WASHINGTON, D.C. - Buried in the 700-plus page energy bill currently under debate in the U.S. Senate is a provision that provides hundreds of millions of dollars worth of federal loan guarantees for a power project apparently to be built by four former Enron executives . . . [my emphasis]
Kennedy becomes the first senator to raise the issue in the Senate, after earlier reports that Massachusetts' junior senator, John Kerry, would speak about the minutes in Washington.
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"The contents of the Downing Street Minutes confirm that the Bush Administration was determined to go to war in Iraq, regardless of whether there was any credible justification for doing so. The Administration distorted and misrepresented the intelligence in its attempt to link Saddam Hussein with the terrorists of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden, and with weapons of mass destruction that Iraq did not have."
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Jesus, they had additional substantive evidence that the Swift Boat Liars were full of shit and refused to release it. The incompetent way that matter was handled knows no bounds.
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Some snapshots of religious zeal in the US: there are churches in Texas where 20,000 worshippers pray every Sunday; Alabama's most senior judge was dismissed for refusing to remove the Ten Commandments from his court; the re-election of George Bush returned with the support of thousands of evangelicals lured to the polls by local laws banning homosexual marriage.
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Despite the separation of church and state being enshrined in the US constitution, more than 40 per cent of US citizens said religious leaders should use their influence to try to sway policy-makers. In France, by contrast, 85 per cent of people said they opposed such "activism" by the clergy.
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But the US appears to be exceptional among industrialised nations because of the numbers who believe religion should influence policy-makers. [Link] [my emphases]
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My friend was watching a mutual friend's cat while he was on vacation. Before he left, he warned that the cat was old (21 years old), and not doing so hot. He suspected that he was ready to die. Sure enough, the cat died on the last day of vacation. My friend asked me how he should tell him. I gave him these options to break the news.
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FIRST, require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress;
SECOND, select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse;
THIRD, cut the number of House committees, and cut committee staff by one-third;
FOURTH, limit the terms of all committee chairs;
FIFTH, ban the casting of proxy votes in committee;
SIXTH, require committee meetings to be open to the public;
SEVENTH, require a three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase;
EIGHTH, guarantee an honest accounting of our Federal Budget by implementing zero base-line budgeting.
I do believe that's the RepublicanContract with America.
Hey, they were close!
P.S. I couldn't even type that with a straight face. Sigh...why does no one call them on these things?
DAVID BRANCACCIO: NOW on PBS...
The ethical questions dogging Majority Leader Tom DeLay continue to grow. Have his favors to lobbyists led him from family values to supporting virtual slavery?
REP. CHRISTOPHER SHAYS (R-CT): My instinct, my gut, tells me there'll be more because Tom is constantly pushing that ethical limit to the extreme
We have also made contact with several other members of Congress, and we believe that it will not be long before a group in Congress officially calls for an ROI.
Unfortunately, as most Nation readers know, the Downing Street Minutes have only been a story in the rest of the world, especially in Britain. In the United States it is taking much longer for the mainstream to pick up on it, and the issue is still being treated far less seriously than the seriousness of the charges warrant.
Fortunately, the blogosphere has found this new proof of George W. Bush's "misleadership" much more compelling than the mainstream press has; writers like Apian have posted incisive diaries on www.dailykos.com/, which regularly covers the story, as has Georgia10 and her friends, who founded the wonderful site www.downingstreetmemo.com/.
Despite a slow start, the Downing Street Minutes may have a long life expectancy, and the Misleader of the Pack may yet have to confront the truth.
A jaw-dropping article in The Texas Observer shows that two lobbying clients of Jack Abramoff paid $25,000 to Grover Norquist's group for a lunch date and meeting with President George W. Bush in May 2001. Abramoff brought the Indian chiefs to the White house at the request of Norquist, a leading "movement conservative" in Washington. In addition, Abramoff obtained $2.5 million in contributions from the Indians for a nonprofit foundation run by his wife and himself.
Norquist, Abramoff and Karl Rove have worked together for 30 years, since they were national leaders of the College Republicans. Norquist, DeLay and Abramoff are all key players in the "the K Street Project" to turn the Washington lobby corps into an arm of the Republican Party.
The Observer was too tasteful to crack any jokes about how forgettable a meeting with this Great White Father (my emphasis) might be. Dubose reports: "According to a source close to the tribal majority, Chairman Poncho recently 'revisited that issue' of his visit to the White House. He had previously denied it because he thought he was responding to press inquiries that implied he had a one-on-one meeting with Bush. He now recalls that he did in fact go to the White House on May 9, 2001. ... That meeting lasted for about 15 minutes and was not a one-on-one meeting. ... Abramoff was at the meeting."
According to the new version, Bush made some general comments about Indian policy but did not discuss Indian gaming. Abramoff billed the Coushatta $25,000 for the meeting. ...
I doubt there is a more important story in this country today. All reporters who want to be the next Woodward and Bernstein should follow Dubose and Martin to the local ends of this story
Congressman Conyers is up to 145,000 signatures on his letter to President Bush. If you still haven't signed the letter, head on over - and encourage everyone you know to show their support by signing, too.
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"the RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war."
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(New York-WABC, June 6, 2005) - A warning for millions of customers of CitiFinancial - an affiliate of Citibank - your personal and financial information is missing. Computer tapes were lost by UPS during shipment - tapes that contain account numbers and social security numbers.
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(TOKYO, March 19 2004 Reuters) - The Japanese banking unit of U.S. financial giant Citigroup (C,Trade) said on Friday that a magnetic tape containing information on over 120,000 of its customer accounts had gone missing in Singapore. The back-up tape, which had monthly transaction data on 123,690 Citibank customer accounts in Japan, went missing on February 21 while a local security company was transporting it, the Japanese unit of Citibank NA said in a statement.
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"When I go back (to Washington) on Monday, I am going to raise the issue," he said of the memo, which has not been disputed by either the British or American governments. "I think it's a stunning, unbelievably simple and understandable statement of the truth and a profoundly important document that raises stunning issues here at home. And it's amazing to me the way it escaped major media discussion. It's not being missed on the Internet, I can tell you that." - John Kerry - 1 June 2005
WASHINGTON - U.S. intelligence and foreign allies have growing evidence that wanted terrorists have been residing in Iran despite repeated American warnings to Tehran not to harbor them.
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On Iran, Ritter said that President George W. Bush has received and signed off on orders for an aerial attack on Iran planned for June 2005. Its purported goal is the destruction of Iran's alleged program to develop nuclear weapons, but Ritter said neoconservatives in the administration also expected that the attack would set in motion a chain of events leading to regime change in the oil-rich nation of 70 million - a possibility Ritter regards with the greatest skepticism.
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This week, over 500 leading economists, led by conservative icon Dr. Milton Friedman, called for a national debate about whether prohibition of marijuana is worth the cost. The occasion was a new report by Harvard University economist Dr. Jeffrey Miron estimating - - probably conservatively -- that replacing prohibition with a system of common-sense regulation could mean $10 billion to $14 billion per year in reduced government spending and new revenues.
"We believe such a debate will favor a regime in which marijuana is legal but taxed and regulated like other goods," Friedman and colleagues wrote. "At a minimum, this debate will force advocates of current policy to show that prohibition has benefits sufficient to justify the cost to taxpayers, foregone tax revenues, and numerous ancillary consequences that result from marijuana prohibition."
A good case can be made that prohibition costs too much -- in money, but also in ruined lives and harm done to society. But first, let's talk about dollars:
According to the federal government, nearly 15 million Americans use marijuana at least once a month. That's equal to every man, woman and child in the states of Oregon, Nebraska, Indiana and Oklahoma combined. It's nearly as many Americans as will buy a new car or truck this year. It's a huge market.
These 500 economists are right: There might be a better way, and it's time to start talking about it.
The good news is that, as Stevens says in the opinion, it preserves the right of federal legislators to change the laws, so that's nice. When we finally get over our reefer madness in this country, which I expect to be in a couple of hundred years or so, maybe the Armageddon Party can join with the Theocrats and make it legal. But of course, it won't be necessary because Pfizer will have found a way to perfectly re-create the effect of marijuana in a pill form and will have made millions selling it by prescription to those who can afford it --- which is, after all, the whole point.
A profound transformation is occurring in America and those responsible for it don't want you to connect the dots. We are experiencing what has been described as a "fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power." From public land to water and other natural resources, from media with their broadcast and digital spectrums to scientific discoveries and medical breakthroughs, a broad range of America's public resources is being shifted to the control of elites and the benefit of the privileged. It all seems so clear now that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time. Back in the early l970s President Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell, predicted that "this country is going to go so far to the right that you won't recognize it." A wealthy right-winger of the time, William Simon, President Nixon's Secretary of the Treasury, wrote a polemic declaring that "funds generated by business...must rush by the multimillions" to conservative causes. Said Business Week, bluntly: "Some people will obviously have to do with less...It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."
We've seen the strategy play out for years now: to cut workforces and wages, scour the globe in search of cheap labor, trash the social contract and the safety net meant to protect people from hardships beyond their control, make it hard for ordinary citizens to gain redress for the malfeasance and malpractice of corporations, and diminish the ability of government to check and balance "the animal spirits" of economic warfare where the winner takes all. Streams of money flowed into think tanks to shape the agenda, media to promote it, and a political machine to achieve it. What has happened to working Americans is not the result of Adam Smith's benign and invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate money, ideological propaganda, a partisan political religion, and a string of political decisions favoring the interests of wealthy elites who bought the political system right out from under us.
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MSNBC Breaking News
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Supreme Court: Federal government can prosecute over medical marijuana use.
It should be clear to all by now that the crazy, clueless bastards at the helm of this country scare the crap out of me. But the depth and breadth of that cluelessness, and the implications for us all, are becoming ever more apparent . . .
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It's clear that 5 years into this Administration that Bush has no vision of where to take the country. Iraq was the vision. Iraq was their idea of how to solve the problems of America in the 21st century. Invade a country, prop up a client state, and extract neocolonial "free market" advantages from raping the country of its oil. This is what happens when you hand the keys to the most powerful nation on the earth to a bunch of rednecks and business school graduates. There's not as much difference between the two as you might think.
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. . . A new White House memo excludes CIA director Porter Goss from National Security Council meetings. The biggest changes in Washington often come about with just a few strokes of the pen. And so a dry, one-page internal memo quietly issued by the White House is being viewed as a kind of eulogy for the once mighty Central Intelligence Agency.
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It's the latest evidence that Negroponte is consolidating his power as the nation's intelligence czar. The May 2 memo, obtained by TIME and also reported late last week by GovWatch.com, states that "effective immediately," Negroponte will participate in meetings of the NSC and its domestic counterpart, the Homeland Security Council (HSC). Meanwhile, CIA Director Porter Goss "will attend NSC and HSC meetings at the direction of the President."
That's the polite Beltway equivalent of saying, "Don't call us. We'll call you."
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. . . Being the great winners of ideological struggle apparently entitles them to raise all Republican leaders to the status of gods. In fact, there is no Republican leader on earth, from Joe McCarthy to Richard Nixon, who has not been entirely misunderstood until now. They have all not only been great warriors and leaders of men, they are also, each in their way, Jesus-like in their transcendent love for their fellow man and devotion to peace. All of them. Even the paranoid drunks and crooks.
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With remarks to a civic group in Enfield recently, Superior Court Judge Howard Scheinblum engaged in what is seldom forgiven in Connecticut's public life: candor.
The judge asserted what can neither be denied nor acknowledged -- that public policy on drugs doesn't work. Speaking from his 15 years of experience on the bench, Scheinblum estimated 90 percent of criminal cases in Connecticut are connected in some way to the pursuit of illegal drugs, and he asserted that society would be far better off to let users of such drugs obtain them by prescription and to be charged for them according to their ability to pay.
That is, the judge said, drugs are not the problem, not the cause of thievery, robbery, and violence; drug prohibitions.
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Judge Scheinblum's analysis only seems cynical, but it has been borne out by the political action of Connecticut's prison guards union against the transfer of inmates to prisons out of state where costs of imprisonment are lower. The families of prisoners have protested as well, but the union didn't care about prisoner welfare; it cared about losing business.
The judge's analysis also has been borne out by state government's refusal to audit drug-criminalization policy. The policy's failure is obvious, but politicians are paralyzed by fear of the policy's financial beneficiaries and the fear of asking the public to challenge old but faulty assumptions.
As with many other policies in Connecticut that are never evaluated for results, the "war on drugs" is not meant to be won; it is meant to be waged. Even its racially disproportionate casualties are not enough to prompt politicians to engage in candor like Judge Scheinblum's. Indeed, Connecticut's politicians are happy to put half the state's young men of color in prison if the other half can be hired to guard them. [Link]
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MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - A man who says he was severely burned when a portable toilet exploded after he sat down and lit a cigarette is suing a general contractor and a coal company, accusing them of negligence.
"When I struck the lighter, the whole thing just detonated - the whole top blew off," said Jenkins, a methane power plant operator with North West Fuels Development Inc. "I can't tell you if it blew me out the door or if I jumped out."
Federal vs. state law
Federal law and California law butt heads on the medical marijuana issue, and it remains unclear which statute takes precedent. A Supreme Court case, Raich v. Ashcroft, is expected to resolve this conflict.
The crux of the Supreme Court case is whether medical marijuana cultivation and distribution is considered "interstate commerce", which falls under federal jurisdiction.
The federal government argued that even if marijuana is cultivated and given away for free it still constitutes interstate commerce. The plaintiffs said that marijuana that is cultivated and consumed in a single state, and is not bought or sold, is subject only to state law. (my emphasis)
The Supreme Court finished hearing arguments on the case last year and is currently formulating a decision.
"When that decision is handed down it will eliminate much of the murkiness surrounding the enforcement of medical marijuana uses", said Sgt. Ron Ashford of the Placer County Sheriff's Department.
"In the legislation there is a lot of room to move there - a lot of leeway", Ashford said.
Meanwhile, patients and operators of the marijuana dispensaries wait for the court decision that is expected to either endorse or criminalize the distribution of medical marijuana.
"We have a ton of patients that are terrified," said Lincoln, from her job at the Colfax marijuana dispensary. "If we get taken away they will not know what to do."
When the nonprofit Broward Art Guild in Florida called its annual exhibit "Controversy," it didn't know the half of it. According to the Sun-Sentinel newspaper, Broward County's director of cultural affairs called the guild's director at home to register her disapproval of a painting called "Yahoo!" that showed President Bush being sodomized alongside images of a man in Muslim headdress and an oil barrel.
The guild is a private group but gets nearly a quarter of its funding from the county, and the pressure from the county official did the job: The painting was relocated to a corner and marked with a warning about its content. The newspaper reported that the county's complaint was provoked by a protest from another artist in the exhibit, Michael Friedman, who found the painting offensive; Friedman's artwork showed Pope Benedict XVI on a background of swastikas.
Q: "You've called Bush a loser."
A: "And a liar."
Q: "You apologized for the loser comment."
A: "But never for the liar, have I?"
-- from a Rolling Stone interview with Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev).
The folks at Amnesty International are practically begging for a one-way ticket to Gitmo. After the human rights group issued a report late last month calling the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, "the gulag of our times," top officials raced to condemn Amnesty.
Funny -- these officials had a different view of Amnesty when it was criticizing other countries.
"This administration eagerly cites Amnesty International research when we criticize Cuba and extensively quoted our criticism of the violations in Iraq under Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the war," protested William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA.
But Schulz isn't protesting too much. In the past week, traffic on Amnesty's Web site has gone up sixfold, donations have quintupled and new memberships have doubled (my emphasis).
There are many chapels on Camp Anaconda, Iraq, for religious services. When one wants to participate or hear religious jaw-jacking, that is where one goes.
There are also many dining facilities. When one is hungry and wants to get something to eat, this is where one goes. When religious services, Bible quoting and gospel singing are held during meal times in the DFACs [Chow Halls], this amounts to disrespect for those of other religions and those of no religion.
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Is it really too much to ask that the preaching and pushing of Christianity be held within the chapels, where those who wish it can seek it there and those who do not wish to hear it will not be held captive and forcibly subjected to Christian ritualism?
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Frederick Geraci
Camp Anaconda, Iraq
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It had a big dinosaur skull on the cover, and was drawn and written quite competently. The graphic novel featured the author - a balding, white-haired, mustachioed guy in a turtleneck, if the pictures were to be believed - showing all the evidence of dinosaurs, with scanned-in photos next to huge blurbs like "CARBON DATING IS A HIGHLY FLAWED AND IMPERFECT SCIENCE!"
The thing is, he wasn't anti-dinosaur. He spent a lot of time confirming the existence of dinosaurs, then moved to quotes like "Behold the behemoth which I made with thee . . . (Job 40:15) and "He moveth his tail like a cedar . . ." (Job 40:17). This, in turn, was proof that dinosaurs existed - and furthermore, they breathed smoke and fire, just like God said they did.
Weird. But not over-the-top. He seemed normal until I got to this panel:
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Yes, that's correct; he has the theory that dinosaurs, enraged by fallen angels, attacked Noah's Ark as the flood began in a no-holds battle to the finish.
And yet that was not enough. He illustrated it for a possible movie, claiming it would be far more exciting than Jurassic Park.
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The fossil remains of numerous dinosaurs have been found with their heads and necks arched upwards, as if in their death throes they were straining to keep their heads above water.
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House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, facing allegations of unethical conduct, has turned to Richmond lawyer and Republican activist Richard Cullen for legal help.
DeLay, R-Texas, recently retained Cullen and the firm where he is a partner, McGuireWoods LLP, a DeLay spokesman confirmed yesterday. Cullen is a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and a former state attorney general, appointed by then-Gov. George Allen, now a U.S. senator.
Cullen will handle a wide range of matters for DeLay, including ones that may come before the House ethics committee, DeLay spokesman Dan Allen indicated in an e-mail. He declined to say why Cullen was selected. Cullen would not comment yesterday. [Link] [my emphasis]
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While drug problems have been historically unknown in Iraq (out of fear of repression striking traffickers and consumers or quite simply from lack of information), OICS has worried about the new trend since its March 2004 annual report. "Drugs have started to enter the country in huge quantities, notably through the Eastern border," with Iran, revealed Iraqi Minister of the Interior Nouri Badrane then, who worried especially about the increase in narcotics consumption among young Iraqis: "Consumption of these drugs is on the rise, due to unemployment, insecurity, and the sense of uncertainty about the future, especially among young people." A few months later, his equivalent at the Health Ministry talked about "a problem that has become endemic," submitting a number of 2,029 registered addicts. [my emphasis]
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Among other things, the report concludes that China's defense expenditures are much higher than Chinese officials have published. It is estimated that China's is the third largest military budget in the world, and clearly the largest in Asia.
China appears to be expanding its missile forces, allowing them to reach targets in many areas of the world, not just the Pacific region, while also expanding its missile capabilities within this region. China also is improving its ability to project power, and developing advanced systems of military technology.
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China has important decisions to make about its goals and its future. Ultimately, China likely will need to embrace some form of a more open and representative government if it is to fully achieve the political and economic benefits to which its people aspire.
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From now on, instead of sending important information by email, I will be posting to the Big Brass Alliance Forum set up by Pam, to whom we owe a great deal of thanks.
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It's correct of course to criticize Bush for all this stuff. But the cold truth is that we - the American public - are now equally to blame. We saw what was wrong and chose not to care. Having seen what was wrong, we chose to ratify the administration's conduct.
Welsh singing star Charlotte Church branded US President George Bush "a right weirdo" and opera legend Pavarotti a "big fat diva", it was reported today.
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Church, 19, said gaffe-prone Bush had no idea where Wales was when she met him after performing for outgoing President Bill Clinton in Washington in 2000.
"Clinton was lovely, in tune with everyone else, but George Bush just hasn't got a clue what he's doing," she said, according to the Daily Record.
"He asked me what state Wales was in. I said: 'It's its own country next to England, actually Mr Bush.'
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WASHINGTON -- Online political activists want the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to stay cool when considering proposed rules that some fear will chill online political debate, particularly in the blogosphere.
The FEC agrees, but the courts do not.
Faced with a mandate from a federal court to extend some aspects of campaign finance laws to include the Internet, the FEC finds itself in the awkward position of proposing rules it didn't want to write in the first place.
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It is interesting that the ACLU got a ruling requiring that all the Abu Ghraib pictures be released to the public. What is really interesting is that the government argued that releasing them would be contrary to the Geneva Conventions. (Via Talk Left)
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. . . alleviate the personnel crunch by retaining soldiers who are earmarked for early discharge during their first term of enlistment because of alcohol or drug abuse, unsatisfactory performance, or being overweight, among other reasons." [my emphasis]
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. . . But fear is a powerful thing: deep, psychological, repressed fear - that if the truth is not held back, then the monsters of anarchy must be unleashed. It is better to take down a President for something a great deal more prosaic than war crimes and mass murder. Because what does it say about us if our leader is guilty of such things? [my emphasis]
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The [Republicans] talk about a culture of life. What about a culture of corruption in this country? We have the leader in the Republican Party [in the House of Congress], who the president just endorsed as doing a fine job, and who the chair of the Republican party endorsed as doing a fine job.
I happen to think that's true; the Republican definition of a fine job is to be reprimanded three times in a row [by the House ethics committee]. The Republican definition of a fine job appears to be if your leader is under investigation and three of his aides have been indicted for allegedly funneling $600,000 of corporate money into Texas campaigns. That's how Republicans do business. They think it's fine. Americans don't think it's fine. We need to get the culture of abuse and corruption in Washington out of here.
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-Dr. Howard Dean, DNC Chairman.
Yasith Chhun often boasted to newspapers and magazines about masterminding an attack on government buildings in Cambodia and his plans to overthrow the Southeast Asian country's communist regime.
The U.S. State Department declared the group he headed, the Cambodian Freedom Fighters, a terrorist organization in 2001.
But that label didn't stop Chhun, 48, from gaining friends among GOP stalwarts, such as Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of Huntington Beach and the National Republican Congressional Committee, which raises funds for electing Republicans to Congress.
Rohrabacher said he was aware of the State Department's concerns about the Cambodian Freedom Fighters but remained a supporter of Chhun and his allies because of their passionate efforts to topple the Cambodian government led by Prime Minister Hun Sen.
"The State Department quite often will worship at the altar of stability and not consider liberty and justice as part of the equation," the congressman said in a phone interview. When "you talk about a dictator like Hun Sen, you don't want stability, you want change. Let's hope our State Department is not condemning anybody who would act to eliminate Hun Sen."
Sakphan Keam, an English-Khmer translator in Long Beach, said many of the city's Cambodian Americans equate the Republican Party with reform overseas, a belief that was strengthened by President Bush's invasion of Iraq.
Allegations of ethics violations swirling around House Majority Leader Tom Delay have raised serious questions about a possible epidemic of "pay-to-play" politics in American government. On Friday, June 3, 2005 at 9 P.M. on PBS (check local listings), NOW investigates the charges against DeLay and shines a spotlight on the real-world consequences of special interests, lobbyists, and big campaign donors using money and gifts to exert influence over our elected officials. The program looks at the sweatshop working conditions in the Marianas Islands, an American territory, which is the focus of new allegations that an aide to DeLay offered federal money to local legislators to support a local leader who opposed reforming the garment industry there.
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Amnesty International first communicated its concerns about the treatment of prisoners to Rumsfeld in January 2002 and continued to raise these concerns at the highest levels as allegations of abuse mounted from Afghanistan, Guantanamo and Iraq.
[AI's William] Schulz said this administration responded by preventing human rights workers from investigating or visiting the detention facilities in question. Schulz contrasted the administration's actions in this regard to countries such as Libya and Syria that have allowed independent monitors to examine prison facilities. [my emphasis]
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A progressive blog, Democrats.com, is offering a $1,000 reward to anyone who can get United States president George W. Bush to answer a question about pre-Iraq war intelligence . . .
In July 2002, did you and your administration "fix" the intelligence and facts about non-existent Iraqi WMD's and ties to terrorism - which were disputed by U.S. intelligence officials - to sell your decision to invade Iraq to Congress, the American people, and the world - as quoted in the Downing Street Minutes?
. . . But claiming that the people who brought Nixon down are responsible for the Khmer Rouge and the Killing Fields? ARE YOU EFFIN' KIDDING ME? . . .
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Let me just quote the part of Noonan's article I'm interested in talking about:
Felt helped produce was a weakened president who was a serious president at a serious time. Nixon's ruin led to a cascade of catastrophic events--the crude and humiliating abandonment of Vietnam and the Vietnamese, the rise of a monster named Pol Pot, and millions--millions--killed in his genocide. America lost confidence; the Soviet Union gained brazenness. What a terrible time. Is it terrible when an American president lies and surrounds himself by dirty tricksters? Yes, it is. How about the butchering of children in the South China Sea. Is that worse? Yes. Infinitely, unforgettably and forever.
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If we're going to seriously accept an argument that Nixon was capable of stopping Pol Pot then it's not too crazy to contend that Clinton could've stopped al-Qaeda if he hadn't been critically weakened by "Lewinsky-blowjob-gate." Clinton would've been in a position to seriously go after al-Qaeda if he wasn't distracted by the impeachment saga of 1998 and 1999.
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I heard a really bad joke last year:
Q: What's the difference between Iraq and Vietnam?
A: Bush had a plan to get out of Vietnam.
The Brad Blog reports that the John Conyers Downing Street Letter to Bush petition has topped 86,000 signatures so far, with the ante upped to 250K, over the 100K originally requestion. Amazing. Conyers on the response:
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And, that's what's happening now. I smell the long-forgotten skunk, the long-forgotten rot of fascism. What is happening all around can no longer be denied. What I ran away from so desperately in 1938 is coming back full circle. Only the jack-boots have not yet arrived . . .
Donald Rumsfeld, whose Steely Resolve more and more resembles aluminum siding, is a man unafraid of confronting the full spectrum of America's enemies from Al Qaeda to Amnesty International.
His retirement as Secretary of Defence will leave a trail of ruination as its legacy that will stretch forward into the indeterminate future.
"When Rumsfeld leaves office, what will his successor inherit?"
"A volunteer military without volunteers. The Army missed its active-duty recruiting goal in April by almost half. Guard and Reserve recruiting are collapsing. Retention will do the same as "stop loss" orders are lifted. The reason, obviously, is the war in Iraq. Parents don't want to be the first one on their block to have their kid come home in a box.
"The world's largest pile of wrecked and worn-out military equipment (maybe second-largest if we remember the old Soviet Navy). I'm talking about basic stuff here: trucks, Humvees, personnel carriers, crew-served weapons, etc. This is gear the Rumsfeld Pentagon hates to spend money on, because it does not represent 'transformation' to the hi-tech, video-game warfare it wrongly sees as the future.
"Commitments to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of future weapons programs that are militarily as useful as Zeppelins but less fun to watch..."
"Finally, the equivalent of an unfavorable ruling by a bankruptcy judge in the form of a lost war. We will be lucky if we can get out of Iraq with anything less than a total loss."
Yeah, I'd say that about covers it.
But there was a catch: The war hadn't started yet, at least not officially. This was September 2002--a month before Congress had voted to give President Bush the authority he used to invade Iraq, two months before the United Nations brought the matter to a vote and more than six months before "shock and awe" officially began.
At the time, the Bush Administration publicly played down the extent of the air strikes, claiming the United States was just defending the so-called no-fly zones. But new information that has come out in response to the Downing Street memo reveals that, by this time, the war was already a foregone conclusion and attacks were no less than the undeclared beginning of the invasion of Iraq.
It only takes one member of Congress to begin an impeachment process, and Conyers is said to be considering the option. The process would certainly be revealing. Congress could subpoena Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Gen. Richard Myers, Gen.Tommy Franks and all of the military commanders and pilots involved with the no-fly zone bombings going back into the late 1990s. What were their orders, both given and received? In those answers might lie a case for impeachment.
Here's what John Dean, key Watergate figure, wrote about Dubya's case for the Iraq war in a June 2003 column for findlaw.com: "To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked... Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be a 'high crime' under the Constitution's impeachment clause."
A Google news search reveals that the majority of the coverage of the Downing Street memo is either on foreign news sites (France, New Zealand) or on blogs (Brad Blog). Only a few U.S. sites (aside from bloggers, such as the Big Brass Alliance) have made mention of the story, and then it's from the "U.S. largely ignores Downing Street Memo" angle.
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In the more sombre assessment of others in the administration, however, the US has long lost its grip on Iraq's political process. "We are losing control," said one veteran Arabist in the administration who requested anonymity.
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Geoff Porter, analyst with the Eurasia Group consultancy, said US interests had been "stymied on most fronts", with US officials frustrated with, and ignorant of, Iraq's fractious politics. "There is an air of resignation, with people throwing up their hands that this will be a long-term process."
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Ask along that man who's wearing a carnation.
Bring every single person
from Victoria Station,
Go into that hospital
and bring nurses and patients,
Everybody go home and fetch their relations!
- Welcome - The Who
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Progressive Democrats of America has joined with AfterDowningStreet.org, a coalition of veterans' groups, peace groups, and political activist groups to launch a campaign urging the U.S. Congress to begin a formal investigation into whether President Bush has committed impeachable offenses in connection with the Iraq war and they need everyone's help! Here are some simple tools to alert your local media outlet about this new coalition. Demand a Resolution of Inquiry!
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while many of his former supporters are still angry with senator john kerry, he seems to finally have caught on and is following the lead of the emerging real leaders of the democratic party---bloggers.
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The Big Brass Alliance, in addition to supporting Congressman John Conyers' and AfterDowningStreet.org's efforts to pursue a formal inquiry into the administration's actions leading up to the Iraq war, is also throwing its weight behind the Awaken the Mainstream Media campaign started by Daily Kos diarist smintheus.
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Enough of who Deep Throat is or what he did. Get on your knees and thank Gawd for him and Daniel Ellsberg. Medal of Freedom anyone? More about how Watergate is more and more like, Jesus, what do you call the Bush administration's scandals?
Yellow Cakegate?
Iraqgate?
My Pet Goatgate?
Electiongate? Part I and Part II?
Mission Accomplishedgate?
AWOLgate?
The president looked stoned on the night we went to war against Iraqgate?
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The Republicans have been trying to abolish Constitutional government for some time. And each time, the wave breaks further up the beach.
Nixon, the first wave: Watergate, and the plumbers, were felonies orchestrated and directed from the White House. And Nixon tried to use national security as a cloak to hide his crimes. But our Democratic institutions - and here I use the letter "D" in both upper and lower case - were strong enough to withstand the assault. Hearings were held, and Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment.
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NEW YORK, May 23, 2005 - Troubled United Airlines ended its traditional pension plans dramatically earlier this month, abandoning them in a highly publicized move to the federal government's pension insurance agency. But many other traditional plans die quietly, either converted to "hybrid" plans or frozen and replaced with worker-funded 401(k) plans.
And it's happening with increasing frequency.
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The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., which insures private sector pensions, says the number of covered plans has dropped from a high of 112,208 in 1985 to fewer than 30,000 today. Of those remaining, some 20 percent are hybrid designs such as cash balance plans under which companies allocate pay and interest credits to accounts in each employee's name.
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"I calculated that under the cash balance plan, I would have to work until 78 to get the same annuity (monthly benefit) I would have had at age 65 under the old plan," Krueger said.
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...Swiss and American scientists demonstrate in new experiments with a nasal spray containing the hormone oxytocin.
After a few squirts, human subjects were significantly more trusting and willing to invest money with no ironclad promise of a profit.
The researchers acknowledged their findings could be abused by con artists or even sleazy politicians who might sway an election, provided they could squirt enough voters on their way to the polls.
