A List of Right Wing Traitors Wishing for More Terrorist Attacks Against the US

The right wing thinks that because Bush fucked up Iraq, more Americans should die. The right wing thinks that because Bush has waged war on all the wrong countries, more Americans should die. The right wing thinks that because Bush's approval ratings are in the toilet, more Americans should die!

There is something psychotic about the right wing's perverse nostalgia for those halcyon days of national tragedy --the deaths of some 3,000 innocent people, most of whom were American citizens. There is but pure evil in the right wing's wish to find in American deaths, Bush's vindication. Columnist Stu Bykofsky who hopes "terrorists" strike the US for our own good.

ONE MONTH from The Anniversary, I'm thinking another 9/11 would help America.

What kind of a sick bastard would write such a thing?

ONE MONTH from The Anniversary, I'm thinking another 9/11 would help America.

What kind of a sick bastard would write such a thing?

A bastard so sick of how splintered we are politically - thanks mainly to our ineptitude in Iraq - that we have forgotten who the enemy is.

It is not Bush and it is not Hillary and it is not Daily Kos or Bill O'Reilly or Giuliani or Barack. It is global terrorists who use Islam to justify their hideous sins, including blowing up women and children.

...Iraq has fractured the US into jigsaw pieces of competing interests that encourage our enemies. We are deeply divided and division is weakness.

What this bastard Byofsky is saying is that because Bush fucked up his war of naked aggression against a nation that even GOP fanatics now admit had nothing whatsoever to do with the events of 911, the US should be struck by terrorists again.

It's not surprising that Bkkofsky's biggest booster was Faux News with a headline across the screen that read:

NEED ANOTHER 911

And if that is not enough, Fox dares to defend its indefensible, evil position, that of wishing deaths upon Americans that Bush might become the "hero" he never was and never will be. Watch this and puke!

It would appear to me that the right wing has given their treasonous game away. They are positively nostalgic about 911. The phrase "need another 911" sounds like a call for action. The phrase sounds for all the world like a signal. Need another 911!!

Homeland Security Director, Michael Chertoff, member of the radical "Federalist Society", states that he has a feeling in his gut that Bykofky will get his wish --another deadly terrorist attack!

He got as specific as saying that al-Qaida seems to like the summer, but as to the rest of it, he is perfectly content to let us sit and wait and worry — and to contemplate his gut.

His gut!

We used to have John Ashcroft’s major announcements.

We used to have David Paulison’s breathless advisories about how to use duct tape against radiation attacks.

We used to have Tom Ridge’s color-coded threat levels.

Now we have Michael Chertoff’s gut!

--Keith Olberman

Ric Santorum on the Hugh Hewitt radio show, wistfully implied that more terrorist attacks will occur and that they will "... alter the body politic" leading to a reversal of the anti-war sentiment in America. Again, the right wing theme is sounded. The right wing seeks in the deaths of more innocent Americans a vindication of Bush's policy of aggression, torture and war crimes.

At last --there is Bush himself.

Bush Claims Power to Wage War on US Citizens

Bush proves himself a "state absolutist", arrogating unto himself the power to wage war on the American people.

The President is now claiming, and is aggressively exercising, the right to use any and all war powers against American citizens even within the United States, and he insists that neither Congress nor the courts can do anything to stop him or even restrict him.

—Glenn Greenwald: The NSA Fight Begins - Strategies for Moving Forward

So when Bush says that the "Constitution is just a Goddamned piece of paper", he aligns himself with Hitler, Mussolini, Mao -- "state absolutists", fascists, and radical communists.

There are several things wrong with this mindset:

• It ignores a fact: Bush and GOP policies cause terrorism. I have the stats to prove it.[See: The Heritage Foundation Picks a Fight with the Cowboy and Terrorism is Worse Under GOP Regimes ]
• To find Bush's vindication in the deaths of more innocent Americans is a symptom of a very virulent form of psychotic delusion. Again --Bush's wars have had nothing to do with terrorism other than to make terrorism worse.
• To wish for the deaths of innocent Americans is symptomatic of an utter lack of empathy, said by Dr. Gustav Gilbert --whose job it was to interview accused Nazi war criminals --to be the very root of "evil"
  

Discoveries

• The Twilight Zone -The Eye Of The Beholder
• The Rise and Fall of an Empire - The Fall of Rome

The Existentialist Cowboy

Conservative Lies
Indict Bush
Why Conservatives Hate America
GOP Crime Syndicate
Iraq

Spread the word:

"There is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there?"

Either this government --that of Bush and his co-conspirators --is legitimate or it is not! If it is not, then, by definition and law, nothing following from it is lawful. Unlawful regimes may get away with issuing decrees but without "legitimacy", decrees are unlawful. Dictatorships, therefore, find it necessary to enforce decrees with tanks and arms.

Bush's every signing statement is in itself unlawful and doubly so if his regime is illegitimate. I submit, moreover, that because Bush's regime is illegitimate i.e, unlawful, no law passed by this Congress is validated by Bush's signature, required by law to become law! That, of course, likewise includes his every signing statement, his every decree, his every order to the men and women who comprise the armed forces of this once great land. All are unlawful.

Hit Tip: Blue Ibis

The US Constitution established the sovereignty of the people of the US. That means the government works for you --not the other way 'round. The Bush government, however, would not have it that way. It is typical of dictatorships, totalitarian regimes and monarchies that "people" serve the government.

If the Bush regime is not legitimate, then Bush is not really "President" nor can the legislature represent you Constitutionally in the absence of a legitimate executive. Bush, meanwhile, has worked assiduously to marginalize the legislative branch and rob them of Constitutionally mandated oversight authority. All are characteristics of Bush's illegitimacy, his lawlessness, his contempt for the rule of law.

Bush is nothing more than an enforcement puppet of the Military/Industrial complex, itself complicit in the Iraq war --a criminal fraud perpetrated upon the people of the US, the people of Iraq, US allies, and the peoples of the world. The defense department budget is a deliberate fraud --thinly disguised bribes to defense contractors and Bush's corporate sponsors.

I proposed almost a year ago that the people of the US convene a new national convention. The people have that right. I also wonder what might happen if a guy like George Soros and other folk provided the underwriting it would take to set up an alternative direct election of the President and the members of Congress authorized by the new national convention. This mechanism must ensure a paper trail confirming EVERY vote. Thus the very crookedness of the GOP might bring down the crooked establishment it created. There is no way to argue with a valid, verifiable beyond any reasonable doubt vote! It could be done!

Where does it say in the Constitution that only the existing parities may finance and hold an election? Where does it say that a new Constitutional convention cannot authorize such an election? In fact, thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence gives the people that right.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — 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.

Likewise, the preamble to our existing Constitution gives us precisely that right by declaring that the people of the United States are sovereign, that "government" rules ONLY by their consent. That is undeniably true whether the fascist cabal in Washington likes it or not! It is time THEY be overthrown and replaced with a legitimate government of the people!

From the comments to my last article:

I think the point that reverberates the most is this, "It will take a revolution to change things." Just as Keith Olbermann expressed in his lament about the Military Commissions Act, and the suspension of habeas corpus. "Depriving us of trial by jury was actually considered sufficient cause to start a war of independence." Such an undertaking was perhaps easier in 1776 than today - the oppressor is no longer across the Atlantic - but no less necessary.

--Sadbuttre

How will the revolution be fought? My friend, who uses the cyberspace moniker "Fuzzflash" pointed the way.

But none of these people had access to cyberspace, like we do. Tommy Paine would have ovulated on the spot, or at any rate have gotten inordinately excited if similar pamphleteering potential were available to he and his dissident peers.

In a way, the smoke signals of cyberspace are all we've got left.

He continues with a reminder that American suburbs are short on public or town squares, plazas, in fact, any place where revolution might be fomented. It's almost as if it were by design. Certainly, the small towns prior to having been Walmartirized, were big on meeting places, most commonly a town square just across the street from the courthouse.

...“carnival, in Rabelais work and age, is associated with the collectivity; for those attending a carnival do not merely constitute a crowd; rather the people are seen as a whole, organized in a way that defies socioeconomic and political organization (Clark and Holquist 302). According to Bakhtin, “[A]ll were considered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age” (Bakhtin 10). At carnival time, the unique sense of time and space causes the individual to feel he is a part of the collectivity, at which point he ceases to be himself. It is at this point that, through costume and mask, an individual exchanges bodies and is renewed. At the same time there arises a heightened awareness of one’s sensual, material, bodily unity and community (Clark and Holquist 302).” From wiki

Will Youtube take the place of courthouse squares?

Imagine what would happen if millions of Americans took to the streets wearing masks of Bush and Reagan and Nixon et al. demanding that BushCo bow to our constitution. Flash mob assembles, demonstrates peacefully and loudly. Clips go straight to You Tube.

Perhaps the combined and allied corporofascists have outsmarted themselves. Tiananmen Square played into the hands of the totalitarians for whom it was an easy target, a killing field.

In the weeks ahead, I hope to take a look at successful revolutions --Ghandi's India, Walesa's Poland, the Velvet Revolution et al. The future of the US is on the line. If the people will not stand up for Democracy, Bush and his moneyed ilk will only get worse and more outrageous. Will Americans allow this man of no talent and no humanity to get away with robbing the nation of what had already been gained at great cost? Will Americans be pacified with a timid, compromise Democratic party?

It is time to recreate a Democracy. It is time to hold alternative elections. It is time to drive the crooks from Washington.

Bertrand Russell, in one of his "unpopular" essays, outlined three possible futures for mankind. Our complete obliteration by nuclear war was one of them.

An update:

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 10 — When state Democratic leaders from around the country meet this weekend in Vermont, the California chairman, Art Torres, expects to be peppered with the sort of questions that have been clogging his in-box for weeks.

What is this about Republicans trying to change the way Electoral College votes are allocated in California? Is there a countereffort by Democrats in the works? What does it mean for presidential candidates?

Frustrated by a system that has marginalized many states in the presidential election process, or seeking partisan advantage, state lawmakers, political party leaders and voting rights advocates across the country are stepping up efforts to change the rules of the game, even as the presidential campaign advances.

In California, this has led to a nascent Republican bid to apportion the state’s electoral votes by Congressional district, not by statewide vote, in a move that most everyone agrees would benefit Republican candidates. Democrats in North Carolina are mulling a similar move, because it would help Democrats there.

In more than a dozen states, the efforts have also led to a game of leapfrog in the scheduling of presidential primary and caucus dates. Most recently, on Thursday, Republicans in South Carolina moved their primary to January from February to get ahead of Florida’s. ...

--States Try to Alter How Presidents Are Elected

This is how the GOP has managed to rise to power! They CHEAT! It all began in Texas with one Tom DeLay.

Additional resources

• Dick Cheney Lied About His Whereabouts on 911
• The Threat of U.S. Fascism: An Historical Precedent
• In '94, Cheney Warned of US Quagmire in Iraq
• War in Iraq, Revolution in America
• DynCorp Sex Abuse Scandal
• Halliburton Profits

The Existentialist Cowboy

Conservative Lies
Indict Bush
Why Conservatives Hate America
GOP Crime Syndicate
Iraq

Spread the word:

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:

Additional resources

• Purpose and Effect of the Preamble to the Consitution
• US Military Investigates Multiple Alleged Massacre Incidents
• Senator Feinstein Warns Against the Bush Administration's Efforts to Vastly Expand Executive Power
• US faces third charge of killing Iraqi civilians
  
• UN panel issued a stinging report of US torture policies
• Bush Challenges Hundreds of Laws
• Now We Know How A Dictator Can Game The Presidency
• Evesdropping on America

Discoveries

• Herbie Hancock & Tony Williams
• The Phantom Planet
• Mesa of Lost Women
• Doctor Who - Rose

The Existentialist Cowboy

Conservative Lies
Indict Bush
Why Conservatives Hate America
GOP Crime Syndicate
Iraq

Spread the word:

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....

Additional resources.

• The Imperial Presidency Crushed
• The Bush Administration’s New Target: Uninsured Kids
• The Nation
• Carl Bernstein: Bush More "Disastrous" Than Nixon
• The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism
• Blue Herald
• The Things You Had to Leave
  
• Free Range Librarian
• HuffPost--Andi Zeisler
  
• Professor Ouch
• LarsMeanderings
• DeborahAger.com
  
• Megan's Blog

Discoveries

• A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash
• Concerto pour trompette en mi bémol majeur, de Joseph Haydn
• Glenn Gould - J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations

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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.

1. 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.]
2. Link to this post so that people can find the exact origin of the meme.
3. 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:

1. 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

2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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]
7. 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."
8. 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!
9. 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.
10. Department of Homeland Conspiracy is new to my blogroll but putting issues even more bluntly: The United States of America is Dead
11. Any blog that could write of George Tenet that he is "alleged to have assisted our nation" deserves recognition. A tag, therefore for Firedoglake.
12. 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!
    
13. Pensito Review is a mainstay, an essential resource that reduces global issues to their effects on you. An example: Global Warming Sucks!
14. 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."

15. And because thinking engages the whole human being, my final entry: 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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A Dream of Freedom

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.

--William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Caliban), Act 3, Scene 2

George W. Bush enjoys the support of only one American in four, the lowest presidential approval rating in a generation. It is no coincidence that leading Dems beat every major ’08 Republican.

What is not clear from the polls is whether or not Americans really get it! Simplistic polls cannot measure the degree to which this "President" wages war on the US Constitution and every principle that impelled the separation from England. Have Americans, at last, grasped the subversive nature of this radical, reactionary, rogue administration? If not, Gore Vidal has a reminder.

This is an unpatriotic government. This is a government that deals openly in illegalities, whether it is attacking a country which has done us no harm, two countries—Iraq and Afghanistan—because we now believe, not in declaring war through Congress as the Constitution requires, but through the President. ‘Well, I think there are some terrorists over there, and I think we got to bomb them, huh? We’ll bomb them.’ Now, we’ve had idiots as presidents before. He’s not unique. But he’s certainly the most active idiot that we have ever had.

--Gore Vidal

I am not inclined to quibble with Vidal. However, Bush's is not merely an "un-patriotic" regime, it is a treasonous one. Bush, after all, perpetrated a well-orchestrated fraud upon the sovereign so that he might wage a war of naked aggression and thus seize the oil fields of Iraq.

Vidal recently contrasted Bush with the Roman Emperor Tiberius whose reputation Vidal thinks suffers because his history was written by his enemies, most notably Tacitus.

The Senate of Rome sent him congratulations with the comment, “Any law that you want us to pass, we shall do so automatically.” And he sent a message back. He said, “This is outrageous! Suppose I go mad. Suppose I don’t know what I’m doing. Suppose I’m dead and somebody is pretending to be me. Never do that! Never accept something like preemptive war,” which luckily the Senate did not propose preemptive wars against places they didn’t like. But Mr. Bush has done that.

--Ibid

Scholars assure us that when Jesus Christ said "Render unto Caesar", the Caesar he referred to was Tiberius. Americans will remember Tiberius as portrayed by George Baker in the BBC series of I, Claudius of 1976 (Britain) and 1977 (US). The series was based upon Robert Graves' "I, Claudius" and relied heavily on Tacitus. It reinforced the image of Tiberius as a rake, retiring to Capri where he buggered anything that moved that also had an orifice. Tacitus himself says this of his own objectivity.

But the successes and reverses of the old Roman people have been recorded by famous historians; and fine intellects were not wanting to describe the times of Augustus, till growing sycophancy scared them away. The histories of Tiberius, Caius, Claudius, and Nero, while they were in power, were falsified through terror, and after their death were written under the irritation of a recent hatred.

--Annals, Tacitus

In defense of Tiberius, Vidal reminds us that Tiberius was, at least, wiser than Bush who more nearly resembles Claudius, considered by his own family to have been an idiot, a stammerer, a failure, a "least consequential twig".

A member of a ruthless and murderous imperial family, he survives because he seems to all around him the least consequential twig of the family tree. But Claudius bears enduring witness to a moment when the virtues of the Roman republic, which has already been disposed of by the time he begins his tale, are being lost to the bloodlusts and hubris of the Roman empire. 

--I, Claudius, a Review

 While scholars may quibble about the accuracy of Tacitus or that of Robert Graves, there is Gibbon who described, in a comprehensive nine volume history, the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire fell, he claimed, due to "a loss of civic virtue" in a lazy citizenry who just didn't get it.

Other reasons for the fall of Rome may be just as credible and equally modern sounding. Like the US under Bush, Rome lacked adequate budgetary controls, resources were wasted, defense was outsourced, not to Blackwater but to barbarians. As in the US, the Roman economy had become a Ponzi scheme premised upon conquest and plunder --perpetual war. Wealth trickled up, not down. A landed elite escaped taxation as they robbed poorer farmers of their lands. A "Roman dole" never paid its own way. Roman society was rotten, top heavy and broke. I can support my thesis that Rome's own currency had already collapsed by the time the Praetorian Guard auctioned off the empire to an aristocrat--Didius Julianus. Rome would have fallen if the barbarians had not gathered at the gate. [See: America's Indebted Prosperity]

Bush has assumed an imperial "Presidency", a dictatorship. He claims the power and authority to rewrite laws and interpret the Constitution. He has said that he will deprive Americans of every right affirmed in the Bill of Rights. Bush has said that he alone will define "terrorism" and to make the point, he flouts American treaty obligations. Unless Bush is checked or impeached, unless his corrupt administration is overthrown or otherwise brought down and utterly repudiated, his decrees will stand. Bush will have deprived every citizen of his/her rights. The people will have become subjects of a dictatorial regime which spies on them. Only a rogue state would find it necessary to rob its citizens of the rule of law and does so to maintain itself in power. Only a rogue regime finds it necessary to bully the rest of the world with nukes. Only a rogue regime will create enemies abroad in order to maintain its power base at home. This simply must not be tolerated. Any American regime effecting such an outcome is, by definition, illegitimate. The people are now and always sovereign.

I despair that my government has abandoned the democratic ideals of millions of Americans who must now bear the shame that Bush has brought upon them. Once a beacon of hope and freedom, the US now stands for atrocity and repression..

American "radicals" might never have posed a threat to an establishment that, at least, mouthed the ideals of our founding. Rather, radicals in America, settled into a role: that of a nagging conscience. Many "radicals" eased into the role of making uncomfortable a corrupt establishment --one that has begun the work of undoing Washington, Jefferson and Madison.

America was not always the reactionary right wing state that it is today. Throughout our history, American radicals, like latter day Calibans, lurked about the edges of our collective political consciousness. We often hear, like "a thousand twangling instruments", the dream that had been our founders' dream and, later, that of Martin Luther King.

In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
...
When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

--Martin Luther King, Jr

You know, it’s at a time when people say, ‘Well, it makes no difference what we do, you know, if we march and we make speeches, and this and that.’ It makes a lot of difference if millions of Americans just say, “We are fed up! We don’t like you. We don’t like what you’re doing to the country and what you have done to the country. We don’t like to live in a lawless land, where the rule of law has just been bypassed and hacks are appointed to the federal bench, who will carry on and carry on and carry on all of the illegalities which are so desperately needed by our military-industrial corporate masters.”

--Vidal, op cit

In waking from a "Caliban's" dream, we find ourselves ruled by the likes of Nixon, Reagan, Bush. When we should be roused to rebellion, we are, like Caliban, tempted merely to re-capture in sleep a sweet dream of freedom, equality and peace. But we must not doze. We must awaken and act!

Additional Resources

• Is Bush Worship a Cult? According to International Standards Defining Cultism, It Apparently Is
• The United States of America is Dead
• The Crisis Papers
• How George W. Bush Looted Iraq
• 5,517 blog posts about Why Conservatives Hate America"
• I, Claudius Project
• Annals, Tacitus
• Interview with Saul Alinsky
• Lyrics: Me and Bobby McGee

Discoveries

• Secrets of the Third Reich
• Michael Moore Interview on Real Time With Bill Maher
• Mark Crispin Miller: Laughing In The Dark

The Existentialist Cowboy

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Indict Bush
Why Conservatives Hate America
GOP Crime Syndicate
Iraq