Saturday, July 21, 2007

The Logic of Impeachment

A 'must read' by Robert Parry:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has taken impeachment "off the table," in line with Official Washington's view that trying to oust George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would be an unpleasant waste of time. But there is emerging a compelling logic that an unprecedented dual impeachment might be vital to the future of the United States.

If some historic challenge is not made to the extraordinary assertions of power by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the United States might lose its status as a democratic Republic based on a Constitution that adheres to the twin principles that no one is above the law and everyone is endowed with inalienable rights.

Bush is daring Congress to either mount a constitutional battle or submit to his will.

If Congress submits to that punk's will, any more than they already have, the Nation is lost. Period.

Even if impeachment didn't reach the ultimate goal of removing Bush and Cheney, it would put down a marker of congressional resistance to executive abuses.

The public would get the point, too.

Same theory as vigorous application of a 2x4 to a mule's head: sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do to get his attention.

In my neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia, lawn signs have sprung up reading simply "Impeach Him" or "Impeach Them Both." No one needs to say who the "him" and the "them" are.

From opinion polls, it's clear, too, that Americans across the country are furious with Bush and Cheney. Many recognize that Bush and Cheney represent an unparalleled threat to core American principles, such as the concept of inalienable rights.

These millions of Americans are searching for some courageous politicians willing to take the lead. Instead, the people get all-night Iraq War debates that go nowhere – and empty promises that, some day down the road, the Democrats will finally get serious.

What these citizens want is for the Democrats to stiffen their spines and finally declare, loudly and clearly, "Impeach the bastards."

Amen. Do not miss this one.

Mention the President, Lose a Case?

Law.com

Apparently President George W. Bush is now so unpopular that some lawyers believe the mere mention of his name in front of a jury could tip the scales against them.

Attorneys Michael P. Laffey and Robert P. DiDomenicis of Holsten & Associates in Media, Pa., are defending Upper Darby Township, Pa., in a civil rights suit brought by Harold Lischner, an 82-year-old doctor who claims he was falsely arrested for displaying an anti-war sign at a Bush campaign event in September 2003.

With the case set to go to trial on July 23, the defense lawyers recently filed a flurry of motions, including one that asked Eastern District of Pennsylvania Judge Gene E.K. Pratter to prohibit the plaintiff from mentioning Bush's name.

That bears repeating: They arrested an 82-year-old man for displaying an anti-war sign at a Bush campaign event.

Boy, there's some "law & order" for ya, huh? So much for exercise of First Amendment rights if the current occupant doesn't like it. At least Bush can't order "off with his head!"

Yet.

A final note: if you go read the article, drink some triple-caffeine Java and take a lunch. It was written by lawyers.

Laughing at us ...

I've been saying this for years. We are a nation of prudes.

Great thanks to Avedon Carol for the link.

Hillary's tits ...

Oh. My. God. Hillary showed some cleavage, the end of the world is upon us! She'd get my vote if she showed me her tits*.

...

I know its an exercise in futility to expect more from our media but, seriously, what's next? Barack Obama and his Peculiar Pigment? Yeesh.

...



Pic courtesy of WaPo. Click to embiggen.


*I know it's shallow, but I'm easy.

When whores collide ...

Another chapter of my novel The Fourth Estate is up at The Practical Press.

Friday, July 20, 2007

Bush to get it up the ass...

Us too. Bush is going in for a colonoscopy and The Dick will be president for a coupla hours. Fasten yer seat belts and watch yer six.

May I respectfully suggest that if they're gonna put any 'scopes up Bush where the Sun don't shine, they should go for the gusto and use the one from Arecibo. Guaranteed to put a smile on his face and ours too.

Update:

Mrs. G informs me that the space aliens who normally conduct probes of Bush actually had to return him so he could go get this one.

Hil on Pot - Well, Sorta

From Stop The Drug War:

Hillary Clinton continues to get the drug policy questions right:

During a visit to Manchester, New Hampshire on July 13, Len Epstein of Granite Staters for Medical Marijuana told the senator and presidential candidate: "Twelve states allow medical marijuana, but the Bush administrations continues to raid patients."

Clinton replied: "Yes, I know. It's terrible."

"Would you stop the federal raids?" Epstein asked.

"Yes, I will," she responded firmly.

Good for her. The "War On Some Drugs" is an expensive loser, particularly in the case of voter-approved medical marijuana.

This oughta get her the votes of many sick and forgetful people if they can get out of bed and remember why they did that...

More Impeachment Stuff

Go read this.

Ho Hum. Another GOP/Christianist/Hooker Deal

Pensito Review

President of the Christian Action League, 74, Is Arrested after Paying Hooker with Checks

Seventy-four? You'd think the old fucker would be content to get his rocks off the way most older Southern preachers do - from watching all the young boys and girls in their white shifts during full immersion baptisms down at the river...one hand holding them under and the other, well, you get the idea...

I don't know who's more stupid - him for paying with a check, or her for taking one.

Rev. Coy Privette, the president of the Christian Action League, a North Carolina ultraconservative Christian political organization based in Raleigh, has been arrested for soliciting prostitution

I don't want to say anything mean about this gal, who's no doubt doing doing whatever it takes to get by, but go take a look at her.

The Christian Action League is funded by the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, and it is affiliated with the ultra-rightwing American Family Association.

For over three decades, Privette has been one of the best known and most outrageous spokesmen for "family values" and Christian extreme right politics in North Carolina. In the 1970s, he was serving as minister at the North Kannapolis Baptist Church when he joined the tide of evangelicals entering politics that included the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition. He served in the N.C. Legislature from 1984 to 1992, and has been a member of the board of commissioners in Cabarrus County since 1998.

Ah, the usual suspects. It does my heart good to see yet another one of these 'family values' hypocrites get caught at it.

All the President’s Enablers

Paul Krugman, and also worth a click to see "Neocon Gold". No, Fixer, it ain't some kinda weed that weirds ya out...

In a coordinated public relations offensive, the White House is using reliably friendly pundits - amazingly, they still exist - to put out the word that President Bush is as upbeat and confident as ever. It might even be true.

What I don't understand is why we're supposed to consider Mr. Bush's continuing confidence a good thing.

Now Iraq is a bloody quagmire, Afghanistan is deteriorating and the Bush administration’s own National Intelligence Estimate admits, in effect, that thanks to Mr. Bush's poor leadership America is losing the struggle with Al Qaeda. Yet Mr. Bush remains confident.

It's not as much 'confidence' as it is denial and willful ignorance. Besides, since The Dick and God made him do it, it's impossible for everything, I say again every thing, he's done to be the biggest, costliest mistake in American history. It's not a mistake. He did it on purpose.

Yet while Mr. Bush no longer has many true believers, he still has plenty of enablers - people who understand the folly of his actions, but refuse to do anything to stop him.

That's kinda the mystery here - Bush is flat fuckin' wreckin' the joint and everybody stands on the sidelines wringin' their hands. Or actually applauding. That's not the way to stop him.

You can't stop the bastard with laws. He laughs at laws, holds them in contempt, has asserted that he is above them. And Congress still thinks they can use procedure and law to thwart him.

Bush and Cheney need to be physically restrained. Physically, as in forcibly remove them to a place of confinement where they can do no more harm, like on Law and Order. It's called "arrest". Then, and only then, can the law be used against them.

You know, at this point I think we need to stop blaming Mr. Bush for the mess we're in. He is what he always was, and everyone except a hard core of equally delusional loyalists knows it.

Yet Mr. Bush keeps doing damage because many people who understand how his folly is endangering the nation's security still refuse, out of political caution and careerism, to do anything about it.

I rarely disagree with Mr. Krugman, but of course we can blame Bush. No matter who advised him or how wrong-headed his approach or who helped him, he did it. There's plenty of blame to go around in this deal, of course. Congress and others have enabled these bastards to commit their crimes and destroy the Constitution, and even though it's happening openly and blatantly right in front of their eyes, they refuse to do what's necessary - in cowboy parlance "dab a loop on 'em".

Saddle up, boys. They got a head start, and yer gonna haveta ride hard, head 'em off and round 'em up. Do it near a tree for convenience' sake.

Hey, W! Bin Laden (Still) Determined to Strike in U.S.

MoDo

Squirming White House officials had to confront the fact yesterday that everything President Bush has been spouting the last six years about Al Qaeda being on the run, disrupted and weakened was just guff.

The administration's most thorough intelligence assessment since 9/11 is stark and dark. Two pages add up to one message: The Bushies blew it. Al Qaeda has exploded into a worldwide state of mind. Because of what’s going on with Iraq and Iran, Hezbollah may now "be more likely to consider" attacking us. Al Qaeda will try to "put operatives here" - (some news reports say a cell from Pakistan already is en route or has arrived) - and "acquire and employ chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear material in attacks."

W. swaggers about with his cowboy boots and gunslinger stance. But when talking about Waziristan last February, he explained that it was hard to round up the Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders there because: "This is wild country; this is wilder than the Wild West."

Yes, they shoot with real bullets up there, and they fly into buildings with real planes.

If W. were a real cowboy, instead of somebody who just plays one on TV, he would have cleaned up Dodge by now.

The Chimp's idea of "cleanin' up Dodge" is to clear the brush and the Hell with what's goin' on in the back room of the Long Branch. Besides, those fellows who are runnin' the crooked gambling and sex trade are no doubt on his payroll.

Rigged Game

For what it's worth, here's a quote from BuzzFlash about the judge who threw out the Wilsons' lawsuit:

From the Archives: This Was Our Headline on a Story Last Year by a Partisan Decision by the Same Bushevik Judge Who Threw Out the Valerie Plame Civil Lawsuit Against the Busheviks on Thursday. "As Bush plays games with the law, Judge Bates says it's OK for him to sign two different versions of same bill. Guess what, the judge was appointed by Bush and "As a District Court Judge, Bates dismissed the GAO's effort to learn with whom Cheney's energy task force conferred." Also, he was appointed by Rehnquist to the FISA Court. Does anyone smell a partisan hack judge here? Oh, Judge Bates also served as one of Ken Starr's merry pranksters. "Judge Bates was on detail as Deputy Independent Counsel for the Whitewater investigation from 1995 to mid-1997." Get the picture of a Bush loyalist who values partisanship over the Constitution? 8/13/06 Judge Bates spent two years working for Kenneth Starr and the Independent Counsel's office during the investigation into President Bill Clinton, specifically Deputy Independent Counsel under Ken Starr from September 1995 until leaving in March 1997.

You can't beat a rigged game by playing by the rules. IMNSHO the way to deal with a rigged game is with a Louisville Slugger, a length of old No. 530 motorcycle chain, a fence rail and some tar and feathers. Which is a metaphor for about 100,000 citizens on the White House lawn with pitchforks and scythes. Which is also a metaphor for whatever works to GET THOSE SONSABITCHES OUT NOW! Fair play, courtesy, and rules be damned. They don't use 'em, and it's past time to get rough with the bastards.

Let 'em have it ...



That house in Paris is looking better and better.

When I read that a judge has thrown out Joe and Valerie's suit against the administration, when I see the Rethugs still exerting control over Congress regardless of the public's demand for a change, when I see the news media still carrying the Chimp's water, I'm of a mind to throw up my hands, pack up the Mrs. and the dog and move to a place we love, where progressive ideas aren't considered part of the lunatic fringe.

The America I know and love is long dead, 7 years dead, and I get this feeling it's beyond resuscitation. Every federal agency and the courts have been corrupted, our civil rights have been abrogated (and you know we won't get 'em back anytime soon), and corporate interests make government policy. So what the fuck? How do we win?

I don't know. I don't see a solution.

Even a Dem President with a Dem majority in Congress gives me little hope because they follow the money the same way the Rethugs do. That's if we even get to elect a Dem because, as Gord noted yesterday, I doubt the Chimp and Cheney will want to leave when their term is up.

It's just so frustrating, I'm tempted to call the people who own the house pictured above and make 'em an offer they can't refuse for it. I'm tempted to say, 'let the Rethugs have America, they have to live in the shithole they've created' and pack it in.

Tempted, but there's still some fight left in this old dog. We'll make that decision in '09. Besides, if they're allowed to continue, the stench of America will eventually wash up on the Left Bank too.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

VA Secretary Jim Nicholson resigns

Think Progress. Links at site.

Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson has resigned.

Nicholson's primary qualification for the VA job was serving as chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1997 to 2000, "raising close to $380 million for the 2000 cycle." In March, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) called for his resignation, noting that his appointment was purely political and looked "like a Brownie situation."

UPDATE: In February, Nicholson tried to downplay the number of injured veterans, claiming that "a lot of them come in for dental problems."

Dental problems. Yeah, IEDs, grinding your teeth for one fifteen month tour after another after another, or meth and alcohol abuse from PTSD will play Hell with your smile.

Reminds me of the time Suzuki had a rash of broken motorcycle frames. Afraid of lawsuits, they downplayed it and claimed it was an 'electrical problem'. When pressed, their rep said, in perfect Japanenglish, "Frame break, pull off spark prug wire, bike stop - erectrical probrem!"

Good riddance to another incompetent Repug crony.

It'll all be over in '09? Maybe not...

From Corrente:

So! The DFH types like us aren't the only ones to think this way. Former US Ambassador Dan Simpson writes for the Toledo Blade:

[...]

There is also the late-at-night, eerie concern that Mr. Bush has in his head some sort of scenario where, for reasons of national security - real or drummed up - the 2008 elections will have to be postponed and he will get to stay on.

My suspicions have at their base the feeling I have that, given their operating style now, this bunch will not leave the White House easily in 2009.


Nice to see this mainstreamed at last.

Because when the going gets tough, the tough get foily.

Because, really, when do monarchs ever surrender power?

I just checked the Dow. I'm rich! Prescience has paid off at last! Tinfoil hat stocks are up now that this has hit the MSM!

Don't worry - they'll leave the White House even if not right on time. Feet first, maybe, but they'll leave.

Media Putz of the Week

Media Putz:

William Kristol is living proof of how the American media has turned the concept of meritocracy upside its head and now puts chronic failures at the top of the pundit pyramid.

Kristol is the scion of leftists turned Neo-Cons. He has the East Coast pedigree that used to be a prerequisite for entrance into the neo-liberal ruling class. But somewhere, something went horribly wrong.

As the paid shill of Rupert Murdoch, who underwrites the Weekly Standard that Kristol "edits," Kristol has emerged as the favorite Neo-Con "expert spokesman" on the mainstream media. This is despite the reality that Kristol has a record of being a smiling booster of just about every failed "Masters of the Universe" foreign policy pursued by Bush and Cheney.

Lately, Kristol has been advocating the nuking of Iran when not doing the Sunday morning "news show" circuit, boasting about what a great job Bush is doing in Iraq. He's the kind of insider that the D.C. media establishment thinks of as a "nice guy" and "one of them."

That's just the intro. Specifics follow.

Which brings us to the specific recent reason for Kristol occupying the Media Putz hat this week: a July 15 column in the Washington Post that the Washington Post prominently promoted online with the teaser, "Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol will chart the remarkable -- and often ignored -- successes of the Bush administration."

Many BuzzFlash readers took note of this "Neo-Con in Wonderland" view of a presidency that has made us more vulnerable as a nation to external threats, at a grave cost in lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.

Then the winning nomination. Definitely worth the read.

I like these lines in the close:

Bill Kristol loves to be perceived as a player in the Bush White House, which is kind of like feeling macho because you hang out at the Gotti crime family's poker club.

With Kristol, you need a crowbar to separate the facts from the fiction, if you can find any facts in his endless, chipper blather. With columns like this one, you remind us how easy it is to separate journalism from the truth.

Hell yeah it's easy - all you have to be is deluded and lie a little. Well, OK, be really deluded and lie a lot.

Update:

Go read David Corn's rebuttal to Kristol's idiot op-ed:

Who knew Bill Kristol had such a flair for satire?

How else to read his piece for Outlook on Sunday, in which he declared, "George W. Bush's presidency will probably be a successful one"? Surely Kristol, the No. 1 cheerleader for the Iraq war, was mocking himself (and his neoconservative pals) for having been so mistaken about so much. But just in case his article was meant to be a serious stab at commentary, let's review Kristol's record as a prognosticator.

And review Kristol's prognostications he does! The word 'wrong' pops into mind a lot...

The Bush-Cheney years have been marked by ineptitude, miscalculation, and scandal. A successful presidency? Bush will be lucky if he gets a public elementary school in his adopted hometown of Crawford, Tex., named after him. He has placed this country in a hole. Yet Kristol, with shovel in hand, points to that hole and says, Trust me -- we're about to strike oil!

If it's true that history repeats first as tragedy and then as farce, Kristol has short-circuited the process and gone straight to parody. His Bush boosterism -- an act of self-justification -- would be amusing were it not for all the damage he has helped Bush to cause.

Perhaps there's a spot for Kristol right next to his idol Bush in a nice quiet Eastern European secret CIA prison. Or at The Hague.

Cheney Suppressed Evidence in California Energy Crisis

Quite a long piece at Truthout. If you're interested in this, you'll be interested in this. All the usual suspects, plus a few.

In-depth investigation shows how Vice President Dick Cheney pressured federal energy regulators to conceal evidence of widespread market manipulation by energy companies during the California electricity crisis in 2001.

Cheney had just been informed by his longtime friend Thomas Cruikshank, the man who handpicked the vice president to succeed him at Halliburton in the mid-1990s, that federal energy regulators were close to completing an investigation into allegations that Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Williams Companies and AES Corporation of Arlington, Virginia had created an artificial power shortage in California in April and May of 2000 by shutting down a power plant for more than two weeks.

This story is based on a two-month investigation into Cheney's energy task force; how the vice president pressured cabinet officials to conceal clear-cut evidence of market manipulation during California's energy crisis, and how that subsequently led Cheney to exert executive privilege when lawmakers called on him to turn over documents related to his meetings with energy industry officials who helped draft the National Energy Policy and also gamed California's power market. Truthout spoke with more than a dozen former officials from the Energy Department and FERC as well as current and former energy industry executives all of whom were involved in personal discussions with Cheney relating to the National Energy Policy.

"[We] started out Monday losing $3 million ... So, then we decided as a group that we were going to make it back up, so we turned like about almost every power plant off. It worked. Prices went back up. Made back about $4 million, actually more than that, $5 million," the Reliant trader says in a tape-recorded conversation on June 23, 2000.

Just one more reason The Dick should be in jail, along with a whole bunch of other people.

Bush is the one our founding fathers warned us about

Robert Scheer

George W. Bush is the imperial president that James Madison and other founders of this great republic warned us about. He lied the nation into precisely the "foreign entanglements" that George Washington feared would destroy the experiment in representative government, and he has championed a spurious notion of security over individual liberty, thus eschewing the alarms of Thomas Jefferson as to the deprivation of the inalienable rights of free citizens. But most important, he has used the sledgehammer of war to obliterate the separation of powers that James Madison enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

[...] "The separation of the power of raising armies from the power of commanding them is intended to prevent the raising of armies for the sake of commanding them."

That last sentence perfectly describes the threat of what President Dwight Eisenhower, 165 years later, would describe as the "military-industrial complex," a permanent war economy feeding off a permanent state of insecurity. The collapse of the Soviet Union deprived the military profiteers and their handsomely rewarded cheerleaders in the government of a raison d’être for the massive war economy supposedly created in response to it. Fortunately for them, Bush found in the 9/11 attack an excuse to make war even more profitable and longer lasting. The Iraq war, which the president’s 9/11 Commission concluded never had anything to do with the terrorist assault, nonetheless has transferred many hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars into the military economy. And when Congress seeks to exercise its power to control the budget, this president asserts that this will not govern his conduct of the war.

The problem is that the "state of war" in question here was an al-Qaida attack on the U.S. that had nothing whatsoever to do with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Perhaps to spare Congress the embarrassment of formally declaring war against a nation that had not attacked America, Bush settled for a loosely worded resolution supporting his use of military power if Iraq failed to comply with U.N. mandates. This was justified by the White House as a means of strengthening the United Nations in holding Iraq accountable for its WMD arsenal, but as most of the world looked on in dismay, Bush invaded Iraq after U.N. inspectors on the ground discovered that Iraq had no WMD.

Bush betrayed Congress, which in turn betrayed the American people - just as Madison feared when he wrote: "Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it compromises and develops the germ of every other."

I wish that germ in the White House had never been developed.

Molly Ivins: Another reminder of what we lost with her

From her 16. January 2003 column in The Free Press
“I assume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side (God forgive me if that is hubris). The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, "Horrible three-way civil war?" And as George W. Bush himself once said, "Unrest in the Middle East causes unrest throughout the region."”

—Molly Ivins



Go read the whole thing, it is just one small example of how brilliant (and what a brillian writer) she was.

R.

Harry's new balls ...

You gotta hand it to Harry Reid for growing a set of nuts in the past week. Seems he likes them and wants to show 'em off.

Playing hard ball. Reid just pulled the Defense Authorization bill off the floor. If the GOP Senators want to continue filibustering meaningful Iraq legislation, Reid won't proceed.

...


Give 'em Hell, Harry, and don't back down.