Commentary: Impeachment Is The Next Appropriate And Necessary Step POSTED 7/28/08
This commentary was written by John Nichols and appeared on The Nation's website edition for Friday, July 25, 2008.
As the House Judiciary Committee took up the question of how best to address what its chairman described as "the Imperial Presidency of George W. Bush," it was one of the ranking Republicans in the room, Iowa Congressman Steve King, who observed that, "We are here having impeachment hearings before the Judiciary Committee."
"These are impeachment hearings before the United States Congress," King continued. "I never imagined I would ever be sitting on this side when something like this happened."
King was not happy about the circumstance.
A resolute defender of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the congressman was objecting to the very mention of the "I" word.
As it happened, impeachment was mentioned dozens of times during the hearing, often in significant detail and frequently as a necessary response to lawless actions of the president and vice president.
(THERE'S MORE -- CLICK HERE From Free Internet Press POSTED 7/28/08)
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Lyndon G. Furst:
A Different Perspective
POSTED 7/24/08
Dr. Furst is an educator at Andrews University and a good Berrien County Democrat. He graciously allows SCDC to post his "A Different Perspective" series of personal observations and commentary. Always informative, his "Perspectives" are well worth your attention. His articles are published in the Berrien Springs Journal Era.
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Minimum Wage Raise Too Little, Too Late
By Holly Sklar
Minimum wage workers have been stuck in a losing game of “Mother May I” with the federal government. Workers step forward when the government says yes to raising the minimum wage. Workers step backward when the cost of living increases, but the minimum wage doesn’t.
Until 1968, minimum wage workers took frequent and big enough steps forward to make overall progress. Since 1968, when the minimum wage reached its peak buying power, workers have taken many steps backward for every step forward.
The July 24 minimum wage raise is so little, so late that workers will still make less than they did in 1997, adjusting for the increased cost of living, and way less than in 1968.
The decade between the federal minimum wage increase to $5.15 an hour on Sept. 1, 1997, and the July 24, 2007 increase to $5.85 was the longest period in history without a raise.
Gas prices rose from $1.23 to $2.97 a gallon in the same period. Now it’s over $4.
The new $6.55 minimum wage is lower than the 1997 minimum wage, which is worth $6.88 in 2008 dollars, and way lower than the inflation-adjusted $9.86 minimum wage of 1968. For full-time workers that translates into $20,509 a year at the 1968 rate, compared with just $13,624 at the hourly rate of $6.55.
POSTED 7/24/08
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Fox
News On-Air Racism Challenged by Huge Petition Drive and
Hot Rapper Nas Don Hazen, AlterNet
A rally outside Fox News headquarters led by Color of
Change delivers 620,000 signatures.
POSTED 7/24/08
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Will John McCain Make Exorcism (Literally) a Campaign Issue?
As John McCain moves to select a running mate, it seems--at least for the moment--that the star of potential veep nominee Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana governor, is rising. This is good news for Democrats.
On one level, Jindal is impressive. The son of Indian immigrants, he's only 37 years old, and he has already been elected a member of the U.S. House and a governor. (Talk about a Junior Achiever!) Yet can McCain, who claims Obama is not sufficiently experienced to become president, say with a straight face that Jindal is prepared to take the helm? And Jindal's record in Louisiana--including his stint in charge of the state health department--has its spotty moments. Then there's that exorcism.
Blogs and news outfits have already picked over a 1994 essay that Jindal, a convert to Catholicism, wrote for a Catholic magazine, describing an exorcism of a friend in which he was an observer/participant. Not only did Jindal and his pals manage to drive the Satanic demon out of their friend; the exercise, Jindal suggested, also cured her skin cancer. The article was entitled, "Physical Dimensions of Spiritual Warfare." POSTED 7/24/08
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Lyndon G. Furst:
A Different Perspective
"Flipping and Flopping Toward Election Day"
POSTED 7/23/08
Dr. Furst is an educator at Andrews University and a good Berrien County Democrat. He graciously allows SCDC to post his "A Different Perspective" series of personal observations and commentary. Always informative, his "Perspectives" are well worth your attention. His articles are published in the Berrien Springs Journal Era.
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The Real Legacy of the ‘Reagan Revolution’ by Robert Scheer POSTED 7/119/08
McCain campaign co-chair Phil Gramm is right: We have “become a nation of whiners.” But who is whining more than the bankers that former Sen. Gramm’s financial deregulation legislation benefited? The very bankers who now expect a government bailout, such as those at UBS Investment Bank, where Gramm found lucrative employment.
As chair of the powerful Senate Banking Committee, Gramm engineered passage of legislation that effectively ended the major regulatory restraints applied to the financial industry in response to the Great Depression. The purpose of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act-co-authored by Gramm, passed in 1999 by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton-was to liberate the banks, stockbrokers and insurance companies from restraints imposed on their activities more than seven decades ago. It was legislation that the financial community, which contributed heavily to Gramm’s campaigns in the previous five years, desperately wanted and obviously has abused. So why now bail these institutions out?
Hows about some “tough love” for those bankers suddenly in trouble? You know, the sink-or-swim approach of “welfare reform” that Gramm and Clinton applied to poor people to end their addiction to government handouts. Or, perhaps a heavy dose of “faith-based” personal responsibility initiatives to get those knaves who messed up our entire housing market back on the straight and narrow. Sounds ridiculous I know, because nothing but the bleeding-heart, big-government, throw-money-at-the-problem approach will do when it comes to salvaging corrupt corporations.
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Obama, Iraq and Afghanistan ------ From The Nation: Any proposal to transfer American troops from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan is sure to cause debate and questions among peace activists and rank-and-file Democrats. The proposal potentially represents a wider quagmire for the US government and military. POSTED 7/16/08
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Obama Says US Strategy in Iraq Is Unsound
Barack Obama says that
ending the occupation of Iraq is a priority.
(Photo: AP)
(From Truthout.Com) Washington - Contending that the U.S. is not pursuing a sound strategy for keeping Americans safe, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama laid out goals Tuesday that he argued would deal with the nation's most pressing threats.
In a major speech on the war, Obama listed ending the war in Iraq responsibly as the top priority. If elected president, he said, he would also finish the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban; secure nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue nations; achieve "true energy security"; and rebuild the nation's alliances. POSTED 7/16/08
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Drilling Without Oil, Tax Cuts Without Growth
Senator McCain is in the unenviable position of running on the track record of a president with the worst economic performance since Herbert Hoover. He has adopted the strategy of ignoring the record while embracing his predecessor's policies. McCain is betting the media will be so incompetent that they will not notice. He might be right. The basic story here is very simple. The centerpiece of Senator McCain's economic agenda is the continuation of the Bush tax cuts. Of course, he has tossed out a few other items, but impact of his other proposals, such as ending earmarks, is trivial. For all practical purposes, McCain's economic agenda is Bush's tax cuts. POSTED 7/16/08
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Lyndon G. Furst:
A Different Perspective
POSTED 7/16/08
Dr. Furst is an educator at Andrews University and a good Berrien County Democrat. He graciously allows SCDC to post his "A Different Perspective" series of personal observations and commentary. Always informative, his "Perspectives" are well worth your attention. His articles are published in the Berrien Springs Journal Era.
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The Current Oil Shock -- Why there's no relief in sight from the energy reality we're facing. —By Dilip Hiro, TomDispatch via MotherJones POSTED 7/14/08
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Lyndon G. Furst:
A Different Perspective
POSTED 7/14/08
Dr. Furst is an educator at Andrews University and a good Berrien County Democrat. He graciously allows SCDC to post his "A Different Perspective" series of personal observations and commentary. Always informative, his "Perspectives" are well worth your attention. His articles are published in the Berrien Springs Journal Era.
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The Three Biggest Myths the Bush Administration Wants You to Believe About Offshore Drilling
Conservatives are preying on concern over gas prices by propagating false myths that drilling for oil off our coasts will lower the cost of gas. POSTED 7/14/08
Why the demise of civilisation may be inevitable by Debora MacKenzie in New Scientist, 4/2/08: POSTED 7/4/08 POSTED AT THE REQUEST OF TINA TROWBRIDGE
This is a copyrighted article found in the April issue of the magazine New Scientist. The article is only available at the New Scientist web site by subscription, however a blog has posted the article and the link below will take you to the blog. We offer this excerpt only as a "tease" so you will go to the New Scientist web site and subscribe.
DOOMSDAY. The end of civilisation. Literature and film abound with tales of plague, famine and wars which ravage the planet, leaving a few survivors scratching out a primitive existence amid the ruins. Every civilisation in history has collapsed, after all. Why should ours be any different?
Doomsday scenarios typically feature a knockout blow: a massive asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic (see "The end of civilisation"). Yet there is another chilling possibility: what if the very nature of civilisation means that ours, like all the others, is destined to collapse sooner or later?
A few researchers have been making such claims for years. Disturbingly, recent insights from fields such as complexity theory suggest that they are right. It appears that once a society develops beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly fragile. Eventually, it reaches a point at which even a relatively minor disturbance can bring everything crashing down.
Some say we have already reached this point, and that it is time to start thinking about how we might manage collapse. Others insist it is not yet too late, and that we can - we must - act now to keep disaster at bay.
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Major David J. R. Frakt's Closing Argument in Favor
of Dismissal of the Case Against Mohammad Jawad
(6/19/2008)
(From the
ACLU Web Site) On Feb 7, 2002, President Bush issued
an order. The order stated, in pertinent part “I accept
the legal conclusion of the Department of Justice and
determine that Common Article 3 of Geneva does not apply
to either al Qaeda or Taliban detainees.”
“I determine that the Taliban detainees do not qualify as prisoners of war. . .al Qaeda detainees also do not qualify as prisoners of war.”
“Our values as a nation, values that we share with many nations in the world, call for us to treat detainees humanely, including those who are not legally entitled to such treatment. . . As a matter of policy the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely, and to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.”
With these fateful and ill-advised words, President Bush, our Commander-in-Chief, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not, started the U.S. down a slippery slope, a path that quickly descended, stopping briefly in the dark, Machiavellian world of “the ends justify the means,” before plummeting further into the bleak underworld of barbarism and cruelty, of “anything goes,” of torture. It was a path that led inexorably to the events that brings us here today, the pointless and sadistic treatment of Mohammad Jawad, a suicidal teenager.
-damaged
9th Ward and criticized both the Bush Administration and Congress
for its handling of the disaster. Lamenting the pace of recovery,
McCain said, "I want to assure you it will never happen again in
this country. You have my commitment and my promise." 
60
years of enormous military spending is taking a dramatic toll on the
rest of the economy.
Washington
- The Veterans Administration has lied about the number of veterans
who've attempted suicide, a senator charged Wednesday, citing
internal e-mails that put the number at 12,000 a year when the
department was publicly saying it was fewer than 800. 
