Op-Ed

At the House Judiciary Committee hearings on Bush's use of signing statements on Wednesday, two exchanges at the end were quite revealing.  Four hours into a hearing interrupted by several votes (thanks, Nancy!) the corporate media had all departed.  Broadcast media never showed in the first place.  Only a few bloggers and a bunch of citizens and staffers hung behind.  Most of the Congress Members had left for good.

Through most of the hearing, Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Elwood and Associate Professor of Law at Georgetown Nicholas Rosenkranz had maintained that Bush's signing statements were mere words and that Bush has obeyed to the letter each law he has signed, even if he's added a "signing statement" maintaining his right not to obey sections of that law.  Elwood even claimed that if the President were to act contrary to the original law, he would notify Congress that he was doing so.

This is what it's come to.  The local newspaper in my town in Virginia today ran an op-ed by rightwinger Cal Thomas attacking Hillary Clinton for her past support for the war.  Thomas began by criticizing Clinton for pretending she had never supported the war, but the bulk of his column blamed her simply for supporting it and for falling for the lies that Bush had used to sell it:

"One wonders what took such a smart woman until January 2007 in Iowa to conclude that she had been duped.  And, one wonders: If she can be misled by so many people in whom she has confidence, how will she be able to see clearly as president?"

Along with this column, the paper printed a cartoon from the San Antonio Express News that shows Hillary with a "Hillary 08" button thinking "He's not the only one I wish would go away."  She's reading an article about Obama, and walking up behind her is another Hillary labeled "Pro-War Hillary."

Peace is a chant, a vibration, a leap of the human spirit into the 21st century and beyond. It's also HR 808 - radical common sense crafted into a bill and introduced this week into the new Congress by Dennis Kucinich.

Let me describe for you, as best I can in this brief space, the heave of emotion this piece of legislation and the campaign to support it have set off in me the past few days. For this I thank and blame the Peace Alliance, which held a conference in D.C. over the weekend in support of the bill - well, it was half conference, fact-dense and nitty-gritty, brimming with info on bullying and suicide and war; and half revival, alive with music and global religion, full of God and Buddha and the spirit of the Founding Fathers and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Jane Addams and Susan B. Anthony and many others.

It's an honor to be part of this obviously growing movement for peace and justice.  Our president took us into war before Congress gave its so-called authorization.  He did so without telling Congress or the American people and without Congress appropriating any funds for the purpose.  In the summer of 2002, Bush took $2.5 billion – according to the Congressional Research Service – away from other projects, including Afghanistan, and used it to build airfields in Qatar and to begin bombing Iraq in preparation for the full-scale invasion. 

That is a crime.

In fact, it's what the founders of this country would have called a high crime and misdemeanor.

And what do we do about high crimes and misdemeanors?

Open this article for blogging, beginning at 10:15 a.m. ET.

10:13 a.m. I'm in the room, but you can view a live webcast here. I've just been handed hardcopies of the upcoming witness statements. If you can find them online anywhere, please post a link beneath this article.

10:15 a.m. Witness list: John Elwood, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Dept. of Justice

Hon. Mickey Edwards, former member of Congress, Aspen Institute

Karen J. Mathis, President, American Bar Association

Professor Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, Assoc. Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center

Professor Charles Ogletree, Jesse Climenko Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Half a million people marching against the war seem to be cursed to have their numbers reported as "tens of thousands" in the mainstream media for reasons that strike me as similar to the reeling U.S. auto industry's ongoing reliance on monster SUV sales (and didn't Ford make headlines by hemorrhaging almost $13 billion last year?).

That is, the human race has slipped, developmentally, from the grasp of the institutions that attempt to contain and define it. What a muddle. We're flowing instinctively toward survival - toward a sustainable, global society, as free of war and dehumanized enemies as it is of reliance on fossil fuels - but those in power can't bear it, can't understand it, and keep selling us the past.

How else do you explain the sort of zombie life George Bush's war on terror enjoys in the corridors of official thought - where, for instance, the insanity of "troop surge" is given polite, respectful deference - well after its lifeblood of public support has bled into the sand?

Molly Ivins is gone, and her words will never grace these pages again -- for this, we will mourn. But Molly wasn't the type of woman who would want us to grieve. More likely, she'd say something like, "Hang in there, keep fightin' for freedom, raise more hell, and don't forget to laugh, too."

If there was one thing Molly wanted us to understand, it's that the world of politics is absurd. Since we can't cry, we might as well laugh. And in case we ever forgot, Molly would remind us, several times a week, in her own unique style.

Shortly after becoming editor of Molly Ivins' syndicated column, I learned one of my most important jobs was to tell her newspaper clients that, yes, Molly meant to write it that way. We called her linguistic peculiarities "Molly-isms." Administration officials were "Bushies," government was in fact spelled "guvment," business was "bidness." And if someone was "madder than a peach orchard boar," well, he was quite mad indeed.

Molly Ivins, the liberal Texas columnist best known for her down-home humor and biting wit, passed away on Jan. 31, 2007. We at Creators Syndicate are deeply saddened by this loss to us individually and to newspaper readers around the world.

When Molly Ivins began her journalism career at the Houston Chronicle in the late '60s, no one, including her, realized the tremendous impact her political writings would have on our nation. Her friendly, approachable style changed the tone of newspaper column writing, and she fast became a reader favorite.

Richard S. Newcombe, president of Creators Syndicate, said he was personally saddened by the great loss.

"When Molly joined Creators Syndicate in 1992, she brought excitement and levity," he said. "I had admired her columns in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, especially the way she infused political issues with color and personality. She was an incredibly charismatic talent in her own right."

With the federal minimum wage now 28 percent lower, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was fifty years ago, Senate Republicans are nonetheless threatening to filibuster its increase. This leaves the Democrats with a choice, which will set the tone for future legislation. They can cave to Republican demands to add questionable business tax breaks, a response Montana Democrat Max Baucus embraces. Or they can use their time, while the debate goes on, to highlight the fundamental issues at stake, hammering the Republicans with their opposition to this most modest step toward helping low-income  working Americans. Ted Kennedy did this when he challenged the $200 billion of amendments offered in an attempt to derail the bill, and then asked "When does the greed stop?” 

Our beloved sister Molly Ivins is fighting for her life against cancer, and all we can do is try to send her even a fraction of the brillliance, joy and love she has given us for so many incomparable years. This genius daughter of Texas turmoil has stood alone for so long as a voice of clarity, wit, common sense and plain-spoken conscience that it’s hard to know even where to start.

Perhaps most important to remember is that she has not been just a writer. From her modest but gracious home in the heart of Austin, she has done anything but sit back and snipe with that unique penetrating wit of hers. She could have done it. She could have just gone to that keyboard every day, blown them all away, and built her national reputation from the sheer genius of an insulated ivory tower.