Taking the 14th

"The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."

14th Amendment, US Constitution
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Now, I'm no lawyer, which means that I generally take such statements at face value and have no knowledge of what pretzels they've been twisted into by various courts in various cases, but it seems to me that if congress can't question the validity of our public debt, then congress can't refuse to pay it or more importantly say it's only valid under a certain amount authorized by Congress after they've already deemed it legal. What do you think?

I hate to bring up the constitution at a time when the Tea Bag Patriots are pretending to worship it while claiming that those who would like to actually conform to it are "shredding it" but the situation is getting serious.

Of course this whole controversy is about "taking down" the president we elected by a good margin and replacing him with a Tea Party Republican of their choice hell bent not on reducing the debt, but killing Social Security, Medicare, all forms of welfare and any protection for the public against the health insurance cartel -- and all to make sure people like me can put an extra tank of fuel into the yacht every now and then thus creating jobs in the Bahamas and Taiwan.

After all they raised the debt ceiling every year a Republican was in office since the beginning of the Reagan administration and authorized Bush's massive debt explosion like a well disciplined private army. Remember when "debt doesn't matter" was the slogan? No? Well I do.

"Obama would be impeached if he blocked debt payments"

says Rep. Steve King (R-IA) and he'd also be impeached if he invalidated the debt ceiling based on the 14th amendment, says Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) Talk about a poker player with a 'tell.' Might as well lay the cards on the table.

It's all about impeachment and all about finding some flimsy excuse or forcing the president into a position where they will impeach him if he does and impeach him if he doesn't. No more revolting, I guess than impeaching one for asking his secretary not to tell his wife he was having an affair. Talk about insurrection and rebellion! No sooner did we lose the Cold War gravy train then we embarked on the Cold Secession.

President Clinton of course told us recently that he wouldn't hesitate to use the 14th to raise the debt ceiling and "force the courts to stop me." You'll remember of course the attempts to impeach him on any pretext and how the talk of the "failure of the Clinton Presidency" preceded the Clinton Presidency and how he would certainly be a one term president and how his tax policies would bankrupt the economy. They hope you won't remember, of course because we're hearing the same damned bullshit again.

"I think the Constitution is clear and I think this idea that the Congress gets to vote twice on whether to pay for [expenditures] it has appropriated is crazy.”

said Bill Clinton to The National Memo last week. No wonder slimy things like the Newt are challenging the constitutional basis for even having a Supreme Court.

Meanwhile that 3% extra tax cut I get on anything I earn over $250,000 is going to prompt me to create jobs for those struggling people now paying for the longest, most expensive wars in American history while losing their houses, jobs, medical insurance waiting for the Voodoo to kick in and save us all -- and all will be fine just in time for a Tea Party president. I can feel it in my bones.

Impeach!

Is this the same Republican Party that once spent 60 million dollars of our money investigating a 20 year old real estate deal ( and found nothing,) attempted to make an impeachable scandal out of firing a travel agent and actually did impeach a president for denying an act that was neither a crime nor connected to any charges against him?

Is this the Same United States of America that a generation ago ran a president out of office for interfering with a burglary investigation, that ran a vice president out of office for using his office for personal gain?

No it isn't. It's a country so terrified that men with beards will take over our country and lay waste to Festus, Missouri and Keokuk Iowa that we will allow the closest thing to a fascist leader we have ever had to tell the courts to ignore the destruction of evidence in open defiance of a court order. It's a country so insane with irrational and baseless fear that it's willing to do without the law and depend on the honesty of crooks and liars any time the president says BOO!

We're not obligated to obey the law, said the Bush administration to U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy last night, and you'd better not question anything we do either because your laws get in the way of our secret investigations. How much more clear can they make it that we are in such terrible danger that a dictatorship is the only solution and how much more clear can it be that the war on the courts waged by the Neocon insurgents has no other purpose than to allow them to rule unopposed?

Yes, impeachment will be difficult, since they can and will destroy any records or other evidence they like without even bothering to deny it as has been demonstrated, nor will they recognize the authority of any other branch of government to question them, but I fear that impeachment remains the only legal way to remove these pirates from office and I fear that even that may be too little and too late. No outside group of religious nuts will bring down the United States or do us serious damage. No foreign entity can conquer us or will be able to trade our freedom for tyranny. Only we can do that and we will do that unless the remaining support for this illegal government gives way to recognition that the only thing we have to fear is Bush and his lawless government.

Cross posted from The Reaction

Guantánamo

O dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark! total eclipse, Without all hope of day.

-John Milton, Sampson Agonistes-

The worst of the worst, scum de la scum; they're bad, evil, terrible people we are holding in Guantánamo, or so we have been told all along. Don't feel bad for the men in cages, we're only torturing them a little bit and after all, if someone has information about a terrible terrorist plot, wouldn't you torture them to find out?

Try to reconcile that official rationale for dehumanizing a group of people picked up or kidnapped under widely varying circumstances from many different places and sometimes only because somebody accused them, or they had a name similar to somebody who might have known somebody; try to reconcile it with the steady trickle of prisoners who after 5 years of duress and investigation have been released as not being dangerous or knowing nothing and being not guilty of doing anything.

Isa Murbati, a 41-year-old father of five who had been a Guantánamo prisoner for more than five years without having been charged with anything, arrived in Bahrain last night. Oops, never mind. He's the sixth and last Bahraini to be released and all the men had been in coveralls and cages since 2002. At lease one had attempted suicide repeatedly. If it had not been for the persistent efforts of the government of Bahrain and King Hamad Bin Isa al Khalifa, whose kingdom is considered to be "pro-American" and allows the US to base the Fifth Fleet there, who knows what would have happened to these wretches? Many other prisoners have no place to go because no country will take them. No money, no clothes, no country and most assuredly nearly or fully demented from half a decade of no sleep and waterboarding. The worst of the worst.

The government of Bahrain will seek compensation and perhaps they will succeed. After all they do have leverage, but paying damages would be an admission of having done something wrong and admissions of wrong doing do not escape the iron curtain around the White House any more easily that light will exit any other black hole. I'm sure something will be worked out to save the smiling face of our delusional dictator, but what amount of money can restore a ruined life, a ruined mind?

As far as anyone knows, the amount of valuable information extracted from the torture rooms is about nil. Of course the black hole doesn't emit much light and what it does emit tends to be disinformation or denial, but what can a man who has been in a dog cage for 5 years tell us about? Not much about Osama perhaps, but he can tell us a lot about the United States of America.

Nothing short of impeachment can restore our ruined reputation and bring back the light to the dark and secret nightmare cellars of our nation.

But wait, there's more.

And Bush wants it. He still doesn't think he has enough power to do what he will about looking and listening and snooping and spying on anyone, anywhere, anytime. He wants more. He wants those who broke the law before he emasculated the Constitution protected from prosecution and of course as of July 23rd he's made new laws all by himself allowing him to seize the assets of anyone getting in the way - not that he will let anyone see the details. On May 9th he gave himself dictatorial powers and he wants more.

And the witch hunt begins. Since nothing he did in violation of the 4th amendment can now be considered illegal, it seems the administration now feels able to punish whoever exposed his massive and still mostly secret intelligence gathering, spying and data mining directed against US citizens without court approval. According to the August 13th edition of Newsweek, a secret warrant has been used to seize the computers and files of Thomas M. Tamm, who previously worked in the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR)—the supersecret unit that oversees surveillance of terrorist and espionage targets.

Stalin would applaud and now Bush has nearly Stalinesque powers to punish someone who tried to expose the criminal administration in its criminal activities. Such things are not unprecedented, but they are unprecedented in America - and Bush wants more. The man who said he didn't trust government but trusted the people now wants more secrecy, more power and more ability to punish those untrustworthy advocates of a government constrained by law and responsible to the elected representatives of the American people and to an independent judiciary.

It's hard to believe that a lame-duck president would press for such power and such protection from any checks and balances the law provides if he did not intent to stay in power beyond the November 2008 elections. I'm no longer embarrassed to say that I think he doesn't intend to leave and that I think his ambitions are dictatorial. I would however, be embarrassed to say that I'm a citizen of a country that allowed this to happen; a country that snickered about Liberals, obsessed about celebrities, numbed their brains with pop culture, sucked up lies and propaganda like Flavor-Aid in the hot Guyana jungle and allowed it to happen.

Bush secrets, Bush lies

Look at the long history of the Bush family and you see patterns. Disturbing and even horrifying patterns. It's no secret that the Bush family patriarch, Prescott Bush, was a Nazi sympathizer, involved in a New York bank that laundered money for Hitler. After a Herald Tribune story calling him "Hitler's Angel" exposed his bank as a de facto Nazi front organization, the Bush assets were seized under the Trading With The Enemy Act of 1941 . The media coverage was minimal and for over 60 years the story has been denied, but for anyone interested, the records are there and more are appearing.

The funds were returned after the war and Prescott went on to become a Senator from Connecticut using the laundered Nazi money. As Prescott's father Samuel Bush served during the First World War as a government official in charge of coordination and assistance to major weapons contractors, it's fair to say that the family tradition of profiting from war is at least of four generations standing.

Prescott Bush himself served in the military during the Great War and while he was in France, he wrote letters home bragging about his medals for bravery but had to retract the story when he was shown to be lying. He later claimed he had only been joking about his medals.

Prescott returned from the war and failed at several business ventures until his father in law got him a position as vice president of Harriman & Co which through a series of mergers became Brown Brothers Harriman & Co with Bush as a partner. This bank represented the interests of German companies including the interests of Fritz Thyssen, who had been an early financial backer of the Nazi party. Thyssen's deposits at the time were said to total aver 3 million - a very large sum at the time. Thyssen later authored the book I was Hitler's Banker.


But now for the really scary part. The BBC investigative program Document has revealed that during the Great Depression, Prescott Bush was involved in a plot which included prominent businessmen to overthrow the government of United States, replacing President Roosevelt with a fascist system like the ones they admired in Europe. He was also a supporter of Eugenics: the practice of sterilizing "inferior" people for the benefit of the "race."

I don't have to fill you in on the Bush family's continuing connection with the Military Industrial Complex, which includes Saudi arms companies and some shady deals, not to mention a very profitable war based on lies and forgeries, but you can see certain patterns in the Bush dynasty, including shady dealings with criminal governments, The use of dirty money to promote family enterprises, love of totalitarianism, lying, war profiteering and of course treason. No wonder the passion for secrecy runs so deep!

Think of impeachment not as ridding ourselves of a criminal administration, but as cutting off the head of a snake; a very big, long and dangerous snake.

Is it 1984 yet?

The character of the man with the sandwich boards saying "the end is neigh" used to appear regularly in cartoons and sometimes on the streets of New York. I used to laugh along with most people and because the end has always proved to be a little further off than proposed, but also because the end always seems nigh. There is an end to everything, however and the end of Freedom in the United States seems visible to the point where I'm about to join the club. The End is Neigh.

This week, President George W. Bush signed another one of those amazing executive orders that in former years would have had Americans loading up their flintlocks, grabbing coonskin caps and taking to the hills. Bush now asserts his right to confiscate the property of anyone who interferes with his war. The definition of 'interfere' seems hazy enough to fit far too many circumstances and of course the ultimate definition lies not with the courts or the Congress, but with George.

Of course, just in case Congress starts to act as though they had some of the powers they are assigned by the Constitution, George W. Bush is ready for them. The Washington Post tells us today that Bush's thugs now assert that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege. Along with his order of May 9th: the "National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51" and "Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20," Bush has virtually unlimited emergency powers, immune to any powers of the legislative and judicial branches among which is the ability to define "emergency." How much longer will any of us be able to write critically of Bush, to read anything unauthorized? Is it 1984 yet?

Paul Craig Roberts is a conservative with credentials: Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He's calling for impeachment and impeachment now. Like me, he's concerned that the stage has been set for a staged attack or provocation that would allow a drastically escalated war and the invocation of emergency powers. It's hard for me to see why these outrageous executive orders, coupled with the relentless "chatter" about threats and gut feelings of threats aren't the top stories of the day and I fear that by the time they do hit the headlines, Bush's Thousand Year Reich will be in full swing.

AND NOW THIS!

I read at a New York Times blog that Defense Undersecretary Eric Edelman has written a letter to Senator Hillary Clinton asserting that: “Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia,” Clinton, of course is a US Senator and asking the Defense Department to come up with a plan to withdraw troops wouldn't be seen by a sane administration as anything but a request for a plan and not aiding and abetting an "Enemy." But of course this is not. Of course the Defense Undersecretary is expressing an opinion, but as of this week, that opinion has teeth - big ones.



Impeachment now.

I am not Ron Paul

I promise I'm not. I know I've been saying the same things and you have read some of it here first, but I'm not Paul at all.

Paul Watson at Prison Planet quotes the Republican candidate as warning us against a staged, Gulf of Tonkin style attack and the subsequent invocation of martial law under Bush's Executive Order of May 9th, 2007 making him a dictator if he so chooses. No, I don't wear a beanie with a propeller on it and neither does he; we just read the news and contemplate historical precedent.

Paul also worries about severe economic consequences to any expanded military endeavors, as do I. A sense of confidence based on little but a rising Dow Industrial Average may prove very transitory if Bush's dependence on prolonging and extending war to support the economy as well as to support his sense of entitlement to ever increasing power.

As different a person from Mr. Paul as Barbara Boxer is talking impeachment - and I promise I'm not her either, nor am I Dennis Kucinich. What we all are, is a part of one of the greatest areas of unanimity ever seen in the US; the vast majority who see Bush as a loose cannon. I'd like to think that Robert Wuhl's assertion on his HBO special that incompetence is a time honored American institution and we will get through it as we did with Franklin Pierce, but I cannot. We live in a nuclear age and on a very much smaller planet. There has never been a time when a bad president; a mad president could do as much harm to everything as is the present.

There has been a lot of argument about whether Bush/Cheney has done anything that really warrants impeachment, but if you see us on the road to world war, as losing our economic leadership, moral leadership and most importantly: losing not only our civil rights but our democracy, what else can we hope for but Impeachment?

Bush 1 Clinton 140

It didn't take long. The viral e-mail full of misinformation and twisted logic hit my mailbox early in the morning on the 4th of July, a day already filled with flags, fake history and fulsome braggadocio. The ritualized sneering, the evocation of some sneerworthy but irrelevant straw man like Hillary or Jane or Bill; the non-sequiturs, the ad hominem attacks. . . it's like a thousand others.

It's titled Bush one Vs. Clinton 140 and it begins:

As Shrillery Clinton condemns G.W. Bush for commuting Scooter Libby's prison sentence, I felt compelled to compile a short list of the pardons and commutations hat [sic] her wife, Bill Clinton, did in his last years and days as President of this country. This woman has more nerve than I can imagine in her condemnation of President Bush. Perhaps if Scooter Libby was accused or convicted of domestic bombings, sexual assault, bank fraud, solicitation of child pornography, tax evasion or cocaine traffficking, [sic] such as her family friends listed below are, Shrillery would be in favor of a pardon.

Of course this opening gambit is to make you think that the nationwide outrage is something Mrs. Clinton invented. I won't address the ritual name calling or allegations of gender ambiguity; it's just typical Republican sleaze, signifying nothing. Of course no one will bother to critically look at each and every case of presidential pardon,
either from Clinton or his predecessors but even so, the statement evades two important points, the first of which is that one's misdeeds are not excused by misleadingly similar misdeeds of others. The second is that pardoning someone who has served a sentence is not the same as removing the sentence of someone who has served no time while your friends pay his expenses and fines.

Libby was not, of course pardoned, he was simply excused from having to go to jail because, as the decider decided, the sentence which fell well within the guidelines for everyone else, was too severe. Since he reduced it to nothing, he must have felt that any sentence was too severe. This of course from a man and a party who have championed mandatory and severe sentences. The outrage of most of the public has more to do with the obvious cronyism and the additional increment of obstruction of justice that is this unashamed reward for loyalty. As laughable as it may be, the only way for them to deal with the flimsiness of this farce is to counterattack. -- and so they do.

No mention of course is made about Reagan's pardons or Bush the Elder's equally self serving gifts to those who broke the law in the furthering and covering up of presidential crimes and while none of that is relevant, it makes the reference to Mrs. Clinton's "nerve" a bit funny in a nauseating sort of way.

Somehow, all this faux outrage and haughty bravado reminds me of some images I saw of the last days of Nicolae Ceauşescu, standing before a vast crowd he thought was there to praise him once again. He seemed stunned and incredulous that they were booing and jeering and yet he never stopped waving and acting as though he was the beloved patriarch; as though he were in control. Three days later he was put against a wall.

The nerve of an administration that may have the respect of perhaps 20% of the American public acting as though it was merely dealing with some insignificant and helpless minority while the nation counts the minutes until we are rid of them.

I remember another image; some words scrawled on a wall in Beijing after the massacre had been cleaned up and swept under the rug: "all this must be accounted for."

(cross posted at The Reaction)

Jolly Roger

I won't be hanging an American Flag from my front porch tomorrow. I won't be listening to songs of praise for America on TV. I will ignore as much of the patriotic drivel as I can and I'm sure as hell am not going to pledge allegiance to that grimy and blood stained flag I'm supposed to worship like a religious relic.

Do I have to explain why? Our proud ship of state,as Lyndon Johnson used to be fond of calling it, is now a rusted hulk infested with pirates and rats. Its cargo has been sold off, its passengers robbed and locked up - all except for one.

I was listening to Air America in the car today and there as everywhere, the talk was of the commutation. Professional traitors like Fred Thompson are proud of Libby and think he's done a lot for the country, others wonder what Martha Stewart is thinking. I'm wondering what Record producer Weldon Angelos is thinking as he serves a 55 year sentence for selling three little bags of weed to an undercover cop. He didn't get 55 years because he had some crazed hanging judge, but because "conservatives" as fascists call themselves in America, like mandatory and draconian sentences. Even the sentencing judge, U.S. District Judge Paul Cassell, an appointee of President Bush, called the sentence "unjust, cruel and irrational." He is right. Hijack a plane, rape a child, embezzle a hundred million bucks and you'll get a shorter sentence. But so Republican is the Supreme court, they upheld the sentence.

Severe sentences are the nectar and ambrosia of the Republicans. They breathe heavily at the thought of locking someone in a box forever, they love torture, they love executions of the retarded, the insane and the underage - but they don't love those mandatory sentences when it happens to one of them. They do a lot for our country as Republicans and that makes up for any felony.

Swashbuckling George wouldn't commute Angelos' sentence, but Scooter? All Scooter did was to help cover up a felony that could have resulted in the impeachment of the Vice President. It's ridiculous to talk of a double standard when there is no standard. It's ridiculous to talk about the rule of law when the law changes to suit the whim of the leader.

Libby won't pay that fine or the million bucks or so his lawyers charged him - that's taken care of by a Republican group headed by Fred (just like Reagan) Thompson. Before long he'll have a nice book deal and a certain pardon. Angelos will spend his life in a cell.


The hell with the flag and the parades and the marching and speeches about the troops. Hang out the pirate flag, call your congressmen and call them again. Tell them you support impeachment and impeachment right now. Tomorrow may be too late.

The name of the beast

Turn up your iPods America. Get out the skateboards, turn on the ball game, tune in to Rush and pop open another Budweiser. Watch American Idol, download some ring tones and text your buds. We're almost there; we're almost stupid enough, angry enough and confused enough for the fascism we've wanted for over 75 years to take effect. Sure, the rich get richer and the smart eventually get smarter, but dumbass America never learns.

Some questions on a new Newsweek poll are frightening. Somehow, the disinformation machine has 41% of Americans believing Saddam Hussein was involved in planning, financing or carrying out the September 11th Attack on New York. Somehow a majority don't know that the attackers came from Saudi Arabia.

That 59% know Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House but 81% can't tell you who the Chief Justice is, indicates to me that whatever news they are getting is from the right wing rabble-rousers hell bent on making Nancy Pelosi the next Jane Fonda. The 20% who think that Saddam's non-existent nukes were found; the 15% who think Osama has been caught or weren't quite sure are less surprising. That no doubt represents the irreducible fraction of irredeemable idiots and is roughly equal to the percentage identifying themselves as Republicans.

So when I read about how Cheney has since his election, felt that he was a special branch of government designed to be above the law and not answerable to the people or their representatives, I'm not surprised. A man who answers "fuck yourself" to a senator who has a right to ask the question of who Cheney actually works for; a man who burns records when he bothers to keep them, who ignores subpoenas and makes money from a war he helped promote with falsified data and the suppression of facts, is just the sort of big league tyrant stupid, hysterical and ignorant populaces turn to. A man who has restructured the Executive branch by fiat and in defiance of the law would once have caused a revolution, but today one hardly hears of support for impeachment or even censure.

Yes, his popularity ratings are abysmal and yet the man who could stop him in his tracks is silent and supportive - and we elected him. I'm afraid that given the chance we'd do it again and I'm worried that we won't even have the chance come 2008.