January 22, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
THE REAL REASON FOR WARRANTLESS SPYING
The Bush administration has a history of making incursions into our lives. We know now that Bush was doing warrantless spying on Americans months before the 9/11 attacks. The administration, under the guise of writing a new law to protect kids from pornography, wants major search engines to turn over their records of searches. Groups with absolutely no connection to terrorists, but who oppose Bush's policies, have been infiltrated. It's all about spying on political opponents. This guy makes Richard Nixon look sane. This article by William E. Gibson is at www.bradenton.com:
While the White House defended domestic surveillance as a safeguard against terrorism, a Florida peace activist and several Democrats in Congress accused the Bush administration on Friday of spying on Americans who disagree with President Bush's policies.
Richard Hersh, of Boca Raton, Fla., director of Truth Project Inc. of Palm Beach County, told an ad hoc panel of House Democrats that his group and others in South Florida have been infiltrated and spied upon despite having no connections to terrorists.
"Agents rummaged through the trash, snooped into e-mails, packed Web sites and listened in on phone conversations," Hersh charged. "We know that address books and activist meeting lists have disappeared."
The Truth Project gained national attention when NBC News reported last month that it was described as a "credible threat" in a database of suspicious activity compiled by the Pentagon's Talon program. The listing cited the group's gathering a year ago at a Quaker meeting house in Lake Worth, Fla., to talk about ways to counter military recruitment at high schools.
WHERE'S OSAMA?
After the attacks on 9/11 George W. Bush was in full swagger saying that he was going "smoke out" Osama bin Laden, that bin Laden was "on the run." He was going to get Osama "dead or alive." Over four years later, as far as we know, Osama is very much alive and conveniently providing threatening tapes whenever the Bush administration needs a diversion from its myriad of scandals and incompetence. You have to think that actually capturing Osama, or confirming his death, would deflate Bush's balloon. As long as the Evil One is out there taunting Americans he's a useful tool. Maureen Dowd takes a look in this column linked at www.trueblueliberal.com:
I don’t like the thought of Dick Cheney ogling my Googling.
Because what I’m Googling, of course, is Dick Cheney. I have to constantly monitor how Vice Voyeur is pushing the federal government to constantly monitor millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls, e-mail notes and Internet searches.
If you want to know why the Grim Peeper is willing to turn this country into a police state to take his version of democracy to other countries, just do a Google search under “antiterrorism,” “government snooping,” “overreaching” and “fruitcake.”
It was hard to know which story yesterday was scarier: Osama bin Laden, still alive and taunting the U.S., or the Justice Department’s trying to force Google to turn over a suspiciously broad array of information on millions of users’ searches and Web addresses, supposedly to investigate online crime involving pornography.
THE LIGHT AND THE DARKNESS
Mark Morford is one of my favorite columnists. In this column he looks at the success of the movie "Brokeback Mountain." Oh, the horror! A gay love story that might actually win some Academy Awards. As he points out, human consciousness has continued to expand, despite all the efforts of the trolls to hold it back with their hatred, their bigotry, and their superstition. This column is linked at www.sfgate.com:
No matter the heat and bile of the resistance, no matter how brutish or sanctimonious the stranglehold of our leadership, no matter how many complaints about nipples or wailings about intelligent design or accusations of a "gay agenda," no matter how many uptight neocon judges they appoint, progress still manages to find the cracks, to slip through the holes, to seek the sun. Consciousness expands anyway. The river flows on. The awakening continues. It is always the way.
And the Bushes and the Cheneys and the Rumsfelds, the Gonzalezes and the James Dobsons and the Sam Alitos of the world, they can only stand at the base of that mountain of new awareness and pass their laws and beat their chests and scream their resistance as the mystics and the masters just smile that ageless, knowing smile and walk away.
Saturday, January 21, 2006
January 21, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
TODAY'S FRESNO BEE RIGHT-WINGER
In today's Fresno Bee we have a right-winger attacking a letter writer who criticized Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito for his convenient lapses of memory during the Senate confirmation hearings. In a typical right-wing tactic, the writer said Hillary Clinton had lapses of memory in regard to the Rose Law firm records and that Al Gore had lapses of memory about the Clinton administration's alleged warrantless searches.
First, I would point out that those issues have nothing whatever to do with Samuel Alito. If the writer is so chagrined about Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, why isn't he equally concerned about Samuel Alito, especially when Alito is vying for a lifetime appointment? I always thought that the Rose Law Firm and Whitewater were non-issue issues anyway, and Hillary Clinton was not an elected official or a prospective Supreme Court Justice. We've learned that warrants were not required by law when the Clinton administration pursued a spy. Samuel Alito is a very dangerous man with his record of supporting strongarm tactics by the government and his endorsement of the "unitary executive" theory of the presidency.
PRISONS ARE A LOUSY SOLUTION
Here in Punitive Land you're poor because you're lazy, stupid, or lack virtue. Those poor character traits then lead you to use drugs, rob liquor stores, or commit other crimes that get you sent to prison. There are some people in prison who belong there, but there are far too many inmates who are there for things like drug abuse. This is an extremely articulate, thoughtful article from a female inmate in Chowchilla, California, just up the road from Fresno. The article by Beverly Henry is at progressive.org/media_mphenry010306
As an African-American girl, I attended segregated schools without enough resources to provide a quality education. As an adult, I struggled continuously with drug addiction, but there were no resources available for me to get help. Instead, I was sent to prison.
My experience resonates with the historical reality for black people. We always have had unequal access to resources that would have allowed us to provide for our families and make our communities prosper. Nearly one-fourth of all black folks in America live below the poverty line, twice the national average.
America has become a country that imprisons those it fails, blaming poverty, drug addiction or homelessness on individuals, rather than recognizing and addressing the conditions that give rise to them.
IMPEACH BUSH
TODAY'S FRESNO BEE RIGHT-WINGER
In today's Fresno Bee we have a right-winger attacking a letter writer who criticized Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito for his convenient lapses of memory during the Senate confirmation hearings. In a typical right-wing tactic, the writer said Hillary Clinton had lapses of memory in regard to the Rose Law firm records and that Al Gore had lapses of memory about the Clinton administration's alleged warrantless searches.
First, I would point out that those issues have nothing whatever to do with Samuel Alito. If the writer is so chagrined about Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, why isn't he equally concerned about Samuel Alito, especially when Alito is vying for a lifetime appointment? I always thought that the Rose Law Firm and Whitewater were non-issue issues anyway, and Hillary Clinton was not an elected official or a prospective Supreme Court Justice. We've learned that warrants were not required by law when the Clinton administration pursued a spy. Samuel Alito is a very dangerous man with his record of supporting strongarm tactics by the government and his endorsement of the "unitary executive" theory of the presidency.
PRISONS ARE A LOUSY SOLUTION
Here in Punitive Land you're poor because you're lazy, stupid, or lack virtue. Those poor character traits then lead you to use drugs, rob liquor stores, or commit other crimes that get you sent to prison. There are some people in prison who belong there, but there are far too many inmates who are there for things like drug abuse. This is an extremely articulate, thoughtful article from a female inmate in Chowchilla, California, just up the road from Fresno. The article by Beverly Henry is at progressive.org/media_mphenry010306
As an African-American girl, I attended segregated schools without enough resources to provide a quality education. As an adult, I struggled continuously with drug addiction, but there were no resources available for me to get help. Instead, I was sent to prison.
My experience resonates with the historical reality for black people. We always have had unequal access to resources that would have allowed us to provide for our families and make our communities prosper. Nearly one-fourth of all black folks in America live below the poverty line, twice the national average.
America has become a country that imprisons those it fails, blaming poverty, drug addiction or homelessness on individuals, rather than recognizing and addressing the conditions that give rise to them.
Friday, January 20, 2006
January 20, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
NO MORE REPUBLICAN LITE
Like Molly Ivins, I'm weary of Democrats being Republican Lite. We've seen it consistently since Democrats allowed George W. Bush to steal the 2000 election. They've rolled over for appointments like John Ashcroft as Attorney General. They rolled over and voted for Bush's Iraq War Resolution. They supported the despicable bankruptcy bill. They're refusing to filibuster the dangerous Samuel Alito as a Supreme Court Justice. The polls show the public overwhelmingly supports progressive ideas such as universal health care, raising the minimum wage, and getting out of Iraq. This column is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
Bush, Cheney and Co. will continue to play the patriotic bully card just as long as you let them. I've said it before: War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds were "German dogs." They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds. The MINUTE someone impugns your patriotism for opposing this war, turn on them like a snarling dog and explain what loving your country really means. That, or you could just piss on them elegantly, as Rep. John Murtha did. Or eviscerate them with wit (look up Mark Twain on the war in the Philippines). Or point out the latest in the endless "string of bad news."
Do not sit there cowering and pretending the only way to win is as Republican-lite. If the Washington-based party can't get up and fight, we'll find someone who can.
PUT ECONOMIC ISSUES UP FRONT
We learn today that presidential advisor and traitor Karl Rove told a group of Republicans that national security is the issue for Republicans in 2006. Rove claimed that Democrats are "consistently wrong" on national security issues. Who was it, once again, who was in power on September 11, 2001? Who was it who lied us into a war that has recruited countless enemies, killed thousands of innocent people, stretched our military, and drained our treasury? Who has failed to capture Osama bin Laden? Don't talk to me about national security. But the issues where Democrats can trounce Republicans are economic. We see the evidence of Republican economic policies. A few very rich people are getting richer, and everyone else is sinking. This article by Bernie Horn is at www.tompaine.com:
To win in 2006, progressives must frame the election as a choice between an equal opportunity economy and a trickle-down economy. “It’s the economy, stupid”—but unlike 1992, it’s not a matter of economic growth versus stagnation. This time it’s about fundamental fairness. While the rich are getting richer, for the rest of us, the American Dream is slipping from our grasp.
There are other issues that motivate voters, of course. The Bush administration and its right-wing enablers are making America less free and less secure. But voters are predisposed to give conservatives the benefit of the doubt on freedom and security. Equal opportunity is the American “value” most clearly owned by progressives.
So this year, progressives should focus on policies that are (1) principally about economics, (2) popular with a large majority of voters, and (3) framed in such a way that conservatives will have to oppose them. That’s the definition of a progressive wedge issue—a political position where we are strong and they are compelled by their corporate benefactors to side against the American public.
IMPEACH BUSH
NO MORE REPUBLICAN LITE
Like Molly Ivins, I'm weary of Democrats being Republican Lite. We've seen it consistently since Democrats allowed George W. Bush to steal the 2000 election. They've rolled over for appointments like John Ashcroft as Attorney General. They rolled over and voted for Bush's Iraq War Resolution. They supported the despicable bankruptcy bill. They're refusing to filibuster the dangerous Samuel Alito as a Supreme Court Justice. The polls show the public overwhelmingly supports progressive ideas such as universal health care, raising the minimum wage, and getting out of Iraq. This column is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
Bush, Cheney and Co. will continue to play the patriotic bully card just as long as you let them. I've said it before: War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds were "German dogs." They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds. The MINUTE someone impugns your patriotism for opposing this war, turn on them like a snarling dog and explain what loving your country really means. That, or you could just piss on them elegantly, as Rep. John Murtha did. Or eviscerate them with wit (look up Mark Twain on the war in the Philippines). Or point out the latest in the endless "string of bad news."
Do not sit there cowering and pretending the only way to win is as Republican-lite. If the Washington-based party can't get up and fight, we'll find someone who can.
PUT ECONOMIC ISSUES UP FRONT
We learn today that presidential advisor and traitor Karl Rove told a group of Republicans that national security is the issue for Republicans in 2006. Rove claimed that Democrats are "consistently wrong" on national security issues. Who was it, once again, who was in power on September 11, 2001? Who was it who lied us into a war that has recruited countless enemies, killed thousands of innocent people, stretched our military, and drained our treasury? Who has failed to capture Osama bin Laden? Don't talk to me about national security. But the issues where Democrats can trounce Republicans are economic. We see the evidence of Republican economic policies. A few very rich people are getting richer, and everyone else is sinking. This article by Bernie Horn is at www.tompaine.com:
To win in 2006, progressives must frame the election as a choice between an equal opportunity economy and a trickle-down economy. “It’s the economy, stupid”—but unlike 1992, it’s not a matter of economic growth versus stagnation. This time it’s about fundamental fairness. While the rich are getting richer, for the rest of us, the American Dream is slipping from our grasp.
There are other issues that motivate voters, of course. The Bush administration and its right-wing enablers are making America less free and less secure. But voters are predisposed to give conservatives the benefit of the doubt on freedom and security. Equal opportunity is the American “value” most clearly owned by progressives.
So this year, progressives should focus on policies that are (1) principally about economics, (2) popular with a large majority of voters, and (3) framed in such a way that conservatives will have to oppose them. That’s the definition of a progressive wedge issue—a political position where we are strong and they are compelled by their corporate benefactors to side against the American public.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
January 19, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
THE DISMAL STATISTICS
Sixteen quarters of economic expansion under George W. Bush show wages growing at a slower pace than at any time since the end of World War II. Where are the benefits from those tax cuts to the rich we heard so much about? This item comes from Kevin Drum at www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_01/008032.php
After 16 consecutive quarters of economic growth, pay is rising at a slower rate than in any similar expansion since the end of World War II. Companies are paying less of their cash gains in the form of wages and salaries than at any time since the Great Depression, according to government figures.
...."There is no doubt that something is happening" to reduce labor's share of income, says Robert Solow, a Nobel Prize- winning economist and professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. An economy that doesn't distribute its gains widely is "poorly performing," he says.
MCCLELLAN IS BUSH'S LIAR
Scott McClellan gets paid to stand before the Washington press corps almost every day to lie through his teeth. McClellan dodges and weaves and dissembles about matters of national and international import. If you like lying for a living, then George W. Bush is the right guy to represent. This commentary by Doug Thompson is at www.opednews.com:
Although White House spokesliar Scott McClellan claims lobbyist/crook du jour Jack Abramoff only met with administration staff two or three times, the scandal ridden buyer of influence enjoyed frequent private meetings with President George W. Bush, who referred to Abramoff as “one of this administration’s greatest friends.”
In a town where money buys influence and access, it would have been highly unusual for one of the top fundraisers for the Bush White House to not have had meetings with the President.
McClellan, in a carefully-worded response to reporters Tuesday, said his personal investigation into the matter revealed that Abramoff may have had two “private staff level meetings” at the White House. This is the same Scott McClellan who claimed he investigated the Valerie Plame leak and told reporters that neither Vice President Dick Cheney nor anyone on his staff had any involvement in that scandal. Then Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, got slapped with an indictment for giving the info to the press.
IMPEACH BUSH
THE DISMAL STATISTICS
Sixteen quarters of economic expansion under George W. Bush show wages growing at a slower pace than at any time since the end of World War II. Where are the benefits from those tax cuts to the rich we heard so much about? This item comes from Kevin Drum at www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_01/008032.php
After 16 consecutive quarters of economic growth, pay is rising at a slower rate than in any similar expansion since the end of World War II. Companies are paying less of their cash gains in the form of wages and salaries than at any time since the Great Depression, according to government figures.
...."There is no doubt that something is happening" to reduce labor's share of income, says Robert Solow, a Nobel Prize- winning economist and professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. An economy that doesn't distribute its gains widely is "poorly performing," he says.
MCCLELLAN IS BUSH'S LIAR
Scott McClellan gets paid to stand before the Washington press corps almost every day to lie through his teeth. McClellan dodges and weaves and dissembles about matters of national and international import. If you like lying for a living, then George W. Bush is the right guy to represent. This commentary by Doug Thompson is at www.opednews.com:
Although White House spokesliar Scott McClellan claims lobbyist/crook du jour Jack Abramoff only met with administration staff two or three times, the scandal ridden buyer of influence enjoyed frequent private meetings with President George W. Bush, who referred to Abramoff as “one of this administration’s greatest friends.”
In a town where money buys influence and access, it would have been highly unusual for one of the top fundraisers for the Bush White House to not have had meetings with the President.
McClellan, in a carefully-worded response to reporters Tuesday, said his personal investigation into the matter revealed that Abramoff may have had two “private staff level meetings” at the White House. This is the same Scott McClellan who claimed he investigated the Valerie Plame leak and told reporters that neither Vice President Dick Cheney nor anyone on his staff had any involvement in that scandal. Then Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, got slapped with an indictment for giving the info to the press.
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
January 18, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
IT DEPENDS ON THE WEAPONS
Another bit of right-wing logic graced the pages of the letters page in The Fresno Bee today. Today's correspondent was replying to people who quote Benjamin Franklin. Franklin said that people who give up liberty for security deserve neither liberty or security. The argument this person used was that, well, in Franklin's time the weapons were more primitive. They had things like muskets and bows and arrows. Today terrorists or other enemies have a variety of more advanced weaponry. So I guess the existence of nuclear weapons that can exterminate all life on earth, according to this guy, means that we shouldn't have any civil liberties. I don't see that having civil liberties impedes efforts against terrorists. If we're ever to get beyond this dark time in human history, we should uphold civil liberties more strongly than ever before, or the terrorists will win. Taking us back to a more superstitious, fearful, repressive society is exactly what they want.
DEATH BY REMOTE CONTROL
Among the weapons in the U.S. arsenal are aerial drones that can be directed by remote control from thousands of miles away. When the operator decides it's time to take out someone they send the drone after them and fire Hellfire missiles. The problem with these assassination machines is that innocent people are getting murdered. A recent incident in Pakistan comes to mind. Ted Rall talks about it in this article linked at www.smirkingchimp.com:
In the dark, pre-dawn hours of Friday, the thirteenth of January, near the Afghan-Pakistani border, the buzz of an unmanned robot plane broke the silence. Half a world and 12 and a half time zones away, someone on the sixth floor of CIA headquarters keyed a command into a computer. The digitized message, relayed through the building's circuitry and transmitted skyward, bounced along an array of aircraft and satellites before arriving at the RQ-1 Predator drone plane hovering above the Bajaur region of Pakistan's Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA). Four AGM-114N Hellfire II missiles, each purchased by American taxpayers from Lockheed Martin at a cost of $45,000, streaked off toward the hamlet of Damadola, five miles into Pakistan.
The four missiles, each carrying enough explosives to take out an armored vehicle, slammed into three local jewelers' houses at 950 miles per hour, nearly twice the speed of a passenger jet at cruising altitude. "The houses have been razed," reported a neighbor, a member of the Pakistani parliament. "There is nothing left. Pieces of the missiles are scattered all around. Everything has been blackened in a 100-yard radius." The target of this latest assassination attempt via missile strike, Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, wasn't there. At least 22 innocent civilians, including five women and five children, were killed. "They acted on wrong information," a Pakistani intelligence official said of the Americans.
ECONOMIC ZOMBIES
We increasingly have an economic system that is ludicrous. Most of the rewards go to very few people. The rest of us toil away with little hope of ever bettering our lives. The essentials necessary for a decent life, such as health care, education, and housing are becoming unattainable. Credit is shoved at us like a drug and a good many Americans have an actual negative net worth, owing more than they own. The Bush administration passed a draconian bankruptcy law that makes it almost impossible for many Americans to get even a fresh start. Nicholas von Hoffman writes about economic zombies in this article at www.thenation.com:
If individuals and families continue to spend more than they make, millions of us may also end up in the land of the living dead. After inflation is taken into account, the wages of 80 percent of working people have been trending slightly downward for the past four years. At the same time the clamor to get people to buy and spend does not abate and will not, since the masters of the universe have determined that the prosperity of the entire globe depends on Americans continuing to visit the mall.
We are seeing early signs of the zombie syndrome. It first appeared in the American automobile industry and latterly at Wal-Mart and the other big, lower-price retail chains. When faced with a choice of selling fewer cars at a profit or more cars at a loss, the automobile companies made the zombie choice to sell more, lose money and sink closer to bankruptcy. This past holiday shopping season retailers, faced with the possibility of lower sales than last year, elected to cut their already thin profit margins to keep their increasingly strapped customers at the checkout lines with their shopping carts full and their bank accounts empty.
IMPEACH BUSH
IT DEPENDS ON THE WEAPONS
Another bit of right-wing logic graced the pages of the letters page in The Fresno Bee today. Today's correspondent was replying to people who quote Benjamin Franklin. Franklin said that people who give up liberty for security deserve neither liberty or security. The argument this person used was that, well, in Franklin's time the weapons were more primitive. They had things like muskets and bows and arrows. Today terrorists or other enemies have a variety of more advanced weaponry. So I guess the existence of nuclear weapons that can exterminate all life on earth, according to this guy, means that we shouldn't have any civil liberties. I don't see that having civil liberties impedes efforts against terrorists. If we're ever to get beyond this dark time in human history, we should uphold civil liberties more strongly than ever before, or the terrorists will win. Taking us back to a more superstitious, fearful, repressive society is exactly what they want.
DEATH BY REMOTE CONTROL
Among the weapons in the U.S. arsenal are aerial drones that can be directed by remote control from thousands of miles away. When the operator decides it's time to take out someone they send the drone after them and fire Hellfire missiles. The problem with these assassination machines is that innocent people are getting murdered. A recent incident in Pakistan comes to mind. Ted Rall talks about it in this article linked at www.smirkingchimp.com:
In the dark, pre-dawn hours of Friday, the thirteenth of January, near the Afghan-Pakistani border, the buzz of an unmanned robot plane broke the silence. Half a world and 12 and a half time zones away, someone on the sixth floor of CIA headquarters keyed a command into a computer. The digitized message, relayed through the building's circuitry and transmitted skyward, bounced along an array of aircraft and satellites before arriving at the RQ-1 Predator drone plane hovering above the Bajaur region of Pakistan's Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA). Four AGM-114N Hellfire II missiles, each purchased by American taxpayers from Lockheed Martin at a cost of $45,000, streaked off toward the hamlet of Damadola, five miles into Pakistan.
The four missiles, each carrying enough explosives to take out an armored vehicle, slammed into three local jewelers' houses at 950 miles per hour, nearly twice the speed of a passenger jet at cruising altitude. "The houses have been razed," reported a neighbor, a member of the Pakistani parliament. "There is nothing left. Pieces of the missiles are scattered all around. Everything has been blackened in a 100-yard radius." The target of this latest assassination attempt via missile strike, Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, wasn't there. At least 22 innocent civilians, including five women and five children, were killed. "They acted on wrong information," a Pakistani intelligence official said of the Americans.
ECONOMIC ZOMBIES
We increasingly have an economic system that is ludicrous. Most of the rewards go to very few people. The rest of us toil away with little hope of ever bettering our lives. The essentials necessary for a decent life, such as health care, education, and housing are becoming unattainable. Credit is shoved at us like a drug and a good many Americans have an actual negative net worth, owing more than they own. The Bush administration passed a draconian bankruptcy law that makes it almost impossible for many Americans to get even a fresh start. Nicholas von Hoffman writes about economic zombies in this article at www.thenation.com:
If individuals and families continue to spend more than they make, millions of us may also end up in the land of the living dead. After inflation is taken into account, the wages of 80 percent of working people have been trending slightly downward for the past four years. At the same time the clamor to get people to buy and spend does not abate and will not, since the masters of the universe have determined that the prosperity of the entire globe depends on Americans continuing to visit the mall.
We are seeing early signs of the zombie syndrome. It first appeared in the American automobile industry and latterly at Wal-Mart and the other big, lower-price retail chains. When faced with a choice of selling fewer cars at a profit or more cars at a loss, the automobile companies made the zombie choice to sell more, lose money and sink closer to bankruptcy. This past holiday shopping season retailers, faced with the possibility of lower sales than last year, elected to cut their already thin profit margins to keep their increasingly strapped customers at the checkout lines with their shopping carts full and their bank accounts empty.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
January 17, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
BUSH MAKING HEALTH CARE WORSE
We're already hearing of what a disaster the Bush administration's prescription drug program has become. People are being turned away from buying life-preserving drugs. The plans are so complicated most people don't know what they should use. Bush has made a big deal about "tort reform," another name for shafting the little guy and benefiting big corporations. Now we see the extension of that ideology of the free market at all costs being pushed into the health care system. Millions of Americans have no health insurance at all. Many of us are having to pay higher and higher premiums and co-pays. Paul Krugman takes a look at yet another Bush disaster in this column linked at www.topplebush.com:
It's widely expected that President Bush will talk a lot about health care in his State of the Union address. He probably won't boast about his prescription drug plan, whose debut has been a Katrina-like saga of confusion and incompetence. But he probably will tout proposals for so-called "consumer driven" health care.
So it's important to realize that the administration's idea of health care reform is to take what's wrong with our system and make it worse. Consider the harrowing series of articles The New York Times printed last week about the rising tide of diabetes.
Diabetes is a horrifying disease. It's also an important factor in soaring medical costs. The likely future impact of the disease on those costs terrifies health economists. And the problem of dealing with diabetes is a clear illustration of the real issues in health care.
ANOTHER WASTE OF RESOURCES
We're learning now that Bush's unconstitutional spying on Americans tied up NSA and FBI resources so they could chase mostly nonexistent terrorists. Bush broke the law and should be impeached. He also has put us in more danger by not apprehending the real terrorists like Osama bin Laden in his mad pursuit of Americans who have no involvement with terrorists. This article by LOWELL BERGMAN, ERIC LICHTBLAU, SCOTT SHANE and DON VAN NATTA Jr. is at www.nytimes.com:
In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.
But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.
F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.
As the bureau was running down those leads, its director, Robert S. Mueller III, raised concerns about the legal rationale for a program of eavesdropping without warrants, one government official said. Mr. Mueller asked senior administration officials about "whether the program had a proper legal foundation," but deferred to Justice Department legal opinions, the official said.
DON'T BELIEVE BUSH PREDICTIONS
How do you take a war projected at 70 billion dollars and turn it into a war that costs two trillion dollars? You put the Bush administration in charge. Of course, there are other more disturbing aspects to this war than its monetary cost. But how much good could two trillion dollars do in our country and around the world? This, like a living wage, is a moral issue. In this article Bill Gallagher looks at the multitude of failed predictions by the Bush administration. The article is linked at www.smirkingchimp.com:
The predictions of President George W. Bush and his minions are predictably wrong. The Busheviks' latest Iraq war predictions are, as always, wildly off the mark and make astrological predictions seem like hard science.
"We will settle for nothing less than complete victory," Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars last week. He made glowing predictions about continued political progress in Iraq, declaring in pure delusion that "when victory comes and democracy takes hold in Iraq, it will serve as a model for freedom in the broader Middle East."
I can see it now. It's written in the stars. The Saudis, Egyptians and Syrian strongmen will be rushing to reform their despotic regimes as the winds of democracy swirl through the desert. And soon after that, just watch those religious radicals in Iran follow the Iraq model. War, invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation for fabricated reasons -- that's the winning formula for freedom and democratic reform in the region.
IMPEACH BUSH
BUSH MAKING HEALTH CARE WORSE
We're already hearing of what a disaster the Bush administration's prescription drug program has become. People are being turned away from buying life-preserving drugs. The plans are so complicated most people don't know what they should use. Bush has made a big deal about "tort reform," another name for shafting the little guy and benefiting big corporations. Now we see the extension of that ideology of the free market at all costs being pushed into the health care system. Millions of Americans have no health insurance at all. Many of us are having to pay higher and higher premiums and co-pays. Paul Krugman takes a look at yet another Bush disaster in this column linked at www.topplebush.com:
It's widely expected that President Bush will talk a lot about health care in his State of the Union address. He probably won't boast about his prescription drug plan, whose debut has been a Katrina-like saga of confusion and incompetence. But he probably will tout proposals for so-called "consumer driven" health care.
So it's important to realize that the administration's idea of health care reform is to take what's wrong with our system and make it worse. Consider the harrowing series of articles The New York Times printed last week about the rising tide of diabetes.
Diabetes is a horrifying disease. It's also an important factor in soaring medical costs. The likely future impact of the disease on those costs terrifies health economists. And the problem of dealing with diabetes is a clear illustration of the real issues in health care.
ANOTHER WASTE OF RESOURCES
We're learning now that Bush's unconstitutional spying on Americans tied up NSA and FBI resources so they could chase mostly nonexistent terrorists. Bush broke the law and should be impeached. He also has put us in more danger by not apprehending the real terrorists like Osama bin Laden in his mad pursuit of Americans who have no involvement with terrorists. This article by LOWELL BERGMAN, ERIC LICHTBLAU, SCOTT SHANE and DON VAN NATTA Jr. is at www.nytimes.com:
In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.
But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.
F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.
As the bureau was running down those leads, its director, Robert S. Mueller III, raised concerns about the legal rationale for a program of eavesdropping without warrants, one government official said. Mr. Mueller asked senior administration officials about "whether the program had a proper legal foundation," but deferred to Justice Department legal opinions, the official said.
DON'T BELIEVE BUSH PREDICTIONS
How do you take a war projected at 70 billion dollars and turn it into a war that costs two trillion dollars? You put the Bush administration in charge. Of course, there are other more disturbing aspects to this war than its monetary cost. But how much good could two trillion dollars do in our country and around the world? This, like a living wage, is a moral issue. In this article Bill Gallagher looks at the multitude of failed predictions by the Bush administration. The article is linked at www.smirkingchimp.com:
The predictions of President George W. Bush and his minions are predictably wrong. The Busheviks' latest Iraq war predictions are, as always, wildly off the mark and make astrological predictions seem like hard science.
"We will settle for nothing less than complete victory," Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars last week. He made glowing predictions about continued political progress in Iraq, declaring in pure delusion that "when victory comes and democracy takes hold in Iraq, it will serve as a model for freedom in the broader Middle East."
I can see it now. It's written in the stars. The Saudis, Egyptians and Syrian strongmen will be rushing to reform their despotic regimes as the winds of democracy swirl through the desert. And soon after that, just watch those religious radicals in Iran follow the Iraq model. War, invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation for fabricated reasons -- that's the winning formula for freedom and democratic reform in the region.
Monday, January 16, 2006
JANUARY 16, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
THE LIVING WAGE MOVEMENT
Right-wingers have no problems with CEOs making millions of dollars a year, even when their companies don't perform well. They have no problem with wealth being concentrated among the top 5% of the population. But talk of raising the minimum wage above poverty level and they whine and screech and claim that it will cause the collapse of western civilization. The living wage movement has framed this as a moral issue and I agree. No one working full time should be living below the poverty line. This article by Jon Gertner is at www.nytimes.com:
The immediate goal for living-wage strategists is to put initiatives on the ballots in several swing states this year. If their reckoning is correct, the laws should effect a financial gain for low-income workers and boost turnout for candidates who campaign for higher wages. In Florida, a ballot initiative to raise the state's minimum wage by a dollar, to $6.15, won 71 percent of the vote in 2004, a blowout that surprised even people like Kern, who spent several weeks in Miami working on the measure. "We would like it to become a fact of political life," Kern says, "where every year the other side has to contend with a minimum-wage law in some state." Though victories like the one in Florida may have done little to help the Kerry-Edwards ticket - George Bush won 52 percent of the state's vote - Kern and some in the Democratic establishment have come to believe that the left, after years of electoral frustration, has finally found its ultimate moral-values issue. "This is what moves people to the polls now," Kern insists. "This is our gay marriage." Already, during the past few months, a coalition of grass-roots and labor organizations have begun gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures to ensure that proposed laws to increase wages are voted on in November. The first targets, Kern told me, will be Arizona, Colorado, Michigan and Ohio. Next in line, either this year or soon after, are Montana, Oklahoma and Arkansas, the home of Wal-Mart.
MAKING KING'S DREAM A REALITY
Today is Martin Luther King Day and it's time to remember what Dr. King represented. He provided hope and inspiration and vision to millions. His death was a tremendous loss to the civil rights movement and to all of those who wanted a more peaceful and just world. His "I Have A Dream" speech is one of the greatest speeches in American history. It's linked at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/Ihaveadream.htm
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today!
IMPEACH BUSH
THE LIVING WAGE MOVEMENT
Right-wingers have no problems with CEOs making millions of dollars a year, even when their companies don't perform well. They have no problem with wealth being concentrated among the top 5% of the population. But talk of raising the minimum wage above poverty level and they whine and screech and claim that it will cause the collapse of western civilization. The living wage movement has framed this as a moral issue and I agree. No one working full time should be living below the poverty line. This article by Jon Gertner is at www.nytimes.com:
The immediate goal for living-wage strategists is to put initiatives on the ballots in several swing states this year. If their reckoning is correct, the laws should effect a financial gain for low-income workers and boost turnout for candidates who campaign for higher wages. In Florida, a ballot initiative to raise the state's minimum wage by a dollar, to $6.15, won 71 percent of the vote in 2004, a blowout that surprised even people like Kern, who spent several weeks in Miami working on the measure. "We would like it to become a fact of political life," Kern says, "where every year the other side has to contend with a minimum-wage law in some state." Though victories like the one in Florida may have done little to help the Kerry-Edwards ticket - George Bush won 52 percent of the state's vote - Kern and some in the Democratic establishment have come to believe that the left, after years of electoral frustration, has finally found its ultimate moral-values issue. "This is what moves people to the polls now," Kern insists. "This is our gay marriage." Already, during the past few months, a coalition of grass-roots and labor organizations have begun gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures to ensure that proposed laws to increase wages are voted on in November. The first targets, Kern told me, will be Arizona, Colorado, Michigan and Ohio. Next in line, either this year or soon after, are Montana, Oklahoma and Arkansas, the home of Wal-Mart.
MAKING KING'S DREAM A REALITY
Today is Martin Luther King Day and it's time to remember what Dr. King represented. He provided hope and inspiration and vision to millions. His death was a tremendous loss to the civil rights movement and to all of those who wanted a more peaceful and just world. His "I Have A Dream" speech is one of the greatest speeches in American history. It's linked at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/Ihaveadream.htm
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today!
Sunday, January 15, 2006
JANUARY 15, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
BUSH'S IMPENDING COLLAPSE
There has been justifiable concern that George W. Bush is creating an apparatus for dictatorship. His disregard or outright contempt for the Constitution, his alliance with the Christian right, and the vast media echo chamber that parrots his policies all seem a part of the equation. But even with all the assets at his command Bush's approval ratings have dropped below 40%. There is increasing restlessness among Americans as they see the results of Bush's economic policies, his total incompetence in handling disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, and the crony capitalism that rewards war profiteers, big pharmaceutical companies, and others. In this item Steve Gilliard analyzes why a dictatorship is not likely in the United States. The column is at stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2006/01/imperial-ceo.html
First, the conditions for one man rule comes after social disorder. People have to feel unsafe in the streets in a personal way. Not in the sense of crime, but of a sense of society falling apart. The Reds fighting the Nazis in the streets of Berlin, the left in Latin America and Greece going after the right.
Just big talk or even a terrorist attack will not do it. There has to be a sense of a lack of personal safety from a society losing control.
The government has to be seen as ineffective as well. Not just slow or annoying, but unable to protect you from crime or your job or even basic social order.
Second: you need a national police force. One poster calls America's current police forces militarized. Funny, when I do my research, I read about the French CRS and the German Bundespolizei, complete with special forces. The way American law is, police are strictly regionalized and resistant to orders from state and federal authorities
The United States is a country of nearly 300 million people with over 200 million guns. To quell the LA riots took elements of the 40th CANG and the 5th Marines days. Two men with AK's held off the LAPD for hours.
A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE
You wonder why some people were so ready to cower in abject fear after the attacks on 9/11, so much that they were willing to hand over almost unlimited power to the incompetent president who didn't prevent the attacks. Many of us lived through the Cold War when there was a very real possibility of nuclear annihilation every day. We weren't giving up our civil liberties then and we weren't going through color coded alerts. George W. Bush, far from exercising real leadership, has made fear itself the method of governing. He uses the fear button to get whatever he wants, whether it's a war against Iraq, or tax cuts for his rich friends, or suppression of civil liberties. This editorial is linked at www.smirkingchimp.com:
Let's put things in perspective. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, around 80,000 Americans have been killed in ordinary homicides. Home invasions, friends getting into an argument at a party, people not wanting to wait for a divorce, and the like. A similar number have been killed on our nation's highways.
Has our chickenhawk president moved boldly to curtail our civil liberties based on these body counts? Of course not.
IMPEACH BUSH
BUSH'S IMPENDING COLLAPSE
There has been justifiable concern that George W. Bush is creating an apparatus for dictatorship. His disregard or outright contempt for the Constitution, his alliance with the Christian right, and the vast media echo chamber that parrots his policies all seem a part of the equation. But even with all the assets at his command Bush's approval ratings have dropped below 40%. There is increasing restlessness among Americans as they see the results of Bush's economic policies, his total incompetence in handling disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, and the crony capitalism that rewards war profiteers, big pharmaceutical companies, and others. In this item Steve Gilliard analyzes why a dictatorship is not likely in the United States. The column is at stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2006/01/imperial-ceo.html
First, the conditions for one man rule comes after social disorder. People have to feel unsafe in the streets in a personal way. Not in the sense of crime, but of a sense of society falling apart. The Reds fighting the Nazis in the streets of Berlin, the left in Latin America and Greece going after the right.
Just big talk or even a terrorist attack will not do it. There has to be a sense of a lack of personal safety from a society losing control.
The government has to be seen as ineffective as well. Not just slow or annoying, but unable to protect you from crime or your job or even basic social order.
Second: you need a national police force. One poster calls America's current police forces militarized. Funny, when I do my research, I read about the French CRS and the German Bundespolizei, complete with special forces. The way American law is, police are strictly regionalized and resistant to orders from state and federal authorities
The United States is a country of nearly 300 million people with over 200 million guns. To quell the LA riots took elements of the 40th CANG and the 5th Marines days. Two men with AK's held off the LAPD for hours.
A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE
You wonder why some people were so ready to cower in abject fear after the attacks on 9/11, so much that they were willing to hand over almost unlimited power to the incompetent president who didn't prevent the attacks. Many of us lived through the Cold War when there was a very real possibility of nuclear annihilation every day. We weren't giving up our civil liberties then and we weren't going through color coded alerts. George W. Bush, far from exercising real leadership, has made fear itself the method of governing. He uses the fear button to get whatever he wants, whether it's a war against Iraq, or tax cuts for his rich friends, or suppression of civil liberties. This editorial is linked at www.smirkingchimp.com:
Let's put things in perspective. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, around 80,000 Americans have been killed in ordinary homicides. Home invasions, friends getting into an argument at a party, people not wanting to wait for a divorce, and the like. A similar number have been killed on our nation's highways.
Has our chickenhawk president moved boldly to curtail our civil liberties based on these body counts? Of course not.
Friday, January 13, 2006
JANUARY 13, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
BUSH ISN'T ABOVE THE LAW
During the Clinton years we heard the phrase "rule of law" repeatedly from Republicans. Bill Clinton wasn't above the "rule of law" in the Paula Jones lawsuit or in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But George Bush isn't held to the same standards because there's a "war on terror." It reminds you a little of that famous line from the Vietnam war that "we had to destroy the village in order to save it." Bush and company are destroying all the foundations of Constitutional law that have made this country so different from other countries around the world. Bob Herbert talks about it in this column linked at www.topplebush.com:
It has become fashionable to say that this controversy is about the always difficult problem of balancing civil liberties and national security. But I think the issue is starker than that. The real issue is President Bush's apparent belief - stoked at every opportunity by that zealot of zealots, Dick Cheney - that he can do just about anything he wants (mistreat prisoners, lock people up forever without filing charges), and justify it in the name of fighting terror.
NEVER MIND THE EXCUSES
There have been a variety of right-wing talking points to justify the U.S. attack on Iraq. George W. Bush began the cavalcade of lies by saying that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that presented an imminent threat to the United States. Then he tried to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. After the U.S. invasion failed to turn up weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration justified the invasion by saying that removing Saddam Hussein was a good thing and we were installing democracy in Iraq. After it became evident that the U.S. was not being welcomed in Iraq, but instead seen as a conqueror, we've heard both that the insurgency is in its "last throes" or that it will take decades to win the "war on terror." We've also heard that the Clinton administration had the same wrong intelligence as the Bush administration, and that Bush acted on bad intelligence. The Downing Street Memos show that Bush wanted a war no matter what. The memos state that the policy regarding Iraq was being "fixed." Ray McGovern talks about the deliberate lies that got us into this war in this article linked at www.commondreams.org:
James Risen’s State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, may hold bigger secrets than the disclosure that President George W. Bush authorized warrantless eavesdropping on Americans.
Risen’s book also confirms the most damning element of the British Cabinet Office memos popularly called the “Downing Street memos;” namely, that “the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.” The result is that it is no longer credible to maintain that the failures in the Iraqi intelligence were the product of a broken intelligence community. The Bush administration deliberately fabricated the case against Iraq, lying to Congress and the American people along the way.
Risen, a senior reporter for The New York Times, reports that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had an urgent need in the summer of 2002 to get the equivalent of a “second opinion” regarding Bush’s plans for war in Iraq—insight independent of his own telephone conversations with the president and independent of what Blair was hearing from his own foreign office.
BUSH SPYING BEGAN BEFORE 9/11
Dick Cheney recently said that if the Bush administration had been conducting warrantless spying before 9/11 the attack might have been prevented. Well, we learn now that the National Security Agency was spying on Americans prior to 9/11. The spying was personally authorized by George W. Bush, according to James Risen, author of a new book that reveals the spy scandal. This article by Jason Leopold is at www.truthout.org:
James Risen, author of the book State of War and credited with first breaking the story about the NSA's domestic surveillance operations, said President Bush personally authorized a change in the agency's long-standing policies shortly after he was sworn in 2001.
"The president personally and directly authorized new operations, like the NSA's domestic surveillance program, that almost certainly would never have been approved under normal circumstances and that raised serious legal or political questions," Risen wrote in the book. "Because of the fevered climate created throughout the government by the president and his senior advisers, Bush sent signals of what he wanted done, without explicit presidential orders" and "the most ambitious got the message."
The NSA's domestic surveillance activities that began in early 2001 reached a boiling point shortly after 9/11, when senior administration officials and top intelligence officials asked the NSA to share that data with other intelligence officials who worked for the FBI and the CIA to hunt down terrorists that might be in the United States. However the NSA, on advice from its lawyers, destroyed the records, fearing the agency could be subjected to lawsuits by American citizens identified in the agency's raw intelligence reports.
IMPEACH BUSH
BUSH ISN'T ABOVE THE LAW
During the Clinton years we heard the phrase "rule of law" repeatedly from Republicans. Bill Clinton wasn't above the "rule of law" in the Paula Jones lawsuit or in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But George Bush isn't held to the same standards because there's a "war on terror." It reminds you a little of that famous line from the Vietnam war that "we had to destroy the village in order to save it." Bush and company are destroying all the foundations of Constitutional law that have made this country so different from other countries around the world. Bob Herbert talks about it in this column linked at www.topplebush.com:
It has become fashionable to say that this controversy is about the always difficult problem of balancing civil liberties and national security. But I think the issue is starker than that. The real issue is President Bush's apparent belief - stoked at every opportunity by that zealot of zealots, Dick Cheney - that he can do just about anything he wants (mistreat prisoners, lock people up forever without filing charges), and justify it in the name of fighting terror.
NEVER MIND THE EXCUSES
There have been a variety of right-wing talking points to justify the U.S. attack on Iraq. George W. Bush began the cavalcade of lies by saying that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that presented an imminent threat to the United States. Then he tried to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. After the U.S. invasion failed to turn up weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration justified the invasion by saying that removing Saddam Hussein was a good thing and we were installing democracy in Iraq. After it became evident that the U.S. was not being welcomed in Iraq, but instead seen as a conqueror, we've heard both that the insurgency is in its "last throes" or that it will take decades to win the "war on terror." We've also heard that the Clinton administration had the same wrong intelligence as the Bush administration, and that Bush acted on bad intelligence. The Downing Street Memos show that Bush wanted a war no matter what. The memos state that the policy regarding Iraq was being "fixed." Ray McGovern talks about the deliberate lies that got us into this war in this article linked at www.commondreams.org:
James Risen’s State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, may hold bigger secrets than the disclosure that President George W. Bush authorized warrantless eavesdropping on Americans.
Risen’s book also confirms the most damning element of the British Cabinet Office memos popularly called the “Downing Street memos;” namely, that “the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.” The result is that it is no longer credible to maintain that the failures in the Iraqi intelligence were the product of a broken intelligence community. The Bush administration deliberately fabricated the case against Iraq, lying to Congress and the American people along the way.
Risen, a senior reporter for The New York Times, reports that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had an urgent need in the summer of 2002 to get the equivalent of a “second opinion” regarding Bush’s plans for war in Iraq—insight independent of his own telephone conversations with the president and independent of what Blair was hearing from his own foreign office.
BUSH SPYING BEGAN BEFORE 9/11
Dick Cheney recently said that if the Bush administration had been conducting warrantless spying before 9/11 the attack might have been prevented. Well, we learn now that the National Security Agency was spying on Americans prior to 9/11. The spying was personally authorized by George W. Bush, according to James Risen, author of a new book that reveals the spy scandal. This article by Jason Leopold is at www.truthout.org:
James Risen, author of the book State of War and credited with first breaking the story about the NSA's domestic surveillance operations, said President Bush personally authorized a change in the agency's long-standing policies shortly after he was sworn in 2001.
"The president personally and directly authorized new operations, like the NSA's domestic surveillance program, that almost certainly would never have been approved under normal circumstances and that raised serious legal or political questions," Risen wrote in the book. "Because of the fevered climate created throughout the government by the president and his senior advisers, Bush sent signals of what he wanted done, without explicit presidential orders" and "the most ambitious got the message."
The NSA's domestic surveillance activities that began in early 2001 reached a boiling point shortly after 9/11, when senior administration officials and top intelligence officials asked the NSA to share that data with other intelligence officials who worked for the FBI and the CIA to hunt down terrorists that might be in the United States. However the NSA, on advice from its lawyers, destroyed the records, fearing the agency could be subjected to lawsuits by American citizens identified in the agency's raw intelligence reports.
Thursday, January 12, 2006
JANUARY 12, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
NEW LEVELS OF INCOMPETENCE EVERY DAY
George W. Bush and his administration don't know how to do anything competently or honestly, which may be one of the reasons they so consistently resort to lying, manipulation, and smearing. Look at the long record of incompetence. Everything from the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks, the unnecessary war in Iraq, the way the war in Iraq has been pursued, the absolute failure to handle the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the abysmal prescription drug plan, and driving the country over the cliff with deficits, shows the absolute incompetence of this administration. Molly Ivins has a column at www.workingforchange.com:
Boy, you really can't take your eyes off this bunch for a minute, can you? If they're not screwing up one thing, then they're screwing up another -- busy little beavers. And then there are the administrative nightmares they have created all by themselves: The new Medicare prescription-drug benefit is such a disaster area, four states took it over in less than a week just to make sure poor people received their drugs.
Some of the press is starting to get the drill. Give us something like the West Virginia coal mine disaster, and instead of standing around emoting like Geraldo Rivera, a few reporters have enough sense to ask the obvious question: What is this mine's safety record? And when it turns out to be abysmal, a few more reporters have enough sense to ask: Who's in charge of doing something after a mine gets 205 safety violations in one year? Where's the Mine Safety and Health Administration? Who runs it? What's their background -- are they professionals or mining industry stooges? Who's the Michael "Heckuvajob" Brown in this outfit? Why are so many jobs at MSHA just left completely unfilled? How much has MSHA's budget been cut since 2001 to pay for tax cuts for the rich?
NEW YORK TIMES ON ALITO
Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito bobbed and weaved his way through his Senate confirmation hearings and we got the added melodrama of his wife bursting into tears and leaving the chamber. But Alito's record from his time on the federal bench offers much to concern anyone who cares about abortion rights, employee rights, and protection from the abuse of police powers. The New York Times offers some commentary at www.nytimes.com:
Some commentators are complaining that Judge Samuel Alito Jr.'s confirmation hearings have not been exciting, but they must not have been paying attention. We learned that Judge Alito had once declared that Judge Robert Bork - whose Supreme Court nomination was defeated because of his legal extremism - "was one of the most outstanding nominees" of the 20th century. We heard Judge Alito refuse to call Roe v. Wade "settled law," as Chief Justice John Roberts did at his confirmation hearings. And we learned that Judge Alito subscribes to troubling views about presidential power.
Those are just a few of the quiet bombshells that have dropped. In his deadpan bureaucrat's voice, Judge Alito has said some truly disturbing things about his view of the law. In three days of testimony, he has given the American people reasons to be worried - and senators reasons to oppose his nomination. Among those reasons are the following:
Evidence of Extremism
Judge Alito's extraordinary praise of Judge Bork is unsettling, given that Judge Bork's radical legal views included rejecting the Supreme Court's entire line of privacy cases, even its 1965 ruling striking down a state law banning sales of contraceptives. Judge Alito's membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton - a group whose offensive views about women, minorities and AIDS victims were discussed in greater detail at yesterday's hearing - is also deeply troubling, as is his unconvincing claim not to remember joining it.
LEGALIZING BUSH'S POWER GRABS
The past few days we've been hearing about concepts such as the "unitary executive" and "plenary powers" and "signing statements." The "unitary executive" concept in effect makes the president all-powerful. Independent executive branches in the federal government such as the Securities and Exchange Commission would be under the direct thumb of the president. I bet the SEC under Bush would be really interested in investigating insider trading and other financial chicanery, don't you? "Plenary powers" gives the president virtually unlimited powers and "signing statements" are a nice little mechanism for not enforcing laws. The latest example was Bush signing an anti-torture law that wasn't worth the paper it was written on because he issued a "signing statement" saying he could interpret the law the way he wanted. In this column Robert Parry talks about the danger of the "unitary executive" concept. The article is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
The "unitary" theory of presidential power sounds too wonkish for Americans to care about, but the confirmation of Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court could push this radical notion of almost unlimited Executive authority close to becoming a reality.
Justice Alito, as a longtime advocate of the theory, would put the Court's right-wing faction on the verge of having a majority committed to embracing this constitutional argument that would strip regulatory agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, of their independence.
If that happens, George W. Bush and his successors would have the power to instruct these agencies what to do on regulations and enforcement, opening up new opportunities to punish enemies and reward friends. The "unitary" theory asserts that all executive authority must be in the President's hands, without exception.
The Supreme Court's embrace of the "unitary executive" would sound the death knell for independent regulatory agencies as they have existed since the Great Depression, when they were structured with shared control between the Congress and the President. Putting the agencies under the President's thumb would tip the balance of Washington power to the White House and invite abuses by letting the Executive turn on and off enforcement investigations.
IMPEACH BUSH
NEW LEVELS OF INCOMPETENCE EVERY DAY
George W. Bush and his administration don't know how to do anything competently or honestly, which may be one of the reasons they so consistently resort to lying, manipulation, and smearing. Look at the long record of incompetence. Everything from the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks, the unnecessary war in Iraq, the way the war in Iraq has been pursued, the absolute failure to handle the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the abysmal prescription drug plan, and driving the country over the cliff with deficits, shows the absolute incompetence of this administration. Molly Ivins has a column at www.workingforchange.com:
Boy, you really can't take your eyes off this bunch for a minute, can you? If they're not screwing up one thing, then they're screwing up another -- busy little beavers. And then there are the administrative nightmares they have created all by themselves: The new Medicare prescription-drug benefit is such a disaster area, four states took it over in less than a week just to make sure poor people received their drugs.
Some of the press is starting to get the drill. Give us something like the West Virginia coal mine disaster, and instead of standing around emoting like Geraldo Rivera, a few reporters have enough sense to ask the obvious question: What is this mine's safety record? And when it turns out to be abysmal, a few more reporters have enough sense to ask: Who's in charge of doing something after a mine gets 205 safety violations in one year? Where's the Mine Safety and Health Administration? Who runs it? What's their background -- are they professionals or mining industry stooges? Who's the Michael "Heckuvajob" Brown in this outfit? Why are so many jobs at MSHA just left completely unfilled? How much has MSHA's budget been cut since 2001 to pay for tax cuts for the rich?
NEW YORK TIMES ON ALITO
Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito bobbed and weaved his way through his Senate confirmation hearings and we got the added melodrama of his wife bursting into tears and leaving the chamber. But Alito's record from his time on the federal bench offers much to concern anyone who cares about abortion rights, employee rights, and protection from the abuse of police powers. The New York Times offers some commentary at www.nytimes.com:
Some commentators are complaining that Judge Samuel Alito Jr.'s confirmation hearings have not been exciting, but they must not have been paying attention. We learned that Judge Alito had once declared that Judge Robert Bork - whose Supreme Court nomination was defeated because of his legal extremism - "was one of the most outstanding nominees" of the 20th century. We heard Judge Alito refuse to call Roe v. Wade "settled law," as Chief Justice John Roberts did at his confirmation hearings. And we learned that Judge Alito subscribes to troubling views about presidential power.
Those are just a few of the quiet bombshells that have dropped. In his deadpan bureaucrat's voice, Judge Alito has said some truly disturbing things about his view of the law. In three days of testimony, he has given the American people reasons to be worried - and senators reasons to oppose his nomination. Among those reasons are the following:
Evidence of Extremism
Judge Alito's extraordinary praise of Judge Bork is unsettling, given that Judge Bork's radical legal views included rejecting the Supreme Court's entire line of privacy cases, even its 1965 ruling striking down a state law banning sales of contraceptives. Judge Alito's membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton - a group whose offensive views about women, minorities and AIDS victims were discussed in greater detail at yesterday's hearing - is also deeply troubling, as is his unconvincing claim not to remember joining it.
LEGALIZING BUSH'S POWER GRABS
The past few days we've been hearing about concepts such as the "unitary executive" and "plenary powers" and "signing statements." The "unitary executive" concept in effect makes the president all-powerful. Independent executive branches in the federal government such as the Securities and Exchange Commission would be under the direct thumb of the president. I bet the SEC under Bush would be really interested in investigating insider trading and other financial chicanery, don't you? "Plenary powers" gives the president virtually unlimited powers and "signing statements" are a nice little mechanism for not enforcing laws. The latest example was Bush signing an anti-torture law that wasn't worth the paper it was written on because he issued a "signing statement" saying he could interpret the law the way he wanted. In this column Robert Parry talks about the danger of the "unitary executive" concept. The article is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
The "unitary" theory of presidential power sounds too wonkish for Americans to care about, but the confirmation of Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court could push this radical notion of almost unlimited Executive authority close to becoming a reality.
Justice Alito, as a longtime advocate of the theory, would put the Court's right-wing faction on the verge of having a majority committed to embracing this constitutional argument that would strip regulatory agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, of their independence.
If that happens, George W. Bush and his successors would have the power to instruct these agencies what to do on regulations and enforcement, opening up new opportunities to punish enemies and reward friends. The "unitary" theory asserts that all executive authority must be in the President's hands, without exception.
The Supreme Court's embrace of the "unitary executive" would sound the death knell for independent regulatory agencies as they have existed since the Great Depression, when they were structured with shared control between the Congress and the President. Putting the agencies under the President's thumb would tip the balance of Washington power to the White House and invite abuses by letting the Executive turn on and off enforcement investigations.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
JANUARY 11, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
PAUPER NATION
You have to think Republicans really like poor people because they're creating so many of us. Every economic policy that has been pushed by Republican administrations in the past two decades has been to transfer wealth to the very affluent and leave the middle class and the poor in the United States scrambling to survive. All the necessities are more expensive, things like health care, housing, and food, while wages have actually fallen. In this article Floyd J. McKay takes a look at the disappearing middle class. The article is linked at www.commondreams.org:
Why can't we get it right on a national health policy to reduce this huge risk to the middle class, and why are we giving tax breaks to the ultra-rich, who never have to or ever will worry about these issues?
Credit laws are stacked against consumers. Payday-cash storefronts, exorbitant credit-card interest rates and variable-rate mortgages are devastating families.
Congress has let the financial industry run wild, including legislation this year making it harder to declare bankruptcy.
All the talk about family values is just that — talk — when our financial policies are driving middle-class families to the wall.
ABRAMOFF SCANDAL IS ALL REPUBLICAN
A typical Republican tactic when Republicans get caught in scandal and corruption is to claim that well the Democrats do it too. Richard Nixon claimed that he didn't do anything worse than previous administrations, although he most certainly did. Now that Republicans are drowning in the swamp of the Abramoff scandal they're again trying to say this scandal is bipartisan. It's not. Gene Lyons writes about it in this column linked at www.smirkingchimp.com:
American politics offers few spectacles quite so diverting as the pious hypocrite unmasked. For your entertainment dollar, nothing beats the United States Congress in full scandal mode. Particularly, it must be said, a Republican Congress. So brazen and nefarious were the schemes of former GOP House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, for example, that it appears "The Hammer" might with more accuracy have been dubbed "The Chisel." What with GOP super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff having pleaded guilty to five felony counts of conspiracy, fraud and tax evasion, and agreeing to help prosecutors, there's no telling how many high-fliers he'll take down with him. Abramoff boasts that he's got the goods on as many as 60 congressmen and their staffs. He's probably blowing smoke, but plenty of name-brand Republicans are having trouble sleeping nights.
RIGHT WING WANTS TO DESTROY FOURTH AMENDMENT
Today a right wing letter to The Fresno Bee went to new extremes in defending Bush's spying on Americans without warrants. Today's constitutional scholar claims that the Fourth Amendment only applies to "contraband." He goes on to claim that Article II of the Constitution gives the president almost unlimited power in a "time of war."
I've read a little history and my reading tells me the Founding Fathers were greatly concerned about an all-powerful executive. The Constitution was constructed with a system of checks and balances precisely because the Founders did not want another King George III. There are no clauses in the Fourth Amendment stating that it doesn't apply in a "time of war."
The Fourth Amendment states: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The Founders obviously didn't know about telephones, computers, or other electronic means of communication, but it seems pretty clear that the Fourth Amendment protected personal privacy against searches and seizures without a warrant.
If the right wing gets it way, the Bill of Rights will be tossed into the dustbin of history and we will descend into a dictatorship.
IMPEACH BUSH
PAUPER NATION
You have to think Republicans really like poor people because they're creating so many of us. Every economic policy that has been pushed by Republican administrations in the past two decades has been to transfer wealth to the very affluent and leave the middle class and the poor in the United States scrambling to survive. All the necessities are more expensive, things like health care, housing, and food, while wages have actually fallen. In this article Floyd J. McKay takes a look at the disappearing middle class. The article is linked at www.commondreams.org:
Why can't we get it right on a national health policy to reduce this huge risk to the middle class, and why are we giving tax breaks to the ultra-rich, who never have to or ever will worry about these issues?
Credit laws are stacked against consumers. Payday-cash storefronts, exorbitant credit-card interest rates and variable-rate mortgages are devastating families.
Congress has let the financial industry run wild, including legislation this year making it harder to declare bankruptcy.
All the talk about family values is just that — talk — when our financial policies are driving middle-class families to the wall.
ABRAMOFF SCANDAL IS ALL REPUBLICAN
A typical Republican tactic when Republicans get caught in scandal and corruption is to claim that well the Democrats do it too. Richard Nixon claimed that he didn't do anything worse than previous administrations, although he most certainly did. Now that Republicans are drowning in the swamp of the Abramoff scandal they're again trying to say this scandal is bipartisan. It's not. Gene Lyons writes about it in this column linked at www.smirkingchimp.com:
American politics offers few spectacles quite so diverting as the pious hypocrite unmasked. For your entertainment dollar, nothing beats the United States Congress in full scandal mode. Particularly, it must be said, a Republican Congress. So brazen and nefarious were the schemes of former GOP House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, for example, that it appears "The Hammer" might with more accuracy have been dubbed "The Chisel." What with GOP super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff having pleaded guilty to five felony counts of conspiracy, fraud and tax evasion, and agreeing to help prosecutors, there's no telling how many high-fliers he'll take down with him. Abramoff boasts that he's got the goods on as many as 60 congressmen and their staffs. He's probably blowing smoke, but plenty of name-brand Republicans are having trouble sleeping nights.
RIGHT WING WANTS TO DESTROY FOURTH AMENDMENT
Today a right wing letter to The Fresno Bee went to new extremes in defending Bush's spying on Americans without warrants. Today's constitutional scholar claims that the Fourth Amendment only applies to "contraband." He goes on to claim that Article II of the Constitution gives the president almost unlimited power in a "time of war."
I've read a little history and my reading tells me the Founding Fathers were greatly concerned about an all-powerful executive. The Constitution was constructed with a system of checks and balances precisely because the Founders did not want another King George III. There are no clauses in the Fourth Amendment stating that it doesn't apply in a "time of war."
The Fourth Amendment states: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The Founders obviously didn't know about telephones, computers, or other electronic means of communication, but it seems pretty clear that the Fourth Amendment protected personal privacy against searches and seizures without a warrant.
If the right wing gets it way, the Bill of Rights will be tossed into the dustbin of history and we will descend into a dictatorship.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
January 09, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
ALITO - THE GOVERNMENT IS ALWAYS RIGHT
Conservatives, who have traditionally been concerned about the encroachment of government, should be concerned about Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. Alito has a fifteen year record of sitting on the federal bench and he has consistently ruled in favor of government usurping the rights of citizens, including allowing the strip search of a ten year old girl. In this article Senator Edward Kennedy talks about the danger of Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court when George W. Bush has been grabbing more and more extraconstitutional power. The article is at www.truthout.org:
I am gravely concerned by Judge Alito's clear record of support for vast presidential authority, unchecked by the other two branches of government. In decision after decision on the bench, he has excused abusive actions by the authorities that intrude on the personal privacy and freedoms of average Americans. And in his writings and speeches, he has supported a level of overreaching presidential power that frankly most Americans find disturbing and even frightening.
In fact, it is extraordinary that each of the three individuals this President has nominated for the Supreme Court - Chief Justice Roberts, Harriet Miers, and now Judge Alito - has served not only as a lawyer for the Executive Branch, but has defended the most expansive views of presidential authority. Perhaps that is why this President nominated them.
But as Justice O'Connor stated, even a state of war is not a "blank check" for a President to do whatever he wants. The Supreme Court must serve as an independent check on abuses by the executive branch, and a protector of our liberties, not as a cheerleader for an imperial presidency.
There are other areas of concern. In an era when too many Americans are losing their jobs, or working for less and trying to make ends meet, in close cases Judge Alito has ruled the vast majority of the time against the claims of individual citizens. He has acted instead in favor of the government, large corporations, and other powerful interests. In a study by a well-respected expert, Professor Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School, Judge Alito was found to rule against the individual in 84 percent of his dissents. To put it plainly, average Americans have had a hard time getting a fair shake in his courtroom.
BUSH'S WAR ON AMERICANS
Today George W. Bush was in full macho mode again when he "warned" Democrats about criticism of the Iraq war. Criticism, Bush claims, gives aid to America's enemies. But it is George W. Bush who has been making war on Americans. His disastrous economic policies that benefit only the wealthy are making economic war on most of us. His trashing of civil liberties is making war on us. His ignorance and apathy about the effects of global climate change are just as dangerous as ignoring nuclear threats. His incompetence in following up on the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission leave gaping holes in our security. In this article Doug Thompson talks about Bush's war against us. The article is linked at www.opednews.com:
Yes, Bush is a wartime President because he’s the one at war – at war with the American people, at war against the American way of life and at war with the Constitution of the United States, that law of the land that he calls “just a goddamned piece of paper.”
My friends in the White House say Bush has also declared war on any Republican Senator who does not vote to make the Patriot Act a permanent threat to American liberties when it comes back up for a vote later this month.
They tell me Bush repeatedly refers to Idaho Senator Larry Craig as “a goddamned traitor” for joining with Democrats to block permanent renewal of the act and add that the President has similar insults for Senators Chuck Hagel and Olympia Snowe.
IMPEACH BUSH
ALITO - THE GOVERNMENT IS ALWAYS RIGHT
Conservatives, who have traditionally been concerned about the encroachment of government, should be concerned about Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. Alito has a fifteen year record of sitting on the federal bench and he has consistently ruled in favor of government usurping the rights of citizens, including allowing the strip search of a ten year old girl. In this article Senator Edward Kennedy talks about the danger of Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court when George W. Bush has been grabbing more and more extraconstitutional power. The article is at www.truthout.org:
I am gravely concerned by Judge Alito's clear record of support for vast presidential authority, unchecked by the other two branches of government. In decision after decision on the bench, he has excused abusive actions by the authorities that intrude on the personal privacy and freedoms of average Americans. And in his writings and speeches, he has supported a level of overreaching presidential power that frankly most Americans find disturbing and even frightening.
In fact, it is extraordinary that each of the three individuals this President has nominated for the Supreme Court - Chief Justice Roberts, Harriet Miers, and now Judge Alito - has served not only as a lawyer for the Executive Branch, but has defended the most expansive views of presidential authority. Perhaps that is why this President nominated them.
But as Justice O'Connor stated, even a state of war is not a "blank check" for a President to do whatever he wants. The Supreme Court must serve as an independent check on abuses by the executive branch, and a protector of our liberties, not as a cheerleader for an imperial presidency.
There are other areas of concern. In an era when too many Americans are losing their jobs, or working for less and trying to make ends meet, in close cases Judge Alito has ruled the vast majority of the time against the claims of individual citizens. He has acted instead in favor of the government, large corporations, and other powerful interests. In a study by a well-respected expert, Professor Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School, Judge Alito was found to rule against the individual in 84 percent of his dissents. To put it plainly, average Americans have had a hard time getting a fair shake in his courtroom.
BUSH'S WAR ON AMERICANS
Today George W. Bush was in full macho mode again when he "warned" Democrats about criticism of the Iraq war. Criticism, Bush claims, gives aid to America's enemies. But it is George W. Bush who has been making war on Americans. His disastrous economic policies that benefit only the wealthy are making economic war on most of us. His trashing of civil liberties is making war on us. His ignorance and apathy about the effects of global climate change are just as dangerous as ignoring nuclear threats. His incompetence in following up on the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission leave gaping holes in our security. In this article Doug Thompson talks about Bush's war against us. The article is linked at www.opednews.com:
Yes, Bush is a wartime President because he’s the one at war – at war with the American people, at war against the American way of life and at war with the Constitution of the United States, that law of the land that he calls “just a goddamned piece of paper.”
My friends in the White House say Bush has also declared war on any Republican Senator who does not vote to make the Patriot Act a permanent threat to American liberties when it comes back up for a vote later this month.
They tell me Bush repeatedly refers to Idaho Senator Larry Craig as “a goddamned traitor” for joining with Democrats to block permanent renewal of the act and add that the President has similar insults for Senators Chuck Hagel and Olympia Snowe.
Monday, January 09, 2006
JANUARY 9, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
THE BUSH CULT
The diehard supporters of George W. Bush seem to have no standards at all. Ethics don't count. Morality doesn't count. Telling the truth doesn't count. Violating the Constitution doesn't count. They support their man no matter what. Ed Tant discusses the issue at www.smirkingchimp.com:
"In Bush we trust" could be the mindless motto of the cult of George W., the diehard Bush backers who would defend their man even if he were caught in bed with the proverbial live boy and dead girl. While the slick and sleazy Bill Clinton was impeached for lies and cover-ups of a tawdry scandal that made his Oval Office more of an oral office, the same pundits, preachers and politicians who wanted to storm the Clinton White House with torches and pitchforks now seem to have no problem with a president who seems hell-bent on making this country into "one nation under surveillance."
The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly states all Americans have the right "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."
BUSH NOT COMPETENT ON TERRORISM EITHER
George W. Bush has deservedly low approval ratings in almost every area of public policy. His one claim to legitimacy has been his "war on terror," where his approval ratings are 50% or slightly higher. But does Bush deserve any credit for any perceived success in the "war on terror"? Michael T. Klare has some doubts in this article at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=47757
Far from impeding Al Qaeda and its offshoots, the overthrow of the Taliban and, especially, the Hussein regime have been a boon to their efforts. War and chaos in the Middle East, with American forces serving as an occupying power, have proved to be the ideal conditions in which to nurture a multinational jihadist movement aimed at punishing the West. As noted in a recent CIA report, would-be jihadists from all over the world are flocking to Iraq to bloody the Americans and acquire critical combat skills that can later be applied in their own countries. According to a summary of a CIA report in the New York Times, the Agency has concluded that "Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory" for militants to improve their skills in urban combat. It follows from this that the longer American troops remain in Iraq, the greater will be the potential advantage to international terrorism. Indeed, senior CIA officials have reportedly told Congressional leaders that the war in Iraq is "likely to produce a dangerous legacy, by dispersing to other countries Iraqi and foreign combatants more adept and better organized than they were before the conflict."
BUSH'S SHORT TERM MEMORY
When the Enron scandal erupted and engulfed "Kenny Boy" Lay George W. Bush suddenly couldn't remember Ken Lay, even though Lay was a major contributor to the Bush campaign and enough of a confidant to earn the moniker "Kenny Boy." Now Bush can't remember Jack Abramoff, the super lobbyist who has enough information to sink the corrupt Republican party. It turns out the Secret Service has 195 documented visits from Abramoff to Bush administration officials or Bush himself. There are also photos of Abramoff with Bush. So many scandals and so little time. Will this one bring down Bush? This article is at www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-05-06-abramoff-bush_x.htm
In President Bush's first 10 months, GOP fundraiser Jack Abramoff and his lobbying team logged nearly 200 contacts with the new administration as they pressed for friendly hires at federal agencies and sought to keep the Northern Mariana Islands exempt from the minimum wage and other laws, records show.
The meetings between Abramoff's lobbying team and the administration ranged from Attorney General John Ashcroft to policy advisers in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, according to his lobbying firm billing records.
Abramoff, a $100,000-plus fundraiser for Bush, is now under criminal investigation for some of his lobbying work. His firm boasted its lobbying team helped revise a section of the Republican Party's 2000 platform to make it favorable to its island client.
IMPEACH BUSH
THE BUSH CULT
The diehard supporters of George W. Bush seem to have no standards at all. Ethics don't count. Morality doesn't count. Telling the truth doesn't count. Violating the Constitution doesn't count. They support their man no matter what. Ed Tant discusses the issue at www.smirkingchimp.com:
"In Bush we trust" could be the mindless motto of the cult of George W., the diehard Bush backers who would defend their man even if he were caught in bed with the proverbial live boy and dead girl. While the slick and sleazy Bill Clinton was impeached for lies and cover-ups of a tawdry scandal that made his Oval Office more of an oral office, the same pundits, preachers and politicians who wanted to storm the Clinton White House with torches and pitchforks now seem to have no problem with a president who seems hell-bent on making this country into "one nation under surveillance."
The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly states all Americans have the right "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."
BUSH NOT COMPETENT ON TERRORISM EITHER
George W. Bush has deservedly low approval ratings in almost every area of public policy. His one claim to legitimacy has been his "war on terror," where his approval ratings are 50% or slightly higher. But does Bush deserve any credit for any perceived success in the "war on terror"? Michael T. Klare has some doubts in this article at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=47757
Far from impeding Al Qaeda and its offshoots, the overthrow of the Taliban and, especially, the Hussein regime have been a boon to their efforts. War and chaos in the Middle East, with American forces serving as an occupying power, have proved to be the ideal conditions in which to nurture a multinational jihadist movement aimed at punishing the West. As noted in a recent CIA report, would-be jihadists from all over the world are flocking to Iraq to bloody the Americans and acquire critical combat skills that can later be applied in their own countries. According to a summary of a CIA report in the New York Times, the Agency has concluded that "Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory" for militants to improve their skills in urban combat. It follows from this that the longer American troops remain in Iraq, the greater will be the potential advantage to international terrorism. Indeed, senior CIA officials have reportedly told Congressional leaders that the war in Iraq is "likely to produce a dangerous legacy, by dispersing to other countries Iraqi and foreign combatants more adept and better organized than they were before the conflict."
BUSH'S SHORT TERM MEMORY
When the Enron scandal erupted and engulfed "Kenny Boy" Lay George W. Bush suddenly couldn't remember Ken Lay, even though Lay was a major contributor to the Bush campaign and enough of a confidant to earn the moniker "Kenny Boy." Now Bush can't remember Jack Abramoff, the super lobbyist who has enough information to sink the corrupt Republican party. It turns out the Secret Service has 195 documented visits from Abramoff to Bush administration officials or Bush himself. There are also photos of Abramoff with Bush. So many scandals and so little time. Will this one bring down Bush? This article is at www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-05-06-abramoff-bush_x.htm
In President Bush's first 10 months, GOP fundraiser Jack Abramoff and his lobbying team logged nearly 200 contacts with the new administration as they pressed for friendly hires at federal agencies and sought to keep the Northern Mariana Islands exempt from the minimum wage and other laws, records show.
The meetings between Abramoff's lobbying team and the administration ranged from Attorney General John Ashcroft to policy advisers in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, according to his lobbying firm billing records.
Abramoff, a $100,000-plus fundraiser for Bush, is now under criminal investigation for some of his lobbying work. His firm boasted its lobbying team helped revise a section of the Republican Party's 2000 platform to make it favorable to its island client.
Saturday, January 07, 2006
JANUARY 7, 2005
IMPEACH BUSH
THE SAGA OF WILBUR ROSS
I bet Wilbur Ross is a hero in right-wing land. Here's a guy who swoops down like a vulture, buys up bankrupt companies, and "saves" them. In the process, of course, he destroys unions and pension funds and squeezes every ounce of profit, even when it means life and death for people like the miners in West Virginia. This article by Ward Harkavy is at villagevoice.com:
Underground miners are famous for taking canaries down to their workplaces. When the canaries start gasping and dying, it's time for everyone to go back up to the surface before they, too, die.
Unfortunately for miners, "king of bankruptcy" Wilbur Ross, rescuer of dying industries (but not of dying miners), is waiting for them. He's not the canary in the coal mine. He's more like the vulture.
How much more tragedy could be heaped on poor Upshur County, West Virginia, site of the Sago disaster? The blunder by public officials in saying the trapped miners were alive, when actually all but one of the doomed dozen were dead, was brutal. The county's Stockert Youth Center has been converted into a grief-counseling headquarters, and people will be working overtime there.
BUSH'S SPYING WAS ILLEGAL
A new Congressional research report seems to state the obvious--that Bush's spying on Americans without warrants was illegal. We shouldn't even need a Congressional research report to tell us that. But at least it's one more piece of evidence for Bush's impeachment. This story by Carol D. Leonnig is at www.washingtonpost.com:
A report by Congress's research arm concluded yesterday that the administration's justification for the warrantless eavesdropping authorized by President Bush conflicts with existing law and hinges on weak legal arguments.
The Congressional Research Service's report rebuts the central assertions made recently by Bush and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales about the president's authority to order secret intercepts of telephone and e-mail exchanges between people inside the United States and their contacts abroad.
BUSH ECONOMY NOT SO ROBUST AFTER ALL
I saw a headline today that the unemployment rate is 4.9%. That sounds pretty good by historic standards and the Bush administration will be trumpeting the benefits of Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy and telling us how wonderful the economy is. But the truth is the economy isn't doing that well at all. As this story points out, if people who had stopped looking for jobs were counted in the unemployment statistics, the unemployment rate would be 6.6%. Real wages have fallen every year since Bush took power. Job growth has been anemic by past standards. This story comes from thinkprogress.org/2006/01/06/low-wages-standards/
While we all hope that the economy will strengthen, the White House’s all-out PR effort today on the economy fails to recognize how historically weak both wages and job growth have been. Most Americans have good reason to believe the economy is not working for them. We should not lower our standards to the point where our leaders can state that our economy is doing great when the typical worker has seen his or her wages drop in real terms over the last four years and when job growth is at historic lows for this stage of a recovery.
A more candid assessment of the December jobs and earnings report – and the full 2005 job record – would recognize the following 3 points.
IMPEACH BUSH
THE SAGA OF WILBUR ROSS
I bet Wilbur Ross is a hero in right-wing land. Here's a guy who swoops down like a vulture, buys up bankrupt companies, and "saves" them. In the process, of course, he destroys unions and pension funds and squeezes every ounce of profit, even when it means life and death for people like the miners in West Virginia. This article by Ward Harkavy is at villagevoice.com:
Underground miners are famous for taking canaries down to their workplaces. When the canaries start gasping and dying, it's time for everyone to go back up to the surface before they, too, die.
Unfortunately for miners, "king of bankruptcy" Wilbur Ross, rescuer of dying industries (but not of dying miners), is waiting for them. He's not the canary in the coal mine. He's more like the vulture.
How much more tragedy could be heaped on poor Upshur County, West Virginia, site of the Sago disaster? The blunder by public officials in saying the trapped miners were alive, when actually all but one of the doomed dozen were dead, was brutal. The county's Stockert Youth Center has been converted into a grief-counseling headquarters, and people will be working overtime there.
BUSH'S SPYING WAS ILLEGAL
A new Congressional research report seems to state the obvious--that Bush's spying on Americans without warrants was illegal. We shouldn't even need a Congressional research report to tell us that. But at least it's one more piece of evidence for Bush's impeachment. This story by Carol D. Leonnig is at www.washingtonpost.com:
A report by Congress's research arm concluded yesterday that the administration's justification for the warrantless eavesdropping authorized by President Bush conflicts with existing law and hinges on weak legal arguments.
The Congressional Research Service's report rebuts the central assertions made recently by Bush and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales about the president's authority to order secret intercepts of telephone and e-mail exchanges between people inside the United States and their contacts abroad.
BUSH ECONOMY NOT SO ROBUST AFTER ALL
I saw a headline today that the unemployment rate is 4.9%. That sounds pretty good by historic standards and the Bush administration will be trumpeting the benefits of Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy and telling us how wonderful the economy is. But the truth is the economy isn't doing that well at all. As this story points out, if people who had stopped looking for jobs were counted in the unemployment statistics, the unemployment rate would be 6.6%. Real wages have fallen every year since Bush took power. Job growth has been anemic by past standards. This story comes from thinkprogress.org/2006/01/06/low-wages-standards/
While we all hope that the economy will strengthen, the White House’s all-out PR effort today on the economy fails to recognize how historically weak both wages and job growth have been. Most Americans have good reason to believe the economy is not working for them. We should not lower our standards to the point where our leaders can state that our economy is doing great when the typical worker has seen his or her wages drop in real terms over the last four years and when job growth is at historic lows for this stage of a recovery.
A more candid assessment of the December jobs and earnings report – and the full 2005 job record – would recognize the following 3 points.
Friday, January 06, 2006
JANUARY 6, 2005
IMPEACH BUSH
GIVING IN TO PARANOIA
You wonder if people like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney really do hear voices. It's those voices telling them that karma can be a very bad thing. The evil that men do eventually rebounds on them. Steal and it will be taken from you. Enslave and you will be enslaved. Paranoia has run like a virus through the Republican party for some time. Think back to the McCarthy era when Communists were everywhere. Think of the Richard M. Nixon presidency as Nixon compiled enemies lists and planted bugs in the offices of political opponents. George W. Bush has been responsible for so much evil it's no wonder he's paranoid. This article by Chris Elliott is at www.commondreams.org:
This arrogant administration is so assured of its own righteous providence that any kind of process associated with its self-appointed directives is regarded as a nuisance and optional at its own discretion. The NSA’s rogue wiretapping is a symptom of an administration drunk on its own power, and to imagine this program hasn’t already been abused is the height of naiveté.
A bureaucracy is carrying out this initiative, and within any bureaucracy there are always zealous individuals who dedicate themselves to the proscribed mission, and add some component of their own individual vision. There is always an Ollie North, a John Poindexter, a Henry Kissinger who will overarch even a wrong-headed undertaking such as the secret wiretapping of American citizens. Agencies and organizations that have already been shown to have fallen under the purview of this insidious program of illegal wiretapping and e-mail monitoring include the Quakers and PETA (People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals). And it’s only going to get worse.
Early administration response to the leaking of the NSA wiretaps was a denial of the program’s existence. When the evidence became irrefutable, the administration started talking about limitations of the program, such as it only being used in international communications, and only with individuals in the United States who have "a clear link to al-Qaida." Now that even this backpedaling has proven to be another series of lies, a frustrated Bush administration has cast it to the court of public opinion, and to my utter astonishment, has found a level of acceptance among many Americans, mostly knee-jerk Bush apologists.
THOSE NEOCON DREAMS
The people behind the Project for a New American Century were confident the United States could rule the world. It started with things like globalization, opening the borders for laissez-faire capitalism. It involved a huge military and the possible militarization of space. Iraq and its oil reserves would be just the beginning. How things have changed. In the past six years we've gone from having huge budget surpluses to oceans of red ink. Our military is tied down in Iraq with no good end in sight. China is rapidly gaining economic ground on the U.S. We're losing our edge in science and technology. This article by Rupert Cornwell is at www.commondreams.org:
After a pretty wretched 2005, how different everything appears.
Yes, the U.S. economy is still the largest. But the gap is shrinking. Last year China overtook Italy to become the world's sixth-largest economy, and in 2006 should surpass Britain and France. By 2035, it should have caught up with the United States.
The United States remains far and away the greatest military power on Earth. But Iraq has brutally revealed the limits of American "hard power."
The 2003 invasion will go down in the textbooks for the brilliance of its execution. But despite spending $5 billion a month, and 140,000 troops on the ground, the United States can not ensure stability or security in Iraq.
Instead, Iraq has stretched the United States' all-volunteer military close to the breaking point. Washington intends to cut that force by a third this year. In truth, it has no choice.
BUSH'S BETRAYAL OF THE MILITARY
George W. Bush lied us into a war and sent our troops in harm's way unnecessarily, which is the greatest crime. But now we learn that the Pentagon has failed to even supply adequate body armor, which could have saved countless lives of soldiers with wounds in the upper body. Bush likes to do his photo-ops with the troops, he likes to stage stunts like landing on aircraft carriers, and use tough cowboy rhetoric, but he fails to even adequately supply the troops. This article by Michael Moss is at www.nytimes.com:
A secret Pentagon study has found that at least 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to their upper body could have survived if they had extra body armor. That armor has been available since 2003 but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection, according to military officials.
The ceramic plates in vests currently worn by the majority of military personnel in Iraq cover only some of the chest and back. In at least 74 of the 93 fatal wounds that were analyzed in the Pentagon study of marines from March 2003 through June 2005, bullets and shrapnel struck the marines' shoulders, sides or areas of the torso where the plates do not reach.
Thirty-one of the deadly wounds struck the chest or back so close to the plates that simply enlarging the existing shields "would have had the potential to alter the fatal outcome," according to the study, which was obtained by The New York Times.
IMPEACH BUSH
GIVING IN TO PARANOIA
You wonder if people like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney really do hear voices. It's those voices telling them that karma can be a very bad thing. The evil that men do eventually rebounds on them. Steal and it will be taken from you. Enslave and you will be enslaved. Paranoia has run like a virus through the Republican party for some time. Think back to the McCarthy era when Communists were everywhere. Think of the Richard M. Nixon presidency as Nixon compiled enemies lists and planted bugs in the offices of political opponents. George W. Bush has been responsible for so much evil it's no wonder he's paranoid. This article by Chris Elliott is at www.commondreams.org:
This arrogant administration is so assured of its own righteous providence that any kind of process associated with its self-appointed directives is regarded as a nuisance and optional at its own discretion. The NSA’s rogue wiretapping is a symptom of an administration drunk on its own power, and to imagine this program hasn’t already been abused is the height of naiveté.
A bureaucracy is carrying out this initiative, and within any bureaucracy there are always zealous individuals who dedicate themselves to the proscribed mission, and add some component of their own individual vision. There is always an Ollie North, a John Poindexter, a Henry Kissinger who will overarch even a wrong-headed undertaking such as the secret wiretapping of American citizens. Agencies and organizations that have already been shown to have fallen under the purview of this insidious program of illegal wiretapping and e-mail monitoring include the Quakers and PETA (People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals). And it’s only going to get worse.
Early administration response to the leaking of the NSA wiretaps was a denial of the program’s existence. When the evidence became irrefutable, the administration started talking about limitations of the program, such as it only being used in international communications, and only with individuals in the United States who have "a clear link to al-Qaida." Now that even this backpedaling has proven to be another series of lies, a frustrated Bush administration has cast it to the court of public opinion, and to my utter astonishment, has found a level of acceptance among many Americans, mostly knee-jerk Bush apologists.
THOSE NEOCON DREAMS
The people behind the Project for a New American Century were confident the United States could rule the world. It started with things like globalization, opening the borders for laissez-faire capitalism. It involved a huge military and the possible militarization of space. Iraq and its oil reserves would be just the beginning. How things have changed. In the past six years we've gone from having huge budget surpluses to oceans of red ink. Our military is tied down in Iraq with no good end in sight. China is rapidly gaining economic ground on the U.S. We're losing our edge in science and technology. This article by Rupert Cornwell is at www.commondreams.org:
After a pretty wretched 2005, how different everything appears.
Yes, the U.S. economy is still the largest. But the gap is shrinking. Last year China overtook Italy to become the world's sixth-largest economy, and in 2006 should surpass Britain and France. By 2035, it should have caught up with the United States.
The United States remains far and away the greatest military power on Earth. But Iraq has brutally revealed the limits of American "hard power."
The 2003 invasion will go down in the textbooks for the brilliance of its execution. But despite spending $5 billion a month, and 140,000 troops on the ground, the United States can not ensure stability or security in Iraq.
Instead, Iraq has stretched the United States' all-volunteer military close to the breaking point. Washington intends to cut that force by a third this year. In truth, it has no choice.
BUSH'S BETRAYAL OF THE MILITARY
George W. Bush lied us into a war and sent our troops in harm's way unnecessarily, which is the greatest crime. But now we learn that the Pentagon has failed to even supply adequate body armor, which could have saved countless lives of soldiers with wounds in the upper body. Bush likes to do his photo-ops with the troops, he likes to stage stunts like landing on aircraft carriers, and use tough cowboy rhetoric, but he fails to even adequately supply the troops. This article by Michael Moss is at www.nytimes.com:
A secret Pentagon study has found that at least 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to their upper body could have survived if they had extra body armor. That armor has been available since 2003 but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection, according to military officials.
The ceramic plates in vests currently worn by the majority of military personnel in Iraq cover only some of the chest and back. In at least 74 of the 93 fatal wounds that were analyzed in the Pentagon study of marines from March 2003 through June 2005, bullets and shrapnel struck the marines' shoulders, sides or areas of the torso where the plates do not reach.
Thirty-one of the deadly wounds struck the chest or back so close to the plates that simply enlarging the existing shields "would have had the potential to alter the fatal outcome," according to the study, which was obtained by The New York Times.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
JANUARY 5, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
WHAT BUSH IS REALLY SAYING
When George W. Bush admitted that he had violated the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and said he would continue to violate it to "protect" the country what he was really saying that he can arbitrarily violate his Constitutional oath of office. He's commander-in-chief, you see, in a "time of war," so the rules don't apply anymore. I don't remember any asterisks in the Constitution saying the Bill of Rights apply except in a time of war. If anything, the Bill of Rights should be adhered to even more strongly when national security is at risk. Gene Lyons takes a look in this column linked at www.nwanews.com:
Every time George W. Bush gets caught in a tight spot, he does the same thing : He plays the 9 / 11 fear card, wraps himself in the flag, emits jawdropping falsehoods and all but accuses his critics of treason. So it is with the stunning revelation that the White House has ordered the illegal, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens in brazen defiance of federal law and the U. S. Constitution. If allowed to stand, Bush’s actions will have taken the United States a long way down the road to military dictatorship. Indeed, that’s essentially what his legalistic enablers, starting with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Vice President Dick Cheney, argue : that in wartime, the commander-in-chief can take any action he deems appropriate to protect the nation, bypassing Congress and the courts to assert the primacy of the presidency until declaring victory in the “war on terror.” As terrorism is not an enemy, but a tactic—a vile, cowardly tactic, but by definition not subject to being defeated—the metaphorical war against it could last indefinitely. And as long as it lasts, the commander-in-chief rules by fiat. Our constitutional rights exist at his sufferance.
THE DARK SIDE OF THE AMERICAN ECONOMY
Politicians like to crow about favorable statistics. The GDP grew a certain percentage in the last quarter. A certain percentage of Americans own their own homes, and on it goes. If people like George W. Bush were giving the full picture, they would also mention the percentage of people who live in poverty, the percentage of children who go to bed hungry, and the number of Americans who don't have health insurance. In this article César Chelala looks at the less publicized side of the U.S. economy. The article is linked at www.commondreams.org:
Although there are several federal and state social-benefit systems in the U.S., a variety of obstacles, such as the high cost of health care and the lack of adequate housing, leads people further into poverty and becomes an abuse of their human rights. Official statistics show that 12.7 percent (or 37 million) of the population in the U.S. lived in poverty in 2004, while 15.7 percent (45.8 million) lacked health-insurance coverage; 11.9 percent of households (comprising 38.2 million people, including 13.9 million children) experienced food insecurity.
It is estimated that 33 million Americans continue to live in households without an adequate supply of food. According to statistics from the Bread for the World Institute, 3.5 percent of U.S. households experience hunger (9.6 million people, including 3 million children.) Children are a disproportionate share of the poor in the U.S. Although they are 26 percent of the total population, they constitute 39 percent of the poor.
IMPEACH BUSH
WHAT BUSH IS REALLY SAYING
When George W. Bush admitted that he had violated the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and said he would continue to violate it to "protect" the country what he was really saying that he can arbitrarily violate his Constitutional oath of office. He's commander-in-chief, you see, in a "time of war," so the rules don't apply anymore. I don't remember any asterisks in the Constitution saying the Bill of Rights apply except in a time of war. If anything, the Bill of Rights should be adhered to even more strongly when national security is at risk. Gene Lyons takes a look in this column linked at www.nwanews.com:
Every time George W. Bush gets caught in a tight spot, he does the same thing : He plays the 9 / 11 fear card, wraps himself in the flag, emits jawdropping falsehoods and all but accuses his critics of treason. So it is with the stunning revelation that the White House has ordered the illegal, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens in brazen defiance of federal law and the U. S. Constitution. If allowed to stand, Bush’s actions will have taken the United States a long way down the road to military dictatorship. Indeed, that’s essentially what his legalistic enablers, starting with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Vice President Dick Cheney, argue : that in wartime, the commander-in-chief can take any action he deems appropriate to protect the nation, bypassing Congress and the courts to assert the primacy of the presidency until declaring victory in the “war on terror.” As terrorism is not an enemy, but a tactic—a vile, cowardly tactic, but by definition not subject to being defeated—the metaphorical war against it could last indefinitely. And as long as it lasts, the commander-in-chief rules by fiat. Our constitutional rights exist at his sufferance.
THE DARK SIDE OF THE AMERICAN ECONOMY
Politicians like to crow about favorable statistics. The GDP grew a certain percentage in the last quarter. A certain percentage of Americans own their own homes, and on it goes. If people like George W. Bush were giving the full picture, they would also mention the percentage of people who live in poverty, the percentage of children who go to bed hungry, and the number of Americans who don't have health insurance. In this article César Chelala looks at the less publicized side of the U.S. economy. The article is linked at www.commondreams.org:
Although there are several federal and state social-benefit systems in the U.S., a variety of obstacles, such as the high cost of health care and the lack of adequate housing, leads people further into poverty and becomes an abuse of their human rights. Official statistics show that 12.7 percent (or 37 million) of the population in the U.S. lived in poverty in 2004, while 15.7 percent (45.8 million) lacked health-insurance coverage; 11.9 percent of households (comprising 38.2 million people, including 13.9 million children) experienced food insecurity.
It is estimated that 33 million Americans continue to live in households without an adequate supply of food. According to statistics from the Bread for the World Institute, 3.5 percent of U.S. households experience hunger (9.6 million people, including 3 million children.) Children are a disproportionate share of the poor in the U.S. Although they are 26 percent of the total population, they constitute 39 percent of the poor.
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
JANUARY 4, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
ANYTHING FOR A BUCK
The mining disaster in West Virginia that killed twelve miners reminds us that under the Bush administration and its ideology of cutting regulations this is what we get. Big corporations pay pocket change in fines for gross safety violations. And the lives of workers are put at risk so the people who own the mining companies can enhance their profit margins. This item from David Sirota is at www.workingforchange.com:
EXCLUSIVE: Bush ignored explicit warnings in 2002 about mine safety
The tragic news about the death of 12 mine workers this week has brought up all sorts of questions about the Bush administration's record protecting mine workers. Back in 2002, I was working for the House Appropriations Committee. At the time, you may recall there was a big mining accident in Western Pennsylvania. President Bush held a big photo-op to pretend like he cared - but he never responded to the fact sheet that House Democrats put out questioning why he had made so many cuts to mine safety programs.
CONGRESS: LET GEORGE DO IT
As Maureen Dowd points out in this column, many members of Congress have adopted a totally laissez-faire attitude toward their advise and consent function in the federal government. They are more interested in getting perks from big time lobbyists like Jack Abramoff and living the good life than in actually fulfilling their Constitutional duties. This column is at www.topplebush.com:
Think about it: all those congressmen don't really need to do their jobs anymore. With the president able to make war more or less as he chooses, treat the enemy as he sees fit and snoop on Americans at will, our representatives have more time for the duty many are clearly best suited to: playing golf gratis in Scotland. (Remember how the White House press used to give poor Bill Clinton such a hard time about mere mulligans?)
Now that Dick Cheney has freed Congress from the bother of advising and/or consenting, lawmakers can work on new ways to game the system and wallow in the G.O.P.'s culture of corruption - while tut-tutting about the decline in American moral values.
Since the Republican-run Capitol doesn't have to worry about holding the Bush White House accountable for excesses in torture and spying and the other myriad ways it has placed itself above the law, congressmen have more leisure hours for Abramoff successors to treat them to some Redskins games and steak dinners.
ENDLESS WAR, UNCHECKED POWER
George W. Bush has frequently talked about the "war on terror." The whole concept is ludicrous, of course. Terrorists are criminals. You can no more win a war on terror than you can win a war on crime. All you can really do is contain it. You can search out and apprehend the criminals and process them through the appropriate legal machinery. But by declaring a "war on terror" Bush and his minions have been trying to stretch Constitutional boundaries to give Bush unchecked power in his role as commander-in-chief. This is an interesting commentary by Tom Engelhardt is at www.commondreams.org:
This is why the announcement of (and definition of) the "global war on terror" almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks was so important. It was to be a "war" without end. No one ever attempted to define what "victory" might actually consist of, though we were assured that the war itself would, like the Cold War, last generations. Even the recent sudden presidential announcement that we will now settle only for "complete victory" in Iraq is, in this context, a distinctly limited goal because Iraq has already been defined as but a single "theater" (though a "central" one) in a larger war on terror. A war without end, of course, left the President as a commander-in-chief-without-end and it was in such a guise that the acolytes of that "obscure philosophy" of total presidential power planned to claim their "inherent" constitutional right to do essentially anything. (Imagine what might have happened if their invasion of Iraq had been a success!)
IMPEACH BUSH
ANYTHING FOR A BUCK
The mining disaster in West Virginia that killed twelve miners reminds us that under the Bush administration and its ideology of cutting regulations this is what we get. Big corporations pay pocket change in fines for gross safety violations. And the lives of workers are put at risk so the people who own the mining companies can enhance their profit margins. This item from David Sirota is at www.workingforchange.com:
EXCLUSIVE: Bush ignored explicit warnings in 2002 about mine safety
The tragic news about the death of 12 mine workers this week has brought up all sorts of questions about the Bush administration's record protecting mine workers. Back in 2002, I was working for the House Appropriations Committee. At the time, you may recall there was a big mining accident in Western Pennsylvania. President Bush held a big photo-op to pretend like he cared - but he never responded to the fact sheet that House Democrats put out questioning why he had made so many cuts to mine safety programs.
CONGRESS: LET GEORGE DO IT
As Maureen Dowd points out in this column, many members of Congress have adopted a totally laissez-faire attitude toward their advise and consent function in the federal government. They are more interested in getting perks from big time lobbyists like Jack Abramoff and living the good life than in actually fulfilling their Constitutional duties. This column is at www.topplebush.com:
Think about it: all those congressmen don't really need to do their jobs anymore. With the president able to make war more or less as he chooses, treat the enemy as he sees fit and snoop on Americans at will, our representatives have more time for the duty many are clearly best suited to: playing golf gratis in Scotland. (Remember how the White House press used to give poor Bill Clinton such a hard time about mere mulligans?)
Now that Dick Cheney has freed Congress from the bother of advising and/or consenting, lawmakers can work on new ways to game the system and wallow in the G.O.P.'s culture of corruption - while tut-tutting about the decline in American moral values.
Since the Republican-run Capitol doesn't have to worry about holding the Bush White House accountable for excesses in torture and spying and the other myriad ways it has placed itself above the law, congressmen have more leisure hours for Abramoff successors to treat them to some Redskins games and steak dinners.
ENDLESS WAR, UNCHECKED POWER
George W. Bush has frequently talked about the "war on terror." The whole concept is ludicrous, of course. Terrorists are criminals. You can no more win a war on terror than you can win a war on crime. All you can really do is contain it. You can search out and apprehend the criminals and process them through the appropriate legal machinery. But by declaring a "war on terror" Bush and his minions have been trying to stretch Constitutional boundaries to give Bush unchecked power in his role as commander-in-chief. This is an interesting commentary by Tom Engelhardt is at www.commondreams.org:
This is why the announcement of (and definition of) the "global war on terror" almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks was so important. It was to be a "war" without end. No one ever attempted to define what "victory" might actually consist of, though we were assured that the war itself would, like the Cold War, last generations. Even the recent sudden presidential announcement that we will now settle only for "complete victory" in Iraq is, in this context, a distinctly limited goal because Iraq has already been defined as but a single "theater" (though a "central" one) in a larger war on terror. A war without end, of course, left the President as a commander-in-chief-without-end and it was in such a guise that the acolytes of that "obscure philosophy" of total presidential power planned to claim their "inherent" constitutional right to do essentially anything. (Imagine what might have happened if their invasion of Iraq had been a success!)
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
JANUARY 3, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
TALKING ABOUT FIFTH COLUMNISTS
Today's Fresno Bee featured a letter from a right-winger wailing about the "fifth column" in the media that says George W. Bush lied about Iraq and other matters. I think the real fifth columnists are the people who continue to support Bush even though he obviously lied about the war in Iraq and has consistently violated the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. It depends on what kind of country you want. Do you want the United States that existed prior to September 11, or do you want to live in a totalitarian country that is little different from the old Soviet Union?
MORE PROOF BUSH LIED ABOUT IRAQ
A new book by a New York Times reporter presents even more evidence that the CIA and the Bush administration knew there were no WMDs in Iraq. Maybe the right-winger I mentioned above has some other word for "lie," but as Gertrude Stein might have said, a lie is a lie is a lie. This story is from www.makethemaccountable.com:
A new book on the government's secret anti-terrorism operations describes how the CIA recruited an Iraqi-American anesthesiologist in 2002 to obtain information from her brother, who was a figure in Saddam Hussein's nuclear program.
Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad of Cleveland made the dangerous trip to Iraq on the CIA's behalf. The book said her brother was stunned by her questions about the nuclear program because — he said — it had been dead for a decade.
New York Times reporter James Risen uses the anecdote to illustrate how the CIA ignored information that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction. His book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration" describes secret operations of the Bush administration's war on terrorism.
The major revelation in the book has already been the subject of extensive reporting by Risen's newspaper: the National Security Agency's eavesdropping of Americans' conversations without obtaining warrants from a special court.
BUSH'S CONSISTENT LYING
George W. Bush is on videotape stating that, of course, the government would seek a warrant before doing any surveillance on American citizens. This is a tacit admission that a warrant is required to do the kind of spying Bush now claims is absolutely essential to American security--so much, in fact, that he has to run around the FISA court. This statement on videotape also came after Bush had already been illegally spying on Americans. This article by Robert Parry is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
George W. Bush's dysfunctional relationship with the truth seems to be shaped by two complementary factors - a personal compulsion to say whatever makes him look good at that moment and a permissive environment that rarely holds him accountable for his lies.
How else to explain his endless attempts to rewrite history and reshape his own statements, a pattern on display again in his New Year's Day comments to reporters in San Antonio, Texas? In that session, as Bush denied misleading the public, he twice again misled the public.
Bush launched into a defense of his honesty by denying that he lied when he told a crowd in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2004 that "by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires - a wiretap requires a court order."
Two years earlier, Bush had approved rules that freed the National Security Agency to use warrantless wiretaps on communications originating in the United States without a court order. But Bush still told the Buffalo audience, "Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."
IMPEACH BUSH
TALKING ABOUT FIFTH COLUMNISTS
Today's Fresno Bee featured a letter from a right-winger wailing about the "fifth column" in the media that says George W. Bush lied about Iraq and other matters. I think the real fifth columnists are the people who continue to support Bush even though he obviously lied about the war in Iraq and has consistently violated the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. It depends on what kind of country you want. Do you want the United States that existed prior to September 11, or do you want to live in a totalitarian country that is little different from the old Soviet Union?
MORE PROOF BUSH LIED ABOUT IRAQ
A new book by a New York Times reporter presents even more evidence that the CIA and the Bush administration knew there were no WMDs in Iraq. Maybe the right-winger I mentioned above has some other word for "lie," but as Gertrude Stein might have said, a lie is a lie is a lie. This story is from www.makethemaccountable.com:
A new book on the government's secret anti-terrorism operations describes how the CIA recruited an Iraqi-American anesthesiologist in 2002 to obtain information from her brother, who was a figure in Saddam Hussein's nuclear program.
Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad of Cleveland made the dangerous trip to Iraq on the CIA's behalf. The book said her brother was stunned by her questions about the nuclear program because — he said — it had been dead for a decade.
New York Times reporter James Risen uses the anecdote to illustrate how the CIA ignored information that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction. His book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration" describes secret operations of the Bush administration's war on terrorism.
The major revelation in the book has already been the subject of extensive reporting by Risen's newspaper: the National Security Agency's eavesdropping of Americans' conversations without obtaining warrants from a special court.
BUSH'S CONSISTENT LYING
George W. Bush is on videotape stating that, of course, the government would seek a warrant before doing any surveillance on American citizens. This is a tacit admission that a warrant is required to do the kind of spying Bush now claims is absolutely essential to American security--so much, in fact, that he has to run around the FISA court. This statement on videotape also came after Bush had already been illegally spying on Americans. This article by Robert Parry is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
George W. Bush's dysfunctional relationship with the truth seems to be shaped by two complementary factors - a personal compulsion to say whatever makes him look good at that moment and a permissive environment that rarely holds him accountable for his lies.
How else to explain his endless attempts to rewrite history and reshape his own statements, a pattern on display again in his New Year's Day comments to reporters in San Antonio, Texas? In that session, as Bush denied misleading the public, he twice again misled the public.
Bush launched into a defense of his honesty by denying that he lied when he told a crowd in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2004 that "by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires - a wiretap requires a court order."
Two years earlier, Bush had approved rules that freed the National Security Agency to use warrantless wiretaps on communications originating in the United States without a court order. But Bush still told the Buffalo audience, "Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."
Monday, January 02, 2006
JANUARY 2, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
2005: A ROTTEN YEAR UNDER BUSH
You have to wonder what parallel universe diehard Bush supporters reside in. These are the people with the floppy shoes and the big red noses who think Bush is doing a wonderful job. Just what has this guy done that is good for the country or for the world? We know about the lousy economy, the crummy record on the environment, the lies that got us into a war in Iraq and that have gotten thousands of innocent people killed, the war crimes such as using white phosphorus, the use of torture and even attempts to legalize torture, the utter incompetence at dealing with Hurricane Katrina and the havoc in New Orleans, and the egregious violation of the Constitution in illegal spying on American citizens. Rob Kall writes about it in this article at www.makethemaccountable.com:
The horrific fall of the most basic rights and strengths of America-- democracy, privacy, truth and trust in government, transparency-- did not happen at once. But 2005 was the year when we the people, and the rest of the world were finally able to see clearly that the Bush Administration and its rubber stamp republican sycophants were not just a little, but outrageously, historically corrupt, brazenly breaking laws and flaunting their criminal actions.
2005 was the year when Bush decided he could declare his illegal actions. Perhaps he's appointed enough judges to make him feel safe that they will rule in his favor.
2005 was the year that the truth came out that the job of the Justice department to prevent bad laws from being implemented at the state level was blocked by political appointees who over-ruled career appointees who said laws allowing gerrymandering in Texas and pricey voter ID cards in Georgia should be illegal. This will forever cast a negative light on Attorney's General Gonzalez and Ashcroft. These two are running an agency that should be investigating and incarcerating them.
UNFETTERED POWER
When it was revealed that George W. Bush had broken the law in doing an end around the FISA court--illegally spying on American citizens--Bush admitted he had broken the law, said he would break it again, and claimed that the leak about his actions were "shameful." He went even further and claimed that Congress had given him the go-ahead to break the law when Congress passed the Iraq war resolution, even though Congress gave absolutely no authorization to ignore the FISA court. As Jonathan Schell points out in this article, if Congress allows Bush to get away with this, then Congress has ceased to be a meaningful institution. What's the point of the Constitutional system of checks and balances when Congress totally abdicates its responsibility? This article is at www.thenation.com:
Bush's choice marks a watershed in the evolution of his Administration. Previously when it was caught engaging in disgraceful, illegal or merely mistaken or incompetent behavior, he would simply deny it. "We have found the weapons of mass destruction!" "We do not torture!" However, further developments in the torture matter revealed a shift. Even as he denied the existence of torture, he and his officials began to defend his right to order it. His Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, refused at his confirmation hearings to state that the torture called waterboarding, in which someone is brought to the edge of drowning, was prohibited. Then when Senator John McCain sponsored a bill prohibiting cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners, Bush threatened to veto the legislation to which it was attached. It was only in the face of majority votes in both houses against such treatment that he retreated from his claim.
But in the wiretapping matter, he has so far exhibited no such vacillation. Secret law-breaking has been supplanted by brazen law-breaking. The difference is critical. If abuses of power are kept secret, there is still the possibility that, when exposed, they will be stopped. But if they are exposed and still permitted to continue, then every remedy has failed, and the abuse is permanently ratified. In this case, what will be ratified is a presidency that has risen above the law.
TRULY HONORING THE VICTIMS OF 9/11
George W. Bush can't go very far into a speech without mentioning 9/11 and how it changed "everything." But did it really? It was a horrific and murderous act, but the world goes on. What did change was the way our government behaves. The attacks on 9/11 have been used by the Bush administration as a permission slip to destroy fiscal sanity, to declare preemptive war, to torture, to commit war crimes, and to shred the Bill of Rights. Is that the kind of legacy the victims of 9/11 would have wanted? Shouldn't we instead be making the Bill of Rights even stronger and more meaningful? Shouldn't we be pursuing a course that truly makes the United States the shining city on the hill? In this article Bud A. McClure speaks out for the Bill of Rights. The article is at www.commondreams.org:
To much of the world we have become a monster. Lying, killing, and torturing are now justified and accepted by many Americans as necessary ingredients to keep us safe from another 9/11. We are an uglier, meaner, less compassionate country. In letters to editors around the country people routinely support and even advocate for more control, more sanctions, more government intrusion into our lives. Have we lost our minds? We have certainly lost our way.
I don't want to live in a country where anyone's rights are abridged, even terrorists. Where the government operates in secrecy and abuses it power and it's people. Where the president can commit crimes and not be held accountable. I don't give a damn about living securely if I have to give up one tiny bit of my freedom guaranteed by our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Not one bit!! In this regard I consider myself in line with the patriots of New Hampshire whose motto "Live Free or Die" is right on! There can be no erosion of these Rights if we are to remain free. These Rights are the bedrock of our security, of our freedoms, and our liberty. Let's reaffirm those rights for everyone, especially those who died back in 2001.
Let's sing Auld Lang Syne to the term 9/11.
IMPEACH BUSH
2005: A ROTTEN YEAR UNDER BUSH
You have to wonder what parallel universe diehard Bush supporters reside in. These are the people with the floppy shoes and the big red noses who think Bush is doing a wonderful job. Just what has this guy done that is good for the country or for the world? We know about the lousy economy, the crummy record on the environment, the lies that got us into a war in Iraq and that have gotten thousands of innocent people killed, the war crimes such as using white phosphorus, the use of torture and even attempts to legalize torture, the utter incompetence at dealing with Hurricane Katrina and the havoc in New Orleans, and the egregious violation of the Constitution in illegal spying on American citizens. Rob Kall writes about it in this article at www.makethemaccountable.com:
The horrific fall of the most basic rights and strengths of America-- democracy, privacy, truth and trust in government, transparency-- did not happen at once. But 2005 was the year when we the people, and the rest of the world were finally able to see clearly that the Bush Administration and its rubber stamp republican sycophants were not just a little, but outrageously, historically corrupt, brazenly breaking laws and flaunting their criminal actions.
2005 was the year when Bush decided he could declare his illegal actions. Perhaps he's appointed enough judges to make him feel safe that they will rule in his favor.
2005 was the year that the truth came out that the job of the Justice department to prevent bad laws from being implemented at the state level was blocked by political appointees who over-ruled career appointees who said laws allowing gerrymandering in Texas and pricey voter ID cards in Georgia should be illegal. This will forever cast a negative light on Attorney's General Gonzalez and Ashcroft. These two are running an agency that should be investigating and incarcerating them.
UNFETTERED POWER
When it was revealed that George W. Bush had broken the law in doing an end around the FISA court--illegally spying on American citizens--Bush admitted he had broken the law, said he would break it again, and claimed that the leak about his actions were "shameful." He went even further and claimed that Congress had given him the go-ahead to break the law when Congress passed the Iraq war resolution, even though Congress gave absolutely no authorization to ignore the FISA court. As Jonathan Schell points out in this article, if Congress allows Bush to get away with this, then Congress has ceased to be a meaningful institution. What's the point of the Constitutional system of checks and balances when Congress totally abdicates its responsibility? This article is at www.thenation.com:
Bush's choice marks a watershed in the evolution of his Administration. Previously when it was caught engaging in disgraceful, illegal or merely mistaken or incompetent behavior, he would simply deny it. "We have found the weapons of mass destruction!" "We do not torture!" However, further developments in the torture matter revealed a shift. Even as he denied the existence of torture, he and his officials began to defend his right to order it. His Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, refused at his confirmation hearings to state that the torture called waterboarding, in which someone is brought to the edge of drowning, was prohibited. Then when Senator John McCain sponsored a bill prohibiting cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners, Bush threatened to veto the legislation to which it was attached. It was only in the face of majority votes in both houses against such treatment that he retreated from his claim.
But in the wiretapping matter, he has so far exhibited no such vacillation. Secret law-breaking has been supplanted by brazen law-breaking. The difference is critical. If abuses of power are kept secret, there is still the possibility that, when exposed, they will be stopped. But if they are exposed and still permitted to continue, then every remedy has failed, and the abuse is permanently ratified. In this case, what will be ratified is a presidency that has risen above the law.
TRULY HONORING THE VICTIMS OF 9/11
George W. Bush can't go very far into a speech without mentioning 9/11 and how it changed "everything." But did it really? It was a horrific and murderous act, but the world goes on. What did change was the way our government behaves. The attacks on 9/11 have been used by the Bush administration as a permission slip to destroy fiscal sanity, to declare preemptive war, to torture, to commit war crimes, and to shred the Bill of Rights. Is that the kind of legacy the victims of 9/11 would have wanted? Shouldn't we instead be making the Bill of Rights even stronger and more meaningful? Shouldn't we be pursuing a course that truly makes the United States the shining city on the hill? In this article Bud A. McClure speaks out for the Bill of Rights. The article is at www.commondreams.org:
To much of the world we have become a monster. Lying, killing, and torturing are now justified and accepted by many Americans as necessary ingredients to keep us safe from another 9/11. We are an uglier, meaner, less compassionate country. In letters to editors around the country people routinely support and even advocate for more control, more sanctions, more government intrusion into our lives. Have we lost our minds? We have certainly lost our way.
I don't want to live in a country where anyone's rights are abridged, even terrorists. Where the government operates in secrecy and abuses it power and it's people. Where the president can commit crimes and not be held accountable. I don't give a damn about living securely if I have to give up one tiny bit of my freedom guaranteed by our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Not one bit!! In this regard I consider myself in line with the patriots of New Hampshire whose motto "Live Free or Die" is right on! There can be no erosion of these Rights if we are to remain free. These Rights are the bedrock of our security, of our freedoms, and our liberty. Let's reaffirm those rights for everyone, especially those who died back in 2001.
Let's sing Auld Lang Syne to the term 9/11.
Sunday, January 01, 2006
JANUARY 1, 2006
IMPEACH BUSH
THE DELAY-ABRAMOFF DUO
Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay weren't quite Martin and Lewis, but they had quite an interlocking relationship, according to a new story in The Washington Post. DeLay may be one of the most corrupt members in the history of Congress, and he is just a reflection of the current Republican party. This story by R. Jeffrey Smith is at www.washingtonpost.com:
The U.S. Family Network, a public advocacy group that operated in the 1990s with close ties to Rep. Tom DeLay and claimed to be a nationwide grass-roots organization, was funded almost entirely by corporations linked to embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to tax records and former associates of the group.
During its five-year existence, the U.S. Family Network raised $2.5 million but kept its donor list secret. The list, obtained by The Washington Post, shows that $1 million of its revenue came in a single 1998 check from a now-defunct London law firm whose former partners would not identify the money's origins.
BUSH LIKES SOME LEAKS, NOT OTHERS
George W. Bush is in high dudgeon over the leak about a secret program to illegally spy on American citizens in violation of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment. He has appointed a special prosecutor to sniff out the leaker. Mr. Bush has not been so outraged, however, at the leak of CIA agent's Valerie Plame's name. Maybe Bush is only concerned about leaks that reveal his own criminality. This item comes from www.ostroyreport.blogspot.com/#123105
Here's the scenario: our over-zealous, corrupt president flicks the switch some three-dozen times since 2001, authorizing the National Security Agency to use illegal wiretaps and other surveillance tactics on American citizens to supposedly intercept terrorist chatter and protect the nation from acts of terrorism. And when news of this flagrant violation of Congressional law finds its way to the front pages, as it did Dec. 16 in the NY Times, Bush's ire is raised and a special prosecutor is soon named to investigate the leak. Why? Because as we all know, Bush hates leaks and the leakers who leak them. Except of course when they're card-carrying Busheviks, in which case leaks are just fine. The hypocrisy is mind-blowing.
As reported in the Times Saturday, the Justice Department announced Friday that it had opened a criminal investigation into the leak about Bush's secret eavesdropping scheme. Incredulously, the DOJ finds it more appropriate to legally pursue the whistle-blowers than those who may have committed the original crime.
THE LOUSY TREATMENT OF AMERICAN WORKERS
The productivity of American workers has doubled since 1969. That should mean an increase in salaries and benefits. It's not happening under administrations such as George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. All the rewards go to the richest Americans. Instead, workers are working mandatory overtime, not getting paid sick leave, not getting enough vacation time, seeing health care insurance costs soar, and either having no pensions or having their pension funds raided. It's time to get rid of these Republican monsters and get leadership that will represent working people. This article by Joe Robinson is at www.latimes.com:
IT WAS A GREAT YEAR for labor — if you worked at a call center in India, made your living as a CEO or sold real estate to big-box stores. But deep in Cubicle Nation, the average American worker remained on a fast track to the Industrial Revolution, with soaring workweeks, declining wages and health, pension and vacation benefits vanishing faster than you can say job security.
Add to the siege outsourcing, cutbacks, the dismantling of ergonomics rules and forced overtime — all while business is racking up historic profits — and even a nearsighted dingo could see that the trends are unsustainable for families, personal health, company medical plans or an informed and involved citizenry. And completely unnecessary.
IMPEACH BUSH
THE DELAY-ABRAMOFF DUO
Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay weren't quite Martin and Lewis, but they had quite an interlocking relationship, according to a new story in The Washington Post. DeLay may be one of the most corrupt members in the history of Congress, and he is just a reflection of the current Republican party. This story by R. Jeffrey Smith is at www.washingtonpost.com:
The U.S. Family Network, a public advocacy group that operated in the 1990s with close ties to Rep. Tom DeLay and claimed to be a nationwide grass-roots organization, was funded almost entirely by corporations linked to embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to tax records and former associates of the group.
During its five-year existence, the U.S. Family Network raised $2.5 million but kept its donor list secret. The list, obtained by The Washington Post, shows that $1 million of its revenue came in a single 1998 check from a now-defunct London law firm whose former partners would not identify the money's origins.
BUSH LIKES SOME LEAKS, NOT OTHERS
George W. Bush is in high dudgeon over the leak about a secret program to illegally spy on American citizens in violation of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment. He has appointed a special prosecutor to sniff out the leaker. Mr. Bush has not been so outraged, however, at the leak of CIA agent's Valerie Plame's name. Maybe Bush is only concerned about leaks that reveal his own criminality. This item comes from www.ostroyreport.blogspot.com/#123105
Here's the scenario: our over-zealous, corrupt president flicks the switch some three-dozen times since 2001, authorizing the National Security Agency to use illegal wiretaps and other surveillance tactics on American citizens to supposedly intercept terrorist chatter and protect the nation from acts of terrorism. And when news of this flagrant violation of Congressional law finds its way to the front pages, as it did Dec. 16 in the NY Times, Bush's ire is raised and a special prosecutor is soon named to investigate the leak. Why? Because as we all know, Bush hates leaks and the leakers who leak them. Except of course when they're card-carrying Busheviks, in which case leaks are just fine. The hypocrisy is mind-blowing.
As reported in the Times Saturday, the Justice Department announced Friday that it had opened a criminal investigation into the leak about Bush's secret eavesdropping scheme. Incredulously, the DOJ finds it more appropriate to legally pursue the whistle-blowers than those who may have committed the original crime.
THE LOUSY TREATMENT OF AMERICAN WORKERS
The productivity of American workers has doubled since 1969. That should mean an increase in salaries and benefits. It's not happening under administrations such as George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. All the rewards go to the richest Americans. Instead, workers are working mandatory overtime, not getting paid sick leave, not getting enough vacation time, seeing health care insurance costs soar, and either having no pensions or having their pension funds raided. It's time to get rid of these Republican monsters and get leadership that will represent working people. This article by Joe Robinson is at www.latimes.com:
IT WAS A GREAT YEAR for labor — if you worked at a call center in India, made your living as a CEO or sold real estate to big-box stores. But deep in Cubicle Nation, the average American worker remained on a fast track to the Industrial Revolution, with soaring workweeks, declining wages and health, pension and vacation benefits vanishing faster than you can say job security.
Add to the siege outsourcing, cutbacks, the dismantling of ergonomics rules and forced overtime — all while business is racking up historic profits — and even a nearsighted dingo could see that the trends are unsustainable for families, personal health, company medical plans or an informed and involved citizenry. And completely unnecessary.
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