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POSTED 8/25/08
Text 622246 (McCain)...
In response to Barack Obama
successful campaign to get supporters to sign up for breaking news via
their cell phones, Arizona Senator John McCain has countered with his
own hot-n-sexy, all-the-kids-are-doing-it,
is-this-like-on-the-internets? text message initiative.
Text POW to 622246 in order
to be reminded that Republican Presumptive nominee John McCain was once
A PRISONER OF WAR FOR FIVE YEARS.
Text STOP in order to not
have this message sent to you every six minutes, but this will not take
effect until at least nine weeks AFTER election day.
Text STAFF to 622246 in
order to be the first to help Senator McCain answer simple questions
like, "Is your shirt green?", "What's your middle name?", and "Who just
farted?"
Text MITTENS to 622242 in
order to be the first to see Mit Romney walking Senator McCain's dog,
shampooing Senator McCain's carpet, and listening to Cindy McCain
complain about poor people in the hopes of becoming Senator McCain's
Vice Presidential Nominee.
Text PIMP MI HOWZ! to 622246
in order to find out in which of John McCain's four... er six... um
seven... well, eight houses the Senator will be sleeping in this
evening.
Text GET OFF ONE OF MY MANY
LAWNZ to 622246 in order to be the first to know when the Republican
nominee has sold one of those houses in order to try and get within
three... er four... um, six... well, seven houses of the rest of
America.
Text FREE MEDIA PLEASE to
622242 in order to be the millionth to know that John McCain has
released a web-based hit-piece on Senator Obama that they have no
intention of actually running in any market more expensive than Fond du
Lac, Wisconsin.
Text MY FRIENDS MY FRIENDS MY
FRIENDS when your enthusiasm for Senator McCain, my friends, reaches
"Kissing Your Sister" levels to be reminded, my friends, of the other
terrible choices Republicans could have nominated this year, my friends.
Text WHOLESOME BRAN MUFFIN to
622246 in order to be the first to know if the Senile Senator from
the Senior State of Arizona has pooped this week. |
POSTED 8/8/08
Apparently determined to let no visit by his opponent go
unchallenged, Sen. John McCain descended on Michigan today just one day
after Sen. Barack Obama visited the state’s capital.
McCain’s Tuesday afternoon visit to the Fermi II nuclear
plant in Republican-leaning Monroe County to support nuclear energy,
where he was joined by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., was closed to the
public and the press.
“Solving our national energy crisis requires an ‘all of
the above’ approach,” read McCain’s prepared remarks, released to the
media. “That will require aggressive development of alternative energies
like wind, solar, tidal and bio-fuels. It also requires expanding
traditional sources of energy like off shore drilling, clean coal, and
nuclear power like the power produced at this plant here in Michigan.”
McCain’s visit was the latest in a recent string of
Michigan appearances by the presumed Republican nominee.
“I’d be willing to guess — and this is strictly a guess —
that his appearance has to do with the Obama appearance yesterday,” said
University of Michigan political research scientist William Jacoby.
“They believe this is a state open to competition. It’s tit for tat. I
think that’s exactly what they’re doing.”
Gauging from the steady drumbeat of campaign appearances
by both candidates over the last two months, Michigan is clearly viewed
as a contested state. Voters here have supported the Democratic
candidate for president in every election since 1992. Yet McCain won the
state’s Republican presidential primary in 2000, and Leah Yoon, McCain’s
regional communications director, said last month that “Michigan is a
state which we believe is within striking distance of winning in
November.”
Both campaigns have been flooding the state with costly
television ads. According to the nonprofit organization Michigan
Campaign Finance Network, by July 20 McCain had spent $3.2 million on TV
advertising in the state, while by July 28 Obama had spent $2.7 million.
Former McCain rival and native son Mitt Romney has been stumping heavily
for McCain and is widely believed to be on a short list of potential
vice presidential nominees, valued for his appeal to the party’s right
wing but especially for his Michigan roots. (Jonathan Martin at Politico
reports that McCain is leaning toward announcing his veep choice after
Obama’s speech at the Democratic convention on Aug. 28.)
But Jacoby said Michigan’s blue leanings and bad economy
mean all the love McCain is showing Michiganders is likely to go
unrequited.
“I’m really surprised at the money McCain is investing
here,” he said. “I don’t think it’s likely McCain will win this state. I
think any Democratic state is going to go Democratic this year.”
The visit to Fermi II, an 1,130-megawatt boiling water
reactor near Lake Erie, was an opportunity for McCain to showcase his
support for nuclear energy, which he believes will help the United
States reduce its dependence on foreign oil. The candidate has called
for the construction of 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030 and points
to France, which gets about 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear
sources, as a model of how to successfully harness nuclear power.
Yet in some respects, Fermi II is an odd location for
McCain to highlight the nuclear power’s benefits: the plant site’s
original reactor, Fermi I, had a partial meltdown in the 1960s and was
decommissioned in 1972. It was forced to make an emergency shutdown this
year when two water pumps failed.
THERE'S MORE -- GO TO
MICHIGAN MESSENGER |
POSTED: 7/27/08
"The World's Most Popular
Politician"
is what the
UK Independent called Barack Obama today:
Gordon Brown's political nightmare will
continue to haunt him today when he welcomes to
Downing Street the man who is arguably the
world's most popular politician.
That famous
lime green backdrop McCain used is starting to
make more sense: The green of jealousy is McCain's
natural color.
And Bush must be feeling even worse when he reads
things like this LA Times headline:
"Obama's popularity as anti-Bush is telling"
To continue with the LA Times story:
Barack Obama's electoral rival is John McCain,
but Obama's overseas trip this week has given
heartburn to another Republican -- President Bush.
...
The trip had to come as a jolt for administration
officials, said Wayne White, a senior State
Department intelligence official in Bush's first
term. "I'm sure it was a bit rattling for the
administration to see someone treated with such
deference," he said.
Diplomats are good at understatement, aren't
they?
In Israel, where back in May Bush
lambasted Obama in all but name for saying he would
try talking to the Iranians,
The Israelis said they were willing to accept
Obama's plans to talk to top Iranian leaders as a
means of exhausting diplomatic possibilities.
This is called leadership, in case you can't
recognize it any more after 8 years of Bush/Cheney.
Meanwhile, back at the Independent:
Mr Brown could have bathed in the reflected glory
of the Democratic presidential candidate by holding
a joint press conference with him today after their
scheduled 45-minute meeting. However, he is
forbidden by protocol from doing this as he did not
hold a press conference with John McCain, the
Republican candidate, last May.
M. Sarkozy threw such diplomatic niceties to the
winds yesterday, having allowed Mr McCain to answer
journalists' questions alone outside the Elysée
Palace during his visit. The French President, whose
popularity ratings are as dismal as those of Mr
Brown, clearly hoped for a "bounce" as he revelled
in the presence of Mr Obama, whom he described as
"my mate" in Le Figaro.
And the
Guardian took note of how Obama is learning to
handle McCain's "base" - the press:
The Democratic presidential candidate and his
media team turned the mood around as they travelled
from Israel to the West Bank and on to Germany and
France, with the final stop in London today. The
press corps was appeased when Obama, who prefers to
sit on planes with his iPod and press cuttings or a
book, ignoring staff and journalists, made a rare
trip to the back of the Boeing en route from Israel
to banter with reporters. Even rarer, he had an
off-the-record dinner with them, at a French
restaurant in Berlin on Thursday.
The restoration of relations with the press shows
in the coverage he received throughout the week. He
has been hailed as presidential, cable networks
covered his Berlin speech live and almost every
major US paper carried on their front pages a
picture of him in front of a crowd of 200,000 in
Berlin.
(The Guardian overlooks some of the sniping the press
still indulges in, the
New York Times, for example, calling his Berlin
speech "vague"; on the other hand, the Times did a nice
piece on his London visit, and they described his
stop in France as
"3 Hours in Paris, and Smiles All Around", with a
great photo of him and Sarkozy. So maybe things are
improving.)
And oh, yes, McCain is jealous:
"With all the breathless coverage from abroad,
and with Senator Obama now addressing his speeches
to 'the people of the world,' I'm starting to feel a
little left out," McCain said in an address focused
largely on the domestic economy. "Maybe you are,
too."
LA Times: Obama meets with British PM, turns focus
to U.S. economy
To which Obama responded:
"It doesn't strike me that we've done anything
different than what the McCain campaign has done,
which is to recognize that part of the job of being
president and commander in chief is to forge
effective relationships with our allies," he said.
A main goal of the trip, he said, was to give
allied leaders and the American public "some sense
of where an Obama administration might take our
foreign policy."
This trip will not sell the isolationists who think
we should care nothing for the world's opinion of us,
but then nothing Obama could do will sell himself to
that crowd.
So the risk paid off. Not just in establishing
Obama's credentials in foreign policy and world
leadership, but in his handling of the press. On that
last point, he has also been helped by the fact that
McCain's gaffes, stumbles and general lack of gravitas
(a/k/a boorishness) have gotten too noticeable for
everyone except
Faux Noise to ignore.
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POSTED: 7/19/08
Why The GOP Is Seriously Screwed if
Obama Wins
Everyone who pays any attention to politics knows that the GOP is on its
heels. On every issue from the war to healthcare to the environment to
the middle-class economy, the American people have sided firmly with
Democrats and progressives. The issues have always favored Democrats,
of course. But the prominence of those issues as the basis for voting
as well as the strength with which those issues clearly favor Democrats
first made itself abundantly clear in 2006.
And the same thing is likely to
happen in 2008, with the outside chance of a filibuster-proof Senate to
boot.
Republicans, however, look back to
the elections of 1992 and 1994 to believe that they can quickly spring
back from these electoral and ideological defeats in 2010 or 2012.
Perhaps they're right--but I would bet heavily against it.
If Obama wins, Republicans are screwed in more ways than they can
possibly imagine. Or then
again, perhaps they can--and they're petrified to the core. If so, we
should expect them to pull out
all
the stops to create the ugliest election we've seen in our lifetimes.
Why is this one election such a
big deal? Many, including myself, believe that we are in the midst of
a realignment year not unlike 1896 or
1932; under this scenario, Democratic victory this year would help
bring about 30+ years of Democratic dominance until the next
realignment. Yet that would be true regardless of this election's
victor, due to changing voting patterns especially among youth.
No,
this
election in particular, if it goes against the GOP, spells utter
disaster for them until and unless they utterly remake themselves as a
party. For the election of an African-American
candidate is doom to the current incarnation of Republican politics.
The beginning of the end for
Republicans, you see, was the effort to privatize social
security--combined with the outrageous waste that is the Iraq War.
Ever since FDR ran roughshod over
conservatism and the people loved him for it, the GOP has been desperate
to dismantle the extraordinarily popular New Deal. This desperation
reached a new fervor during the
Movement Conservative revolution spawned by Barry Goldwater. The
rich-get-richer, self-serving ideology of the corporate conservatives
was given the veneer of academic respectability by the
villainous influence of Milton Friedman and his
"Chicago School" neoliberal economic ideas, which saw all such
government "intrusions" into providing needed public services as evil
"distortions" in the free market, devoutly to be purged.
But the GOP had a problem:
the
New Deal was too damn popular to overturn. Even the
criminally authoritarian Richard Nixon founded the EPA, while stating
that
"we're all Keynesians now", referring to Milton Friedman's
ideological economic nemesis and New Deal proponent
John Maynard Keynes. Proponents of pro-corporate, neoliberal
ideology had to ply their disastrous ideas in places without strong
democracies or those shocked by coups and other disasters--places like
Pinochet's Chile, for example. Western Democracies, it seemed, were too
powerful and their people too used to their middle-class "good life" to
accept the feudal economic "reforms" the GOP had in mind.
But then the GOP got a gift they have been exploiting ever since:
The Civil Rights Movement.
In one fell swoop, a country with a deep and shameful history of
virulent racism was thrown into a cauldron of liberation, desegregation,
school busing, affirmative action that was the perfect tool for the rich
overlords to use to divide the angry white American masses long enough
to fool them into voting against their own interests.
Indeed, as many political
scientists
including Thomas Schaller have painstakingly pointed out, the
Republican rise to electoral dominance was almost purely a by-product of
stoking racial resentments. The liberal attempt to enforce racial (and
gender) equality in America's cities led inexorably to a rural and
white-flight resentment of "those damn elitist eggheads" and their
supposed social engineering projects: these resentments were couched in
cultural and religious terms at the expense of economic issues, as
Thomas Frank points out. But make no mistake: the
red-state/blue-state division so loved and exploited by Republicans
starts--and often ends--with
race.
And divide they did. Instead of
telling Americans that they didn't really need their union jobs or
social programs, the GOP simply poured gasoline on the burning embers of
our racial resentments and fears. They lied to us by saying that our
tax dollars were going to
Cadillac-driving welfare moms instead of to fund a military
larger than the rest of the world's combined, and that Democrats who
promised to improve economic conditions would
release black men from jail to rape and murder white women, even as
their own candidates worked diligently to
rape and murder the constitution. It is a lie they continue even to
this day by attempting to
unfavorably compare tax dollars spent on overwhelmingly black
Katrina victims to those spent on the overwhelmingly white victims of
the recent midwest flooding.
What wasn't covered by "wasteful
spending" on "lazy people"
was
covered by supposedly "wasteful spending" on brown peoples of other
countries: global initiatives such as the United Nations, and on
supposedly wasteful "nation building" in places like Kosovo. It seems
almost a quaint bit of history now to recall that George W. Bush ran
against Al Gore on a campaign
against spending money on the reconstruction of Kosovo.
But then the GOP screwed up big-time.
In the heady days after the shock of 9/11 during which they thought
they couldn't possibly lose and were aiming for
Permanent Republican Majorities, the Republicans forgot that their
ideology was based on race-baiting lies and started to believe their own
press clippings.
They attacked and attempted to
privatize social security--the third rail of politics--and embroiled
themselves in a massive, neoliberal nation-building project in Iraq.
All of a sudden,
they
were the ones spending wastefully on brown people overseas--and the
veneer was off of their attempt to dismantle every last piece of the New
Deal under the guise of attempting to dismantle the Great Society.
Meanwhile, the country had moved far enough toward sanity on the issue
of race that in the wake of Katrina, rather than be appalled at all the
"dirty black people" as the Republicans had hoped, most of the nation
instead felt deep empathy for the victims--and despairing wrath at the
government that had failed to provide them aid in their hour of need. The
American People were angry--and ready for a change.
In come Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton--a black man and a woman vying fiercely for the Presidency and
making history in the process. Obama triumphs. And
looming on the GOP's horizon is its worst nightmare:the
possibility that a majority of Americans might vote for an
African-American for President.. And not just vote for
one, but
get
used to one. Americans might become accustomed to the idea
of an African-American family living in the White House, and being its
public face to the world. That in the process, Americans might actually
make leaps and bounds forward on the issue of race and thereby remove
the most effective wedge in the Republican toolbox for decades.
And then all Republicans would
have left is their deeply unpopular drive to abolish the New Deal. It
would, in short, spell utter doom for the Republicans outside of the
deep South and certain pockets of the Midwest.
Nor would it be an easy wedge to
replicate. The GOP, seeing this coming, attempted to replace their
African-American punching bag with a Latino one. While this might be a
short-term hate fix in certain areas, it comes at a heavy price:
Hispanics constitute today a larger voting bloc than do
African-Americans, and it grows every year. Alienating the entire
Hispanic population as they have the African-American population would
ensure the GOP's status as a permanent minority party. Meanwhile,
nobody seriously could or would believe that tax dollars are being
"wasted" in significant quantities on gays (though they've
tried it repeatedly with AIDS funding) or Muslims or any other group
targeted for Republican hate tactics.
And that is why this election terrifies the GOP. In just one
election cycle, an entire agenda and electoral strategy spanning over
three decades could be dashed on the rocks, with no credible
replacement. Milton
Friedman's privatization agenda would be dead in the water, without hope
of rescue barring military coup. Republicans in this situation are like
a desperate, dangerous cornered animal.
And that prospect should terrify
all of us and put us on our guard. |
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POSTED: 7/19/08
I am pissed.
My first reaction was shame. I
have questioned the need for hate crime legislation and protection in
the past. Shouldn't people who do violence to others be punished for the
violence, and not the intent? Isn't every crime a hate crime, I
foolishly asked.
My second feeling was the
realization that action is needed.
You know what? On second thought,
I'm just pissed off and ready to do something about this.
In my hometown, which I love very much, a man and his partner have
been targeted by the worst, most violent kind of hatred.
Swastikas were painted on his
property, along with threats. They tried to break his door down and do
God knows what to the people inside. And this is not called a hate crime
-- because by the standards of my state's laws, it is not a hate crime.
According to the article:
Oklahoma is one of 17 states that have
hate-crime laws that do not protect homosexuals from crimes directed at
them because of their sexual orientation.
One of the victims of this
horrible crime is a United States Marine Corps veteran, who has been
disabled due to his service.
This is not the only time gays
have been targeted recently in my state. Also from the article:
In October, Steven Domer, a gay Edmond
resident, was abducted and killed. Darrell Lynn Madden, a member of a
white-supremacist group, is charged with his murder, and authorities say
Madden targeted Domer because he was gay.
These are hate crimes of the most
obvious sort, and they are not because the law says they are not.
I have sometimes doubted the need
for specific legislation that covers hate crimes. Now, there is no
doubt. This man is my neighbor, as is his partner. And in all
likelihood, so is his attacker.
I just want to know one thing.
What can I do?
UPDATE:
I found some local TV news coverage of the story posted at YouTube.
POSTED 7/13/08
UPDATE II:
I have written a letter to my
Congressman, Rep. John Sullivan.
Rep. Sullivan,
I never write to government officials, but
after reading about what has happened at the home of someone who I share
a hometown with, I felt obligated.
An East Tulsa man and his partner have been
the targets of repeated hate crimes. Robert Stotler is a man who has
served his country bravely in the United States Marine Corps.
Thugs have vandalized his home, destroyed
his personal property, threatened to return -- and did return to
terrorize him and his family again.
But because there is no specific protection
against hate crimes in the state of Oklahoma for gay and lesbian
couples, the police have no choice but to treat this as just another
case of vandalism.
This is not vandalism. These crimes have
targeted Stotler and his partner because of who they are, making it a
completely different case than some car full of teenagers knocking down
mailboxes in a neighborhood. One is a hate crime, and one is not.
Oklahomans who are the victims of hate
crimes deserve the protection that the crimes deserve. I know that you
may have been against specific protection for GLBTs in the past, but
surely this incident reveals that people are falling in between the
cracks of the system.
This will happen again and again until
these gaps in the law are closed. Today it's Mr. Stotler. In a few
years, it could be my 4-month-old son.
Please write me back or contact me so we
can talk about what can be done to offer all Oklahomans targeted by hate
crimes the same protection under the law that they deserve.
Thank you for your time, sir.
Here is Sullivan's
contact pagefrom his Web site. He is my congressman, as well as
Stotler's. If you choose to contact him, please be polite and respectful
or do not do so at all.
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POSTED: 7/14/08
If you read
Frank Rich, you should demand impeachment hearings
That’s why the Bush White House’s
corruption in the end surpasses Nixon’s. We can no longer take cold
comfort in the Watergate maxim that the cover-up was worse than the
crime. This time the crime is worse than the cover-up, and the
punishment could rain down on us all.
Strong words. The final words in
a column appearing in tomorrow's
New
York Times by Frank Rich entitled
The Real-Life ‘24’ of Summer 2008. While the column title invokes
Jack Bauer, the column is in fact an exploration of a new book by Jane
Mayer of
THe
New Yorker entitled
The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a
War on American Ideals. Rich's discussion makes the book seem like
a must read. Of greater importance, what he describes from the book
should lead us all to demand MEANINGFUL investigations by the Congress,
NOW, even if that requires an impeachment investigation to accomplish.
Rich offers some
comparisons between the Woodward and Bernstein (Carl, not me, even
though we both had mothers named Sylvia who worked in the OPA, but that
is a tale for a different time)
The
Final Days which provided such a riveting portrayal of the
very end of Nixon's administration before he resigned in shame.
Ultimately, as the final paragraph makes clear, he joins with John Dean
in saying that what has been and still is occurring is worse than
Watergate.
Rich describes Mayer as connecting
the dots of her own reporting with the best of some of her colleagues,
such as James Risen of the New York Times (NOTE: Risen had the NSA
story, but the Times sat on it before the 2004 election, when news of
that story might have had an effect, and only finally published it
because Risen was going forward with his book). Rich draws from the
book
that in 2004 two conservative Republican
Justice Department officials had become "so paranoid" that "they
actually thought they might be in physical danger." The fear of being
wiretapped by their own peers drove them to speak in code.
He explains why the parallel
with the book on Nixon is insufficient:
The Dark Side" is scarier than "The Final
Days" because these final days aren’t over yet and because the stakes
are much higher. Watergate was all about a paranoid president’s
narcissistic determination to cling to power at any cost. In Ms. Mayer’s
portrayal of the Bush White House, the president is a secondary, even
passive, figure, and the motives invoked by Mr. Cheney to restore
Nixon-style executive powers are theoretically selfless. Possessed by
the ticking-bomb scenarios of television’s "24," all they want to do is
protect America from further terrorist strikes.
. Of course, the Taliban and Al
Qaeda seem to be reconstituting in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Rich's column reminds us that the
Bush administration lied when it said "we do not do torture." The Mayer
book goes beyond what we already know from Antonio Taguba:
Ms. Mayer uncovered another damning
verdict: Red Cross investigators flatly told the C.I.A. last year that
America was practicing torture and vulnerable to war-crimes charges.
Rich describes top administration
officials who have been involved in some of these activities as being
nervous:
Scapegoating the rotten apples at the
bottom of the military’s barrel may not be a slam-dunk escape route from
accountability anymore
and, perhaps more telling:
So hot is the speculation that war-crimes
trials will eventually follow in foreign or international courts that
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, has publicly
advised Mr. Feith, Mr. Addington and Alberto Gonzales, among others, to
"never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and
Israel."
But it may be far worse. Let me
offer two more selections, so that perhaps we might begin to grasp how
much this administration has to cover up. First s Meyer tells it:
a major incentive for Mr. Cheney’s descent
into the dark side was to cover up for the Bush White House’s failure to
heed the Qaeda threat in 2001. Jack Cloonan, a special agent for the
F.B.I.’s Osama bin Laden unit until 2002, told Ms. Mayer that Sept. 11
was "all preventable." By March 2000, according to the C.I.A.’s
inspector general, "50 or 60 individuals" in the agency knew that two Al
Qaeda suspects — soon to be hijackers — were in America. But there was
no urgency at the top. Thomas Pickard, the acting F.B.I. director that
summer, told Ms. Mayer that when he expressed his fears about the Qaeda
threat to Mr. Ashcroft, the attorney general snapped, "I don’t want to
hear about that anymore!"
And what should absolutely shock
us all if this is true:
The coerced "confession" to the murder of
the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
to take one horrific example, may have been invented to protect the real
murderer.
There is more, much more in the
column. And I suspect that Rich's column merely scratches the surface
of what Mayer has prepared for us in the book. I expect to purchase a
copy as quickly as I can.
I believe this is yet another
indication of why we cannot grant immunity from law suit, condone
pardons for criminal acts, or refuse to investigate. The Congress, both
House and Senate, have a moral, legal, and constitutional obligation to
fully determine what actions this administration has done. First, those
actions involve the expenditures of moneys taken from the federal
treasury for which there has apparently been no authorization. Second,
the actions about which we know, and the many more we logically should
suspect have also been done, represent clear violations of US Statutes,
ratified treaties, international conventions, and the principles of our
Constitution and our Bill of Rights. Apparently some people in Congress
may have known, but somehow we the American people did not know, and
perhaps many in Congress did not know because the administration would
disclose information to a limited group of Members and Senators so they
could fulfill the letter of the law requiring notification, but barring
those elected representatives of the American people even from sharing
with their colleagues. As a result, the Congress has been
appropriating, authorizing, legislating, and approving without the
knowledge necessary to fulfill their own constitutional obligations and
oaths of office.
This administration may be "almost
over." But in the remaining months the leaders will be making every
attempt possible to lock down as much as they can to bind the next
president. It is not dissimilar from the previous tactic - repeated in
this administration - of deliberately bankrupting the federal government
so that the domestic programs for which Democrats campaign and which
many conservative Republicans oppose become financially impossible
absent serious tax increases.
If we are to remain a democratic
republic - and that assumes that we in fact still are one - we must have
accountability. Because the administration will refuse any attempts of
information, it is past time to call the bluff. Start arresting people
who refuse to testify on the basis of inherent contempt. And if the
stonewalling continues, begin an impeachment inquiry, and if the
administration still refuses to comply, continues its stonewall, then
that is an obstruction of the right and duty of the Congress to
investigate the possibilities that high crimes and misdemeanors have
been committed. That obstruction is itself a high crime and
misdemeanor.
I am a realist. Absent
information not currently available, there would be no pressure on
Senate Republicans to convict, even were articles of impeachment passed
by the House. That is not the point. It is time to lay down clear
lines, for the Congress to reassert its authority, so that no president
in the future, be s/he named Obama, McCain, Clinton, Sebelius, or people
whose names are not yet on the horizon, will eer be able to act in such
a clearly unconstitutional and unlawful and - yes - tyrannical fashion
as we have seen from this White House. Tyranny is when the leader(s) of
the government are not restricted by constitution, law, or other
governmental power. Given the continued cravenness of the Congress, I
think one can fairly say that we have at least face evidence of
tyrannical acts.
And I suggest, although it is
probably too late, that one question we should seek to get before the
Speaker at Netroots Nation is precisely that of an impeachment inquiry.
While I may have removed the words from my electronic signature, I
still believe that if impeachment is off the table, so is democracy.
Our system of government gives the final authority to the elected
representatives of the people, the tow chambers of Congress. While
Article II left the executive branch somewhat undefined, with the
Founders trusting George Washington to demonstrate by example how the
office should function, they were absolutely clear in giving the
Congress the extraordinary power to remove members of the other two
branches. The members of the House, who would vote the articles, have
always been directly answerable to the people who elect them every two
years, and on behalf of the people should exercise their responsibility
to hold presidents, vice presidents, cabinet and other executive branch
officers, and judges, accountable for the actions they do, or fail to
do.
I read Rich. I thought about the
implications of what he has to say about the Mayer book, which I will
read. I wrote this.
Now it is your turn.
Peace. |
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