Glibbertysmidgeon

My husband likes to talk to me about the bizarre resistance to health care reform. I squirm when it’s on the news, because it makes me so mad.

Sarah Palin and her “death panel” hooey, nutjobs breaking up town hall meetings rudely shouting others down with their racist and uninformed outbursts..

To me, it’s so patently obvious that a better health care system, one that INCLUDES a public option, is in all our best interests. Are you really going to tell me you think some people shouldn’t get health care?

But the thing that makes me feel hopeless, is that so many people are falling for it.

Can’t you see that it’s all propaganda, sent through the talk shows straight from the insurance companies, who don’t want the competition?

Here, read for yourself. On CNN.com

Ding dong the witch is dead
the wicked witch
the wicked witch
ding dong the wicked witch is dead!

Today I feel like singing. Like something magical has happened, and the world will never be the same. To me, this wasn’t just a Presidential election, it was a moment in which Americans defined ourselves.

And, even though I think it’s better than great that we’ve elected our first black President, there’s a different aspect to this election that is just as magical for me.

For the past eight years I have watched my country fall under the sway of an evil witch doctor- an administration that used fear mongering to keep the population in line. The Bush administration appealed to the lowest parts of us- greed, fear, racism and hate to gain acceptance for thier illegal war, their tax cuts for the rich, their attacks on social services, their neglect of the poor, their rape of the environment.

In this election, Americans could have chosen more of the same. The McCain campaign was bathed in lies (Obama is an Arab terrorist about to raise your taxes and turn the country socialist!), racism, and fear mongering. The Obama campaign was all about accepting responsibility for the realities of our situation, and working together to solve them. It was about coming together and patching up the cracks that these past years have opened up in our sense of community, in our faith in government, and in our sense of personal empowerment.

On Tuesday, we chose to throw a bucket of water on that old witch.
On Tuesday, we stood together to turn this country in a new direction.
On Tuesday, we turned back into the America I’d always thought I lived in.

On Tuesday, I regained my lost faith in America.

My mother recently comented on my blog that she didn’t like either Obama or McCain, but that McCain seemed like the lesser of two evils. It struck me that, at the start of this campaign, I felt exactly the opposite.

I have liked Obama since I first saw him speak at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. His optimism and eloquence brought me to tears. Of course I wanted him to win. But at the time, I associated John McCain with his battle with President Bush over torture (McCain was against it), and the McCain/Feingold campaing refinance act. McCain was a real war hero (not a deserter, like the current President) and seemed like a pretty respectable, moderate, sensible fellow.

I figured that no matter who wins, we’ll be better off than we have been over the last 8 years.

Then I started learning more. I read his platform, which isn’t much different from George W. Bush’s platform. Then I watched the debates.

These raised concerns that I had been harboring for the past few years.
McCain and Bush were famous enemies eight years ago, when they vied for the Republican Presidential nomination. Bush played some extremely nasty tricks on McCain in 2000, including spreading a rumor that implied that “McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi-born daughter was an African-American child he fathered out of wedlock.” (wikipedia) After such treatment, I couldn’t understand what I was seeing when McCain started suddenly spouting Bush’s talking points midway through the second term. Next, we saw him meeting with crackpots he had previously denounced and hugging Bush at press events…

At the time I thought he was just cynical. Embracing the enemy so that he could be on the winning side. It was degrading and I lost respect for him, but I guess I thought the ‘real’ McCain still lurked somewhere under the fake smile. Now I’m not so sure.

After 8 disastrous years, George W Bush and all of his policies are widely despised. His approval rating is in the dump. Presidential scholars are predicting he’ll be ranked among the worst U.S. Presidents in history, if not THE worst. Every politician in the country is running on a platform of change, and nobody is seeking Bush’s endorsement. It seems to me that this climate is ideal for allowing the ‘real’ McCain to finally shine through.

Instead..he’s stumping those awful Bush-era tax cuts for the rich- wanting to add another 100 billion, then make the whole package permanent. He’s using the Bush debate tactics, repeating the same tired talking points, whether they address the question or not. (If I never hear the word ‘earmarks’ again…) Repeating fear-mongering attacks against his opponent again and again, even after those attacks have been clearly rebutted. (Obama is not going to raise taxes on you and me, only on the rich, no matter how many times McCain claims that we’re all going to pay higher taxes)

Worse, he’s answering straight questions with baloney answers like, “I know how to get Osama Bin Laden, I know where he is and I know how to get him, and I’ll get him.” What?? If he knows where Bin Laden is and he’s not telling, what kind of patriot is he? Stop talking, John, you’re embarrassing yourself.

The change in McCain from 8 years ago is so striking, and so apparently real, that I can only suppose that he’s a victim of Stockholm Syndrome.

Even if he is mentally unbalanced, his latest shenannigans are unforgivable. This business of insinuating Obama is sympathetic to terrorists, and painting him as some kind of foreigner who is dangerous to America isn’t just dirty politics, it’s dangerous. The McCain campaign is purposely inciting racism and hatred. Supporters at recent rallies have been heard shouting threats against Obama, and actually stating that they think he’s an Arab.

Outside of these rallies, McCain states that he likes and respects Barack Obama, and that Obama is a good American. Apparently he thinks that stirring up an angry mob of racists is a fair and reasonable political strategy, nothing personal.

I think he’s putting a good man in danger in the hope of winning a few votes.
I can’t even piece together the words for how I feel about this vile and reckless ‘strategy’. Pandering to the white sheet crowd? For VOTES?

Shame on you, McCain.

In yesterday’s post, I listed just a few of the things that are going terribly wrong in our country. Today, I’m thinking about how our lawmakers are dealing with these large and pressing problems. Here’s a sampling of what our public servants have been up to lately:

• Holding a three day debate on a doomed constitutional ammendment to ban gay marriage.
• Blowing a lot of hot air about those dangerous Mexican immigrants, and arguing about how to stop them.
• Holding a vote on another doomed constitutional ammendment – this one to ban flag burning. (Note: three other countries have or had flag burning bans: China, Iran, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein)

These are all red herrings.
Rather than taking responsiblility for their disastrous failures and criminal behavior here and abroad, our elected officials are trying to distract us.
With elections looming in November and a growing public outrage over the war and numerous corruption scandals, they’re trying to create some outrage about issues they can control.

Let’s go down to New Orleans and see if they care more about gay marriage or building levees.

And let’s really think about flag burning. Studies show that there have been about 4 instances of flag burning in the past 20 years. This is more important than the health care crisis?

Let’s not get me started on illegal immigration. I need to write a whole post on that topic. Suffice it to say that this is another way to use people’s prejudice to stir up some votes.

The new politics is about appealing the absolute lowest, knee jerk, bigoted caveman in all of us. Forget about reason, let’s just make voters mad. Let’s appeal to the HATE in all Americans. That’ll get us re-elected.

But who wants to live in a country run by hate?

I want to go and see An Inconvenient Truth, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it.

Okay, what I really want is to HAVE SEEN it.
I want to know what is in the movie; I want to be able to discuss it intelligently with my friends.. but I’m afraid to actually sit through it. I know I’ll walk out crying, with one more horrible, heavy truth lying cold on my heart.

I’ve considered buying a ticket- just to show my support, and then going home to ask a friend for the half-page synopsis. If I could only believe that my $10.00 contribution to the success of the film might still, somehow, save us all from Global Warming.

In recent months, I’ve begun reverting to the old ways- devolving into the Ostritch Girl I was raised up to be. When I was a little girl, I hated when my Dad watched the news.

I didn’t want to know about the wars going on in other countries or the people who lost their homes in the big storm. I was not interested in police shootouts or drug raids.

I couldn’t fix my Dad’s depression or my grandmother’s frailty; I couldn’t find Dad a steady job or provide a place where we all could live and never have to move. My own problems had already shown me how small and powerless I was.

I just wanted to read my Black Stallion books and imagine that everything could be solved with a child’s patience and a long, bareback ride.

I understand why someone would rather watch American Idol than listen to the truth about what the U.S. is doing to innocent people at Guantanamo Bay.
I understand why it’s more appealing to mow the lawn than to have a serious discussion about the proper balance between national security and individual liberties.
I understand that it was bad enough to watch the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and our government’s disastrous inabilty to respond- but how are we all supposed to digest the additional insult of the 2 billion in tax dollars that have been blown on waste and fraud in the rebuilding effort?

And the bad news just keeps coming.

• Trans fats may cause diabetes.
• Bird flu has been transmitted from human to human here in the U.S.
• Tuna is no longer safe for pregant women.
• I’m STILL the only person in my family who has health insurance.
• The suicide rate in New Orleans has tripled.
• There are many, many reasons to believe our elections are being cheated.
• The phone and cable companies are trying to kill my blog and all it’s little friends.
• Every day we find that another of our elected officials is actually a criminal.
• The President has issued 100′s of “signing statements” indicating in each one that he finds himself to be above legally enacted U.S. laws.
• The East Coast is flooding.
• Oil prices keep going up.
• People keep dying in Iraq.

…and the hurricane season is here, and the levees are not repaired.

It’s enough to make me want to stick my head in the sand.
Or into a children’s book.

The latest ironic turn in the Valerie Plame investigation:

NEW YORK What was Valerie Plame working on at the CIA when she was outed by administraton officials and columnist Robert Novak? MSNBC’s David Schuster on Monday said he had confirmed an earlier report that she was helping to keep track of Iran’s nuclear activity–not a front and center issue for the White House.

Earlier this year, Larisa Alexandrovna of the Web site RawStory.com, reported that Plame, whose covert status was compromised in the leak, was monitoring weapons proliferation in Iran. At the time, officials told her that Plame’s outing resulted in “severe” damage to her team and “significantly hampered the CIA’s ability to monitor nuclear proliferation.”

Editor & Publisher

So… in an attempt to get Bush and Cheney re-elected, the Bush-Cheney administration leaked information that compromised the team that was watching over Iran’s nuclear program. Three years later, Bush is offering threats to Iran that sound chillingly like those he was shouting at Iraq before he sent in the troops.

If he was really serious about Iran’s nuclear program, one would think he wouldn’t out his own undercover agent.
I guess back then, national security was less important than his re-election.

It’s good to know where a person’s priorities are.

Next time you fill up your car, don’t blame the guy that owns the station. He’s still making an average of ten cents on the gallon, as he has for years. Instead, think about Lee R. Raymond.

Raymond is the freshly retired C.E.O of Exxon Mobile, and he walked away from that job with $167.7 million.

Lofty figures have in recent instances prompted headlines to blare the news of Lee R. Raymond’s golden parachute from Exxon Mobil (nyse: XOM – news – people )–reportedly, a $69.7 million compensation package and $98 million pension payout–and juxtapose the figure to gasoline in the U.S. hitting an eye-watering $3 per gallon at some locations.

Forbes

Raymond’s last reported salary was $38 million in 2004. What does this man do to earn $38 million a year? Is he really that much smarter, hard working, and good looking than I am?
I guess he’s getting credit for Exxon’s all time record-breaking profits.

Exxon Mobil’s first-quarter profit was nearly a billion dollars more than the same quarter a year earlier. Not as much as Wall Street wanted, but still an awful lot of money – especially to people paying $3 a gallon or more to fill their gas tanks. They’re wondering why oil companies don’t feel their pain.

CNN

Yes, that says BILLION.
And they’re not the only ones.

Today, Chevron announced that it has made four billion dollars since January of this year. This is a 49% increase over the same period last year.

Conoco- Phillips earned $3.29 billion in the first quarter of this year, an increase of 13% over last year.

The entire oil industry is generating record breaking profits, while you and I fork over larger and larger chunks of our paychecks to pay for their products. The cost of heating oil for my building rose 70% last year alone.

Since George Bush took office, the price of oil has risen from $1.46 to $2.91. That’s a 100 percent increase in five years. This is the fastest rise in gasoline prices in two decades.

In all this time, he has failed to take action- but now even FOX news polls show his popularity in the dumpster, and he is forced to make some kind of gesture.

President George W. Bush, in trouble over soaring gasoline prices, ordered a probe on Tuesday into any price gouging, called for an end to tax breaks for Big Oil and suspended putting oil into the U.S. emergency stockpile.

As a short-term measure, Bush also gave the Environmental Protection Agency authority to suspend federal clean-burning gasoline rules this summer that are forcing consumers to buy expensive new gasoline blends.

Reuters

Let’s look at his plan more closely:

1. Ordered a probe on Tuesday into any price gouging: Just for the record- the Federal Trade Commission has never investigated the oil industry for price gouging. Ever.
2. Called for an end to tax breaks for Big Oil: Strangely, he called for an end to tax breaks for big oil, then turned around and urged Congress to extend tax breaks to the industry.
3. Suspended putting oil into the U.S. emergency stockpile: Unfortunately, oil shortages are only going to get worse. With global demands increasing and supplies beginning to dwinle,this oil shortage is not going away anytime soon. This tactic is purely political. If he can drop the price by a few cents for a few months by removing one consumer, then maybe the Republicans can hold on to a few seats in the upcoming elections. This is no long term fix, and it’s a terrible band-aid because it depletes our national emergency reserve, which threatens our overall national security.
4. Suspend federal clean-burning gasoline rules: This is just blatant opportunism. If anything, using alternative fuel sources should decrease our dependence on oil. Any excuse to roll back environmental laws…

This plan has no mention of improving fuel efficiency standards for cars, but it does include a scheme to give every American a $100 rebate. Because our votes are always for sale- and cheap too! I guess it worked for him before his last election- but that time he paid $300 per person.

Bush also opposes the measures Congress is proposing to deal with the situation:

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., is asking the Federal Trade Commission to monitor refiners this summer, while Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., offered a bill that would require energy companies to pay a federal royalty on all oil pumped from the Gulf of Mexico if oil prices exceed $55 a barrel. Some oil now is exempt from royalties, costing the government billions of dollars.

Washington Post

Our entire energy policy is a failure. Though that should be no surprise to anyone, since the whole lousy thing was drafted in a big, secret retreat attended only by Dick Cheney and energy lobbyists.

It’s not as if serious people didn’t see this coming. Europe, for example, spends about half of what the United States does on energy, relative to GDP. But Europe has entirely different policies on everything from mass transit to building codes to gas taxes. Brazil makes more than half of its motor fuels from domestic renewable ethanol. Japan is far ahead of the United States in the development of efficient hybrid cars.

Had we begun adjusting to the need for a post-petroleum economy during the first and second oil shocks, three decades ago when Jimmy Carter was ridiculed for wearing that cardigan, or even 10 years ago when ”Ozone Al” Gore was mocked for taking seriously the threat of global warming, we would not be getting robbed quite so helplessly at the pump by a collusion of Mideast sheiks, oil barons, and their Republican enablers.

Boston Globe

Why is the President continuing to protect Big Oil instead of addressing our energy problems in a forward thinking manner? Why does he oppose rolling back tax breaks for the rich corporations?

Maybe it’s the $450 million dollars the oil companies have spent on lobbying in the past six years.

Over the past six years, oil and gas companies have spent nearly $450 million on politicians, political parties and lobbyists in order to protect their interests in Washington. Since 1990, energy companies have made $183 million in political contributions alone, 75 percent of which have gone to Republicans. In addition, over the past six years, nine of the top ten recipients of contributions from oil and gas companies have been Republicans. In just the last election cycle, the oil and gas industry contributed more than $20 million to Republicans, four times more than the amount donated to Democrats.

Center for American Progress Report

Or maybe it’s just who he is.
The Bush family is a proud Texas oil family. George H W Bush started the family out in oil:

Bush ventured into the highly speculative Texas oil exploration business after World War II with considerable success. Zapata Corporation was created by him in 1953 as Zapata Oil. He secured a position with Dresser Industries. His son, Neil Mallon Bush, is named after his employer at Dresser, Neil Mallon, who became a close family friend. Dresser Industries, decades later, merged with Halliburton, whose former CEOs include Dick Cheney, George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense and, as of 2005, Vice President of the United States.

Wikipedia

The Bush Administration is also loaded with oil barons. Before becoming our government:

George W. Bush ran a number of oil companies, including Arbusto Energy, Spectrum 7, and the Harken Energy Corporation.
Before joining Bush’s cabinet:

Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton.

Condoleeza Rice was on the Board of Directors member for Chevron, and headed their committee on public policy. Chevron was so fond of her they named an oil tanker Condoleezza Rice.

Former Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans: Was first a roughneck oil rigger, then CEO of Tom Brown, Inc.

It’s natural for people to want to look after their own. If my whole family made their living in jelly beans, you can bet I’d be against a jelly bean tax. But I’m not the President of the United States of America.

The President’s job is something larger than to look after his friends and family- it’s to protect everyone in this country. His job is to protect the poor and weak from the rich and powerful.

Not the other way around.

President Bush announced his new White House press secretary on Wednesday: former Fox News host Tony Snow.

CNN

As we’ve seen so many times, (Michael Brown, Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzales, etc.) it pays to be one of George Bush’s pets.

The only qualification you need to get a high ranking appointment is the ability to agree vehemently with everything The President thinks.

I wonder when he’ll promote Sean Hannity to head the Food and Drug Administration.

hypocrisy:

1. The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness.
2. An act or instance of such falseness.

Dictionary.com

Veteran journalist Seymore Hersh reports that President Bush is considering a program of nuclear strikes against Iran. His aim: to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. The President claims that Hersh’s assertions are, “wild speculation.”

Seymour Hersh is a Pulizer Prize-winning journalist who has spent his 47 year career exposing government coverups. His record shows that he is not prone to “wild speculation”. He is, however, prone to angering the government by exposing things they’d rather keep secret- including the recent Abu Gharib torture scandal.

I know who I trust the most.

Some administration officials claim that the plan is just part of “normal contingency planning.” This argument shows that the administration assumes that we’re all too stupid or disinterested to actually read and understand the meaning of Hersh’s article.

For those of you who do not subscribe to the New Yorker, here’s Hersh himself, speaking to Wolf Blizer:

There’s been a lot of planning going on. It’s more than planning, it’s operational planning. It’s beyond contingency planning. There’s serious, specific plans. Nobody’s made a decision yet. There hasn’t been a warning order or an execute order. But the planning’s gotten much more intense and much more focused.

…

When the JCS, the Joint Chiefs, and the planners wanted to walk back that option, what happened is about three or four weeks ago, the White House, people in the White House, in the Oval Office, the vice president’s office, said, no, let’s keep it in the plan.

CNN

In typical Bush fashion, the President publicly claims to be interested in diplomacy, but secretly- and against the strenuously worded advice of his Joint Chiefs of Staff- he continues to plan nuclear strikes against Iran.

There is so much about this that I could rant about:

That the president is planning to launch yet another war- we’re in a record setting budget deficit paying for his current wars, and we don’t have enough troops to support Iraq, let along Iran.

That the experts admit that they have no more confidence in our intelligence about Iran’s nuclear program than they do in the intelligence that got us into Iraq in search of Weapons of Mass Destructions that didn’t exist.

That all experts agree that Iran is at least 10 years from achieving a single nuclear weapon. Is he rushing simply because he only has two years left in office?

The most galling thing in all of this is the complete hypocricy of this policy.

Nuclear weapons are bad- aggressive nations like Iran should not have them. So let’s use nukes ourselves to launch our second war of choice.

If we want to be the ‘good guys’ we have to act like the good guys.

If nukes are bad, we can’t use them.
If torture is bad, we can’t use it.
If spying on your own people and taking awy their civil rights is bad, then we can’t do that either.

What part of “good” don’t you understand, Mr. President?

Scooter Libby has requested a series of confidential documents to back up his claim that the President himself authorized him to leak confidential information to the press. Among other things, Libby leaked Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent to the press.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former top aide testified that President Bush authorized the release of parts of a classified report on Iraq to rebut criticism of the case for the 2003 invasion, federal prosecutors disclosed in documents released Thursday.

CNN

Valerie Plame, of course, is the wife of Joe Wilson. Seven days before the Vice President’s Chief of Staff outed Mrs. Plame, putting her life and the lives of her fellow operatives in jeopardy, Mr Wilson had embarrassed the White House.

Plame’s husband, a former U.S. ambassador, said the administration had twisted prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat from weapons of mass destruction.
…

After a 2002 CIA-sponsored trip to Africa, Wilson said he had concluded that Iraq did not have an agreement to acquire uranium yellowcake from Niger.

Mercury News

Wilson’s report was filed well in advance of the famous State of the Union Address, in which the President claimed that there was proof that Hussein was buying yellowcake from Niger in an attempt to build nuclear weapons. After hearing the State of the Union Address, Wilson released the findings from his Niger trip to the press.

Wilson’s account of a 2002 trip to Niger to investigate the Iraqi uranium allegations “was viewed in the Office of Vice President as a direct attack on the credibility of the vice president (and the president) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq,” special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald wrote.

CNN

President Bush has long condemned the practice of leaking information:

There also is the issue of Bush’s numerous previous statements, now making their way across the Internet at the speed of a DSL line, about leaking. One of the most popular is from Sept. 30, 2003: “Let me just say something about leaks in Washington. There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. There’s leaks at the executive branch; there’s leaks in the legislative branch. There’s just too many leaks. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.”

Christian Science Monitor

There is no evidence that the President specifially authorized the leak of Plame’s identity (though the same cannot be said of Vice President Cheney, who appears to have instructed Libby to make the disclosure) but an even larger issue raises its head with this revelation.

While the President does have authority to de-classify information, there is no evidence that this information was officially de-classified, and certainly no indication that releasing it had any productive purpose for the American people.

Instead, the President seems to be leaking our national intelligence-and putting our national security at risk- for his own political gain.
This from a President who claims to be tough on national security.

The US stood almost alone yesterday as the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to set up a new Human Rights Council to replace the discredited body based in Geneva.

Ambassadors from around the world broke out in sustained applause when the UN vote was announced: 170-4, with three abstentions.

The Austrailian

Human rights are as American as apple pie- why would the U.S. resist the creation of a U.N. council that is dedicated to protecting them?

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said the assembled diplomats had missed a historic opportunity to help those most in need.

“We must not let the victims of human-rights abuses throughout the world think that UN member states were willing to settle for `good enough,’” Bolton said. “We must not let history remember us as the architects of a council that was a `compromise.’”

Chicago Tribune

Nice words, those, but I don’t find them credible.
Coming from an administration with a human rights pedigree like this one:

Torturing prisoners in Abu Gharib
Torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay
and now, tampering with witnesses in a terrorism trial

I have to suspect that Bolton’s objection is really about looking for a way to keep this council from getting too interested in the skeletons in America’s closet.

The Right Wing Spin Machine has been making a lot of noise about how important wiretapping is for our national security, and how the President would never wiretap innocent Americans- only those dastardly terrorists. That’s why we should all be ashamed of ourselves for questioning him, and be good Americans by looking the other way while he breaks the law.

This argument doesn’t hold water.

According to current law, the government can legally wiretap U.S. Citizens inside U.S. borders- as long as there is a warrant. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court was established specifically to have oversight of such warrants. This law goes on to say that if they need to rush, they can get the warrant AFTER the tap. Up to three days after the fact.

So why does the President need to disregard this law? Why is it important for our national security that he not get the necessary warrant?
There is only one reason I can think of that anyone would need to wiretap U.S. Citizens without a warrant.

And that’s if he doesn’t want anyone to know what he’s doing.

The last time a president was caught illegally spying on U.S. Citizens it had nothing to do with national security. President Nixon was caught spying on the Democratic National Committee’s Campaign headquarters.

June 17, 1972: Five men, one of whom says he used to work for the CIA, are arrested at 2:30 a.m. trying to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate hotel and office complex.

June 19, 1972: A GOP security aide is among the Watergate burglars, The Washington Post reports. Former attorney general John Mitchell, head of the Nixon reelection campaign, denies any link to the operation.

August 1, 1972: A $25,000 cashier’s check, apparently earmarked for the Nixon campaign, wound up in the bank account of a Watergate burglar, The Washington Post reports.

September 29, 1972: John Mitchell, while serving as attorney general, controlled a secret Republican fund used to finance widespread intelligence-gathering operations against the Democrats, The Post reports.

October 10, 1972: FBI agents establish that the Watergate break-in stems from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of the Nixon reelection effort, The Post reports.

November 11, 1972: Nixon is reelected in one of the largest landslides in American political history, taking more than 60 percent of the vote and crushing the Democratic nominee, Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota.

Watergate.info

Nixon, also, defended his illegal actions by claiming he was acting in the interests of national security:

I had been acting, as did my predecessors—President Truman, President Eisenhower, President Kennedy, and President Johnson—in a reasonable belief that in certain circumstances the Constitution permitted and sometimes even required such measures to protect the national security in the public interest.

Nixon’s Second Watergate Speech

The Bush Administration uses the National Defense defense to excuse a variety of ills:

• Invading a country that did not attack us
• Running up record breaking budget deficits
• Torturing prisoners
• Illegally spying on U.S. citizens without warrants

The Bush Administration did learn a thing or two from Nixon’s mistakes. Many of the activities that got Nixon impeached are now entirely legal, thanks to The Patriot Act.

Day by day, this Administrations policies are doing much more damage to our American Dream of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness than any terrorist possibly could.

I was reading about five small towns in Vermont who voted to approve resolutions to impeach President Bush because of his illegal wiretapping. About halfway down the page I saw this:

OUTSIDE POLITICAL MAINSTREAM
The idea of impeaching Bush resides firmly outside the political mainstream. Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold’s call this week to censure Bush — a step short of an impeachment — found scant support on Capitol Hill, even among fellow Democrats.

Yahoo News

I had to wonder why the author felt the need to stick that in.
He could just as easily have mentioned that former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman has called for the President’s impeachment. Holzman served on the committee who voted to impeach president Nixon. The article could have mentioned that the Center for Constitutional Rights has written Articles of Impeachment for President Bush, or quoted Barron’s call for impeachment,

“AS THE YEAR WAS DRAWING TO A CLOSE, we picked up our New York Times and learned that the Bush administration has been fighting terrorism by intercepting communications in America without warrants. It was worrisome on its face, but in justifying their actions, officials have made a bad situation much worse: Administration lawyers and the president himself have tortured the Constitution and extracted a suspension of the separation of powers . . .
Certainly, there was an emergency need after the Sept. 11 attacks to sweep up as much information as possible about the chances of another terrorist attack. But a 72-hour emergency or a 15-day emergency doesn’t last four years . . .

Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation. They ought to investigate it, consider it carefully and report either a bill that would change the wiretap laws to suit the president or a bill of impeachment.

It is important to be clear that an impeachment case, if it comes to that, would not be about wiretapping, or about a possible Constitutional right not to be wiretapped. It would be about the power of Congress to set wiretapping rules by law, and it is about the obligation of the president to follow the rules in the Acts that he and his predecessors signed into law.

Some ancillary responsibility, however, must be attached to those members of the House and Senate who were informed, inadequately, about the wiretapping and did nothing to regulate it. Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, told Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003 that he was “unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse these activities.” But the senator was so respectful of the administration’s injunction of secrecy that he wrote it out in longhand rather than give it to someone to type. Only last week, after the cat was out of the bag, did he do what he should have done in 2003 — make his misgivings public and demand more information.

Published reports quote sources saying that 14 members of Congress were notified of the wiretapping. If some had misgivings, apparently they were scared of being called names, as the president did last week when he said: “It was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy.”

Wrong. If we don’t discuss the program and the lack of authority for it, we are meeting the enemy — in the mirror.

Barron’s

Maybe it’s true that most Americans don’t care if their President breaks the law, but I do. And I’m tired of being told I’m outside the mainstream.

What does it mean to be in the mainstream anyway? Why is being part of the mainstream better than being outside of it?

In Old Salem, it was once mainstream to burn ‘witches’. Only a radical would say, “We shouldn’t burn any witches”. I would have been outside the mainstream in Old Salem, because I don’t belive in witches, and I’m strongly opposed to burning people.

There was a time when the mainstream of America believed that slavery was right and good, and that the underground railroad was a radical organization. Again, I would have been outside the mainstream.

These news outlets act as if being one of the sheep is something admirable, and that thinking for yourself- being outside the ‘mainstream’- is somehow wrong.

Of course there are many instances when the mainstream is right- people shouldn’t kill one another or steal from one another, etc. However, as a concerned member of a Democracy, I consider it my responsiblity and my civic duty to examine and question the conventional wisdom of my society. It is my duty to raise alarm if I see any sign of witch burning, slavery, torture, or a president who purposely disobeys the law of the land.

I guess I wasn’t meant for the mainstream.

Published on Wednesday, March 1, 2006 by the Chicago Tribune
What to Do When the Emperor Has No Clothes
by Garrison Keillor

These are troubling times for all of us who love this country, as surely we all do, even the satirists. You may poke fun at your mother, but if she is belittled by others it burns your bacon. A blowhard French journalist writes a book about America that is full of arrogant stupidity, and you want to let the air out of him and mail him home flat. And then you read the paper and realize the country is led by a man who isn’t paying attention, and you hope that somebody will poke him. Or put a sign on his desk that says, “Try much harder.”

Do we need to impeach him to bring some focus to this man’s life? The Feb. 27 issue of The New Yorker carries an article by Jane Mayer about a loyal conservative Republican and U.S. Navy lawyer, Albert Mora, and his resistance to the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. From within the Pentagon bureaucracy, he did battle against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo, who then was at the Justice Department, and shadowy figures taking orders from Vice President Dick “Gunner” Cheney, arguing America had ratified the Geneva Convention that forbids cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners, and so it has the force of law. They seemed to be arguing that President Bush has the right to order prisoners to be tortured.

One such prisoner, Mohamed al-Qahtani, was held naked in isolation under bright lights for months, threatened by dogs, subjected to unbearable noise volumes and otherwise abused, so that he begged to be allowed to kill himself. When the Senate approved the Torture Convention in 1994, it defined torture as an act “specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.”

Is the law a law or is it a piece of toast?

Wiretap surveillance of Americans without a warrant? Great. Go for it. How about turning over American ports to a country more closely tied to Sept. 11, 2001, than Saddam Hussein was? Fine by me. No problem. And what about the war in Iraq? Hey, you’re doing a heck of a job. No need to tweak a thing. And your blue button-down shirt–it’s you.

But torture is something else. Most people agree with this, and in a democracy that puts the torturers in a delicate position. They must make sure to destroy their e-mails and have subordinates who will take the fall. Because it is impossible to keep torture secret. It goes against the American grain and it eats at the conscience of even the most disciplined, and in the end the truth will come out. It is coming out now.

Our adventure in Iraq, at a cost of billions, has brought that country to the verge of civil war while earning us more enemies than ever before. And tax money earmarked for security is being dumped into pork-barrel projects anywhere somebody wants their own SWAT team. Detonation of a nuclear bomb within our borders–pick any big city–is a real possibility, as much so now as five years ago. Meanwhile, many Democrats have conceded the very subject of security and positioned themselves as Guardians of Our Forests and Benefactors of Waifs and Owls, neglecting the most basic job of government, which is to defend this country. The peaceful lagoon that is the White House is designed for the comfort of a vulnerable man. Perfectly understandable, but not what is needed now. The U.S. Constitution provides a simple, ultimate way to hold him to account for war crimes and the failure to attend to the country’s defense. Impeach him and let the Senate hear the evidence.

Garrison Keillor is an author and the radio host of “A Prairie Home Companion.”

In case you haven’t seen it, here is the transcript of Michael Brown (of failed FEMA fame) warning the President that hurricane Katrina might create a “catastrophe within a catastrophe” the day before the storm hit the Gulf Coast. This is the briefing where Michael Brown and a series of hurricane experts warned the president, among other things, that the levees could breach.

Five days later, while New Orleans was underwater, and the nation was still discovering how many of our countrymen had been left to die, Bush lied to the press:

“I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did appreciate a serious storm but these levees got breached and as a result much of New Orleans is flooded and now we’re having to deal with it and will,” he said.

BBC

Slate.com asks if we should be worried that Bush did not ask a single question during the entire briefing.

Let me just say, I’m not worried. I’m angry.
If my mechanic tells me my car needs a tune-up, I’m going to have some questions for him. That’s because I care about my car, and about my budget, and I want to make an intelligent decision that protects them both.

But our President doesn’t care enough about the lives of ordinary Americans to ask a single question. All he had time to do was mouth empty, ‘cover my backside’ platitudes to the “folks at the state level” that “we are fully prepared” before disappearing back to his vacation.

In retrospect, it’s obvious that even this was a lie.

In a single week, we learn that Vice President Cheney shot his good friend, and betrayed his country.

The shooting appears to have been a legitimate accident.
The treason, however, was on purpose:

Now, according to documents filed in the CIA-leak case by Fitzgerald, Libby has testified that his “superiors” in the White House instructed him to leak information from a highly classified intelligence report suggesting Iraq was trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction. The National Journal reported that Cheney himself had authorized the leak, although it’s unclear whether anyone bothered to declassify the information before Libby passed it on to reporters.

Scripps Howard News Service

Included in the information Libby leaked was the identity of CIA Agent Valerie Plame. At the time, Plame was deep undercover.

Plame’s identity was published in July 2003 by columnist Robert Novak after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq’s efforts to buy uranium in Niger. The year before, the CIA had sent Wilson to Niger to determine the accuracy of the uranium reports.

Wilson’s revelations cast doubt on President Bush’s claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that Niger had sold uranium to Iraq to develop a nuclear weapon as one of the administration’s key justifications for going to war in Iraq.

ABC News

Outing an undercover agent is a serious breach of national security, and a crime known as treason.
Outing an undercover agent for reasons of revenge?
I don’t have any word low enough for that.

What surprises me about this whole thing, is that anybody would be surprised that Cheney was directly involved.
Scooter Libby was Cheney’s Chief of Staff.

A Chief of Staff is the most trusted and intimate staffer anyone can have.
There is no way Scooter Libby would take an action like this without direct orders from his boss.

Alberto Gonzales, at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on President Bush’s Domestic Surveillance program.

“I am not comfortable going down the road of saying yes or no as to what the president has or has not authorized,”

Bloomberg

Alberto Gonzales refused to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee under oath.

My first thought was that he was clearly planning to lie. Why else would he refuse? After reviewing his answers, I’m back to wondering why he wouldn’t take the oath.

Questions about the operational specifics of the NSA program bounced off Gonzales all day — “what happens to the data?”, “how long is it retained?”— none of which Gonzales would answer. “An open discussion of the operational details would put the lives of Americans at risk,” he claimed.

Time Magazine

He refused to be sworn in, only to sit there refusing to answer questions.

Are these the actions of a man who has nothing to hide?

In an attempt to resurrect the Online Child Protection Act, which was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court two years ago, Alberto Gonzales has picked a fight with Google.

Gonzales has subpoenaed Google’s search records, along with those of the other major U.S. search engines. AOL, Yahoo, and MSN gave Gonzales their data, but Google is resisting.

Google co-founder Larry Page reiterated the company’s opposition Friday in an interview with ABC News.

“Our company relies on having the trust of our users,” Page told the network. “That’s a very strong motivation for us. … I think instead we should have laws that protect the privacy of data, for example, from government requests and other kinds of requests.”

USA Today

First, they asked for our library records.
Then they opened and read our mail.
After that, they wiretapped us without getting any warrants.
Now they want to know what we’re searching for on the Internet.

Thank you, Google, for standing up for our privacy.
I wish our elected officials would join you in protecting us from… themselves.

So… after bending to the enormous pressure from Congress, and from the American people, President Bush finally signed McKain’s anti torture legislation into law.

Then, without any fanfare, he quietly jerked the teeth out of the new law.

After approving the bill last Friday, Bush issued a ”signing statement” — an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law — declaring that he will view the interrogation limits in the context of his broader powers to protect national security. This means Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said.

…

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said that the signing statement means that Bush believes he can still authorize harsh interrogation tactics when he sees fit.

”The signing statement is saying ‘I will only comply with this law when I want to, and if something arises in the war on terrorism where I think it’s important to torture or engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct, I have the authority to do so and nothing in this law is going to stop me,’ ” he said. ”They don’t want to come out and say it directly because it doesn’t sound very nice, but it’s unmistakable to anyone who has been following what’s going on.”

Boston Globe

Not only is the President reserving the right to torture prisoners at his own discretion, but he’s thumbing his nose at our country’s longstanding belief in due process.

The signing statement also advanced the administration’s view that the McCain amendment does not provide for any court review of a prisoner’s claim of cruel treatment, and that all appeals by foreign prisoners before the courts should be dismissed.

Washington Post

If there was ever any doubt that this president wants to torture people, this lays that to rest once and for all.

If there was ever any doubt that this president is willing to decieve the American people in order to do whatever he wants, even if the majority of the country disagrees with him…

Well there’s no doubt about that now either.

Click here to listen to an interview with political scientist Andy Rudalevige about the use of the signing statement.

After a month of criticism, the Bush administration continues to resist a Constitutional ban on torture. The President is publicly defending U.S. interrogation policies, while Vice President Cheney is actively trying to stop legislation that would protect U.S. detainees from torture and abusive interrogation procedures such as those perpetrated by U.S. forces in Agu Gharib.

Vice President Dick Cheney made an unusual personal appeal to Republican senators this week to allow CIA exemptions to a proposed ban on the torture of terrorism suspects in U.S. custody, according to participants in a closed-door session.

Seattle Times

This is especially disturbing, now that we’re learning that the CIA operates secret prisons around the world, which are not subject to any oversight at all:

The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.

…

CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA’s approved “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as “waterboarding,” in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning.

…

The largest CIA prison in Afghanistan was code-named the Salt Pit. It was also the CIA’s substation and was first housed in an old brick factory outside Kabul. In November 2002, an inexperienced CIA case officer allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets. He froze to death, according to four U.S. government officials. The CIA officer has not been charged in the death.

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons, Washington Post

Meanwhile, the Senate has reaffirmed it’s support of Senator McCain’s measure- and this time it’s unanimous:

The Senate approved the same provision last month, 90 to 9. On Friday, senators endorsed it again, this time by a unanimous voice vote, and attached it to a revised military spending bill. The White House has threatened to veto the bill if it includes the measure, saying the provision would restrict the president’s ability to protect the country.

New York Times

Despite growing pressure from all sides, Cheney seems willing to go to any lengths to halt any sort of progress on prisoner protection:

Last winter, when Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, began pushing to have the full committee briefed on the CIA’s interrogation practices, Cheney called him to the White House to urge that he drop the matter, said three U.S. officials.

Washington Post

Beside personal pressure from the vice president, Cheney’s staff is engaged in resisting a policy change. Tactics included “trying to have meetings canceled … to at least slow things down or gum up the works” or trying to conduct meetings on the subject without other key Cabinet members, one administration official said. The official said some internal memos and e-mail from the National Security Council staff to the national security adviser were automatically forwarded to the vice president’s office – in some cases without the knowledge of the authors.

Hartford Courant

Even while the debate rages, the Administration is making no move to prove that detainees are not being tortured right now:

… the Pentagon is also coming under fire for refusing to allow United Nations special envoys access to prisoners being held at Guantánamo Bay. The Defense Department recently decided to allow the UN to visit Guantánamo but rejected requests for meetings with detainees, saying that was the role of the International Committee of the Red Cross – a decision that has prompted some criticism from Democrats.

Financial Times

President Bush and his Administration constantly talk about ‘American Values’ when it supports their political game. But when it comes time to living according to those values, they are showing their true colors.

Lucky for us, there are still a few brave patriots willing to stand up to The Administration.

Speaking from the Senate floor, McCain said, “If necessary – and I sincerely hope it is not – I and the co-sponsors of this amendment will seek to add it to every piece of important legislation voted on in the Senate until the will of a substantial bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress prevails,” McCain said on the Senate floor. “Let no one doubt our determination.”

From the Los Angeles Times (via Concord Monitor)

You go, Senator McCain.