be shown to be more fair, and they wouldn't lose anything with Angelides as governor and would GAIN by having him replace her with someone else more progressive. Perhaps that's why her campaign manager worked AGAINST Angelides in last election. Coincidentally, since both got elected for four years, this situation will exist for the next six years, as long as Arnold is governor.

4) Perhaps Arnold's "being good" to Dems and playing in the middle now, since he knows that if he plays the partisan card he did earlier with the special election, it is very likely that the Dems would go after him with a recall election, and increase the poker hand of the Dems to go after Feinstein as well amongst other things.

5) Why does Feinstein continue to get weak opponents from the Republicans much like Lieberman had been getting in Connecticut. Probably the same reason. Republicans know that folks like Feinstein and Lieberman are the BEST Republicans they could get in those states, so they don't try to upset the apple cart!

I wonder if Feinstein has cut an inside deal with Bushco to ensure that Mukasey won't go after her in exchange for her vote to approve him out of committee. I think she might have felt threatened at the beginning of the year by the political wheels, which probably explained her unorthodox strident leadership in going after Gonzo and those responsible for the attorney scandal, not a sense of ethics! She knows that Dems won't want to go after her now to heavily, as if she does get nailed, Arnold would throw in a Republican to replace her.

[seemslikeadream]

1. Dianne Feinstein "footprint" America's Empire of Bases

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-08.htm


Of all the insensitive, if graphic, metaphors we've allowed into our vocabulary, none quite equals "footprint" to describe the military impact of our empire. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers and senior members of the Senate's Military Construction Subcommittee such as Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) are apparently incapable of completing a sentence without using it. Establishing a more impressive footprint has now become part of the new justification for a major enlargement of our empire -- and an announced repositioning of our bases and forces abroad -- in the wake of our conquest of Iraq. The man in charge of this project is Andy Hoehn, deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy. He and his colleagues are supposed to draw up plans to implement President Bush's preventive war strategy against "rogue states," "bad guys," and "evil-doers." They have identified something they call the "arc of instability," which is said to run from the Andean region of South America (read: Colombia) through North Africa and then sweeps across the Middle East to the Philippines and Indonesia. This is, of course, more or less identical with what used to be called the Third World -- and perhaps no less crucially it covers the world's key oil reserves. Hoehn contends, "When you overlay our footprint onto that, we don't look particularly well-positioned to deal with the problems we're now going to confront."




http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/17/1354236


The two mother hens of the Defense Facilities Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the people committed to taking care of our bases are easily Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Dianne Feinstein of California, the two states with the largest number of military bases, and those two senators would do anything in their power to keep them open. This is the insidious way in which the military-industrial complex has penetrated into our democracy and gravely weakened it, produced vested interests in what I call military Keynesianism, the use and manipulation of what is now three-quarters of a trillion dollars of the Defense budget, once you include all the other things that aren't included in just the single appropriation for the Department of Defense.

This is a -- it's out of control. We depend upon it, we like it, we live off of it. I cannot imagine any President of any party putting together the coalition of forces that could begin to break into these vested interests, any more than a Gorbachev was able to do it in his attempted reforms of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.