...before Bush starts World War III! Word is
Israel is planning to strike Iran. That takes the heat off Bush while giving him the war he wants in the Middle East. Scenario: Israel strikes Iran. Iran retaliates. The US joined Israel and Bush get his jollies watching mushroom clouds from afar! Gog Magog, my ass! Bush his psychotic.
The debate about whether "waterboarding" is or is not "torture" is another GOP red herring. Anyone who denies waterboarding is torture should prove it's not by public submitting themselves to it! That just might end another stupid obfuscation by the GOP. Then again, it doesn't really matter what it's called --especially by the liars of Bush's illegiimate regime. By any defintion, it is a violation of Due Process of Law and the various international conventions to which the US is bound.
I have yet to find anything in the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or the various treaties to which the US is bound by law and convention that gives anyone in the US --including persons who call themselves "President" --a right to violate Due Process of anyone. There are numerous laws, however, which bind the US to the Geneva Convention despite unconstitutional attempts by both Bush and Congress to exempt Bush from Geneva but only after he had already violated it! The statute, in effect at the time Bush committed the crime, makes Bush a war criminal,
subject to prosecution for capital crimes. Congress may change the law but the Constitution forbids they "back date it".
No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
--Article 1, US Constitution
Now --can we please get on with the capital crimes trial of George W. Bush?
Bush is a Bigger Threat Than "Terrorists"!!
The charges against Rumsfeld are a good first step! My goal is to see the lot of them in the dock ---Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, Ashcroft!!! Americans: let me put this bluntly. The Bush administration is not a legitimate administration. It is a crime syndicate, in office because the GOP helped them steal two elections. Being illegitimate, nothing done by this gang is legal or has the force of law. Let me put this yet another way: a criminal occupies the White House and presumes to rule by decree. In the words of Che, the peace must be considered "already broken".
The World Wide Campaign to
Bring Bush's War Criminals to Trial
Bush's arrest for his a seemingly endless list of crimes and outrages is long overdue.
The right not to have one's person violated arbitrarily in the absence of probable cause or evidence, is a crime against humanity. There is, moreover, no evidence, that anyone tortured by George "Torguemada" Bush or his minions in crime, has ever been connected with terror at any time, in any way. Show me some evidence! Show me a single "terrorist" that Bushco has ever brought to justice! Show me something other than bullshit!
And --today --we learned that the cowardly Democrats have confirmed yet another "torturer" as Atty General. Democrats, this is not good enough. How about the American people boycott this election and hold an alternative election? How about the people form a legitimate government under the law. At present, a lawless gang occupies Washington. What do the Democrats in Washington proposed to do about it. I learned early in my broadcasting career that one was either a part of a solution or part of the problem. The cowardly Demos are quickly becomming a part of the problem, if not co-conspirators!
Now from the department of "Big Frickin' Deal"!!!
The
AP reports, "Under pressure to support the troops but end the war, House Democrats said Thursday they would send President Bush $50 billion for combat operations on the condition that he begin withdrawing troops from Iraq." The proposal, "similar to one Bush vetoed earlier this year, would identify a goal of ending combat entirely by December 2008.
"
The Politico notes Speaker Pelosi "told reporters yesterday that the new proposal "would leave a small force in the country to pursue Al Qaeda, protect US interests and train Iraqi security forces." The
New York Times says the plan "is certain to be opposed in the House by many Republicans as well as some strongly antiwar Democrats who want tougher restrictions on the president."
The Hill notes Republicans "attacked Democrats for going to the well once again with votes calling for a withdrawal of troops." The measure "also caught many Democrats off guard. In the early afternoon, most legislators interviewed said they hadn't seen the legislation, even some who were actively trying to obtain a copy."
...I am unimpressed! Democrats could have ended this war but haven't. The attitude is typified by Hilary who obviously believes that "Anti-war nut jobs" have no place to go.
In the meantime, it's time for Bush's criminal regime to put up or shut up! It's time Democrats grew a spine! It's time that the people of the US overthrew this government and replaced it with a lawful one under the Constitution.
In the meantime, Democrats have helped Bush get another torturer appointed to Attorney General. Bush will not have improved his horrible, criminal record with his appointment of 66 year old Michael Mukasy can be expected to follow the the example set by John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, two liars remembered for their contempt for the laws they swore to enforce and uphold. Congress has failed to find redemption.
Mukasey, 66, a former federal judge from New York, told senators he considers waterboarding "repugnant," but he could not categorically say whether the technique amounts to torture, which U.S. and international law bans.
(CBS) Waterboarding, a controversial interrogation technique that simulates drowning, dates back to at least the Spanish Inquisition, and has been used some of the world's cruelest dictatorships, according to Human Rights Watch.Forms of waterboarding vary but generally consist of immobilizing an individual on his or her back - head inclined downward - and pouring water over the face to induce the sensation of drowning.
Other techniques include dunking prisoners head-first into water, as was used by Chadian military forces in the mid 1980s. The Khmer Rouge, responsible for the deaths of approximately 1.5 million Cambodians during the 1970s, strapped victims on inclined boards, with feet raised and head lowered, and covered their faces with cloth or cellophane. Water then was poured over their mouths to stimulate drowning.
Waterboarding, long considered a form of torture by the United States, produces a gag reflex and makes the victim believe death is imminent. The technique leaves no visible physical damage.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, considers waterboarding a form of torture. McCain has been quoted as saying that waterboarding is "no different than holding a pistol to his head and firing a blank."
--CBS News,
Waterboarding: Interrogation Or Torture?The single shread of good news:
U.S. Hawks Dive For CoverDennis Kucinich didn't vote for the 2002 resolution to invade Iraq. Several Democratic senators who voted for that resolution and who are currently presidential contenders for the 2008 election have expressed regrets; the only candidate who has not done so is Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, amazingly the current Democratic front-runner. ...
This move by Kucinich puts more heat on Democrats than on the GOP. We know the GOP to be crooked war whores but we expected more from Democrats. Perhaps we should not have. We were taken for granted by a party that drinks from a poisoned well, a party that thinks we have no place to go.
Thank you,
thepoetryman
The United States is funding and in many cases arming the three ethnic factions in Iraq—the 
Obama is surrounding himself with folks from Bill Clinton's administration. I remember those eight years well, I was protesting his policies the whole time. Welfare was reformed and social spending was gutted even more. The prisons became even more crowded with nonviolent drug offenders. The sanctions and ongoing bombing campaign in Iraq that happened on Clinton's watch killed hundreds of thousands of children, and his Secretary of State said the price was worth it. NAFTA was passed and then the WTO was formed, all with Clinton's blessings. These trade deals that Clinton and most of his party supported plunged millions of people around the world into poverty and an early death. Yugoslavia and Iraq will glow for thousands of years because of the nuclear waste littering the land that fell during the Clinton years.
Of course, Clinton inherited the mess in Iraq, and Clinton certainly did not invent neoliberal economics, nor did Clinton start the process of the de-industrialization of the US, the growth of Mexican sweatshops, or the support of the death squad regime in Colombia. But he embraced all of that, and much, much more.
On the other hand, in previous generations, things were different. Before the export of America's manufacturing base, before all the free trade agreements, before real wages in the US lost half their value, the US was run by liberals. Liberals like FDR and Nixon. Nixon? Yes, well, I studied economics a little, and social spending in the US actually continued to increase from the time of FDR to the time of Nixon. It was under Nixon that the EPA, the NEA and other such institutions were born. It was after Nixon that the budget-cutting began in earnest. From FDR to Nixon, whether the administration was Democratic or Republican, social spending increased. Since Nixon, under Democratic and Republican administrations, social spending has decreased.
There have, of course, been variations. FDR enthusiastically bombed Japan into the stone age, killing millions of innocents. Eisenhower was a Republican president, he preferred to bomb Koreans and Vietnamese. Johnson bombed them a lot more, killing millions. Nixon did it, too, of course. All along the way, by and large, there was overwhelming bipartisan support for these policies. Not among the population, but among the elite who rule it.
Several days ago I was exchanging email messages about the state of the world with my good friend Terry Flynn, a professor of economics and the social sciences at Western Connecticut State University. In one email he wrote, "a damn interesting time. The hegemon is rocked. I'm sure we're witnessing a re-configuration of the global order on par with the post-WW2 period." I asked what kind of reconfiguration did he see happening, and this was his eloquent reply:
It's a shift from one hegemonic era to another. The U.S. took over from the U.K. after the war. But our time is up. Don't know which country or alliance will dominate in the next cycle. The major contenders are China and India. But Russia is working very hard to leverage its massive geopolitical presence, natural resources, and techno-military culture, despite huge demographic deficits in comparison with the former countries. Russia has Europe by the balls due to, e.g., Germany's utter dependency on Russian natural gas. And it's far superior to India and China in many important ways. It's still a fucking wreck in terms of law and economic and social policies. But this whole transition is probably a 20 year affair. I just think that the catastrophic U.S. response to 9/11 and the current financial crisis push the regime change hard against the U.S.
If Obama wins the election, he might very well be a fine negotiator for the new, diminished role for this country. He can sell it as enlightened internationalism, not the decline of the American Empire. Of course, the patriots here will insist on waving the flag and encouraging the barbarians to bring it on. They won't go down without a fight. However, the U.S. simply can't afford to sustain its customary role. And there's no reason that China will continue to lend money for us to do so.
Anyway, that's a taste of my thinking on this matter. Oh, by the way, I don't for one minute expect that the new regime will be any kinder to the working classes. They'll still be global capitalists with a lust for power. In principle, no better or worse than the present crew. But as our country is diminished we might start talking seriously about peace and environmental degradation, etc. That could be ironic.
The Democrats have gotten more corporate donations than the Republicans in this last election cycle. The corporate elite has mostly decided that the Dems are better for business now. Better to send them in to clean up the mess. Obama is most definitely his own man, and an extremely intelligent, eloquent, youthful, good-looking and well-organized one at that. He has a brilliant background in community organizing and a first-hand familiarity with reality, the realities, for starters, of poverty, racism and US foreign policy -- those realities that, among others, so desperately need to be changed. Not only is he his own man, but he's the man of the people, of so many people, who so enthusiastically have supported his campaign, going door to door as part of his well-oiled campaign machine, giving him hundreds of millions of dollars in small donations, packing stadiums around the country and around the world, and waiting in line for hours to vote for him in the polls.
But he is also the man of the corporations, of the banks, of the insurance industry, who have funded his campaign massively, and are expecting a dividend for their investments. And they're getting it already, in the form of the appointment of those "liberals" (whatever that means) who supported Clinton's wars, sanctions and neoliberal economic reforms.
Obama has promised to raise taxes on the rich back to what they were under Clinton. I haven't carefully studied the numbers, but I believe we are talking about increasing the income tax on anything above $100,000 from 35% to 38%. Nobody is talking about returning it to what it was when the Progressive Income Tax was formed -- 90%. He is talking about taking soldiers out of Iraq and sending them to Afghanistan -- not bringing them all home and cutting military spending by 90%, in line with international norms, and doing away with this rapacious empire. He is talking about the middle class, and sure, he had to do that to get elected, but when does he ever talk about the poor, the imprisoned millions, the thousands of homeless walking cadavers haunting the streets of every major American city? Every politician talks about building schools, but what about free education through graduate school like they have in most European countries?
No, the scope of debate is far more limited than that. It is a scope defined by that increasingly narrow grey area in between "conservative" and "liberal." There are distinctions, some of them important. That 3% tax increase will do good things for many people, I hope. Perhaps we won't start any new wars, I don't know. Perhaps we'll withdraw from Iraq, but I'll bet no reparations for what we've done there will be forthcoming. Perhaps there will be no new wars on our civil liberties in the next few years, but I'll bet the prison population will not get much smaller.
I hope I'm wrong. But if I am to be proven wrong and there are to be serious changes in the welfare of people in the US and around the world, it will only be as a result of a popular uprising of people calling for a real New Deal for the 21st century, an end to the empire, housing, health care and education for all, and so on. Because even if Obama secretly wants all of these things, as so many of us would desperately like to believe, he's going to need plenty of popular pressure to point to if any of these things are going to become reality. If he really is the socialist wealth redistributor his opponents said he is, he's going to need massive popular support just to avoid being impeached for treason by those corporate stooges who dominate both parties in the Congress.
And if, on the other hand, he really believes his own campaign promises of meager tax increases for the rich, raising the salaries of teachers a bit, fighting terrorism, passing more free trade agreements, being Israel's best friend, and so on, then what we have in store is another Democratic administration. Different kind of like Starbucks is different from McDonald's -- they both pay poverty wages and feed you shit, but Starbucks includes health insurance.