The Existentialist Cowboy: US constitution

Showing posts with label US constitution. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

'They may take our lives but they will never take our freedom!'

By assuming the power to wage war upon the people of the United States, Bush has made it official: he is a traitor. Under the US Constitution, the people themselves are sovereign and Bush has declared war upon the sovereign. The word for that in law and throughout history is: high treason! [See: Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, Joseph Story]

The Constitution of Estados Unidos Mexicanos (United States of Mexico or, if you prefer, United Mexican States) is the product of a revolution that was waged in that country in 1910. Unfortunately, the American United States, (Estados Unidos) could not be expected to have given a revolution in Mexico an adequate treatment, having failed to educate US citizens about its own history. Arguably, George W. Bush could never have gotten away with a complete repudiation of the US Constitution had Americans known as much of their history as do the citizens of Mexico about their country.

Cases in point involve the rights of individuals vs the powers of 'state'. States have no powers but those which derive by the consent of the people. The people, in fact, are sovereign. Any 'leader' who wages war upon them is, by defintion, a traitor! It is on this issue that Bush is either dead wrong or deliberately lying.

It is unfortunate that in the United States, for example, a 'Bill of Rights' was almost an after thought. So confident was James Madison that the Philadelphia Constitution was itself a bulwark against tyranny by virtue of an ingenious 'separation of powers' that he felt a separate 'Bill of Rights' to be unnecessary if not superfluous. At last, when a 'Bill of Rights' was insisted upon, Madison would draft it himself and his work therein is arguably more relevant to the individual than are those powers delegated either the President or Congress in the main body of the Constitution. It is the Bill of Rights which draws the line between state and individual, a line that state dare not trespass. People as 'sovereign' may (to use Thomas Jefferson's word) 'abolish states at their pleasure!

In Mexico (also called Estados Unidos) it is, I think, especially notable that the rights of individuals were not merely after thoughts. The rights of individuals vs those powers of state that might transgress against them are dealt with upfront and in language strong and unambiguous. While the body of the US Constitution is concerned with enumerating the powers and responsibilities of three branches of government, the very first Article in the Mexican Constitution deals with the rights of the people and individuals.

These rights cannot be denied and they cannot be suspended. Slavery is illegal in Mexico; any slaves from abroad who enter national territory will, by this mere act, be freed and given the full protection of the law.

Also covered Article I is the prohibition of all types of discrimination based on ethnic or national origins, sex, age, or social conditions. Everyone is protected by the rule of law regardless of different capacities or talents, social class or conditions, health, opinions, or preferences.

Bush, meanwhile, claims a 'right' to wage war upon the people themselves. This concept is TREASONOUS! Mexican revolutionaries understood what Bush does not: the people are sovereign. This principle was agreed to at Runnymede by King John and it is the very basis for Democracy; it the very foundation upon which any Democracy is based. Any state which presumes to wage 'war' upon its people or to enslave them upon ANY pretext is, by definition, a dictatorship, a tyranny and, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, it must be overthrown, by force if need be!

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
--Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence

Che Guevara said put it this way:

Of these three propositions the first two contradict the defeatist attitude of revolutionaries or pseudo-revolutionaries who remain inactive and take refuge in the pretext that against a professional army nothing can be done, who sit down to wait until in some mechanical way all necessary objective and subjective conditions are given without working to accelerate them.
As these problems were formerly a subject of discussion in Cuba, until facts settled the question, they are probably still much discussed in America. Naturally, it is not to be thought that all conditions for revolution are going to be created through the impulse given to them by guerrilla activity. It must always be kept in mind that there is a necessary minimum without which the establishment and consolidation of the first center is not practicable.

People must see clearly the futility of maintaining the fight for social goals within the framework of civil debate. When the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law; peace is considered already broken.
--Guerilla Warfare, Che Guevara

Bush, by contrast, has said that 'The Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper!" and, in so declaring, he has begun his war upon the people. He is a traitor! He must be charged with high treason and brought to trial. King Charles I of England lost his head for less or similar offenses.

Bush has repeatedly asserted a 'power' to wage war on the American people, claiming and aggressively exercising, the "right to use any and all war powers against American citizens within the United States". Like any other tin-horn dictator he insists that he is above all restraints by Congress and the courts. In any state in which the people are sovereign, anyone waging war upon them is a traitor and is, by law, guilty of high treason! See: Glenn Greenwald: The NSA Fight Begins - Strategies for Moving Forward

Many of these 'wars' are still fought north of the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo in Mexico). They are still fought north of the Rio Grande because of one party primarily: the GOP, otherwise called the Republican party, in fact, not a 'Republican' party at all but the party of the self-declared and absolute dictatorship of George W. Bush.

In 1910, the people of Mexico were oppressed by the regime of Porfirio Diaz. Unlike the people of the United States, Diaz was effectively opposed and eventually deposed by a people's revolution which was eventually responsible for elevating the rights of the people as opposed to the assume and arbitrary prerogatives of any government.

Revolution 1910

As he was portrayed by Mel Gibson in 'Braveheart', William Wallace addressed his rag tag band of 'revolutionary' Scots and allied Irish who opposed the oppressive regime of King Edward, called 'Longshanks'. "What will you do without freedom?", Wallace asked!

What will Americans do unless freedom is restored in Bush's wake? Will America simply slide off into oblivion, slavery, bankruptcy and collapse?

Don't dismiss the notion. Financially, the US is already bankrupt, careers lay in ruins, millions have already lost homes and suffered broken families. The worst is yet to come and FEMA has not constructed a gulag of camps for nothing. The Bill of Rights is but a memory and unless Bush is challenged, it will remain so. The next time you feel the impulse to condescend to your neighbor who lives south of the historic Rio Grande, reflect upon the fact that he is still protected by a rule of law which states without exception:

These rights cannot be denied and they cannot be suspended.

Since the ascension of Bush, you have NO SUCH guarantees!

"They may take our lives but they will never take our freedom!

Jesse Ventura lays it all on the line on the Howard Stern show. Jesse correctly and politely states the issues in question regarding the war and the events of 911.

Part 1

Part 2

A Police State Update:

DALLAS (Reuters) - Texas defied the World Court and executed a Mexican national by lethal injection on Tuesday over the objections of the international judicial body and neighboring Mexico.
Jose Medellin, 33, was pronounced dead at 9:57 p.m. CDT in the state's death chamber in Huntsville, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said.
He had been condemned for the 1993 rape and murder of 16-year-old Elizabeth Pena in Houston and lost his bid late Tuesday for a last-minute stay from the U.S. Supreme Court.
The World Court last month ordered the U.S. government to "take all measures necessary" to halt the upcoming executions of five Mexicans including Medellin's on the grounds that they had been deprived of their right to consular services after their arrests.
Medellin's execution is sure to anger neighboring Mexico and analysts have said it could make life rough for Americans arrested abroad if other countries decide to evoke the U.S. example and deprive them of their right to consular services.
This typically means diplomats will visit and provide legal advice to their nationals being held by authorities.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles had recommended that the state's Republican governor Rick Perry not grant a temporary reprieve, paving the way for Medellin's execution.
Texas, which executes far more convicts than any other U.S. state, had taken the view that the brutal nature of Medellin's crimes rendered him unfit for a reprieve or lesser sentence.
--Ed Stoddard, Texas Defies the World With Execution

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Friday, August 10, 2007

How the Ship of State Became the Ship of Fools

The US has caught a nasty virus the symptom of which is running punditry. It's like cruise ship diarrhea without the satisfaction at the end of ordeal or even panic. Some quick notes: Barack Obama is the most shallow, non-descript, boring politician to ever come down the pike --an intellectual lightweight whose soul has been coached out of him by media consultants. In Barack Obama, I find the vacuous echoes of Ronald Reagan, a previous lightweight who had mastered the art of reading buzzwords off a cue card. My skin crawls.

I have stopped listening to what passes for debate these days. It's become a matter of stringing meaningless platitudes together such that they sound like real human speech. Or is it a Japanese robot?

More quick notes: I wish John Edwards were uglier. Hillary Clinton is damaged goods. Ron Paul, still a Republican, has many more scales to shed before he can change his repitil..uh...Republican skin.

God help us --the only intelligent politician in the field is Dennis Kucinich who has only a snow ball's chance in hell of ever becoming President. It's our loss. Watching Democrats is akin to medieval debate about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

I am sick to death of tedious debates about the conduct of the war of aggression against the people of Iraq. The "conduct" of the war is not the issue. Why we continue to stay is! Why we haven't impeached, tried, removed and imprisoned George W. Bush is! Why a grand jury has not been convened to investigate the GOP crime syndicate is! Why corporations rule the US government is! The validity of the electoral process is! Why bother going through the motions until paper trails are mandated at the polls?

I am sick to death of Congress kowtowing to a President who has the support of little more than 25 percent of the American people. Carl Jung predicted our malaise in 1957 in his "The Undiscovered Self", decrying "...apocalyptic images of universal destruction" brought on by WWII and an atomic age ushered in when the United States dropped weapons of mass destruction on two cities in Japan. In its wake, Jung was fearful that 40 percent of the population —called a "mentally stable stratum" —might not be able to keep the lid on mass psychosis; it might be unable to restrain the spread of "dangerous tendencies", presumably: fascism, fanaticism, militarism, and intolerance. Jung seems to have been less concerned with external threats. The more dangerous tendencies he feared were home grown. There are some real issues to be addressed but all have taken a back seat to punditry.

The theme of collapse seems to have reverberated around the world, now manifesting its symptoms in the scientific community’s latest dramatic reports on global warming, the issue of Peak Oil coming further out of the closet — being discussed openly in mainstream media, and the bursting of the US housing bubble that now finds 1 out of every 264 homes in the nation facing foreclosure as each day the value of the dollar decreases and the value of precious metals soars.
--The Cycle of Time

In the meantime, Democrats have failed to challenge Bush's exploitation of the ultimate strawman: terrorism. Bush owns the issue of "terrorism" even if he had to make it all up. As long as Democrats buy into the paradigm, they have no place from which to launch a counter-attack. Democrats too easily conferred legitimacy upon an illegitimate usurper, credibility when, in fact, Bush lied about everything. They are now paying the price for having played Bush's game. The spectre of terrorism has been of greater benefit to Bush than "real" terrorists who share with O.J.'s "real killers" all the characteristics of a phantom menace.

Political rhetoric is just more of the same when, in fact, nothing is the same. How could the Democrats have missed the sea change that has taken place, the fundamental challenges to Constitutional government? What are the implications? Simply, the Bush junta has challenged not only the Constitution but almost 1,000 years of progress. Principles mouthed by Bush simply fly in the face of the Magna Carta, the English Petition of Right, the Mayflower Compact, The Virginia Declaration of Rights, The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and the Bill of Rights, The Nuremberg Principles, and every US Supreme Court decision that has upheld the right of persons to be free of arbitary rule, to be secure in their homes, to be free of unreasonable arrest in the absence of probable cause that a crime has been committed.

Significantly, totalitarian states have their philosophical roots in Hegelianism, a straight road to both Nazism and Stalinism. There is, by contrast, another road that runs straight from Magna Carta to our own Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.

If the Magna Carta is not the birth certificate of Democracy, it is the death certificate of despotism. It spells out for the first time the fundamental principle that the law is not simply the whim of the king. The law is an independent power unto itself. And the King could be brought to book for violating it!"
—Simon Schama, History of Britain

Bush's demogoguery is an issue and the Democrats should be on the offensive. Instead, most members of Congress lined up behind what Gore Vidal called an "un-American" administration.

Instead of bullshit and platitudes from Obama --nonsense talk about attacking Pakistan, Barack should have been screaming about America's enemies inside the White House --George W. Bush and his every supporter. Do the Democrats get it? Have they not understood what Bush has done? Is Congress without a clue?

The Constitution itself is explicit when it establishes the sovereignty of the people. But, if that were not enough to dispel notions of the "state as absolute", a Bill of Rights was insisted upon and ratified by the people. In the 1960's, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas believed the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights to be absolute —beyond the power of Congress or the executive to modify or infringe in any way. We could use someone like Douglas today. As his friend Tommy Corcoran pointed out, Douglas had "wanted the Presidency worse than Don Quixote wanted Dulcinea" and Franklin Roosevelt believed that Douglas would have been the strongest running mate in 1944. It was Democratic bosses who persuaded Roosevelt to pick Harry Truman instead. Oh well! "To err is Truman!"

Democratic "opposition" to Bush seems less naive than irrelevant, locked into the GOP paradigm when Democrats should be forcing a defensive GOP to debate on Democratic turf, on Democratic issues, indeed, the very future of Democracy in America. Tragically, the Democrats will get suckered into debating the "conduct" of a war that should never have begun, a war that is itself a crime, a war that has, in fact, no good end, a war that is, in fact, lost!

Democrats are in danger of blowing the last chance they will ever have to forge a new and better future. It's become a cliche that the Chinese character for "crisis", literally translated, means "dangerous opportunity". If the Democrats fail to make the most of this opportunity, the people of the US will be no better off, nothing will have been gained for the ordeal we have suffered, nothing true, lasting or valid will have been affirmed. What a waste if this should all turn out to be the most irrelevant presidential debate in this nation's history!

And now for something completely different:

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Thursday, August 09, 2007

How Power Without Responsibility Poses a Threat to the World

Following is the complete text of an excellent article by Aziz Huq for The Nation, reprinted by CBS News. The very crux of the following article is a theme sounded many times on this blog i.e, the mission of this administration "the transformation of limited government into a government that is not accountable to anyone." There are two words to describe this. Dictatorship! Tyranny!

After enduring weeks of blistering criticism for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' inartful elisions about the National Security Agency (NSA) spying activities, the Bush administration has successfully forced on Congress a law that largely authorizes open-ended surveillance of Americans' overseas phone calls and e-mails. How did they do it?

The Protect America Act of 2007 — the title alone ought to be warning that unsavory motives are at work — is the most recent example of the national security waltz, a three-step administration maneuver for taking defeat and turning it into victory.

The waltz starts with a defeat in the courts for administration actions — for example, the Supreme Court's extension of the rule of law to the US military prison at Guantánamo in the 2004 case of Rasul v. Bush, or its striking down of the military commissions in 2006 in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. The second step does not follow immediately. Rather, some months later, the administration suddenly announces that the ruling has created a security crisis and cries out for urgent remedial legislation. Then (and here's the coup de grâce) the administration rams legislation through Congress — the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, or the Military Commissions Act of 2006 — that not only undoes the good court decision but also inflicts substantial damage to the infrastructure of accountability.

This time, the sordid dance began with a bad ruling for the government, a ruling that demands some context to be understood.

In January the administration suddenly announced that it was submitting the secretive NSA "terrorist surveillance program" to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISC, a closed judicial process established by the 1978 FISA law to handle search warrants for foreign intelligence purposes. The move came as federal appellate courts in Ohio and California seemed on the cusp of ruling the NSA's domestic surveillance efforts illegal as violations of FISA and possibly the Fourth Amendment. It seemed a way to forestall defeat in those cases.

But in early summer, a FISC judge declined to approve part of the NSA's activities. While the ruling remains classified, it apparently focused on communication that originated overseas but passed through telecom switches in the United States.

Modern telecommunications work by breaking communications into packets of data and routing them through a network of connected computers. Messages do not travel in a linear fashion: A message from Murmansk to Mali might be routed through California. Many of the largest switches routing international data are located in the United States. As USA Today reported in May 2006, the NSA is already tapping those switches. And since January, the government appears to have obtained "basket warrants," allowing it to trawl this data freely, without any judicial or Congressional oversight.

It seems likely that the judge objected because the NSA was collecting calls that originated overseas but ended in the United States. The NSA can generally get a warrant for such communications — unless there is no evidence that the person under scrutiny is a terrorist. A broad-brush NSA surveillance program, especially one that generates its leads through data-mining, the science of extracting information from large databases, might have exactly this problem.

The second step in the waltz came several months later, with administration allies such as House minority leader John Boehner invoking the FISC ruling on Fox News as justification for a new law. As usual, the administration and its allies had no compunction about using classified information — such as the ruling — when it helped them politically. And as usual, the administration artfully concealed the full details of the ruling even while insisting on it as a spur to immediate action. By waiting for the last week of the Congressional session, the administration in effect cut off the possibility of meaningful debate.

The third step of the waltz has a grim familiarity about it: enactment of a law that is in no way limited to addressing the narrow "problem" created by the FISC ruling. Rather, the Protect America Act is a dramatic, across-the-board expansion of government authority to collect information without judicial oversight. Even though Democrats negotiated a deal with Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell that addressed solely the foreign-to-foreign "problem" created by the FISC ruling, the White House torpedoed that deal and won a far broader law.

To those who have followed this administration's legal strategy closely, the outcome should be no surprise. The law's most important effect is arguably not its expansion of raw surveillance power but the sloughing away of judicial or Congressional oversight. In the words of former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, the law provides "unlimited access to currently protected personal information that is already accessible through an oversight procedure."

Like the Constitution's Framers, this administration understands that power is accrued through the evisceration of checks and balances. Unlike that of the Framers, its mission is the transformation of limited government into a government that is not accountable to anyone.

On Monday, the administration defended the Protect America Act as a "narrow" fix and rejected accusations that it authorized a "driftnet." To see how disingenuous these claims are requires some attention to the details of the legislation.

The key term in the Protect America Act is its licensing of "surveillance directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States." This language has a superficial reasonableness, since domestic surveillance has long been understood to raise the most troubling abuse concerns.

But the trouble with this language is that it permits freewheeling surveillance of Americans' international calls and e-mails. The problem lies in the words "directed at." Under this language, the NSA could decide to "direct" its surveillance at Peshawar, Pakistan — and seize all US calls going to and from there. It could focus on Amman, or Cairo, or London, or Paris, or Toronto. Simply put, the law is an open-ended invitation to collect Americans' international calls and e-mails.

Further, the law does not limit the collection of international calls to security purposes: Rather, it seems the government can seize any international call or e-mail for any reason — even if it's unrelated to security. Indeed, another provision of the law confirms that national security can be merely one of several purposes of an intelligence collection program. This point alone should sink the administration's claim to be doing no more than technical fiddling. While the FISA law limited warrantless surveillance absolutely, this law licenses it, not only for national security purposes but also for whatever purpose the government sees fit.

Of further concern is the "reasonably believe" caveat. This means that so long as the NSA "reasonably" believes its antennas are trained overseas, wholly domestic calls can sometimes be collected. And since the NSA uses a filter to separate international calls from wholly domestic calls, it need only "reasonably believe" that it's getting this right. It's this new latitude for error that is troubling, especially because this isn't an administration known for its care when the rights and lives of others are at stake. It remains deeply unclear how much domestic surveillance this allows.

The problems created by this loosening of standards are compounded by the risibly weak oversight procedures contained in the law. Rather than issuing individualized warrants, now the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General can certify yearlong programs for collecting international calls. The program as a whole is placed before the FISA court, which can only invalidate those procedures and claims that are "clearly erroneous." The government thus has to meet an extraordinarily low standard, in a one-sided judicial procedure in which the court has no access to details of the program's actual operation.

Congressional oversight is even more laughable. Attorney General Gonzales, that paragon of probity and full disclosure, is required to report not on the program's overall operations but solely on "incidents of noncompliance." Of course, given how weak the constraints imposed by the law are, self-reported noncompliance is likely to be minimal.

Finally, some advocates and legislators have taken comfort in the law's six-month sunset provision. But this means that the act will be up for authorization in the middle of the presidential campaign, an environment in which the pressures to accede to administration demands will be even higher than usual. And the law doesn't really sunset after six months: The provision is artfully drafted to allow the NSA to continue wielding its new surveillance powers for up to a year afterward.

The Protect America Act, in short, does not live up to its name: It does not enhance security-related surveillance powers. Rather, it allows the government to spy when there is no security justification. And it abandons all but the pretense of oversight. The result, as with so many of this administration's ill-advised policies, is power without responsibility — and it is by now all too clear how wisely and carefully this administration wields power in the absence of accountability.

One coda to this story is worth adding. The Justice Department is unlikely to take action against Representative Boehner for his partisan invocation of classified information on network news. Newsweek reported this week that former Justice Department lawyer Thomas Tamm is being investigated apparently in connection to leaks of information about the NSA's domestic surveillance. So goes Gonzales Justice: Politicized manipulation of classified information gets the green light, while hardworking career officials become targets for speaking out when they see the law being violated.

Power Without Responsibility, Aziz Huq, Reprinted by CBS with permission from The Nation.

There is increasing bi-partisan support for impeachment. Of course, impeachment must begin with both Bush and Cheney to be followed with a wholesale housecleaning of the most corrupt administration in American history.

Is that enough? No --unless Bush's assault on the Constitution is undone, impeachment is a complete waste of time. Unless Congress reasserts its sole power and authority to wage war and unless Bush's sorry rewrite of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is undone, impeachment will simply bestow dictatorship upon a successor. It's not about Bush anymore; we all know him to be an evil fuck up! This is about the kind of nation we will have after Bush is brought to justice for capital crimes.

Rome failed to restore its lost republic. Will that be the story of the US?

News items from Bush's repressive regime:

Kent officer tickets man for 'Impeach Bush' sign

That's an outrage, of course. We have a right to carry any damn sign we please! But, I have long ago stopped trying to "cover" every outrage against the Bill of Rights, indeed, the very rule of law. Under Bush, they are legion. It is Bushco's strategy to move against freedom on so many fronts, that it is beyond the ability of media or watchdogs to chronicle every outrage, every abuse, every subversion of law or the very rule of law itself.

Our Un-American Government
FindLaw columnist and human rights attorney Joanne Mariner discusses different definitions of what it means for a practice or belief to be "un-American," as defined by American figures ranging from Joseph McCarthy to Bill O'Reilly to Donald Rumsfeld. Mariner notes that even after Rumsfeld described the torture perpetrated at Abu Ghraib as "un-American," the U.S. has continued to condone torture. She argues that in the end, the term "un-American" should be defined in opposition to that which is best in American life -- including our regard for human rights. She encourages readers to sign a pledge to this effect, opposing what, she argues, are truly un-American practices such as indefinite detention and other rights violations....

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Wednesday, August 08, 2007

May the enemies of Democracy tremble

Over the last several weeks, I have been honored to have been "tagged" for the Thinking Blogger Award by blogs Liberality, Hot Potato Mash, and Bluebloggin. The recognition of peers freely given is, in the words of Churchill, "no small thing" And, it is in that spirit, that the rules require that I pass on the honor. I am required to tag five "thinking blogger". Having been tagged thrice, I suppose I can pass the award on to 15 outstanding blogs. To be honest, that has made the job a bit easier. Who could select only five from the following list? And I worry about the one's I've omitted from the following.

According to the rules, I now must display the rules.

If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think. [Having been tagged three times, I will tag five for each or a total of 15 blogs.]
Link to this post so that people can find the exact origin of the meme.
Optional: Proudly display the Thinking Blogger Award on your site with a link to the post that you wrote.

The envelope please! Here is my list of 15 blogs in no particular order:

The Peace Tree - a veritable oasis of reason amid an irrational din. A recent excerpt:
i think that it is mind boggling that in a country with less want than possibly any other country on the planet- that we should covet anything that anyone else has. much less blow up their families to get it. think about that for a moment
70 reasons to doubt -where Damien has compiled almost everything known about 911. This work of one man equals that of most think tanks. His knowledge is encyclopedic. A must visit.
Intelligentaindigena Novajoservo - explores the plight of indigenous peoples all over the world. A recent post: Ward Churchill: An Indigenist activist willing to stand up for what is right.
Bad Attitudes, by Jerome Doolittle, Chuck Dupree et al., epitomizes a blog of "thinking bloggers". They bring to blogging some serious credentials and don't need to be told who Richard Hofstadter is. Check them out for informed opinion.
BeggarsCanBeChoosers.com is the work of professional, award-winning journalist Marc McDonald. A recent post, The Real Reason The Wingnuts Hate YearlyKos, exposes the hypocrisy of right wing propagandists like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.
cannablog which recently made the point beside a reproduction of Guernica that Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole, but Colin Powell ....[read the post]
Daveawayfromhome who writes eloquently of a loss felt by many:"For over two decades I've watched as America has slowly given itself over to the powers of Authority. America, the rebel nation, the home of rock-and-roll, somehow seems to have given up the urge to make it's own choices."
Les Enrages. From this excerpt, a reminder "The heart is what counts here, for that’s where Liberty lives." Until we get the bullet proof indictment that puts the Bush gang in a dank cell, that will do!
News Sophisticate, lately, exposes Blackwater recruitment of its hired guns in Latin America. This is, of course, symptomatic of the fascist society that the US has become.
Department of Homeland Conspiracy is new to my blogroll but putting issues even more bluntly: The United States of America is Dead
Any blog that could write of George Tenet that he is "alleged to have assisted our nation" deserves recognition. A tag, therefore for Firedoglake.
Freedom and Democracy are Dying, is the work of a "thinking blogger" from Canada who asks his neighbor: Why Does Saudi Arabia Need Military Aid? Indeed!
Pensito Review is a mainstay, an essential resource that reduces global issues to their effects on you. An example: Global Warming Sucks!
Vagabond Scholar --the work of a dedicated blogger who takes the time to tighten his prose while sharing videos of the Clancy Brothers. Don't miss "Will You Go, Lassie, Go."

Watergate Summer

I want OUR COUNTRY BACK....

If you are on the list, consider yourself "tagged". So --those are the blogs I have tagged for the "Thinking Blogger Award". Taken individually, each is treasure. Taken together --a force for freedom and good. May the enemies of Democracy tremble at their approach.

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