Duty to Warn

Start with Bush. Never at ease before the cameras, he now has the hunted blink and compulsive nasolabial twitch of the mad dictator, a cornered rat with nowhere left to run. Nixon looked the same in his last White House days, and so did Hitler, according to those present in the Fuhrerbunker. As Hitler did before him, Bush raves on about imagined victories. Spare a thought for the First Lady, who has to endure his demented and possibly drunken harangues over supper. The word around Washington is that he's drinking again. At this rate he'll be shooting the dog and ordering the First Lady to take poison, which I'm sure she'll have great pleasure in forwarding to her mother-in-law.

Certainly it's hard to escape Bush's voice. Every time I turn on the radio, there he is giving a press conference, or yet another bulletin on the great triumphs in Iraq (where the recent election produced utter defeat for the United States and total victory for Iran).

Thomas Paine saw the United States as an "asylum for mankind." Sadly, under the political and social dominance of the Social Darwinists, America has become more of an "asylum for the insane". Torture, state-sponsored terrorism, illegal wars, flagrant disregard for international law, tax decreases for the wealthy, funding cuts for social safety net programs, government endorsed racism, and diasporas in the aftermath of natural disasters are but a few examples of the handiwork of the wealthy elite as they create a gross perversion of Paine's vision of the US. Not to worry though. America’s patrician class now has its own private armies to protect its gold from the proletariat they so graciously tolerate.

If ever there was a time to speak up... THIS IS IT. It takes FIVE minutes or less.
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Nadler Demands Appointment of Special Counsel to Investigate Illegal Eavesdropping Operation
“Neither the President himself, nor anyone else in the White House can authorize an order to spy on Americans without a warrant.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) today demanded that Attorney General Gonzales appoint a special counsel to investigate the President’s apparent violation of law in asking the National Security Agency to eavesdrop, without warrants, on Americans’ international phone calls.

Full text of article

ASK YOUR CONGRESSPERSON TO SUPPORT NADLER'S CALL! WE NEED REAL HEARINGS ON SPYING IN THE U.S. WITHOUT WARRANT

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Here's an excellent article by Will Pitt on this issue

The Senate on Friday rejected attempts to reauthorize several provisions of the USA Patriot Act as infringing too much on Americans' privacy and liberty, dealing a huge defeat to the Bush administration and Republican leaders.

In a crucial vote early Friday, the bill's Senate supporters were not able to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a threatened filibuster by Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and their allies. The final vote was 52-47.

The Libertarian Party played a crucial role in bringing together conservative and liberal opponents of the PATRIOT Act to form Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances (http://www.checksbalances.org/index.php). The Patriots lobbied Congress intensively over the past year to allow the controversial provisions to expire on Dec 31 2005.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Uh-oh. Excuse me. I'm so sorry, but we are having a constitutional crisis. I know the timing couldn't be worse. Right in the middle of the wrapping paper, the gingerbread and the whole shebang, a tiny honest-to-goodness constitutional crisis.

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country: Damn the inconvenience, full speed ahead. On his own, without consulting the Congress, the courts or the people, the president decided to use secret branches of government to spy on the American people. He is, of course, using 9-11 to justify his actions in this, as he does for everything else -- 9-11 happened so the Constitution does not apply, 9-11 happened so there is no separation of powers, 9-11 happened so 200 years of experience curbing the executive power of government is something we can now overlook.

That the president of the United States unconstitutionally usurped power is not in dispute. He and his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, both claim he has the right to do so on account of he is the president.

VelvetRevolution.us, a coalition of more than 130 progressive organizations dedicated to transparent elections, reported today that its efforts to hold Diebold Inc. accountable for improper and unethical conduct is getting traction.  On Monday, longtime Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell resigned effective immediately after an acrimonious board meeting.  On Tuesday, a massive class action lawsuit was filed in United States District Court in Ohio against the firm and eight current and former executives for securities fraud, concealment, and insider trading.

Diebold’s stock has fallen more than 30% this year after well publicized troubles with the company’s voting machines and revelations by insiders that the company has severe structural problems.  One of those insiders, ‘Dieb-Throat,’ has compared Diebold to Enron, and he fully expects it to collapse under the weight of all the coming investigations and problems.  In fact, he believes that the new CEO, Thomas Swidarski, will not last long because he is one of the officials in the lawsuit who allegedly engaged in insider trading. 

At the end of November, newspapers across the United States and beyond told readers about sensational new statements by a former top assistant to Colin Powell when he was secretary of state. After interviewing Lawrence Wilkerson, the Associated Press reported he “said that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees after Sept. 11 arose from a coterie of White House and Pentagon aides who argued that ‘the president of the United States is all-powerful,’ and that the Geneva Conventions were irrelevant.”

AP added: “Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. Wilkerson said that Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because ‘otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard.’”

The U.S. government is waging an air war in Iraq. “In recent months, the tempo of American bombing seems to have increased,” Seymour Hersh reported in the Dec. 5 edition of The New Yorker. “Most of the targets appear to be in the hostile, predominantly Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad and along the Syrian border.”

Hersh added: “As yet, neither Congress nor the public has engaged in a significant discussion or debate about the air war.”

Here’s a big reason why: Major U.S. news outlets are dodging the extent of the Pentagon’s bombardment from the air, an avoidance all the more egregious because any drawdown of U.S. troop levels in Iraq is very likely to be accompanied by a step-up of the air war.

So, according to the LexisNexis media database, how often has the phrase “air war” appeared in The New York Times this year with reference to the current U.S. military effort in Iraq?

As of early December, the answer is: Zero.

And how often has the phrase “air war” appeared in The Washington Post in 2005?

The answer: Zero.

Five shots rang out in the name of homeland security and suddenly a nervous, Costa Rica-born U.S. citizen lay dead on a jetway at Miami International Airport - tragic collateral damage in a war that seems less rational with each passing day.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesman later tried to fob off last week's shooting by two air marshals of 44-year-old Rigoberto Alpizar, who was unarmed and suffered from bipolar disorder, as a "textbook response" to the threat of terrorism. If that's true, God help us all. It looked more like a flailing, messy overreaction to nothing much and, at the same time, a signal to the American public that, when real terrorists don't present themselves, we're more than willing to wage war on ourselves.

Americans - certainly Americans of color - may well have more to fear from domestic security forces than al-Qaida.

AUSTIN, Texas -- As one on the liberal side of the chorus of moaners about the decline of civility in politics, I feel a certain responsibility when earnest, spaniel-eyed conservatives like David Brooks peer at us hopefully and say, "Well, yes, there was certainly a lot of misinformation about WMD before the war in Iraq, but ... you don't think they, he, actually lied, do you?"

Draw I deep the breath of patience. I factor in the long and awful history of politics and truth, add the immutable nature of pols -- fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly -- and compare Tonkin Gulf, Watergate and Iran-Contra with the piddly Curveball and Niger uranium. I prepare to respond like a reasonable person -- "Of course not actually lie, per se, in the strict sense" -- and then I listen to another speech about Iraq by either the president or the vice president and find myself screaming, "Dammit, when will they quit lying?"

I realize this is not helping the cause of civility. On the other hand, sanity has its claims, as well.