On the Fourth, Read the Declaration of Impeachment

From AfterDowningStreet

Veterans for Peace has drafted a Declaration of Impeachment using nothing but excerpts from the Declaration of Independence (plus a few words in parentheses). It reads as follows, and should be read at picnics and protests on the Fourth of July:

Excerpts therefrom:

...The history of the present King (George)...is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny...To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has...deprive(ed) us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury...transport(ed) us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

A (President) whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

We, therefore...do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People...solemnly publish and declare, That these...Free and Independent (People)...are Absolved from all Allegiance to the (Bush Administration), and that all political connection between them and (this Administration), is and ought to be totally dissolved...And for the support of this Declaration...we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

Note that the colonists did not just write these words. They also fought and died for them.

Supporting our troops and working to ensure that they not have died in vain are notions that no longer apply to the soldiers who died in the fields around my house in Virginia. The statute of limitations has expired, and the 4,435 who died to rid America of a King George are now in fact required - as a matter of patriotic duty - to have died in vain.

All in vain, all unsupported. Welcome to the world of free speech zones, detention without charge, no access to a court of law, no prohibition on torture. Welcome to the end of the veto and the birth of the signing statement. Welcome to an executive branch that neither obeys Congress nor so much as informs Congress of its actions. Welcome to wars of aggression for a theocratic plutocracy. Welcome back, King George.

Strong stuff, a "must read". Entirely fitting for, and in the spirit of, the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Can't Win the War? Bomb the Press!

Daddy Frank hits the nail on the head once again. Go get 'em, Pop!

The real news conveyed by The Times and its competitors was not the huge program to track terrorist finances, but that per usual from the administration that gave us Gitmo, the program was conducted with little oversight from the other two branches of government. Even so, the reporting on the pros and cons of that approach was, as Mr. Snow said, balanced.

Or so he said Friday morning, June 23. By Monday, the president had entered the fray and Mr. Snow was accusing The Times of putting the "public's right to know" over "somebody's right to live." What had happened over the weekend to prompt this escalation of hysteria? The same stuff that always happens when the White House scapegoats the press (or anyone else): bad and embarrassing news that the White House wants to drown out.

List of "bad and embarrassing news that the White House wants to drown out" follows. Take a lunch.

It's not only the White House that has a vested political interest in concocting a smoke screen by demonizing the fourth estate as a fifth column. The Democrats were holding their hearing because Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, has for two years been stalling his panel's promised investigation into how the administration used intelligence before the war. Hoping that we'd forget about that continuing cover-up, Mr. Roberts last week made a big show of calling for an investigation into the Swift story's supposed damage to national security.

The assault on a free press during our own wartime should be recognized for what it is: another desperate ploy by officials trying to hide their own lethal mistakes in the shadows. It's the antithesis of everything we celebrate with the blazing lights of Independence Day.

For all his insight and writing skill, Mr. Rich left out one teeny little part of the equation: it's an election year. The Repub turds are circling the drain and desperately need to divert attention away from themselves across the board. This is all about "Don't look at me committing despicable crimes! Look at them tellin' about it!"

Most definitely go read the rest.

The Pork Barrel Protection Act

Will Durst

With flags aflame across the nation, the time to protect other American icons is now

The pork barrel protection act So the Flag Desecration Amendment fell a single vote short of passing in the Senate. And all the liberals are celebrating way too long into the night if you ask me. I imagine the Republicans are laughing so hard right now, their drool guards are spilling over capacity. Because now, they get to bring it up again and again and accuse Democrats of dooming old glory to an ignominious fate over and over. The only problem is flags are so the-day-before-yesterday. Might as well be wearing patchouli scented elephant bells. There's a whole plethora of American icons in danger of being bespoilt that Republicans can exploit. Let's take a look, shall we?

# Cheeseburger Anti-Desecration Crusade. The only proper cheese on a cheeseburger is yellow. Either Wisconsin Cheddar or good 'ol American. That's it. You can take your Mexican Pepper Jack and your Baby Swiss and your French Gorgonzola and shred them where the sun don't shine. Like on a salad. And it's a butter grilled sesame seed bun, not sun dried tomato focaccia bread.

# Chocolate Simplification Act. It's chocolate for crum's sake. It don't get more basic than a Hershey Chocolate Bar. If it was good enough to for our brave boys in WW2, it should be good enough for those attention deficit rug rats of yours.

Many more, most of which you won't agree with any more than you did those two!

Making stupid a policy ...

WASHINGTON -- Students across the nation will have to pay thousands more in college loans beginning Saturday, according to a series of reports released today by the research arm of the Campaign for America's Future. College students and graduates will be pushed deeper into debt as interest rates on Stafford loans -- the basic student loan -- rise from 5.3 percent to 7.14 percent on old loans and to 6.8 percent on new loans at the end of this week.

...

I have a harder time believing this is due to ineptitude more than a desire to deny an education to the public. Ignorant people are easier to control.

Tip o' the Brain to C&L.

Iran

Seymour Hersh has a new article out about the coming (presumably) invasion of Iran and a couple things struck me.

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Iran's geography would also complicate an air war. The senior military official said that, when it came to air strikes, "this is not Iraq," which is fairly flat, except in the northeast. "Much of Iran is akin to Afghanistan in terms of topography and flight mapping - a pretty tough target," the military official said. Over rugged terrain, planes have to come in closer, and "Iran has a lot of mature air-defense systems and networks," he said. "Global operations are always risky, and if we go down that road we have to be prepared to follow up with ground troops."

The U.S. Navy has a separate set of concerns. Iran has more than seven hundred undeclared dock and port facilities along its Persian Gulf coast. The small ports, known as "invisible piers," were constructed two decades ago by Iran's Revolutionary Guards to accommodate small private boats used for smuggling. (The Guards relied on smuggling to finance their activities and enrich themselves.) The ports, an Iran expert who advises the U.S. government told me, provide "the infrastructure to enable the Guards to go after American aircraft carriers with suicide water bombers" - small vessels loaded with high explosives. He said that the Iranians have conducted exercises in the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel linking the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea and then on to the Indian Ocean. The strait is regularly traversed by oil tankers, in which a thousand small Iranian boats simulated attacks on American ships. "That would be the hardest problem we'd face in the water: a thousand small targets weaving in and out among our ships." [my ems]

...

Take a look at the map below in light of reading the above.

Click to embiggen

To quote an old song, 'do you see what I see'? You don't need to be a professor at the Naval Academy or the Army War College to see the difficulty of defending a naval force in the Gulf, let alone getting other units in and out by sea. Iran would be our Waterloo. And that's not even asking the question, 'where would we get these extra ground troops from'?

[If it helps, think of the Strait of Hormuz as the road from Baghdad Airport to the Green Zone, only wet. - F ]


Update:

Soto has a take on the interplay between the flag officers and the civilians at the Pentagon.

Thanks to Steve Soto for the Hersh link.
Map courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries.

On 'outing' 2

Okay. I've talked about Armando's problem at Kos' place, and the fact his ego was probably as much to blame as the putz who outed him. Now it seems as if the wingnuts are going on an outing (as well as trolling*) spree (I'm not linking to their sites, but if you check the comments over the last few days you'll find 'em). Seems some on our side are doing it too.

I'll say this once.

I don't care if you leave me a link in 'comments' to Bill O'Reilly's home address, or any other wingnut (Coulter, Malkin, Assrocket), I'm not going to print it and I'm gonna delete the link. I'll beat them with facts, and I'm not lowering myself to their level, whether they're on our side or not. Just because 'they do it' doesn't mean I will.

Update:

Easy enough to find me. The link's been in the left sidebar for 2 years.

Update:

More Greenwald. Seems some folks have egg on their faces:

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Although I haven't heard yet from Kilborn, I received an e-mail from Spillers this morning, in which she said:

Ironically, photos were taken with Secretary Rumsfeld's permission.

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And that ain't the best part.

*Please familiarize yourselves with the Alternate Brain Spam and Troll Policy in the left sidebar. The same technology that allows you to 'out' people allows me to find out who, where, and what you are. I'm not kidding, playing around, or bullshitting. I don't make idle threats. Got it?

Quote of the Day*

Jane:

I think God, Darwin and the rest of us are all happy about that wingnut abstinence thing right about now, eh?

*A feature that is becoming more daily than not.

Setting an example ...

A long piece at Yowling from the Fencepost with an important point:

...

Of my more difficult students, I find that their capacity to appreciate the importance of their means justifying their ends is minimal at best. In ways similar to our political representatives, it isn't how we achieve a goal that is important, it is simply that we achieve it and pay little mind to the cost to others around us. If they are challenged on their grounds that their methods to achieving a goal were -- putting it generously in some cases -- unethical, they either ignore the charge and state that they at least got 'r done or argue that their means was not unjustifiable.

Look at the model that they have to follow: The president can make a dodgy case for war, conduct it, claim success when success has been far from assured, and argue that he at least got it done when people challenge him on how he went about making that case as details of his dodge come out. Is it any wonder that more and more students are not bothered so much these days with cheating on tests via text messages and unaware of or unconcerned about their plagiarizing of material from the internet for papers or projects? We have a president who is allowed to say whatever he wants and have it rubber-stamped or rationalized by his poodles in Congress and allies in the right-wing media.

...

The attitude (begun during the 'Greed Orgy' of the Reagan years) has permeated every part of our society. There is no accountability and everyboody goes around as if it's their world and everybody else is a nuisance. You see it on the roads, in the stores, and eveywhere else. The 'Me Generation' is alive and well.

... Until people can see the value of working to build a strong society and world that offers the prospects of a decent, if not better, future for all our children, we will struggle under the oppressive millstone of such things as war, impoverishment, and ignorance, where only the few in power -- political and financial -- have any say in our future.

In other words, there are too many self-centered pricks making decisions.

Those damn lefty bloggers ...

Tom Tomorrow via Atrios.

Don't talk to me ...

About criminalizing flag burning while it remains legal for people to wear the flag as clothing. If you're gonna protect the flag, protect it from people who think it's a fashion statement.

Update:

And if this isn't desecration of some sort or another, I don't know what is. Do you know what that does to a New Yorker?

Born on the Fourth of July

[I'm gonna leave this up top for a couple days. New posts begin below this one. - Fixer]

This blog is two years old on Tuesday and it's a damn shame we're still doing it. A damn shame we still find material (a lot of it) every day to vent about. By golly, if you would have told me, on the Fourth of July 2004, that Bush and his henchmen would still be in power, that the Congress would still be a rubber stamp for those same fascists, that we'd still be fighting a war in Iraq, I'd have said you're crazy. Two years ago, I figured at this point I'd have an occasional rant about the Dems making some bonehead move or another, but never still be trying to fight these crooked, inept, morally-bankrupt Republicans.

...

[I moved the rest below the fold for brevity's sake.]

Terrorism? Puh!

Bush wasn't interested in catching any terrorists. Like I've been saying for five years, 9/11 was a gift from Allah for the Chimp. It gave him cover to do what he planned to do all along:

I've been wondering what story the wingers were trying to distract us from, with all their yammering about Rummy's vacation homes and the usual death threats.

This is the story.

We've always thought that Bush and the rest of his criminal regime were determined to trash the Fourth Amendment, and the Constitution, from the beginning.

But now we know. Bloomberg:

...

Update:

Neiwert get's in depth on this, evidence Abu Gonzalez lied to Congress.

There's Just Something About Larry....

Larry Flynt.Yes,THAT Larry Flynt.

I just started reading the book he wrote in 2004(before the "elections")called Sex,Lies,and Politics: The Naked Truth.If you've not read it,see if you can find a copy.If you think he's just a smut peddaling pervosaurus,you're sadly mistaken.He's really funny,and very smart.He may be a smut peddler,but he loves America.

I'm from Ohio,so I got to be quite familiar with Mr Flynt's run ins with the law there,back in the early part of his,shall we say,colorful career. He was splashed all over Ohio news programs back then,and many a preacher on many a pulpit in Ohio raged about Larry's outspoken and often flamboyant retorts to the hypocrites in power.His First Ammendment battles in the court system have set precidents that have kept the right wing loonies at bay for many years,and those precidents are in peril.Again.Which goes to show ya,ya can never rest when it comes to keeping a democracy healthy.

I also remember the day he got shot in Gwinnett County,GA.I live a few counties west of there these days,I was still in Ohio back then,I believe.I used to have the issue of Hustler that showed Larry's wounds in all their gore,I kept it for many years.How he even survived that is way beyond me.There was alot of outrage over that issue of Hustler,but Larry's whole point has always been to get us to look at what we as a culture consider dirty and taboo.He takes sex and holds that up against real atrocity,crimes and hypocrisy.People will rail and scream over the sex,but accept and tolerate the results of violence that goes on all around them daily.They just don't want to see the blood and gore(unless it's as entertainment) or try to fix the causes of it.

Larry even wrote Ken Starr a very nice letter offering him a job to write for Hustler after the Starr Report came out.Which is hysterical.And wickedly clever.

Here we are in today's world,America, teaching kids abstinence only as sex education,we go in and mess with humanitarian efforts in Africa's AIDS crises with the same stupid assed faith based sex ed policies,which IS killing people by the way,we're completely ridiculously sexually repressed,which is being allowed to determine our reproductive health care choices,and YET:

We spend TEN BILLION DOLLARS a year,as a Nation,on various and sundry forms of pornography and "adult entertainment".Now,last time I checked,somewhere around probably 85% percent of America would ID themselves as"christian"of one stripe or another.And why is it that it's almost always some faith based group trying to portray sex as being something bad and dirty?Seems to me that it just cannot be only 15 percent of Americans spending all that money on porn and porn accessories.That means there are actually some christians who also use porn,it stands to reason.And I'm not even taking into account all the file sharing and other porn trading going on that's not counted in that 10 billion dollars.It's kinda mind boggling,lol.

My guess is that most christians who do use porn are Big C Christians,who realize being a sexual being is perfectly normal,and actually kind of nice.To them,and most normal people,porn is like a little ketchup on some really good french fries.Not so much ketchup to drown the fries,just enough to make things tastier.Who eats just ketchup?Eww.But then you have the repressed,small c christians,who were most likely somehow traumatized sexually as kids.It happens,probably alot more than we like to think about.And the more damage and rage there is folks,the bigger The Kink.I shudder to think what genres of porn a guy like James Dobson,Rush Limbaugh or Falwell has stashed away.And because they're twisted,they think the rest of us are too.It's a very odd pathology,and unfortunately,it has power in the halls of government and in the minds of way too many of The People.

Anyhoo,if you've not read the book,it's a fun read,even if it's stuff(most of which us informed liberal types know anyway,there's nothing new here really)that pisses all of us off about today's conservatives.

As Larry would say himself,he's a smut peddler who cares,and one hell of a business man.Especially when you consider his humble beginnings.

Love and Hate

As most of you know, I'm a mechanic. Before I started working for Harry, I was an engine builder at Ford Motorsport. It doesn't take much imagination to know I love high performace cars and racing. I got into the life early, my dad racing a car at Islip and Freeport Speedways on Long Island.

That said, much as I love NASCAR, I find myself becoming more averse to it. The problem is their close association with the Republican-Conservative-Neocon agenda. It's things like this that turn me off, as well as the blatant displays of 'patriotism' that are nothing more than the use of our troops as props. After being a die hard fan for over 40 years, I'm not so much of one anymore. If NASCAR is losing me, I'm sure they're also losing a lot of others who love the sport but can't abide the politization of it.

Isn't this illegal?

Glenn Greenwald:

...

He's urging people to find the names and addresses of New York Times editors and reporters in order to "hunt them down and do America a favor." And he said that right after he posted the link to the address of the Times photographer. And this is just the beginning of this syndrome, not the end.

Come on, you legal beagles, people have threatened to sue me for saying a lot less in a less public forum. It seems to me this dickhead [link to his page at Glenn's site] is advocating murder.

Why bother?

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., July 1 - NASA scrubbed the launching of the shuttle Discovery minutes before its scheduled liftoff Saturday as threatening clouds encroached on the 20-mile boundary around the Kennedy Space Center. [my em]

...

Scrub the program and start anew, with technology that isn't 40 years old. All we're doing now is pushing our luck and putting lives in danger needlessly. Good thing our military equipment ain't this delicate.

Arbeit macht frei

(AP) A Republican gubernatorial candidate's call for creation of a forced labor camp for illegal immigrants drew rebukes Friday from two GOP lawmakers, who labeled it a low point in the immigration debate.

Don Goldwater, nephew of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, caused an international stir this week when EFE, a Mexican news service, quoted him as saying he wanted to hold undocumented immigrants in camps to use them "as labor in the construction of a wall and to clean the areas of the Arizona desert that they're polluting." [my em]

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[Link]

What more to say?

Tip o' the Brain to C&L

Get them out

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Of course, the wingnuts will be all over this, pointing out that such "bad news" is hurting the morale of the troops. blah blah blah blah blah. What's hurting their morale is being left in a situation by a bunch of self-serving politicians who are enriching themselves and their buddies by running a "war of choice", with no cost to themselves, and no end in sight. [my em]

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Jo Fish on the troops accused of raping an Iraqi woman and killing her family to cover it up. So long as our troops are there, more and more of this is going to happen.

Update:

It hits a bit closer to home for Lurch.

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The 502d has a long proud history of combat, tough, hard, but not murderers of women and children. I was proud to wear the "crying crow" on my left shoulder. If I had to be there, I was thankful that I was with a unit that had some pride in its history, an esprit de corps. And later I proudly wore it on my right shoulder. I felt sick when I first hear about this story and now, knowing the 502d is involved, I just feel dirty.

...

Armchair Patriots

Good rant at Station Charon on the chickenhawks and their flag-burning charade. Damn near has 8x10 glossy photos with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one describing what each one was*.

They are the ones who are shouting the loudest for others to die in foreign lands, they are the ones waving the flag the most vigorously while undermining all that it is supposed to stand for. These are the Armchair Patriots, and they are legion. The insistence of the most vile of all, the Republican party, a group that has come to symbolize the darkest of all American traits to 'wave the bloody flag' and tar all others as disloyal and tresonous is a low point in our nation's history. This made it especially nice to see the party's failure to mount a successful effort to implement a constitutional ban on flag burning. "Old Glory" lost today" moaned Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist, his latest crusade to amend our governing document to include language denying rights to Americans beaten back by only one vote.

Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii gets it, a World War II veteran who lost an arm in service to his country said in regards to the Republican push for the amendment:

"Our country's unique because our dissidents have a voice....While I take offense at disrespect to the flag...I nonetheless believe it is my continued duty as a veteran, as an American citizen and as a United States senator to defend the constitutional right of protesters to use the flag in nonviolent speech."

Of course being a Democrat he is by that very association deemed `unpatriotic' and a `coward' in using the dastardly labeling of Frist, Karl Rove and the rest of the unscrupulous and yellow thugs who control the government, the media, the courts and by extension are the operators of the message machine that spits out the hateful swill that motivates the most reactionary and ignorant segments of the populace who represent their base. This anti-American political party could never carry the torch were it not for their deception and demagoguery in playing to the most base and vile instincts of the perennially angry. Like any good purveyor of tyranny enabling double speak and race baiting, they have a little something for everybody.

"Something for everybody" list follows. Go read.

*If you don't understand the reference, go get a note from your Mom saying you 're old enough to be here! And if it's signed "Epstein's Mom", kick rocks, kid!

What's that hissing noise?

For a light Saturday read, here's a quick, concise recent view of the housing bubble by Robert Reich:

America's housing bubble has not exactly burst. It's just sprung a leak the size of your average mortgage banker. What's clear is the boom is over. All across America, backlogs of unsold homes are long. Price increases are slowing. In some markets, home prices are actually dropping. I just bought a house in Berkeley, California, that I couldn't have afforded a year ago. I still can't afford it, but at least I'm breathing.

It's better that bubbles leak than burst. Gradual declines are always easier to manage than explosions. But the housing boom has been so large and important to the American economy over the past five years that even this slow leak will cause severe headaches.

One will be experienced by millions of households that had turned their growing home values into piggy banks to finance their continued consumption. That easy route to cash is just about gone. The inevitable result will be less consumption, which will mean fewer jobs.

A more immediate problem will arise for all the people making, financing, and selling houses. Here we're talking about a vast army of carpenters, plasterers, roofers, plumbers, electricians, mortgage bankers, home inspectors, real estate agents, architects, structural engineers and many more. According to Moddy's Economy.com, housing-related employment has accounted for almost a quarter of the five million jobs that have appeared since 2003.

In other words, without the housing bubble, the American economy will lose a lot of its fizz. I don't like bubbles, but from a jobs standpoint this recovery has needed all the fizz it can get. Median wages have gone nowhere. The ranks of the long-term unemployed have been unusually high. The percent of the labor force with jobs is lower than in 2000. Housing has been one of the few bright spots in the economy.

All of which brings us to Ben Bernanke and his gang at the Federal Reserve Board Open Market Committee. They're determined to raise interest rates because they think the economy is too fizzy and still prone to inflation. I hope they listen carefully: The hissing sound they hear is air escaping the housing bubble. There's less fizz in the economy than they think. Raise interest rates, and the Fed raises the likelihood the economy will deflate.

Bush takes credit for "creating" all these jobs. I wonder if he'll take the credit for their loss? I doubt it.

None of this bothers me personally. My house is paid for, my equity line is paid up, and I have enough money in the bank to pay off my credit cards if I had to. It's one of the advantages of staying in one place for a long time, and probably the only advantage of getting to be a sweet, curmudgeonly Olde Farte (Lctp!*) such as I. It helps that real estate prices have increased by a factor of six in the last thirty years and we were able to use that to our advantage a few times. Having said that, if I had to buy it today, I couldn't afford the house I live in.

My advice to you youngsters who would like to have your own home is to wait a year or two until the bubble is pretty much deflated. There's going to be lots of foreclosures due to the free-wheeling mortgage deals that sucked in marginally qualified homebuyers, and you may find just what you want at a bargain price - or at least a manageable one. It should go without saying that it is better to buy and pay for your own place than to rent and pay for someone else's.

*Lurch coined that phrase!