War On Corporate Evil

2012-01-08T15:25:00.000-08:00

Mitt Romney is a smarmy fuck.

2012-01-08T14:13:00.000-08:00

Rick Santorum is a Piece of Shit.

"In a spirited debate with gay rights supporters, GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Thursday defended his opposition to liberalizing marriage laws by raising the specter of polygamy. "What about three men?" he asked."

Need I say more?

Let's see...fuck the wars, fuck the economy, fuck the environment, the real problem are the hypothetical three-way gay marriages that permeate Rick Santorum's wet dreams.

Guess what assholes: the War on Corporate Evil is back. This time: more angry, less words.

2008-11-07T10:20:00.000-08:00

Americans Reject Corporate Evil
For the rest of our lives, we will all remember exactly where we were when we heard the news that Barack Obama was elected President. It was a monumental event for several reasons, including the fact that President-elect Obama is African-American; is a bonafide liberal; and won the election in a dominating fashion. However, I would like to focus on just one of the meanings of this election: in large numbers, the American people turned out and rejected the corporate evil agenda of the Republican party.

It is erroneous to view this election as merely one in which the people voted against the incumbent party due to an economic disaster. It is also false to view this election in which the guy people were more comfortable "having a beer with" won, as nearly always occurs. The reality is that the American people were disgusted with Republican economic policies and wanted to reject them.

One amazing thing from this election is the fact that Democrats are now much more trusted on the economy than Republicans. This is a wholesale change from the conventional wisdom of my youth. In those days, it was always assumed that Republicans were stronger on the economy, whereas the Democrats were viewed as weaker because of their indebtedness to entitlements and the poor. The old CW was that Republicans made this country work efficiently and profitably, even if the poor were usually left out or harmed. No more. Now, people view the Democrats as reliable stewards of the economy while the Republicans are viewed as robber barons only interested in exploiting our economic system.

In a very large way, the pro-corporate evil agenda of the last eight years has been rejected by the people. The election of Barack Obama symbolizes the new perception of the Democratic party as the party that will keep us safe. Hopefully, President-elect Obama will further this perception and save our country from the horrible situation in which we are stuck.

2008-09-17T16:05:00.000-07:00

You Get What You Pay For

The U.S. economy is teetering on the brink of collapse. Will we survive? In the short term, yes, but in the long term we will need a new path. Polls show that the American people are finally waking up to the fact that the Republicans have wrecked the country's economy -- Obama now leads McCain in the Gallup Tracking Poll.

For years, the Republicans have cried for deregulation at all costs. They have largely gotten what they wanted. In return, we got a number of businesses making shady deals that would have been illegal a generation ago. Those deals caused our ship to start sinking.

McCain wants to cut taxes no matter what, even if we cannot afford to pay our bills. Well, ultimately that credit card bill is going to come due. It seems like it's coming right now. Blame the Republicans. We have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars fighting a pointless war in Iraq. Meanwhile, people are beginning to wonder if FDIC can really back all these loans. Enough already. Let's run this country like a business and start taking in more than we spend. Period. We can't afford to cut off revenue streams.

2008-08-25T14:21:00.000-07:00

The San Francisco Chronicle speculates that Barack Obama could lose Colorado -- and the presidency -- if Mitt Romney is John McCain's VP. Why? Because 7% of people in Colorado are Mormon. That's like saying Obama will lose everyone who likes McDonalds if John McCain chooses Mayor McCheese as his running mate. The truth of the matter, which conveniently is never mentioned in the Chronicle's article, is that Mormons are overwhelmingly Republican to begin with. Even if there are some Mormons who would have voted Obama if Romney was not the VP nominee, those people have got to be numbered in the single digits.

Oakland is undergoing a terrible crime wave...or is it? Regardless, the media tells us it is, and the takeover robbery problem is real. However, everyone in the media is apparently too stupid to connect the takeover robbery problem with the millions of dollars that are missing from Oakland's finances. Here's a thought: maybe we are having a crime wave because the city is blowing all that crime prevention money on embezzlement?

Finally, thank god that the Olympics have mercifully ended. Watching a grown man run or swim is about the last thing on Earth I'd care to do. Thank god we spent all this money making China seem legitimate instead of using it to help poor people. Good to know our priorities are straight, as always.

2008-08-06T21:41:00.000-07:00

War Returns

It's been over 800 days since the last post on the War on Corporate Evil. The war is back.

In the past 800 days, a lot of things have happened. Not much of it has been good, but let's briefly summarize. 4134 Americans have now died in Iraq. The Democrats retook Congress in 2006. They've spent most of the last two years quietly fighting the Bush agenda while being villified from both the right and the left. The left wants Bush impeached, Rumsfeld charged with war crimes, and Cheney sent to prison for life without possibility of parole. The right hates Nancy Pelosi, gay marriage, and anything Congress does. No one's happy with Congress.

Now we have a new villain, but he's clearly not as convincing as the last one. John McCain is to Bush sort of like Tommy Lee Jones is to Jack Nicholson in the Batman movies. John McCain is a complete joke. Obviously I respect his war service, just like I like puppies and babies. That's not the point. Everything he has done since has been pure evil. He is worse than George Bush because he talks as if he were some sort of "maverick." The truth is that he is just another Republican, in favor of lower taxes, ending social programs, going to war, and hating gay people.

So why does the War on Corporate Evil return? Because John McCain is the worst thing since "Joey" on NBC. He has to be stopped. Barack Obama is the finest presidential candidate that the Democratic Party has had in my entire life. He can change this country and put us on the right track. We need him.

Mr. McCain, the War on Corporate Evil challenges you to a duel. Blogposts at dusk. We'll be seeing you often and soon.

2006-05-16T10:55:00.000-07:00

War's End

It's been on my mind for some time now. I'm not happy with this decision, but I'm not upset either. I'm confused. But I think the time has come. I'm shutting down the War on Corporate Evil.

The reasons for this are many, so let me try to explain. First, I really don't like the name anymore. It's a catchy name that makes people interested, but that's about it. I'm not thrilled with corporations and their ability to act as psycopaths hell bent on destruction, but then again they aren't going anywhere either. Corporate excess is indeed a big problem in the world, but then again it's not the only problem. Human greed in all of its manifestations is the cause behind most of the problems that we face. Second, we are going to need the support of corporations in order to solve many of the world's problems. The climate crisis will destroy Earth unless corporations find it in their best interest to help effectuate change. Al Gore is trying to work to provide incentives to corporations to fix the environment, and I think that's a crucial task. Third, it's just a little too polarizing to send a message of hatred regarding all corporations. It even turns off some of my other would-be supporters. I never meant to send that message -- I only wanted to attack "corporate evil," not corporations per se -- but that's a difficult line for people to understand.

But it's more than just the name. I just don't have the time that I would need to write the kind of blog that I can be proud of writing. The blogosphere is simply amazing and there's no way that I can compete with people like Kos who devote their lives to blogging. There are better blogs in existence than this blog and there's really nothing I can do about it. I recommend you check them out.

So to my friends, this has been fun. To the strangers out there, I'm honored that you spent your valuable time reading my little blog. I hope everyone enjoyed my rantings here as much as I have enjoyed writing them. It's not Shakespeare, it's just one man's opinion. I'll keep fighting the good fight and I hope you will too.

2006-04-21T08:49:00.000-07:00

Richard Cohen: Al Gore is "the near-perfect Democratic candidate for 2008"

I've never felt more strongly about anything in my life: Al Gore must become President or massive corporations and their Republican cronies will destroy Planet Earth. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post seems to agree after watching Al Gore's upcoming film, "An Inconvenient Truth." I've reprinted this excellent article in full below.

Boring Al Gore has made a movie. It is on the most boring of all subjects -- global warming. It is more than 80 minutes long, and the first two or three go by slowly enough that you can notice that Gore has gained weight and that his speech still seems oddly out of sync. But a moment later, I promise, you will be captivated, and then riveted and then scared out of your wits. Our Earth is going to hell in a handbasket.
You will see the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps melting. You will see Greenland oozing into the sea. You will see the atmosphere polluted with greenhouse gases that block heat from escaping. You will see photos from space of what the ice caps looked like once and what they look like now and, in animation, you will see how high the oceans might rise. Shanghai and Calcutta swamped. Much of Florida, too. The water takes a hunk of New York. The fuss about what to do with Ground Zero will turn to naught. It will be underwater.

"An Inconvenient Truth" is a cinematic version of the lecture that Gore has given for years warning of the dangers of global warming. Davis Guggenheim, the director, opened it up a bit. For instance, he added some shots of Gore mulling the fate of the Earth as he is driven here or there in some city, sometimes talking about personal matters such as the death of his beloved older sister from lung cancer and the close call his son had after being hit by a car. These are all traumas that Gore had mentioned in his presidential campaign and that seemed cloying at the time. Here they seem appropriate.
The case Gore makes is worthy of sleepless nights: Our Earth is in extremis . It's not just that polar bears are drowning because they cannot reach receding ice flows or that "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" will exist someday only as a Hemingway short story -- we can all live with that. It's rather that Hurricane Katrina is not past but prologue. In the future, people will not yearn for the winters of yesteryear but for the summers. Katrina produced several hundred thousand evacuees. The flooding of Calcutta would produce many millions. We are in for an awful time.
You cannot see this film and not think of George W. Bush, the man who beat Gore in 2000. The contrast is stark. Gore -- more at ease in the lecture hall than he ever was on the stump -- summons science to tell a harrowing story and offers science as the antidote. No feat of imagination could have Bush do something similar -- even the sentences are beyond him.
But it is the thought that matters -- the application of intellect to an intellectual problem. Bush has been studiously anti-science, a man of applied ignorance who has undernourished his mind with the empty calories of comfy dogma. For instance, his insistence on abstinence as the preferred method of birth control would be laughable were it not so reckless. It is similar to Bush's initial approach to global warming and his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol -- ideology trumping science. It may be that Gore will do more good for his country and the world with this movie than Bush ever did by beating him in 2000.
Gore insists his presidential aspirations are behind him. "I think there are other ways to serve," he told me. No doubt. But on paper, he is the near-perfect Democratic candidate for 2008. Among other things, he won the popular vote in 2000. He opposed going to war in Iraq, but he supported the Persian Gulf War -- right both times. He is smart, experienced and, despite the false caricatures, a man versed in the new technologies -- especially the Internet. He is much more a person of the 21st century than most of the other potential candidates. Trouble is, a campaign is not a film. Gore could be a great president. First, though, he has to be a good candidate.
In the meantime, he is a man on a mission. Wherever he goes -- and he travels incessantly -- he finds time and an audience to deliver his (free) lecture on global warming. It and the film leave no doubt of the peril we face, nor do they leave any doubt that Gore, at last, is a man at home in his role. He is master teacher, pedagogue, know-it-all, smarter than most of us, better informed and, having tried and failed to gain the presidency, he has raised his sights to save the world. We simply cannot afford for Al Gore to lose again.

2006-04-12T09:58:00.000-07:00

Oprah Winfrey: A Waste of Opportunity

In his book, Dude, Where's My Country?, Michael Moore begged Oprah to run for President. Moore pointed out Oprah's universal appeal, good politics, and immense social and financial power. Moore still has a petition on his website imploring Oprah to run. Others have shared Moore's goal of persuading Oprah to run for President and take America back from the conservatives.

But Oprah doesn't want to be President. In fact, it's becoming more and more clear that Oprah doesn't want to do anything to drastically help society. To be fair, Oprah is one of the most charitable women in the world. Through Oprah's Angel Network and the Oprah Winfrey Foundation, Oprah has donated untold millions of dollars to good causes. The problem is that Oprah falsely believes that relatively small charitable donations are all that she needs to do, or perhaps can do, to help the world.

People are starving to death all over the world. Most of Africa cannot even access clean water. Our environment is being destroyed by mega-rich corporations who immorally exploit it for greed. In short, there simply isn't enough money to go around. If Oprah were a true philanthropist, she would give up the opulence, keep enough for her to be comfortable and give the rest away. More importantly, she would actually speak her voice and use her influence to do good.

Oprah realizes these contradictions and has found a way to cope -- she believes that extravagant, unneccessary spending is "a good thing." At a school fundraiser this week, Oprah callously and shockingly made the following statement:

"I have lots of things, like all these Manolo Blahniks. I have all that and I think it's great. I'm not one of those people like, 'Well, we must renounce ourselves.' No, I have a closet full of shoes and it's a good thing."

"I was coming back from Africa on one of my trips...I had taken one of my wealthy friends with me. She said, 'Don't you just feel guilty? Don't you just feel terrible?' I said, 'No, I don't. I do not know how me being destitute is going to help them.' Then I said when we got home, 'I'm going home to sleep on my Pratesi sheets right now and I'll feel good about it.' "

Wow. Oprah has recast the world into a strict, binary terms: either you are filthy rich or you are destitute. Either she sleeps on Pratesi sheets and has a closet full of shoes or she sleeps on a cardboard box in an alley. Oprah doesn't consider that she could do away with spending ridiculous amounts on expensive sheets and could have 10 pairs of shoes instead of a closet full of shoes. Oprah doesn't consider that she could live a lower upper class lifestyle -- with a nice home and car, with plenty of money for retirement -- and give a lot more to good causes than she currently does. Hundreds of millions being wasted on Oprah's opulence could be used to help feed starving people, provide clean water and help fight the corporate destruction of the environment. I suppose Oprah believes that I live "destitute" despite the fact that I have a roof over my head and food in my belly. Perhaps this is why Jesus said that a camel go go through the eye of a needle before a rich person enters Heaven.

To me, the larger problem with Oprah's statement is that she isn't guilty about being so rich. She doesn't see that she has a duty to help make the world a better place instead of living a bizarre life where money provides her main source of fulfillment. Although Oprah likely votes Democrat and is what some might consider a "liberal", I certainly don't believe she is a liberal. Oprah is part of the problem, not the solution. Oprah has always been totally unwilling to use her position of power to help affectuate positive change in the world. If Oprah would have implored viewers not to re-elect President Bush, he would have lost in a landslide. Instead she kept quiet and African-Americans faced increased oppression under four more years of W. Bush. Oprah even helped President Bush by having him on her show alongside Laura Bush to conduct a softball interview devoid of tough questions that helped increase Bush's potential re-election changes.

Oprah should be ashamed of continuing to waste her life interviewing petty celebrities while this world has so many problems. To be sure, there's nothing wrong with her show or the kind of entertainment it provides. But the kind of power that Oprah has attained via her wildly successful show should not be used simply to provide her with a ridiculously wealthy lifestyle. Small amounts of charitable giving (and considering her 1.2 billion net worth, her charitable giving is indeed relatively small) cannot compensate for a complete lack of public comment about the horrors of the white corporate world in which we live. As the (arguably) most powerful Black American in the world, Oprah has a duty to her race in particular, and the human race as well, to use her power for good. Her failure to do so makes her a waste of opportunity, and nothing more.

2006-04-11T09:47:00.000-07:00

Playing Dirty

It's starting to get to the point that Bush's corruption is so intense and far-reaching that it's no longer big news when another criminal act is revealed. Even some of us who criticize Bush are beginning to suffer burnout from his plethora of crimes. So when it was revealed last week that Bush ordered the declassification of intelligence estimates in order to attack Iraq war critics, no huge uproar resulted.

The real revelation from "Scooter" Libby's testimony is that Prosecutor Fitzgerald is beginning to admit openly that the Bush administration was engaged in game of dirty political warfare against Joseph Wilson. In his filings, Fitzgerald asserts that there was "a strong desire by many, including multiple people in the White House" to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against Mr. Wilson."

Fitzgerald's filings contain this bombshell that, while obvious to most thinking Americans, is now being admitted by Republicans such as Fitzgerald: "It is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to 'punish Wilson.'"

So let's get this story straight. A CIA agent was outed and had her cover blown. Millions of dollars in resources were lost, all her contacts became compromised, and certain individuals may very well have died as a result. The White House was directly responsible for blowing her cover simply in an effort to increase their political standing via an assault upon her husband's credibility. In the 3 years since this occurred, the White House has acted like guilty criminals by involving themselves in a huge coverup designed to mislead the American people, the office of Prosecutor Fitzgerald, and escape criminal punishment.

Impeachment, impeachment, impeachment. How many more causes of action are necessary? The Democrats do need to focus on this fall's elections for the time being, however they should use the GOP's constant criminality as a way to bolster their electoral prospects. And once the Democrats retake the House, the Senate, or both, they need to begin impeachment proceedings as soon as possible. Bush is a devious criminal and with each passing day our Nation's security and integrity are compromised further. If President Clinton, a man who kept the peace and helped repair 12 years of Republican mismanagement of the economy, can be impeached for lying about oral sex, then President Bush should be impeached for the treasonous outing of a CIA agent, for unconstitutionally spying on American citizens without a warrant, for providing fraudulent information to Congress and the American people in order to go to Iraq, for starting an illegal war, for violating the Geneva conventions through his reckless use of torture, for flagrantly disregarding Congressional actions via his illegal use of signing statements...

Need we go on? If you support Bush at this point, you have to support the use of treason to score political points, the use of torture regardless of the law and illegal searches and seizures regardless of the Fourth Amendment. This is even before you begin to talk about legal policy decisions that he has made -- his commitment to fighting the war in Iraq notwithstanding the civil war there, the lack of progress we have made and over 2000 dead American troops; his unholy assault upon our environment in order to help his rich corporate cronies make even more money; his patently unfair tax breaks to the wealthy; his reckless spending that is causing the deficit to soar; and his commitment to un-American ideals that are making the United States hated throughout the world and providing ample recruitment tools for terrorists.

In short, he's the worst President in the history of this Nation and one of the most evil men in recent history.

2006-04-05T10:08:00.000-07:00

Molly Ivins Reveals a Truth: "Al Gore is all we've got"

Molly Ivins makes some good points about the media's role in the global warming disaster and how one man stands between armageddon and Earth's redemption:

The political fight over global warming is over, except in the Bush administration, which has some weird problem with science in general. I’m still not sure what’s behind that: I recall Rush Limbaugh and the radio right taking great glee in pooh-poohing the Kyoto treaty and the whole idea of global warming. Maybe they associated global warming with Canadians or something equally awful.
* * *

The shame for journalism is that it has always been so easy to expose those few “scientific” voices claiming there is nothing to global warming. When the money for “scientific research” on such a subject comes from oil companies, skepticism is required.

Instead, many “journalists” let the bullies on the right cow us with the “liberal media” nonsense and reported there was “a debate” over global warming. There was no debate. The only question is how fast it’s happening. And the answer that keeps coming up is “faster than we thought. And still faster.”
Time magazine, in its warm and fuzzy way, proposes that capitalism can solve much of the problem of global warming—Henry Luce would be so proud. Can’t you see it now? Boy, I’ll bet those titans can hardly wait to cut into next quarter’s profits. The insurance industry, for obvious reasons of its own, has long taken global warming seriously. By simply refusing to insure housing or enterprises near low shores, insurance can make quite a difference.

It’s true the United States could make a good thing out of specializing in green energy and green technology—but we are still living with an administration that subsidizes the oil industry. The question is where the political leadership is going to come from before we reach the Panic Point, before Miami Beach sinks underwater, before Wall Street needs a seawall.

Al Gore is all we’ve got, and the right wing is still prepared to dismiss him with contempt and ridicule, not because he’s wrong but because they’d rather talk about the time he was supposedly advised to wear earth tones.

As the Earth drifts toward crisis, our president does not yet seem capable of grasping even the First Rule of Holes. We’re in one, and it is time to quit digging.

The only thing I would add is that the reason the Republican party wishes to dismiss Al Gore so dishonestly and viciously is because they know that he is the only man aiming to end their wholesale for-profit destruction of the Earth. I again call on readers of this blog to send Al Gore a letter begging him to run for President in 2008. It might be the most important thing you do in your lifetime. The alternative is a mushy, pro-corporate Democrat runs for office and the issue of global warming gets as throughly ignored as it did in the last election. The future of the Earth depends on this man, as dramatic as that sounds. Here's his address:

The Office of the Honorable Al Gore
2100 West End Avenue
Nashville, TN 37203
Phone: (615) 327-2227
Fax: (615) 327-1323

2006-03-28T09:29:00.000-08:00

Scalia: "F*** You"

What can I really say about this? He's obviously incredibly smart, but he lacks common sense and seems to have serious emotional issues.

BOSTON, March 27 (UPI) -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia startled reporters in Boston just minutes after attending a mass, by making a hand gesture some consider obscene.
A Boston Herald reporter asked the 70-year-old conservative Roman Catholic if he faces much questioning over impartiality when it comes to issues separating church and state.

"You know what I say to those people?" Scalia replied, making the gesture and explaining "That's Sicilian."

The 20-year veteran of the high court was caught making the gesture by a photographer with The Pilot, the Archdiocese of Boston's newspaper.

"Don't publish that," Scalia told the photographer, the Herald said.

2006-03-24T12:59:00.000-08:00

The Lawless President
PATRIOT ACT REAUTHORIZATION DEMONSTRATES THE UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF THE UNITARY EXECUTIVE THEORY

George W. Bush thinks that any legislation from Congress is only what he makes of it. Anyone arguing otherwise is either misinformed or lying. For this, George W. Bush is the biggest threat to our nation since King George.

George Bush again made his disdain for the rule of law clear when he signed the reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act. As Presidents have done in the past, Bush attached a Signing Statement describing his interpretation of the law. Unlike past Presidents, George W. Bush has not used these Signing Statements to give his interpretation of ambiguous parts of the law but rather to assert that he will freely and openly violate the law. He justifies this using a ludicrous reading of part the Constitution while conveniently ignoring another part -- the part where he has to faithfully execute the laws of Congress. Bush has taken the use of a signing statement, a rare tool used only when necessary to clarify ambiguous legislation, and has transformed it into an instrument of tyranny. Before you think that I am guilty of hyperbole, consider this: From President Monroe through Clinton, 332 signing statements were issued. Bush is already up to 435. To Bush, the signing statement is a way to implement his radical "unitary executive" agenda that undermines our democracy and pushes this great Nation towards de-facto tyranny.

Under the reauthorized PATRIOT Act, the executive must provide information to Congress, on a specific timetable, as to how often the FBI uses its expanded powers under the law. This makes sense. Congress requires this study in order to know if the additional power that they have granted the Executive is truly justified. In other words, Congress requires the Executive to provide this information so that Congress can properly do its Constitutional duties -- to legislate.

Bush's signing statement states that he will not comply with the reporting requirements if he feels that it would "impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties." This essentially says "Thanks for the increased powers, I'll take 'em, but I'm not telling you how I use them so that Congress can know whether its legislation is proper."

The highly flawed, anti-democratic Unitary Executive theory is to blame. This theory posits, in part, that the executive can determine the scope of the power granted to him in the Constitution. The real problem here is that Bush is clearly violating the intent of Congress based only upon the legal interpretation of his counsel, who are by their very nature advocates seeking to gain as much as they can for their client. Such is the inevitable nature of attorneys. That's why here in the USA we have a judiciary branch that interprets the law. That way an independent branch of government interprets the scope of the constitutional powers given to the other branches of government, which also works as a check on the power of the other branches. The judiciary, of course, gets to interpret the scope of their own powers, but the judiciary's scope -- judicial review -- was long ago defined, for the most part. Further, the power of appointment along with other checks keep the judiciary in line. My point is that if the Executive can interpret the scope of his own power, then White House counsel will continue to push that line because all attorneys want to interpret the law in the light that most favors their client. The end result of this pushing will be de-facto tyranny. The judiciary and the Congress will exist only as tokens and will be subject to the absolute power of the "Unitary Executive."

The Unitary Executive theory only works if you accept that the Framers intended the scope of the executive's power to be determined by appointed White House counsel who owe their jobs to the President. It only works if you ignore Article II, Section III of the Constitution that states that the Executive "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." It only works if you think it's just and right for the President to willfully disobey laws of Congress, an offense that would put normal individuals behind bars. It only works if you think that the separation of powers which so clearly underlay our entire Constitutional democracy are somehow bad.

I guarantee you that the GOP and their cohorts in the Federalist Society would not be such huge supporters of the Unitary Executive theory if we had a Democratic President. It's but a partisan tactic designed for short-term political gain. But the ramifications are far too large to indulge in such schemery. New York University law professor David Golove considers this theory to be a "mind-bogglingly expansive conception" of executive power. The only way to turn back the tide and save our democracy is to oust all Republicans everywhere from office this fall. Enough is enough and the Republican Party has abused the public trust and the Constitution enough.

Finally, I leave you with this. If President Bush really believed that he needed to ignore the PATRIOT ACT's reporting provisions, he could have refused to sign the law. The veto power is an actual Constitutional power granted to the President and is a way for him to protect his interests in "foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, and the performance of the executive's constitutional duties." The reason he did not take this lawful alternative is because President Bush is the lawless President. As Bush once said (and I only wish I was making this up): "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."

2006-03-23T07:46:00.000-08:00

People of Reason, Men of Results, and the Man with the Power

In Georgia v. Randolph, a 5-3 decision decided yesterday, John Roberts stood with Scalia and Thomas to argue for limited Fourth Amendment protections. The court's four "liberal" Justices -- liberal only when considered relative to the far-right bloc of Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito (who did not get to vote in this case due to his too-recent appointment to the court) -- sided with the conservative, yet comparatively moderate Justice Kennedy in the majority. The Court held that warrantless searches of home executed with the consent of one co-occupant violate the Fourth Amendment when another co-occupant expressly refuses police entry at the front door.

This heartening case is noteworthy in muliple aspects.

First, it was Chief Justice Roberts' first dissent. Predictably, he showed himself to be a strong ally of the Scalia/Thomas wing of the bench, as I told everyone on this blog would be true 7 months ago. He also showed himself to use crass politics as a way to distract people from the way he was undermining our rights -- the classic "shell game" trick of far-right conservatives. Roberts argued that the majority's decision would harm women and help domestic abusers by making it harder for police to enter their homes. This is not only a false argument, but it is a Rehnquistian results-oriented one that implores the Court to disregard the law in order to "punish the bad guy." The argument is false because if there really is domestic abuse apparent, the police can constitutionally enter to protect the woman without going upstairs to search for drugs (such as is the case here.) Roberts deceptively acts as if a search and an entrance to protect a victim of abuse are the same thing. The argument is further false because the police can still search upon probable cause or upon exigent circumstances, something that is likely to exist if abuse is clear. Roberts is no champion of women's rights and I trust that we will see further examples of this in the future that will make his dissent in this case look like utter hypocrisy.

Second, the far-right conservatives continued their long march to divorce the warrant clause from the Fourth Amendment. As a general rule, police searches without a warrant violate the Fourth Amendment. Any reasonable search without a warrant must fit into one of the many exceptions to the warrant clause. When a resident in his own home explicitly and unambiguously denies police entry, they should have to have either 1) a warrant or 2) probable cause. These exceptions have already been expanded too far and the Court did a great thing in denying yet another exception, especially when it would have led to more intrusive searches in the privacy of one's home.

This situation is distinguished, and rightfully so, from when a resident would have denied police entry but wasn't around to do it. It's ok for a person to allow the police into their home to search, even if there are co-occupants not nearby to consent as well, but the situation changes drastically when the police receive an explicit denial from a co-occupant. Such is at the very core of the Fourth Amendment. In this modern era of alternative living situations, the idea that the permission of one co-occupant is enough to make a search reasonable despite the explicit denial of all others in the home would severely erode the Fourth Amendment. Where would this line be drawn? Would it be ok for children to consent to home searches? For the elderly? For the mentally-challenged? For the vindicitve roommate?

The police are still free to search these homes; they just need to have probable cause or a warrant. Without either, the adoption of the dissent's "free pass" theory would lead to massive fishing expeditions and a marked decrease in the protections and privacy of the home. When you consider that the Supreme Court has already established that consent searches are valid even if the one who gives consent is not a true co-occupant as long as the police reasonably believe that person to be a co-occupant, the results of the dissent's position are frightening. Not only can strangers give permission for police to enter your home, but now they could do it over your explicit objections while you stand in the front door. Fortunately for those of us who love liberty and despise tyranny, the majority did not adopt this radical position.

Finally, and most importantly, the reality that the Supreme Court is now controlled by the whims of one man displayed itself to the public. That man is Justice Kennedy. Although the so-called "liberals" are really moderates who often side with the conservatives (Souter and Ginsburg are simply not liberal in their view of the criminal justice system, for example), and we cannot yet be certain of the idiosyncrasies of Alito and Roberts, the situation for the most part is a court divided 4-4-1. In the 90s we had a court divided 4-3-2 with O'Connor and Kennedy in the majority for most decisions. As a result, these two Justices alone literally rewrote entire swaths of Constitutional Law. With O'Connor gone, the balance of power lies only with Kennedy.

Justice Kennedy is a Republican appointee and lifelong conservative. People remember his protection of the right to choose in Casey, his unilteral decision to allow future gerrymandering claims despite the lack of a standard and his opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, and assume that Kennedy is some kind of liberal. Not true. He's also been a vehement opponent of affirmative action, a supporter of ambiguous "partial birth" abortion laws, and violated his oath of office when he wrote a patently fraudulent opinion in Bush v. Gore. (Note -- although Kennedy is not listed as the author of the unsigned majority opinion, is the author according to the book Closed Chambers.) The fact that this great nation's future lies in the hands of this man gives me no comfort. We deserve a court of nine reasonable people, unencumbered by politics and bound only to the law. The polarizing events of recent times have effectively given us a court of one. The results are usually going to be bad and victories such as Georgia v. Randolph should not get us too excited.

FINAL NOTE: I want to thank my friend, colleague and study partner James Fox Corpuz for his kind mention of this blog in his sublime column "The Procrastinator," featured in the official newspaper of USF School of Law, The Forum. James singlehandedly is responsible for The Forum's publication of my article on the horrible consequences of the Alito nomination. James is the rare person who is funny in person and in writing. As longtime readers of this blog will assure you, I am incapable of inserting humor into blogging. Also I hear James plays pretty mean basketball for a short dude. I pray for the day that James sees it fit to unleash The Procrastinator on the web and allow the entire planet access to his irreverent thoughts.

2006-03-14T11:07:00.000-08:00

An Open Letter to Al Gore

I'm mailing a copy of my letter below to Mr. Gore himself, but I felt that my opinions were relevant enough to re-post here. I urge others to write Al Gore as well and urge him to run for President.

Dear Vice President Gore,

I write this letter to you today as one patriot to another. Six years ago, I voted in my first Presidential election and proudly voted for you. I have since remained one of your biggest supporters. You are a great man who has changed the world for the better. The situation today has led me to conclude that if you do not run for President in 2008, our nation and perhaps the entire planet may be doomed. Although there will be immense personal costs, I beg you to seek the Democratic nomination for President in 2008.

We are living in a world on the brink of a catastrophe. Global warming is out of control and the Republicans controlling Congress and the White House are doing their best to ignore it. Scientists seem to be in complete agreement that we are on a path for destruction unless we change our harmful policies. The GOP prides itself on a distrust of science that coincidentally justifies their deplorable record of caving to corporate polluters at all costs. While the Democratic party's record is not without blemishes, you and I both know that we Democrats are the only ones who can turn the tide and prevent an environmental disaster. The reason is that Democrats are beholden to the people, not special interests.

You are seen by people of my generation as the foremost champion of environmentalism among politicians. Your book Earth in the Balance is a stunning example of the kind of leadership and foresight that our nation requires. The 2008 Presidential election may very well be the last chance that we have to reverse the damage humans have done. Another Republican President, or even a misguided Democrat President, would likely put the planet on an irreversible course for doom.

Not only do I believe that you are by far the best person for the job, I believe you are the only Democrat capable of appealing to the broad cross-section of America that is necessary to win a national election. There are two main reasons for my belief. The first, less important reason, is your Southern heritage. The Democrats will never win national elections if we concede the entire South to the Republicans. The second, more important reason, is your ability to freely speak your mind. In recent years, you have consistently been ahead of the curve when it comes to pointing out the problems caused by the Bush administration. When craven Democrats feared to take a stand against the Iraq war, you were there to tell the world the fallacy to come. When people feared to point out the constitutional violations implicit in domestic warrantless wiretapping, you were there to expose the truth. The media and the Republican machine tries to spin your frankness as a negative. They are dead wrong. No reasonable American sees your truth-telling as a negative. The American people want a strong leader who is not afraid to tell it likes he sees it. They want someone just like you.

I am currently in my second year at University of San Francisco School of Law. I have decided to become a public defender and dedicate my life to helping those less fortunate. I have begun to wonder, however, if the United States will be the kind of place in which I can raise children. The abominable environmental policies of the Bush administration combined with their flagrant disregard of the Constitution causes me great concern. I feel that you provide our best, and perhaps last, hope to change the course of history and ensure that this great nation thrives well into the next century. I realize that you have been in public service for many years and that you deserve to pursue happiness in other channels. But the imperatives of our nation are calling you back into service. Should you run for President, I will do anything and everything in my power to help you get elected.

Mr. Gore, the United States and the world at large desperately needs your leadership in these troubled times.

2006-03-10T11:00:00.000-08:00

A New Chapter

Some of you may have noticed that I have not been posting much lately. There are three reasons for this: 1) a lack of fresh news combined with the fact that I have already written about many of my views, 2) a lack of time due to a particularly intense semester at law school and 3) my desire to only write posts that present fresh ideas arrived at through thoughtful deliberation. This third reason demands further explanation.

Nearly all of the views I've written about have been arrived at only after a long, deliberative process. Sometimes it's easy to express these long-held views as they apply to new situations that arise in the news. Other times, it's not so easy. Often situations are so complex and involve such a wide array of issues that it would be intellectually dishonest to begin writing about them as if I were fully informed. One example would be the recent flack over the United Arab Emirates control of U.S. ports. Many liberals thought Bush + further weakening of port security automatically made this a horrible decision. But those same liberals allied themselves with racists on the right who just didn't want people with brown skin running U.S. ports. Sometimes these kinds of coalitions are inevitable due to the multitude of issues involved in a given situation. Other times these coalitions indicate that one side or the other is leaping to a conclusion without properly considering all the issues involved. My opinion on this matter was never that emotional nor interesting to merit an article. I think that as long as we are going to allow foreign countries to control our ports, we shouldn't discriminate on the basis of the race of the country. My personal wish would be to make the operation of our ports a government enterprise considering the massive safety ramifications. On the other hand, I don't really know enough about the finer points of port management to honestly say that my proposal is the best idea.

My larger point is that I have come to dislike knee-jerk reactions to complicated social problems. Those problems which have an easy solution -- the problems of SUVs, the unconstitutionality of the death penalty, the horrible failures of Bush during Katrina, the deplorable records of Justices Roberts and Alito -- these problems provide me the best opportunity to speak my voice. For I can speak it knowing that I have been intellectually honest. The problem for me is that I have written about most of the easy issues for which I am duly informed.

Blogging is, in a way, very easy when someone like George Bush is in charge. His absolute moral bankruptcy -- reflected by his aggressive corporate agenda, his war on the environment, his failure to separate church and state and his illegal war in Iraq -- all provide clear examples of what's obviously wrong. At the same time, I find these kinds of posts to often be the "low-hanging fruit," i.e., obvious to spot and therefore somewhat uninteresting. I've tried to provide a unique angle on this blog and have stayed away from posts that merely restate the obvious. An example of this would be the recent video that proved that Bush knew that the levees in New Orleans would not last. But I said the same thing months ago due to the enormous amount of circumstantial evidence; there's nothing that newsworthy about this video because the logical conclusion was already clear to all those willing to think about it. As such, I found no reason to write about this unless I had something original to add.

My point is only to explain my lack of fresh posts and to explain the limited amount of posts that will come in the future. Part of my training to become a lawyer involves the careful process of crafting law. Some people who I admire very much, such as Justice Brennan, at times became too results-oriented and harmed the integrity of the judicial process. (I plan to write on this issue in a future post.) I certainly do not want to stray down that path. I believe liberalism is the correct ideology because it is more fundamentally sound and reasoned than conservatism. Similarly, I'd like the quality of my posts to outweigh the quantity of my posts. Mainstream blogs rely upon daily posts, often several daily posts. This blog will never become one of those because I lack the time necessary to write duly informed comments on a daily basis. (Most mainstream bloggers do as well, so they write crap instead. I digress.) Nonetheless, the War on Corporate Evil must continue. Expect new posts weekly, or perhaps bi-weekly, but expect the posts to be more thorough, unique and thoughtful.

2006-03-01T09:47:00.000-08:00

Their Wealth Matters More Than Your Health

Tomorrow, the GOP-dominated House of Representatives will vote on H.R. 4167, the "National Uniformity for Food Act." This bill will require all state regulation of food to be identical to the federal government's regualtion of food products. In other words, states will be unable to enact any food safety laws beyond those mandated by the FDA. The bill has yet to receive a hearing, but the GOP wants to vote anyways.

This is a horrible idea for two reasons. First, this bill unneccessarily tramples on the principles of federalism. States have an interest in the safety of their food and should be allowed to develop standards specifically targeted towards the residents of particular states. Alaska, for example, has a law in place to require genetically engineered fish to be labeled as such. State officials presumably deemed such a regulation especially important for their state because of the high level of fish consumption in Alaska.

Second, and more important, this will clearly result in lower food safety standards and increased risk to consumers. 80% of all food safety regulations are currently enforced at the state level. Having two levels of enforcement necessarily causes more regulation to be enacted. More regulation means more standards which means more lives will be saved. The existence of 51 independent food safety agencies serves as checks on the FDA and on each other. If the FDA isn't regulating something due to ineptitude, conflicts of interest or an agressive pro-business mindset, one or more of the states will pick up the slack and regulate the problem.

Further, the states will start to look around and see what other states are regulating. California may like a safety regulation from Montana and adopt it as their own, even though California never would have come up with it on its own and the FDA doesn't have a similar regulation in place. The states serve as laboratories for new regulations that can result in new scientific revelations that the FDA alone would not have made.

Obviously, the Republicans in the House want to do this because they do anything and everything that wealthy corporations want. The health of the common man means nothing to these old white men who desire nothing more in life than money and power. They would rather see 5 children die than have a corporation pay a million dollars to comply with a state food safety regulation. To them, it's just another cost-benefit analysis, with the people paying the costs and the corporations reaping the benefits. The supporters of this bill include the mega-rich Grocery Manufacturers of America. The interest groups involved have donated millions, mostly to Republicans, in recent elections.

It is imperative that we do anything we can at this late stage. E-mail your Representative using this easy link or give them a phone call at (202) 224-3121. I'll post a follow up later this week and let readers know whether the GOP House really thinks that their wealth matters more than your health.

2006-02-27T09:01:00.000-08:00

A Moral Obligation Exists to Stop Genocide

180,000 people have been killed in a massive genocide. You wouldn't know it from looking at the news. Among the top 5 stories on Yahoo News today: Microsoft Plans New Windows Products. That's not news; that's a press release. At best, it's technology news ; it's not a top 5 news story. Drivel like this gets top billing by a corporate media that is increasingly clueless about what actually constitutes news.

The #1 story should be the genocide in Darfur. 180,000 people have died since early 2003 as Janjaweed militas protected by the Sudanese government attack African Sudanese villages. When these villages began rebeling in a quest for more autonomy, the government launched the genocide. Meanwhile, our government has been too distracted by the fraudulent war in Iraq to address this pressing need. Sadaam may have gassed "his people," but the horror in Iraq pre-invasion failed to be as problematic as the massacre in Darfur. Worse, more people are dying than ever in Iraq as an inevitable civil war begins.

The media had other priorities. When they weren't releasing Bush administration press releases as actual news, they were busy covering Nick and Jessica or Brad and Angelina. Oprah's berating of an author made top headlines while the killings in Darfur were ignored. Bush made the destruction of Social Security a top agenda in 2005 instead of trying to push the end of violence in Darfur. No legitimate Christian could stand by and ignore this massive human rights violation. But Bush had no problem doing so.

Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times, has been the media's #1 voice bringing attention to the catastrophe in Darfur. He recently told a group at Yale University how the militias use wells as mechanisms of disaster. They poison the wells to kill the villagers and lie in wait nearby to attack people looking for a drink of water. Kristof has been pushing the media to address the issue more. He's engaged in a very public drive to get Bill O'Reilly to take a trip with him to Darfur. He's already raised over $700,000 to gather money so that O'Reilly can take the trip and do his "news analysis" from the country. O'Reilly early protested that he wouldn't go to Darfur because his commitments to Faux News prevented him from doing so. Kristof proposes raising money to buy satellite phones that would allow O'Reilly to shovel his load of crap on the American people from abroad. While some might claim this is all a waste of money, it's not. Kristof has raised public awareness with his campaign against O'Reilly and helped push our leaders to take action.

I don't know enough about this highly complex situation to propose a reasonable solution. If I were in a position for power, I would order experts to conduct studies proposing the best way to end the killings. The United States is morally required to address this problem. If we want to make the world "love freedom" and support our efforts, we need to start doing some good things instead of starting illegal wars. Perhaps the Bush administration realizes this, if only from a PR standpoint and not a moral one.

Led by the U.S., the United Nations has recently began to push for action in Darfur. On Feb. 3, the Security Council called for the UN to take over peacekeeping operations in the region. The Council has already authorized sanctions but those have yet to take effect. On Feb. 17, our president -- that's right, George W. Bush -- finally spoke out on the topic after completely ignoring it in his State of the Union address. After a visit with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Bush announced his support for a peacekeeping mission twice the size of the current one handled by the weak African Union. UN Ambassador John Bolton, a man notorious for his conflicts of interests and bizarre demeanor, is actively pushing for the UN to enact a resolution creating the peacekeeping force. All this is a great sign from the normally inept Bush administration. Still, not much has happened yet. Although Bush has turned it around in the last few weeks, his administration has been criminally negligent in the past 3 years. Our nation can no longer deal with actual threats to world security because they are too involved in a war of choice.

Nicholas Kristof has a laundry list of suggestions for what we could do in Iraq. Considering his expertise on the issue, I'm inclined to listen. Kristof posits that President Bush could:

...enforce a no-fly zone to stop air attacks on civilians in Darfur, lobby Arab leaders to become involved, call President Hu Jintao and ask China to stop protecting Sudan, invite Darfur refugees to a photo op at the White House, attend a coming donor conference for Darfur, visit Darfur or the refugee camps next door in Chad, push France and other allies for a NATO bridging force to provide protection until United Nations troops arrive, offer to support the United Nations force with American military airlift and logistical support (though not ground troops, which would help Sudan's hard-liners by allowing them to claim that the United States was starting a new invasion of the Arab world), make a major speech about Darfur, and arrange for Colin Powell to be appointed a United Nations special envoy to seek peace among Darfur's tribal sheiks.

We can't ignore this issue any longer. It is simply immoral to continue to allow people to be massacred in droves. We aren't the world policemen, but we should work to be the world's moral compass. The time to act was 3 years ago, but we'll have to settle for now.

2006-02-22T09:58:00.000-08:00

There's No Easy Way to Kill

Lethal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Putting aside the fact that the death penalty always violates the 8th amendment, the method of killing itself can violate the US Constitution or the California Constitution.

Lethal injection was introduced as a "more humane" way to execute prisoners. To those watching the execution, it certainly looks more humane than when someone catches on fire during an electrocution. It certainly seems less cruel than gassing a man and watching him choke to death while spitting blood. But is it really?

California has postponed the execution of convicted killer Michael Morales due to a federal District Court judge's order that trained medical professionals must conduct the execution. The conflict here is that the AMA and every other medical association is 100% opposed to the participation of trained medical professionals in executions. Monitoring Morales' execution would require the professionals to be prepared to administer more drugs if the killing did not go as planned. This would require doctors to take affirmative steps to kill, a clear violation of the hippocratic oath.

Further, Judge Fogel wanted the state to only use sodium pentothal to execute Morales. Currently, the state puts the prisoner to sleep with sodium pentothal, then a second drug stops the prisoner's muscle movement so that the viewers can have a clean show, and a third drug stops the prisoner's heart and delivers the killing blow. The judge's rationale is that the second and third drugs are cruel and unneccessary considering that sodium pentothal will get the job done.

Judge Fogel's view regarding the lethal injection process is shared by some unlikely suspects. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court halted an execution based upon the same premise that was supported by Dr. David A. Lubarsky's research. Dr. Lubarsky is a conservative Republican. Nonetheless, he is also the head of the University of Miami medical school's anesthesiology department. His research revealed some startling information:

Lubarsky and three colleagues, Koniaris, Teresa A. Zimmers and Jonathan P. Sheldon, obtained postmortem toxicology reports on 49 executed inmates and measured the level of a particular anesthetic, thiopental, in the inmates' bloodstream.

According to the lethal injection protocol in use in most states, the anesthetic is used to render the inmate unconscious before a second drug paralyzes him. A third drug, potassium chloride, induces a heart attack.

But Lubarsky's research suggested that perhaps 43 of the 49 inmates did not have enough thiopental in their bloodstream to ensure unconsciousness.
''Methods of lethal injection anesthesia are flawed, and some inmates might experience awareness and suffering during execution,'' the article concluded. ``Without anesthesia, the condemned person would experience asphyxiation, a severe burning sensation, massive muscle cramping and, finally, cardiac arrest.''

Wow. 87.7% of the murdered prisoners could have felt severe pain during their lethal injections. Although there is some contrary research, the fact remains that the scientific community cannot guarantee that lethal injections are not a horrific, painful procedure that ruthlessly tortures convicts at the end of their lives. Some conservatives not only don't care about this fact, but they seem to want it to be true: "I am not too worried about his feelings after the lethal injection, as he had absolutely no feelings for the 17-year-old girl he killed." But this entire process has only dragged out the victims suffering by promising some sort of salvation at the end of the killing rainbow. Expecting a man's death to make your life whole again is pure nonsense, but that's exactly the message we send to victims by instituting the death penalty. The mother of the woman that Morales killed had this to say: "We feel devastated and angry...We waited 25 years with expectancy, and now this?'" 25 years with expectancy. An expectation that one day, justice would prevail and the world would somehow be right again. But of course that isn't so. Killing Morales with premediation and deliberation isn't going to bring back the life of the woman he killed. The state's promise that it will do so has unreasonably dragged out the suffering of this poor woman. It's time to stop killing prisoners and promising victims that these deaths will help them in some macabre way.

Dr. Lubarsky has come to the belief that the death penalty is wrong: "Should we be lowering ourselves to the level of the people we are seeking to execute?...That's what separates us from them: We don't torture people on purpose.'' Dr. Corey Weinstein, a consultant to California Prison Focus, points out the irreconcilable problem with the death penalty: "Maybe it is because there is not a way to be humane and do this act."

2006-02-17T08:53:00.000-08:00

Ignoring Global Warming

The Republicans continue to stick by the long discredited argument that "the verdict is out" on global warming. The overwhelming majority of scientists conclude that not only is global warming occurring, but it's a gigantic problem looming the future.

We are already beyond the point where ignorance of global warming can be tolerated. The GOP wants to ignore it because their entire party is supported by industries that profit off the destruction of our planet. They want to burn every last drop of oil, use up every last bit of our coal reserves, and build as many nuclear power plants as possible. Fortunately for them, their decision to align themselves with the religious right has guaranteed that virtually none of their constituency cares about scientific findings. To those Christians who believe in the Rapture, there's no point to fight global warming because the world is about to end anyways. The real problem, as they see it, is gay marriage. This would all make for an ironic story in some novel of the future, but unfortunately for us, it's the reality of the beliefs of the ruling party.

We've been told that the real effects of global warming won't be felt for years, likely the end of our lifetime. While this might provide comfort to some, it's also just another saying that you don't mind giving the death penalty to your children and grandchildren. Even this fleeting bit of false comfort could possibly be coming to an end. Global warming seems to be speeding up beyond scientists' expectations. Greenland's ice caps are now melting twice as fast as they were five years ago.

The Greenland study is quite shocking. Over the past 20 years, southeast Greenland has seen its temperatures rise 5.4 degrees. Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology makes the problem clear in the most simple way possible: "Climate warming can work in different ways, but generally speaking, if you warm up the ice sheet, the glacier will flow faster." That's right folks: you increase the temperature by recklessly abusing the planet with harmful fossil fuel smoke, and ice melts. It's not rocket science.

We probably can't prevent some of the harmful effects of global warming, but we sure can try our best to save this planet. The #1 thing that simply must happen ASAP is for this country to implement some sort of reasonable fuel efficiency standards. As I have pointed out before, SUVs are subject to very low fuel efficiency standards and gigantic SUVs like the Ford Excursion are subject to none at all. Even the standards for regular cars are far too low. The innovations in Hybrid car technology show that we can drive much more efficient cars right now, but the unholy alliance between the oil industry and auto manufacturers has thus far prevented large scale production of Hybrid vehicles. Only the power of the United States Government can change these things.

I predict that one day, after environmental disasters begin to befall parts of this world and kill thousands, global warming will become a top priority in Washington. Both parties will suddenly spring to action as environmentalists and major legislation will be enacted to help fight the problem. But this day will likely come too late to make any real difference. I hope I'm wrong. I hope that a great leader from the Democratic party can really give this issue the attention it deserves and force a public debate on the safety and health of our children. Those of us in the reality-based community must continue to speak about the importance of this issue, inform others, and push our leaders. Otherwise, we will be willing accomplices in this massive crime being perpetuated upon the planet by energy corporations and the Republican party.

2006-02-15T08:43:00.000-08:00

Bits & Pieces

Orwellian News Media Strikes Again -- Cheney May Have Been Drunk During Illegal Hunting Excursion

In 1984, the protaganist worked for the Ministry of Truth erasing history. Someone has the same job today working for the pro-Republican, corporate media.

By now everyone knows that during a hunting trip to kill poor, defenseless, little birds, Dick Cheney shot one of his hunting buddies in the face and chest. To me, it's just another example of how stupid guns are. Accidents like this are unavoidable and if you want to worship killing machines, you've got to accept that things like this happen. The man still has 6 to 200 shotgun pellets still lodged inside of him due to Cheney's misfire.

There are two interesting things about this story other than the fact that it serves as yet another piece of evidence of the inherent stupidity of gun use. First, Dick Cheney was committing a crime. He did not obtain a stamp on his hunting license giving him the right to shoot quail. As usual, the Republicans have no respect for the rule of law. Indeed, they believe they are above the rule of law.

Second, the Orwellian news media is helping engage in a coverup. The possibility exists that Dick Cheney shot his friend in the face because he was drunk. MSNBC originally had this paragraph in their article about the Cheney shooting incident:

Armstrong also told NBC News that she does not believe alcohol was involved in the accident. She says she believes no one that day was drinking, although she says there may have been beer available during a picnic lunch that preceded the incident. "There may be a beer or two in there," she said, "but remember not everyone in the party was shooting."

Subsequently, MSNBC erased this paragraph from their website. Why? To protect their corporate overlords at the Republican party. This is a disgraceful example of why the corporate media doesn't provide "news", they provide press releases for the Republican party.

Scalia Calls Opponents of his Extreme Views "Idiots"

Justice Scalia is the epitome of a corporate tool. He uses all sorts of rationalizations and theoretical tools to justify his support for nearly every single right-wing cause that comes through his court. Perhaps most arrogant and pompous is that he publicly speaks as if he is the one who is true to the law and all of his liberal cohorts are activists. This ignores the fact that Scalia frequently flip flops from issue to issue when it helps support conservative causes. (For example, Scalia held that the commerce clause gives the Federal government the power to regulate medicinal marijuana, but that it doesn't give the Federal government the power to stop violence against women, which has much more profound effect on interstate commerce and is empircally proven.) Scalia potentially committed a crime when he abused his powers and selected George Bush as the President in 2000.

So the latest example of Scalia's evil emerged at one of his regular talks at those not-at-all-non-partisan folks at the Federalist Society. Speaking directly to Justice Breyer's concept of "Active Liberty," which posits that the liberty interests guaranteed by the Constitution are not limited to those specific rights recognized 200 years ago but are rather limited to those our system of government implicitly authorizes in the Constitution, Scalia told the flock:

"That's the argument of flexibility and it goes something like this: The Constitution is over 200 years old and societies change. It has to change with society, like a living organism, or it will become brittle and break."

"But you would have to be an idiot to believe that. The Constitution is not a living organism, it is a legal document. It says something and doesn't say other things."

Scalia skipped this part of the Constitution, I'm afraid. It's called the Ninth Amendment. "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Translation: the people "retain" some rights and the lack of the enumeration of those rights in the Constitution doesn't mean that the people don't retain them. Anyone who selectively chooses to read some parts of the Constitution and ignore others is an "idiot." Justice Scalia is gaining power now that two other right-wing ideologues have joined the court, and this man's assault on our liberties should now be watched more than ever.

2006-02-13T13:53:00.000-08:00

Why the AUMF doesn't allow for Warrantless Wiretaps

I just got back from a great American Consitution Society event regarding warrantless wiretaps. Before these great insights leave my mind, let me quickly refute a common Republican argument: the AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force) does not support the use of Warrantless wiretaps. The AUMF's purported authority for warrantless wiretaps is a line which gives the President the power to use all neccessary and appropriate force to catch the 9/11 terrorists. Republicans charge that this includes the use of warrantless wiretaps. These aren't my ideas, but they ring true:

1. A fundamental tenant of statutory construction is that specific statutes trump general statutes.
The 1978 FISA statute explicitly covers warrantless wiretaps such as that done by the NSA. The AUMF doesn't mention warrantless wiretaps and instead could only conceivably cover it in the most broad terms possible. The specific statute, FISA, should trump the AUMF.

2. FISA specifically contemplated its use in a time of war.
One of the exceptions to the FISA requirement is that the President can conduct warrantless wiretaps without a warrant for 15 days after a formal congressional declaration of war. It neccessarily follows that FISA was intended to still control warrantless wiretaps in the event of a formally declared war. Since this obvious truth emerges, it cannot be claimed that FISA will not control in the event of an undeclared war.

3. FISA has been amended several times since 9/11.
If the AUMF made FISA a moot statute, why has the President worked with the Congress to amend FISA multiple times since the AUMF? This indicates that the Executive believes that FISA still controls. If it still controls in some areas, it still controls in others. It makes no rationale since to say that FISA doesn't apply when the President determines it doesn't but does apply when he says it does.

4. Hamdi fails to provide support for the proposition that AUMF trumps FISA.
The Hamdi case narrowly held that the President has inherent authority to label citizens on the battlefields of Aghanistan "enemy combatants." This authority stems from his role in commander in chief. It is another argument altogether to say that this authority extends beyond the battlefield, beyond Afghanistan, and into the borders of the USA.

5. The President specifically tried to insert the term "in America" to the AUMF.
President Bush tried to have the AUMF apply to all of his acts to catch the 9/11 terrorists within America. Congress rejected this concept. Two conclusions result: 1) Congress never intended the AUMF to trump FISA and 2) the President knew he lacked the inherent authority to conduct warrantless wiretaps.

6. There can be no point of rational limitation if the AUMF trumps FISA.
If the President has statutory authority to conduct warrantless wiretaps due to the ambiguous language of AUMF, then it follows that the President can do whatever he wants in the name of fighting terrorism. Excessive law enforcment techniques that infringe upon the Fourth Amendment, should they be allowed, could be but the tip of the iceberg.

The majority of these arguments apply to the conservative argument that the President has statutory authority under AUMF to ignore FISA. Numbers 4 and 5 cross over and also apply to the conservative argument that the President has inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution to ignore FISA.

2006-02-09T09:45:00.000-08:00

John Kerry Suspects that Bush Stole the 2004 Election

As a followup to my post earlier this week, I'm reprinting an article from Consortium News' Robert Parry that broke the news that John Kerry thinks Bush stole the election in 2004. I'll reiterate that I'm not 100% positive that Bush really stole the election, but I think a massive crime has been perpetrated on the American people due to the corporate media's failure to address the issue in any meaningful way. If Bush did steal the election, the media wouldn't even have cared. A key tenent of facism, or government run by corporation, is fraudulent elections. Here's Parry's article; be sure to visit Corsortium News:

“Kerry heard all the disquieting stories” about voting irregularities in Ohio and other states, said Jonathan Winer, a longtime Kerry adviser and a former deputy assistant secretary of state. “But he didn’t have the evidence to do more.”

The Massachusetts senator conceded to George W. Bush on Nov. 3, 2004, the day after the election when it became clear that the uncounted votes in the swing state of Ohio were insufficient to erase Bush’s narrow lead.

The move infuriated some Democratic activists who felt Kerry should have lived up to his campaign promise that he would make sure every vote was counted. In January 2005, as Bush’s victory was being certified by Congress, Kerry also refused to back a resolution challenging the fairness of the Ohio vote.

Mark Crispin Miller, a New York University professor and author of a new book about the 2004 election entitled Fooled Again, said he discussed the voting issue with Kerry on Oct. 28 when he encountered the senator at a political event.

In a Nov. 4 interview on Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now,” Miller said he gave Kerry a copy of Fooled Again, prompting Kerry’s comments about the 2004 election results.

“He told me he now thinks the election was stolen,” Miller said. “He said he doesn’t believe that he is the person who can go out front on the issue because of the sour grapes … question. But he said he believes it was stolen. He says he argues about this with his Democratic colleagues on the Hill. He had just had a big fight with Christopher Dodd.”

Miller and Winer said Kerry suspected possible tampering with electronic voting machines, but that he was persuaded by his campaign’s top advisers, including veteran consultant Bob Shrum, that contesting the results only would lead to accusations that Kerry was a sore loser.

‘Disquieting Stuff’

In an interview with me, Winer said the “disquieting stuff” that troubled Kerry included reports that touch-screen systems had malfunctioned in such a way that voters who tried to vote for Kerry saw their votes switched to Bush. Kerry also was upset with reports that Ohio’s Republican election officials shorted Democratic strongholds on voting machines, Winer said.

In some Democratic precincts, there were complaints that voters waited in line for hours or gave up and went home, while in heavily Republican precincts, there were plenty of voting machines and lines were relatively short.

Democratic activists also cited the disparity between exit polls, which showed Kerry winning by about 3 percentage points nationwide and carrying key swing states, and the official count, which flipped the results giving Bush wins in most swing states and a national popular vote margin of about 3 percent.

Some defenders of the election results argue that the exit-poll discrepancies could be explained by Bush’s supporters just being less willing to answer questions from pollsters after leaving the voting booth. According to this argument, Bush voters disdained the “liberal media” which they saw represented by the exit-poll questioners.

That explanation, however, doesn’t explain why historically exit polls have been highly accurate or why the 2004 exit polls were on target when it came to the results for Senate candidates, while off the mark on the presidential race. Presumably, if conservatives were ducking the exit pollsters, there would be a similar percentage shift for statewide races.

Doubts, Not Certainty

Winer said he discussed the election irregularities with Kerry in November and December of 2004. At that time, Winer said Kerry never asserted “outright” that the election had been stolen, but was “uneasy” about what he had heard.

Adding to Kerry’s suspicions, Winer said, was the memory of Election 2000 in which Al Gore defeated Bush in the popular vote by more than 500,000 ballots but lost when Bush got five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court to stop a recount of votes in Florida. [For details on Election 2000, see Consortiumnews.com’s “So Bush Did Steal the White House.”]

But Winer said Kerry didn’t believe the evidence existed to prove systematic tampering with the vote in 2004. Kerry also was certain he would face withering criticism if he challenged the election results without strong evidence.

“The powers in place would have smashed him,”’ Winer said.

On “Democracy Now,” Miller said Kerry bent to the will of his campaign advisers to concede, even though his vice presidential running mate, John Edwards, favored holding out until more information was in.

Based on reporting for Fooled Again, Miller said Kerry told Edwards in a phone call that Shrum and other advisers insisted that a concession was the best course. “They say that if I don’t pull out, they (Kerry’s political opponents) are going to call us sore losers,” Miller said, recounting the substance of Kerry’s phone call to Edwards.

Miller said Edwards responded, “So what if they call us sore losers?” But Kerry pressed ahead with his decision to concede.

“Kerry’s caving in like that gave an enormous gift to the right wing,” Miller said. “They (the conservatives) could now claim, ‘well, even their (the Democrats’) candidate doesn’t think it was stolen. And they (Kerry and his advisers) left … the American people hanging out to dry there.”

GAO Report

A recent report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, also has questioned the security of U.S. electronic voting systems.

The GAO said some systems don’t encrypt ballots or other data, leaving them open to tampering that could escape detection. The GAO found that another danger was the potential for altering a ballot’s appearance to trick voters into thinking they were voting for one candidate when their ballots actually went to another.

“Some of these concerns were reported to have caused local problems in federal elections – resulting in the loss or miscount of votes – and therefore merit attention,” the GAO said.

Winer, who is now a private attorney with a specialty in information security, said it’s conceivable that electronic balloting was hacked in Election 2004 but that – without a credible witness confessing – there is little hope to prove it.

“There are systems for one-time use that erase themselves afterwards,” Winer said. “You’d have to have a confession and anyone who would confess would look psychotic.”

Kerry, too, appears to have weighed how he would look if he made accusations about possible hi-tech hijinks affecting the outcome of a presidential election. Pundits surely would have put him on the couch as a delusional conspiracy theorist.

But Kerry’s decision not to fight has left millions of Americans wondering if their democratic birthright has been stolen – along with the last two presidential elections.

2006-02-08T10:56:00.000-08:00

Bush's Beef Incompetence Will Kill You

As many of you know, I do not eat beef. I have not eaten beef at all in a year and I have only eaten it a couple times since the first US cow tested positive for mad cow disease in late 2003. I write this article today for one reason: to save the lives of the loyal readers of the War on Corporate Evil.

The U.S. beef supply is extremely at risk for mad cow disease. Before I carefully document the reasons why eating beef is like having unprotected sex, let me explain what mad cow disease does to you. According to the FDA, Mad Cow Disease is the commonly used name for Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), a slowly progressive, degenerative, fatal disease affecting the central nervous system of adult cattle. Humans who eat cows infected with BSE can get Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (CJD). It is a brain wasting disease similar to Alzheimer's disease. Symptoms begin with memory loss and mood changes. Soon people have trouble walking and speaking; soon after that they can no longer do either. Within six months to two years after symptoms first appear, the infected person will certainly die. There is no surviving CJD. The disease basically drives holes in your brain and turns it into a spongy material, hence the word "Spongiform."

The FDA, the Bush administration and the corporate beef producers all publicly claim that the public is at no risk for mad cow disease. This conclusory statement, however, finds no basis in fact. Just as Bush was incompetent at preventing 9/11, as he was incompetent at helping Katrina survivors, as he was incomptent in launching the Iraq war, Bush has been similarly incompetent in dealing with mad cow. Perhaps this is a calculated move that results from the Bush administration's close ties to the beef industy. First rule of Republican governance -- do not piss off those who line your pockets.

So why are we at risk for mad cow disease?

1. The USDA allows cows to eat slaughterhouse waste, blood and manure. The WHO says that allowing cows to each such filth creates the possibility of mad cow infection.

2. The USDA forbids the entrance of highly infectious parts of cows such as the brain and the spinal cord into the food chain. However a recent US government audit demonstrated that the USDA's inadequate record keeping makes it unclear if all beef producers are actually following these regulations. At the very least it's clear that some beef producers are simply violating the USDA's regulations and allowing these parts to enter the food chain.

3. The USDA only tests so-called "downer" cows for mad cow disease. "Downers" are cows so sick they are unable to walk or stand. The problem, however, is that mad cow symptoms normally take 5 years to appear post-infection. Unfortunately, less than half of US cows reach their fourth birthday when slaughtered, let alone 5 years after infection. The bottom line: cows who are not "downers" can have mad cow disease and the USDA doesn't test any of them for mad cow disease. If they have it, you are gonna get it.

4. To combine points 2 and 3, the government only removes the brain and spinal cord from cows aged 30 months and older. Since mad cow symptoms take 5 years to appear, this means that cows 30 monts and younger (who are never tested for mad cow disease) are not only allowed in the food chain but the most infectious parts of these cows are allowed in the food chain as well.

5. Although the USDA forbids the entrance of "downer" cows into the food chain, that same government audit report proves that at least 20 downer cows were illegally entered into the food chain. These were no accidents either -- these cows are obviously downers because they can't walk. Beef producers launched a massive enterprise to illegally get these deadly cows into our food chain through the use of forklifts and rails above the pens. The USDA is responsible because their shoddy record keeping, lack of adequate inspections and buddy-buddy relationship with the beef producers has allowed these deplorable crimes to occur.

Rational, thinking people can only eat beef by ignoring all of this evidence. No reasonable individual can eat beef and think they are not risking their lives every time they do. Make no mistake about it, I love the taste of beef. I have no moral qualms about eating beef either; cows look like walking hunks of food to me and are dumb as dirt. I just don't eat beef because I want to live. Exposing US citizens to this deadly disease is a human rights violation that is being perpetrated in order to further the interests of massive corporations who are in bed with the Republican Party. For the GOP, that's business as usual.

If you must eat beef, buy only organic and research the beef producer to ensure they actually feed the cows quality materials. The Bush administration has relaxed the requirements for what it takes to call your food "organic," so many foods labeled organic can now be made with a certain percentage of non-organic ingredients. That's a whole other story, however.

Don't eat beef -- cut if out of your diet because your life isn't worth that cheeseburger.

2006-02-06T12:56:00.000-08:00

RACIST GOP TRIES TO UNDERMINE VOTING RIGHTS ACT

Unbelievable. I'm speechless. You know that the benefit from this stance must really help the GOP because the political cost could be sky high. In a remarkable move of hubris, leaders in the Republican Party are calling for the termination of a key part of the Voting Rights Act.

Here's the rule at issue: when more than 5% of the voting age population in a given jurisdiction belongs to a language minority, the Voting Rights Act requires ballots to be made available to that language minority. This is a completely reasonable rule: without the provision of multilingual ballots, these citizens will be disenfranchised and unable to vote.

Why do the Republicans want to fight this? Because they know that the vast majority of non-English speakers are poor and vote Democrat. Further, they don't care about the interests of poor non-whites because the GOP is the party of rich whites. It may not be intentionally racist (at least not for all), but it certainly perpetuates institutionalized racism.

The purported reasons the Republicans give are the same old tired arguments they've used for years to justify their racism: "We believe these ballot provisions encourage the linguistic division of our nation and contradict the 'Melting Pot' ideal that has made us the most successful multi-ethnic nation on earth." The "Melting Pot" ideal is just the modern-day code word for assimilation. The message: act like mainstream white society or we'll steal your right to vote. 56 House of Representative members signed a petition to destroy this part of the Voting Rights Act; 55 of them were Republicans.

America has never been, and should never be, a melting pot. Melting pot implies that you come to this country with a rich culture and you lose it once you arrive. A more appropriate metaphor is that America should become a nice Chef's salad -- all the cultures are still in there and exist, unlike in the whites-only "melting pot" analogy.

If you aren't a rich, white, Christian male, it's time to get this in your head: the Republican Party hates you and will do anything it can to take away your rights. Opposing the Voting Rights Act is a disgraceful, ugly, evil thing that shows just how extreme the current Republican Party has become. I'm sick to my stomach.

2006-02-06T11:17:00.000-08:00

DEMOCRACY: DEAD OR ALIVE
Part 5 of 5

The Forbidden Question: Did Bush Steal Ohio?
Late last year, I wrote the first four parts of a five part series centered around one question: Does democracy really still exist? I've reposted the series below and if you didn't check it out before, do it now.

I've hestitated writing this portion for some time because my beliefs in this area don't have the empirical support necessary to make the kinds of claims I'd like to make. This post is only intended to spark the kind of legitimate discussion that has mostly been forbidden. It starts with the bizarre Georgia elections of 2002, when polls showed Sen. Max Cleland winning re-election. Alan Waldman, a reporter for the Hartford Advocate, sums it up better than I can:

In November 2002, Georgia Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes led by 11 percent and Democratic Sen. Max Cleland was in front by 5 percent just before the election -- the first ever conducted entirely on touch-screen electronic machines, and counted entirely by company employees, rather than public officials -- but mysterious election-day swings of 16 percent and 12 percent defeated both these popular incumbents. In Minnesota, Democrat Walter Mondale (replacing highly regarded Sen. Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash), lost in an amazing last-minute 11 percent vote swing recorded on electronic machines.

The 2002 election just happened to be the first after the Help America Vote Act of 2002 -- an act designed to prevent the debacle of Election 2000 but ended up giving big money to Republican voting corporations to design electronic voting. E-voting lacks a verifiable paper trail, in most states anyways, and as such no recount is possible. Waldman explains the connections between the Republicans and the big voting corporations:

More than 35 Ohio counties used electronic voting machines from Diebold, whose CEO, Warren O´Dell, declared in 2003 that he was ¨committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to¨ President Bush in 2004. Up to 50,000 Diebold touch-screen machines and 20,000 scanners of paper ballots were used in 38 states during the November 2004 election.
The four major companies control the U.S. vote count are all hard-wired into the Bush campaign and power structure. The Bush government gave them millions to roll out computerized voting machines. Diebold chief O´Dell is a top Bush fundraiser. Diebold´s election division is headed by Bob Urosevich, whose brother Todd is a top exec at ¨rival¨ ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, bagman for the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement, which advocates the theocratic takeover of American government. Sequoia is owned by a partner member of the Carlyle Group, which has dictated foreign policy in both Bush administrations and which employed former President Bush for quite a while.

Expert pollster John Zogby, a man who predicted Clinton's 1996 victory within 0.1% when all other pollsters erroneously showed a massive Clinton landslide, predicted on Election Day that Kerry would be elected the 44th President of the United States. Polls at the time showed Bush with a 1-2 percentage point lead, but the conventional wisdom was that Kerry would win because 1) polls tend to over represent Republicans and underrepresent Democrats because telephone polls conducted at night necessarily target a slightly more conservative audience than the American voting population (because poor people work at night and young people go out at night) and 2) undecided voters traditionally break for the challenger at the last minute. This is because you've had 4 years to decided whether you like the incumbent and if you aren't 100% behind him days before the election, that means you are leaning towards a change. Yet Bush defied the odds and scored another Presidential victory.

Another troubling factor in the 2004 election is that all the exit polls showed that Kerry would win Ohio. This was explained away under a bizarre theory that Bush voters were more reluctant to admit to exit pollsters they voted for Bush. Waldman notes that the exit polls were all wrong in the states that used electronic voting but were all right in the states that had a verifiable paper trail:

In 10 states where there were verifiable paper trails -- or no electronic machines -- the final results hardly differed from the initial exit polls. Exit polls and final counts in Missouri, Louisiana, Maine and Utah, for instance, varied by 1 percent or less. In non-paper-trail states, however, there were significant differences. Florida saw a shift from Kerry up 1 percent in the exit polls to Bush up 5 percent at evening´s end. In Ohio, Kerry went from +3 percent to -3 percent. Other big discrepancies in key states were: Minnesota (from +10 percent to +4 percent), New Mexico (+4 to -1), Nevada (+1 to -3), Wisconsin (+7 to +0.4), Colorado (-2 to -5), North Carolina (-4 to -13), Iowa (+1 to -1), New Hampshire (+14 to +1) and Pennsylvania (+8 to +2). Exit polls also had Kerry winning the national popular vote by 3 percent.
In close Senate races, changes between the exit poll results and the final tallies cost Democrats anticipated seats in Kentucky (a 13 percent swing to the GOP), Alaska (9 percent), North Carolina (9 percent), Florida, Oklahoma, South Dakota and possibly Pennsylvania -- as well as enough House seats to retake control of the chamber.
Republican consultant and Fox News regular Dick Morris wrote after the election, ¨Exit polls are almost never wrong. They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots and by substituting actual observation from guesswork. According to ABC-TV´s exit polls, Kerry was slated to win Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa -- all of which Bush ultimately carried.¨

There's one thing that I will claim cost Kerry the victory in Ohio: Secretary of State Ken Blackwell was also Bush's Ohio campaign mangager. Blackwell provided less election machines than in 2000 despite a massive increase in voting registration. (91% of the new registration were Democrats.) Everyone remembers the news reports showing people waiting in lines for hours to vote in Ohio. Strangely, rich white neighborhoods had plenty of voting machines while poorer black neighborhoods had waits of several hours to vote. This was no accident; the Republican party didn't want those people to vote.

I'm certainly not going to claim that Bush stole the 2004 election. I just don't have any hard evidence to make that claim. The point of this article today is that everyone must consider and debate the possibility that the Republican Party might be engaged in a criminal enterprise to undermine our democracy by rigging elections.

With the notable exception of Keith Olbermann, the corporate news media entertained no such suspicions that Bush stole Ohio. Part of this is a good thing -- the legitimacy of our government is key to keeping the peace in America. We can't be questioning elections without some real evidence to do so. On the other hand, this purposeful censorship could very well kill democracy if we know it. If we can't question a considerable body of evidence that indicates a stolen election, how would we ever catch those who would steal an election?

The day after election 2004, I was in shock and disbelief. felt utterly depressed all day pondering the horrors and evil that Bush would inflict upon this nation in the next four years. We've already seen those evils in the form of Bush's refusal to leave Iraq and stop young US troops from dying; from his appointment of two far-right extremists to the Supreme Court; to his illegal warrantless wiretaps that violate our Constitutional rights; to his anti-Robin Hood stance of cutting social programs for the poor in order to give bigger tax cuts to the rich. But after November 2 everyone else acted as if I were crazy when I suggested that the possibility remained that Bush stole Ohio. No legitimate debate ever took place because of this chilling factor. Well, I'm now going to be silent any longer. I have massive doubts about the legitimacy of Bush's re-election. Unfortunately, we'll never be able to prove what happened because our corporate media refused to do the kind of reporting we needed to do at that time.

Right now, election officials fear that 2006 may provide all sorts of voting problems. This is because 20% of the nation will be using new, mostly computerized, election equipment. Most of these lack a paper trail and involve technology in its infancy that is incredibly open to tampering.

I leave you all with this: our Democracy may very well have died a silent death. We all need to question authority and be ready to investigate any and all voter irregularities. What happened in 2002 and 2004 likely followed the Republican Party's behavior over the past half century of undermining democracy in favor of the results that they wanted.

2006-02-06T11:03:00.001-08:00

DEMOCRACY: DEAD OR ALIVE
Part 4 of 5

Racism and Thievery in Florida

The final official tally put Bush just hundred of votes ahead of Gore in Florida's 2000 Presidential Election: 2,912,790 for Bush to 2,912,253 for Gore. When the Supreme Court illegaly prevented the counting of votes in Florida, Gore was less than 300 votes behind and counting.

I. REPUBLICAN THEFT OF BLACK VOTES
Florida is part of a minority of states who do not allow ex felons to vote in Presidential Elections. Of the 35 states who do allow ex-felons to vote, they vote 90% for the Democrats. Florida has nearly half a million ex-felons who are denied the right to vote. Clearly if these people were allowed to vote, Gore would have won. The law remains the law, however, we need not point to that stat to establish a stolen election. Still it's worth noting that nearly all of these people are poor blacks and latinos.

The problem with the purge of ex-felons from the voter list is that the Republican appartus went way too far and broke the law. In 1998, Florida became the first state in the union to privatize the purge of felons from the voting rolls. The Republican Secretary of State handed the firm over to a friendly Republican company, Database Technologies (now known ans ChoicePoint, Inc.).

If you commit a felony in a state which does not deny ex-felons the right to vote, you retain voting rights when you move to a state that denies ex-felons voting rights. Nonetheless, 3000 people who committed felonies in states where they retained their voting rights were purged from the rolls in 2000 and made ineligble to vote. The full faith and credit clause of the Constitution guarantees that each state honor the judicial decrees of the other states. These felons all were guaranteed the restoration of their voting rights at the end of a given period through the statutes relating to their convictions in other states. Florida had to honor their voting rights without asking them to do anything more. The only 2 Florida cases on point, one of which was at the Court of Appeals, and both explained that the law was clear: Florida must let these people vote. Jeb Bush, believing himself to be a dictator, ignored the courts and the legislature. No statute authorized Bush’s action to unilaterally purge all of these people from the rolls.

Another list of purged voters include 8,000 people convicted of misdemeanors. Misdemeanants have the right to vote; that purge was patently illegal. It was up to local election officials to try and sort out who really could vote, something which likely didn’t happen for most of those purged voters. The NAACP later sued the state of Florida for the illegal voter purge and ended up settling for an undisclosed large amount. Unfortunately, by then George W. Bush had already been “selected” President.

II. "SPOILED VOTES"

The Republican Party continued their terrorist attack upon our nation’s democracy by gaming the system to destroy black votes. In heavily black, Democratic Gadsden county, one in 8 votes was ruled “spoiled” and discarded. The Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris equipped Gadsden with an optical vote machine that labeled votes as “spoiled” if they had just one extra mark anywhere on the ballot. Further, the ballots were unusually confusing. In a nearby white, heavily Republican Tallahasse county, they used the same confusing ballots. Yet there, local officals examined the votes to ensure people were filling them out correctly. Voters were able to revote until they got it right. The black voters in Gadsden county did not get the same treatment. This is the equal protection violation, not the nonsense the Supreme Court shoveled to us when they awarded the Election to Bush.

53% of the 180,000 “spoiled” votes belonged to Black voters. Blacks constitute just 13% of the voting population in Florida. Do the math: blacks lost votes disproportionately and this cost Gore the election.

III. VIOLATING THE RULE OF LAW: THE BROOKS BROTHERS RIOT AND MEDIA COMPLICITY
Although both Bush and Gore had to fight the same fight in the courts, Bush spent 4 times as much money on the recount than Gore. How can this be? The answer is simple and sadistic: while Gore's money went almost entirely to lawyers, Bush's money went mostly to funding a PR war. The idea of Bush was that the law would follow the PR, despite the fact that the law exists independtly of political spin. Bush was right.

Thousands of dollars went to Republican operatives across the nation. They appeared on TV shows, speeches all over America and demonstrations in Florida itself. The common thread: Democrats were inventing votes and trying to steal the election. (It's often effective to denounce the exact practice one is guilty of committing; it's a classic trick of scam artists to deflect attention.)

The Republican disdain for the rule of law showed itself when George W. Bush began publicly denouncing the Florida Supreme Court for trying to usurp the power of the legislature. Bush seemed to forget that the role of the courts is to interpret law. Gore, on the other hand, said that he disagreed with the Supreme Court's ultimate decision but that he would respect the rule of law. The Republicans shared no such respect.

This Republican hatred of the rule of law culminated in an immoral riot to subvert the legal process. On November 22, 2000, the Miami canvassing board announced that they would begin to review 10,750 disputed ballots which had not previously been counted. Brendan Quinn, the executive director of the Republican Party of New York, told two dozen Republican operatives to storm the room and stop the recount. The media and most onlookers were stunned; the popular assumption at the time was that mere concerned citizens had broken through. To the Republicans, the idea that concerned citizens would try and physically stop illegal counting of votes presented the ideal message with which to sell their story about Democratic vote theivery. The canvassing board had that a Republican conspiracy was actually responsible for the mob. The mob entered the room and began screaming to try and get the vote count shut down. Proof positive evidence later emerged that at least 12 of the rioters were Republican operatives; 6 were directly paid from Bush's recount fund.

The Republican mod succeeded. Fearing physical violence, the canvassing board stopped the recount within minutes. The Brooks Brothers Riot was an organized Republican effort to defeat the rule of law by acting like ravenous animals fighting for food: no rules, no laws, winning is everything.

The media never bothered to investigate the Brooks Brothers riot. Since the discussion is beyond the scope of this article, I won't get into detail, but suffice it to say the corporate media played a huge role in Election 2000. First, the media crucified Al Gore for a series of alleged “lies” that had nothing to do with governance while gave Bush a free pass to viciously lie about his tax and social security plans. Gore never said he created the internet or that he “found” Love Canal, but the media repeated those lies anyways. To the media, it was ok to lie about complex details that actually affect America, but not ok to misspeak about pointless events. Second, the media's so-called "objectivity" turned the corporate media into a bullhorn for Republican propaganda. Objectivity is reporting the truth without the spin; the facts as they present themselves. The media doesn't report in this manner -- to the media, "objectivity" is just reporting what the Democrats said and then what the Republicans said and equating both views as equally plausible. Objective analysis of the facts, however, plays no role in the modern day media. Bush can keep saying that "the verdict is out" on global warming and the news keeps repeating it without adding that the verdict is in fact NOT out on global warming. In Election 2000, Democrats tried to argue like professors in a salon while Republicans argued whatever served their position best, regardless of the truth of their claims. Third, the media helped give legitimacy to Bush's Presidency that was undeserved. Despite findings that Gore would have won the election had a statewide recount been conducted, the media spun the results heavily for Bush. He was the President and his party were the ones paying their bills. The truth mattered not to the corporate media. Evil logic, but logic nonetheless. Finally, the media didn’t care about the Supreme Court’s theft or about the massive theft of votes in Florida. Once 2001 rolled around, they had bigger fish to fry: Gary Condit and Chandra Levy.

IV. CONCLUSION; OTHER SHENANIGANS
The 2000 election contained the trademark of past Republican victories: massive disenfranchisement of solidly Democratic black voters. But 2000 was far more troubling than usual. The felon purge reflected a conscious violation of the rule of law in order to “win” elections. The design of poor voting machines in black districts pointed to a more specific plan than normal. Events like the Brooks Brothers Riot showed that a right-wing army of foot soldiers had been assembled to throw the election to Bush at all costs.

The 2000 election left a lot of people with a bad taste in their mouths. The Republicans had long been disdainful of democracy, but after 2000 no one could ignore the GOP's massive war against the democratic process. What could come next? And now that the world would closely follow future US elections for election fraud, would the Republicans still be able to openly flaunt democracy?

My argument in Democracy: Dead or Alive is that it would be foolish to assume that the war on democracy ended in 2000. The motive and opportunity remained there, although massive felon purges weren’t going to work anymore in the future. New tactics would be required, and perhaps have been tried. In my final post in this series, I will examine allegations of voter fraud in subsequent elections.

2006-02-06T11:03:00.000-08:00

DEMOCRACY: DEAD OR ALIVE
Part 3 of 5

The Court Goes Corporate: Abandoning the Rule of Law to Appoint Bush

On Saturday, December 9, 2000, five people stole the election for George W. Bush. Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and O'Connor favored Republican politics to the rule of law and the will of the people.

I. INTRODUCTION

This series marks my attempt to prove that the Republican Party devalues democracy and manipulates elections. The proof of my argument lies in the GOP's actions over the past 50 years; Part 1 explained the GOP's role in widespread voter disenfranchisement in 1960s; Part 2 focused on the illegal impeachment of President Clinton which attempted to undermine the legitimate results of the 1996 election. The story continues today with Republican malfeasance in 2000, this time coming from the Supreme Court. The goal of the Democracy: Dead or Alive series is to provide the framework for a legitimate debate as to whether democracy can truly be said to exist in light of the Republicans' recent actions.

In 2000, two potentially treasonous efforts launched by Republican Party and its operatives stole the election from Al Gore, the rightful winner of both Florida and the popular vote: 1) The unconscionable Supreme Court decision that prevented the counting of votes and 2) the coordinated Republican voting fraud centered around the illegal disqualification of eligible black voters. Both Republican efforts served to negate the democratic process in 2000. Today, I focus only on the Supreme Court’s role; the next post in this series will look at the shameful theft of votes in 2000.

II. THE ELECTORAL TIE GOES TO THE COURTS

We all remember the deadlocked election and the subsequent recount. No one wanted a recount, but a recount to ensure the most accurate tabulation of the citizen’s votes was obviously a paramount concern. Soon, however, all the Republicans wanted to talk about was time tables, not getting the job done right.

Federal law gives state broad discretion as to the time for choosing electors. As such, on November 21, the Florida Supreme Court decided to extend the time for ballot certification past the time designated by statute. On December 1, the United States Supreme Court first intervened and unanimously sent the case back to the Florida Supreme Court with instructions to rewrite its opinion to avoid creating a federal question.

On December 8, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide recount of all ballots. This was easily the most sensible approach to take at this time. The election was hotly disputed by both sides; Republicans and Democrats alike were unsure if all the votes had been counted. A complete recount, scrutinized throughout America and the world, would be the most fair, equitable way to resolve the 2000 dispute.

On Saturday December 9, the conservative justices panicked. The recounts had begun and Bush’s lead had been cut in half. With Gore only trailing by less than 200 votes, the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 opinion that stopped the recounts and handed the election to Bush. Had the Supreme Court been legally compelled to issue this decision, I wouldn’t be writing this article and we would have no story. The problem was that the Court abused its power and acted contrary to the law to turn the election towards their Republican hero. As a result, Corporate Evil won this battle.

III. THE SUPREME COURTS' DECISION TO FORCE FLORIDA TO STOP COUNTING VOTES HAD NO REASONABLE BASIS IN LAW, HENCE IT WAS AN ILLEGITIMATE ATTEMPT TO UNDERMINE DEMOCRACY.

A. The Court Has No Reasonable Basis For Its Claim That the Florida Supreme Court Violated Article II by “Impermissibly Distorting” Florida Election Law

The Yale Journal of Law (110 YLJ 1407, no link available) considers the Court’s strongest legal argument to be Rehnquist’s concurring decision, not the 5-4 majority opinion which focused on Equal Protection. The concurring opinion finds its basis in Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution: “[E]ach State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct," electors for president and vice president. Rehnquist argued that the legislature had complete plenary power to determine how to choose electors. The Florida Supreme Court could not alter that power in any way, even to avoid a conflict with the Florida Constitution.

The problem with Rehnquist’s view is that one cannot divorce the courts from legislature. Both are equal components of the lawmaking process. The legislature makes laws, but when it comes to conflict in laws, the courts resolve disputes, just as they always do. More importantly, the legislature specifically delegated authority to the Courts to decide election contests.

The Florida legislature specifically created the right to sue in federal courts to contest election results. That is part of the “manner as the legislature thereof may direct.” The Florida Supreme Court used its power to interpret a conflict in laws when it ordered a statewide recount. Rehnquist acknowledges that courts can interpret election law, that interpretation cannot involve a “significant departure” from the prior law and cannot “impermissibly distort” the statutes “beyond what a fair reading required.” Since the Florida election statutes were rewritten in 1999, nearly all questions of interpretation were of first impression for the Florida Supreme Court. A “significant departure” would be nearly impossible in the absence of precedent.

Rehnquist argued that a legal vote was only the vote punched out and read by the punch card machine. He claimed that voters were given clear instructions on how to vote properly and if they didn’t vote so that the machine read their votes, they were illegal no matter if the intent of the voter was otherwise clear. The Florida Supreme Court took had argued that these votes, called “undervotes”, should be counted if the intent of the voter was clear. This constituted a "fair reading" of the election statutes that failed to "impermissibily distort" them.

Rehnquist and the Bush team longed argued that December 12, 6 days before the electoral college meets, was the drop dead date for the end of the recounts. Hence, no more recounts could occur under the Court’s decision because the Court believed that they would never be finished in time. But by federal law (3 U.S.C. §5), this only creates a “safe harbor” that guarantees a state that its votes will be counted; electoral votes have come in late all sorts of times and always had been counted. Rehnquist believed that since the Florida Legislature wrote that the votes had to be in by December 12^th, that was enough. Yet the court had to balance meeting an artificial deadline with counting all the legal votes in the state of Florida. Given a balance between a legal fiction and a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution, Rehnquist chose the fiction to select George W. Bush.

The real problem with the Republican Court’s opinion lies in the complete disregard for standards of review. The Florida Supreme Court had the most authoritative understanding of Florida election law. The standard of review when interpreting state statutes is not purely de novo but requires some deference to the state court interpreting its only statutes. By Rehnquist's own phrasing of the standard of review, the Supreme Court could only overturn Florida's decision if a “significant departure” existed that “impermissibly distorted” the statutes “beyond what a fair reading required.” But Rehnquist's interpretation wasn’t any more legally sound than Florida's decision. The Florida Supreme Court’s reasoning failed to meet Rehnquist's standard that would allow the Court to overturn its decision and announce a violation of Article II.

B. The Court has No Reasonable Basis for Its Claim That Recounts Violated Equal Protection by Using Different Standards of Vote Tabulation Because the Majority of Elections Use Different Standards of Vote Tabulation.

The 5-4 majority used Equal Protection, not Article II, to justify handing the election to Bush.

The majority pointed to the fact that just three counties in Florida were counting overvotes – votes which machines read as voting for “2” candidates but which the voter’s intent could clearly be ascertained by human inspection. All other counties limited their count to the undervotes – votes with no recorded vote but where the voter intent can clearly be ascertained – which is as the Florida Supreme Court had ordered in its December 8 opinion. Since this discrepancy meant that certain votes could get counted in some places but not in others, the Court found an Equal Protection violation.

The fundamental flaw in this argument is that within states, different methods of counting ballots across different counties occur all the time. Hence, the court's logic only holds water if its reasoning is that states can count votes differently the first time, but on a recount one must employ a uniform standard. There is no logical justification for distinguishing the two methods of counting votes since a recount replaces the first count and involves the exact same means and end.

The court further held that is decision was “limited to the present circumstances,” which has been treated as making the decision “not precedent.” Black voters seeking to remedy equal protection violations had no ammo as the political Republican Justices exposed their flagrant disregard for the rule of law. The common law follows precedent; to declare a decision that effects a Presidential Election “not precedent” stands above the rule of law.

The Court created brand new Equal Protection doctrine created from scratch to justify Bush’s appointment. If the Court was really concerned with a serious Equal Protection violation affecting a Presidential Election, the Court easily could have remanded the case and conducted a recount using a uniform standard. This was Justice Breyer’s opinion; he agreed with the 5 conservatives that an Equal Protection violation existed, but he wanted to send the case back to the Florida Supreme Court to conduct a manual recount. The majority dismisses this argument in a sentence – the Florida statute says the 12^th is the day, and violating that day would not make an “appropriate order” of the court. The court reasons that since a a conflict in laws exists, a minor, technical statutory violation should take precedence over a massive Constitutional violation. This is unbelievable. When two laws conflict, a weighing test must be conducted. The balancing test here reveals the remedy of the Equal Protection Violation to take precedence. The Court, however, cared little for the rule of law. They wanted Bush as President and were prepared to misuse their positions to do it.

IV. JUSTICES WITH CRIMINAL INTENT

It’s fairly obvious that the Court knew that its legal reasoning had no merit. Is this a crime? No, because no statute on the books provides for such a crime. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi argues that although the Court violated no statute, the Justices had criminal intent because they knew their actions were “morally reprehensible.” Regardless of whether it’s called a crime or not, no justification exists under the spirit of the Constitution for stealing elections .

The 2000 “selection” shocked Americans into the reality that an objective Supreme Court ceased to exist. The Court revealed itself as political institution despite the contrary intent of the founding fathers. The Republican members of the court became the very judicial activists that the GOP propaganda machines rail against. The Supreme Court, effectively, caved into the interests of corporate evil rather than obey their oath to the Constitution. This decision by the 5 conservative Justices has resulted in the death of thousands of Americans and enormous wealth transfers from poor to mega-rich. The maintenance of free elections is key to American democracy and essential to the hearts of human beings. To undermine these values demonstrates a profound disrespect for our nation and our Constitution.

Misusing the power of the Supreme Court was not the only manner in which the Republicans stole the 2000 election. In my next post in this series, I’ll address the more troubling issue of massive racism and voting fraud that helped send the election to the courts to begin with.

2006-02-06T11:02:00.000-08:00

DEMOCRACY: DEAD OR ALIVE
Part 2 of 5

A Political Impeachment

In the first part of this series, I explained the Republicans' sordid past of voter disenfranchisement. This legacy of undermining democracy continued on and ultimately infected the democratic process itself. Today we shift forward to the late 1990s.
The Republican Party attempted to undermine the electoral results of the 1996 Presidential Election through its political impeachment of President Clinton. Since Clinton never perjured himself in the legal sense, never committed a high crime or misdemeanor in any sense and was set up by a organized plot, the Impeachment should be viewed as nothing less than a conservative "coup d'etat."

I. Clinton Never Committed Perjury

Although Clinton’s lawyers eventually admitted to perjury, their legal argument centered around whether that perjury qualified as a high crime or misdemeanor. This may have been due to tactics: the larger issue was whether that perjury should really qualify as impeachable. However, Peter Tiersma of Loyola Law School lays out a compelling argument that Clinton’s lies of omission fail to meet the Supreme Court’s definition of perjury:

The seminal case is Bronston v. United States. The issue in Bronston was "whether a witness may be convicted of perjury for an answer, under oath, that is literally true but not responsive to the question asked and arguably misleading by negative implication."

The case arose because Mr. Bronston was involved in bankruptcy proceedings. Attorneys for his creditors were examining him, under oath, regarding assets that he personally owned in various countries, as well as assets owned by companies under his control. During this examination, the following exchange occurred:

Q. Do you have any bank accounts in Swiss banks, Mr. Bronston?

A. No, sir.

Q. Have you ever?

A. The company had an account there for about six months, in Zurich.

The "truth" was that Bronston had had a large personal bank account in Switzerland for five years.

Bronston was convicted of perjury, and his conviction was affirmed on appeal. But the Supreme Court reversed. The Court acknowledged that in ordinary conversation, Bronston's response would probably be understood to imply that he had never had a personal bank account in Switzerland. But this was a legal proceeding where the parties were represented by lawyers trained in adversarial proceedings. Chief Justice Burger emphasized that the perjury statute refers to what the witness "states," not to what he "implies.” If a witness equivocates or gives a vague response, it is the examining lawyer's responsibility to probe more deeply and to clarify the answer.

Since Bronston established a “literal truth” defense to perjury, Clinton’s lack of false statements means that no perjury occurred. President Clinton denied having sexual relations, denied having a sexual relationship and denied having a sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky. Later he admitted to receiving oral sex from her. These statements constitute the entire body of evidence as to perjury.

I don’t believe oral sex involves any sort of “relationship” and a few minutes in the Oval Office doesn’t make it an affair either. Both of those connotate long term, quasi-committed people. When Clinton said “sexual relations” he was just saying “sex” like a Southern gentleman would.

The definition used by the parties in court referred to sexual relations by the term "engaging in" sexual relations. Clinton said later that he believed engaging in sexual relations, as narrowly defined by the parties, required one to physically touch another private parts for the purpose of gratification. Since he never did that to her, Clinton didn’t lie. Republicans say this is parsing words. Nonsense. Clinton was looking for a way out, but there’s no reason to believe that he didn’t understood the definition to describe intercourse, not oral sex. Regardless, his conduct didn’t meet the parties’ definition. It could be argued that he would have perjured himself at this point by saying he did have sexual relations with Lewinsky when, in fact, his conduct failed to meet the controlling definition.

II. No High Crime or Misdemeanor

In some instances, I agree that the “will of the people” is not enough to sustain a Presidency. Democracy can lead to strange results and, on occasion, absolute criminals will be revered by the people. Should a President truly commit “high crimes and misdemeanors” – “injuries done immediately to the society itself “, in the words of Alexander Hamilton– Impeachment should remain as option. Yet impeachment is not a power to take lightly, especially when it involves undermining the will of the people. If it’s unclear whether to do it or not, you err on the side of not doing it. The stakes are enormous.

Clinton’s lie about a private, consensual sexual affair fails to rise to the level of a “high crime and misdemeanor” under any definition of the word. Presidents lie all the time. Of course the other side will be quick to point out that Clinton was impeached for perjury, not mere lying. Fair enough.

Let’s assume Clinton committed perjury. His lawyers admitted as much. Even if Clinton didn't technically perjure himself, I think it's fair to say that he lied. As far as the common folk are concerned, that seems like perjury. The mere commission of perjury, however, is not enough to impeach. The Constitution requires that a President commit "high crimes and misdemeanors" in order to be impeached. Perjury fails to amount to a "high crime or misdemeanor" unless it occurs in the exercise of executive powers.

In a scholarly presentation of the Republicans' case on this issue, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, argues that perjury (22 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 619 -- no link for this one, you need to sign in to Westlaw or Lexis) . It's worth noting that the writer of this article is Charles J. Cooper, a former clerk to Rehnquist and former deputy assistant attorney general to Ronald Reagan. He's also heavily involved with the Federalist Society. Cooper relies upon an exchange between two of the founders arguing whether impeachment should be for "maladministration" or "high crimes and misdemeanors." Madison objected to "maladministration" because it is "[s]o vague a term [would] be equivalent to a tenure during pleasure of the Senate." Cooper implies that because maladministration, which implies poor governance, was considered by one of the founders, then clearly the founders intended for just about anything to qualify as impeachment. Cooper goes back and cherrypicks quotes from history to back up his point.

But this one isolated exchange says nothing about what the founders as a whole thought. Just as when you analyze legislative history, you never know the meaning of a term based solely on the comments of one person. The founders, as a whole, decided to use the lofty phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors." They did not say "any crimes". The founders also spoke of how the crimes must injure society itself. Cooper says that perjury is such a crime. But arguing that Clinton's perjury somehow effects society is preposterous. This is not what the founders intended. They never could have contemplated a society like ours where the President of the United States would get called under oath and asked who he's had sex with. The crimes contemplated were obviously those that a President could actually commit in the late 18th century -- crimes related to the office.

Further, the founders' intentions alone do not control the Constitution. Unlike so-called originalists, I see the Constitution as a living, breathing document. We should interpret the Constitution to the fullest intent of the founders and the basic principles of this Nation. So-called originalists often say that we should ignore these basic principles due to some parsing of miniscule language and words. Regardless of what words were written or said, it's clear that the founders never wanted a President impeached for something as irrelevant a perjury about your personal life.

III. A Massive Conservative Propaganda Machine Set Clinton Up to Fail

a. The Propaganda Machine Starts Rolling

When Nixon resigned, Republicans fumed. Never again they promised. From this came the birth of the counter-establishment. Because academia consistently told the Republicans they were wrong on social issues and the economy, because the Republicans were in fact wrong, the GOP decided to form a new conservative establishment. Instead of the media simply reporting that leading scholars condemned the next tax cuts, the existence of a counter establishment forced the media to report that the verdict is still out -- with scholars on one side and the counter establishment on the other.

Today we take the existence of the counter establishment for granted. Who are they? After Nixon's resignation, what Hillary Clinton would later term "the vast right wing conspiracy" was born. After Nixon, 4 billionaire Republican families began massively funding a conservative propaganda campaign that would resemble actual media or scholarly outlets. The families became known as the "four sisters" of the counter-establishment movement: Richard Mellon Scaife's Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. They funded both intellectual "think tanks" as well as the publication of conservative magazines like the "American Spectator."

Creating organizations like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Society and the American Enterprise Institute had a two fold purpose for the "four sisters": 1) they could undermine academia with polished, well reasoned retorts and 2) it provided an ample base for future conservative leaders. Indeed, many, if not the majority, of President Bush's appointees are tied to one of the "four sisters" groups in some way.

A quick side note: Republican disrespect for academia stems from the fact that they need to lie to sell most of their ideas. If they went out in public and said that they wanted to give huge tax cuts to the top 1% because they funded their campaigns, they'd never get elected. The perfect example of this is how Bush never mentioned a massive, radical "reform" of Social Security in 2004, but as soon as he got reelected he made it priority number one. A lie of omission indeed.

b. The Arkansas Project

Richard M. Larry, the lifelong senior aide of "four sisters" charter member Richard Mellon Scaife, came up with the idea of investigating Clinton's activities as a way to undermine his Presidency in 1993. Scaife and Larry pressured the American Spectator, a right wing tabloid that has received at least $3.3 million from Scaife over the years, to start looking into the random accusations of backwoods kooks in Arkansas. The Spectator began by putting out pieces based upon statements from former Arkansas state troopers. They alleged Clinton arranged sexual affairs and they had all sorts of juicy details. Later on, these troopers and their juicy details were discredited. The author of the piece, David Brock, later admitted that he invented most of the story as well as a subsequent book on Anita Hill. He further admitted that he wasn't a journalist at the American Spectator, he was a propagandist whose mission was to attack Clinton at all costs. Brock had a nervous breakdown, came out of the closet and moved to the left. His sole mission today is to expose the "vast right wing conspiracy" and their lies. You can find his work at mediamatters.org , an invaluable website that tracks the news.

In his book The Republican Noise Machine, Brock explains how the counter establishment works: You start by printing a story in the American Spectator that lacks journalistic credibility, either due to lack of sources, invented facts or both. Soon Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage mentions the story on the air. Next conservative news outlets like Fox News and Newsmax mention that Rush Limbaugh and the Spectator have mentioned it, increasing its credibility. Soon Conservative politicians and pundits start talking about it. And suddenly, the mainstream corporate media mentions that many conservative outlets are talking about the story, thereby legitimizing it. With this powerful infrastructure, the Republicans are able to invent stories, push them through their noise machine and turn those invented stories into actual reported news.

In the 1990s, these awful lies about Clinton involved allegations of rape and cocaine smuggling. They were discredited; the cocaine story cost the editor of the American Spectator his job in one of the few "just desserts" moments of the whole thing.

c. Whitewater

The Clintons were exonerated from Whitewater but here are the facts: David Hale, a convicted felon and former municipal judge, also owned a Small Business Administration lending company. Hale subsequently made a $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal, one of Clinton's partners in a piece of rural Arkansas property named Whitewater. McDougal apparently didn't qualify for the loan. The Clintons were passive business partners with the McDougals and ended up losing money. Here the facts end.

In order to pin this shady situation on Clinton, Hale claimed that Bill Clinton as governor personally called him to pressure him into making the loan. Many other shady allegations came through over the years, all of which were discredited and could all be traced back to one of the "four sisters" propaganda foundations.

The Republican noise machine in early 1993 starting revving up its engines on Whitewater and pressured Clinton to appoint a special prosecutor through its manipulation of the news media. A conservative three judge panel, including D.C. Circuit Judge Sentelle (I just spent the weekend attacking one of his dissents), selected Kenneth Starr as independent counsel in 1994. The independent counsel, created by act of Congress after Carter, creates a "fourth branch" of government accountable to no one. They have ultimate authority to as they please to investigate the President and ultimately file impeachment papers. Republicans hated this law for a long time because they were the ones doing shady things; the Independent Counsel Act has since expired. Don't expect to see it ever revived again now that Democrats hate it too. In my view, it's not constitutional because it interferes with the division of powers.

Starr himself was a member of the Federalist Society and a close personal friend of Richard Mellon Scaife. Despite new evidence or any signs that Clinton did anything illegal, Starr ruthlessly investigated Clinton for another 4 years before Monica Lewinsky broke in 1998. In effect, Starr became a check on Presidential power who had the ability to conduct a nonstop investigation of Clinton for his entire Presidency. The first time they caught him committing any sort of crime, about oral sex, they impeached him. This had been the intent of the Republicans all along.

Starr himself violated the power given to him through the independent counsel. Connecting Lewinsky with Paula Jones and somehow connecting that to Whitewater is strained logic at best, certainly not enough for a so-called brilliant legal mind like Starr's. Clinton and Lewinsky simply were not relevant to Starr's legal objective in pursuing Clinton. His personal objective, however, was to attack Clinton at all costs in order to remove him from the Presidency.

Starr resigned his post at the Independent Counsel in 1997 to take a high paying job as Pepperdine's Dean of its Law School and the School of Public Policy. The Washington Post reported, however, that Richard Mellon Scaife had recently given $1.1 million to the school in order to underwrite that very position. When these allegations surfaced, Starr un-resigned his post and kept on hunting Clinton. Clearly, however, Starr was prepared to get some payback for his war on Clinton.

Finally, if you ever have the stomach to read the Starr report, here it is. Don't read it with kids, it's an overly kinky bizarre romp that probably indicates a high level of porn stashed on Ken Starr's home computer. Regardless, the Starr report came to nothing when the Senate failed to convict Clinton of impeachment. Their legal case was weak and the public despised them for what was going on. The Republicans no longer found it valuable to investigate Clinton after their devastating electoral defeats of 1998. Instead of gaining seats, as the party not holding the Presidency had done in every midterm election during a President's second term in the last century, the Republicans lost seats. The Democrats made gains. Seeing the writing on the wall, the Republicans decided to fold up shop and just steal the Presidency in 2000. Oops, I meant "try and win" in 2000.

IV. Conclusion

The legal argument that Clinton needed to be impeached is weak at best. He may not have committed perjury and certainly didn't commit a "high crime or misdemeanor" as is required under the Constitution to impeach. Further, the Republicans placed him in a situation where he would be under oath answering questions about his private sex life. He had two options: 1) publicly humiliate himself or 2) lie. It was a win-win for the Republicans. Imagine if George Bush went on the stand and Democrats got to ask him about cocaine use in the 1970s. The result would be the same, but it would be unfair.

The lesson of Clinton's Impeachment is that the Republican Party will fight for power at all costs. The considerations of whether impeachment was justified in light of Clinton's two electoral victories and high approval rating never emerged. The will of the people, it seemed, could be ignored in favor of a large goal of attaining power. The plan was to impeach Clinton, then Gore, and then do whatever they pleased with the Presidency. The impeachment, however, marked the first time of a massive, coordinated Republican effort to undermine democracy. It would provide the blueprint for 2000, 2004 and the elections in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The next part in this occasional series will study the Republican attack on democracy in the 2000 Presidential Election.

2006-02-06T10:23:00.000-08:00

DEMOCRACY: DEAD OR ALIVE
Part 1 of 5

The Republican Party does not value democracy and reguarly attempts to steal votes. Considering the recent actions by the Republicans, America needs an active debate about whether democracy truly exists. Today I begin this discussion by examining how the Republicans have undermined democracy at every turn once it became a reality in 1965.

I. BEFORE DEMOCRACY

The history of America is filled with conservatives who worked vigorously to undermine the democratic system. At our nation's inception, only white, male property owners could vote. We were by no means a democracy, but rather a plutocracy. A democracy requires "government by the people", not by "some of the people." Indeed this nation did not really become a democracy until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Prior to JFK, the policy of both political parties was white supremacy. If anything, the Democrats were worse up to that point due to the party's Southern influences. Republicans and Democrats in 1960 were not quite what they are today. In addition to liberal Democrats, you also found very conservative Southern Democrats who enforced the racist status quo. Some fiscally conservative Republicans were socially progressive and/or ardent believers in the essential guarantees of the New Deal. Due to the South's anger at the Republican party following the civil war, the South had long been dominated by the Democrats. The process didn't begin to change until JFK's Civil Rights Act which was ultimately signed by LBJ in 1964 when he famously remarked "We've lost the South for a generation."

The 1965 Voting Rights Act prohibits discrimination in voting practices and procedures due to race. An example of its' successes is that black registration in Mississippi went from 6.7% to 59.8% after the passage of the Act. Over the years Congress has expanded the Voting Rights Act to ensure the continued existence of democracy. In 1975, for instance, people were guaranteed the right to use ballots in foreign languages. Prior to 1965, however, it's difficult to discuss the topic of this article -- undermining democracy -- because we just plain weren't a democracy. It was a country run by white men with a few white women brought along, albeit reluctantly. Up to 1965, however, it is fair to note that Democrats had been more culpable of undermining democracy than the Republicans had been.

After the Voting Rights Act, the two parties began to take vastly different approaches. The Democrats saw a mass exodus of racist Southerners who couldn't deal with the party taking a stand against their so-called "way of life." Existing Democrats became more liberal as a result. The left-leaning wing of the party suddenly could be more vocal and aggressive in pushing a socially progressive agenda without the constant threat of retribution from Southern Democrats. On the other side of the fence, the Republicans jumped at the chance to obtain a new block of voters, especially in the South. President Eisenhower started making small concessions to the South in an attempt to end Democratic dominance, but Tricky Dick Nixon was the one who completed the transformation.

Nixon realized that the Southerners had more in common with fiscal conservatives than fiscal liberals. Both Southern Democrats and mainstream Republicans distrusted the government, despised academia and were fearful of change from the status quo. Nixon termed his plan "positive polarization", history has called it the "Southern Strategy". In my earlier article on Lakoff, I discussed the Republican strategy of framing debates. In some ways, Nixon was the founder of this movement. The term "states rights" was invented as a way to speak in code about white supremacy. The Southern Strategy was fought using such clever manipulations of words. Nixon attempted to speak using the same terms directly to two constituencies that, up to that point, had been consider polar opposites, politically. So Nixon would promise that he, personally, was not a racist but that he was against big government telling us what to do. So fiscal conservatives heard what they wanted -- that Nixon was a social moderate who disfavored government regulation -- and social conservatives heard what they wanted -- that Nixon wasn't going to enforce the federal government's civil rights laws of the 1960s. By speaking against what the government had done in race relations directly after the massive developments of the LBJ administration, Nixon came off to Southerners as being against everything LBJ stood for. More sophisticated Northern Republicans saw Nixon as the social moderate they preferred.

II. THE REPUBLICAN WAR ON DEMOCRACY BEGINS

An offshoot of Nixon's Southern Strategy was to suppress the black vote at all costs and to use dirty tricks to turn white voters against the Democrats. One of these strategies was to send phony "minority representatives" into white communities to inform them of government programs created specifically for minorities at taxpayer's expense. Segregationist candidates who had once been Democrats, such as Trent Lott, now ran as Republicans.

The more devious way of turning the country Republican was by flagrantly violating the spirit, if not the letter, of the Voting Rights Act. Republican party operatives began a massive campaign of stealing black votes. (Disenfranchisement is a nice term, but it also deflects the seriousness of what is occurring. I prefer the term stealing to better reflect the crime.) The Republican Party launched a series of “ballot security” and “voter integrity” initiatives which targeted minority communities. Using these deceptive terms, they were able to eliminate and suppress votes while technically complying with the Voting Rights Act. In 1981, the New Jersey Republican Party hired armed guards to act as a "National Ballot Security Task Force" and set up signs in black and latino neighborhoods claiming: “Warning, This Area Is Being Patrolled by the National Ballot Security Task Force. It Is a Crime to Falsify a Ballot or to Violate Election Laws.” In 1987, the Republican National Committee's true motivations behind "voter integrity" initiatives was exposed when they wrote that the Louisiana measure would "eliminate at least 60- 80,000 folks from the rolls." The goal was not voter integrity; it was voter elimination. In 1990, the North Carolina Republican Party and the Helms for Senate committee mailed 125,000 postcards, 97% of them to African Americans, warning of criminal penalties for voter fraud.

Republican politicians themselves began to open embrace racism and vote suppression. Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy for President in Philadelphia, Mississippi and spoke of "states rights." This isolated community was famous for just one thing in its long history -- the death of 3 civil rights workers in 1964. Speaking the racial code in this town was a clear signal to Southern racists -- I'm with you. During his confirmation hearings for Chief Justice in 1986, 19 witnesses testifying that Rehnquist in the early 60s harassed black and latino voters at polling places in an attempt at disenfranchisement. (Sorry, I meant stealing votes, Mr. Chief Justice. It wasn't his last crime and likely not his first either. See a future post on the 2000 election.)

As future posts will show, these attempts at voter disenfranchisement only increased in the 1990s. By 2004, it was a vast, professionally run, criminal enterprise.

III. CONCLUSION

The above discussion proves that the Republican party kept trying to violate the spirit and letter of the Voting Rights Act. They did so because it helped them win elections. Minorities were not behind the pro-status quo agenda of the Republican Party once it hardened in the late 60s, so the disappearance of their vote was a "good" thing for the Republican party. But what does that say about the Republicans' commitment to democracy? Is the maintenance and preservation of a democratic state even an important goal to the Republicans? Or do they simply want a government "by our people", not "by the people"? Or do they believe that an aggressive policy of limiting votes is just an unavoidable part of democratic politics?

In the next 4 parts of this semi-occasional series, I will explain discuss 4 other recent events that call into question whether democracy even exists anymore. Circumventing the Voting Rights Act and suppressing minorities is just part of the Republican War on Democracy. The GOP's hatred of the democratic process has intensified so much in the last 7 years that democracy may have been killed without many noticing. Next time, I'll look at the Impeachment of President Clinton.

2006-02-01T12:41:00.000-08:00

The Genius of Co-opting Issues

Last night, President Bush gave his 6th State of the Union address. It was a mostly forgettable speech filled with the same tired old rhetoric that Bush has been shoveling at us for years. One comment, however, will likely go down in history: Bush's admission that the U.S. is addicted to oil.

While some will applaud the fact that the Corporate Republican Party has finally admitted this obvious truth, I'm sorry to break the news that this admission is nothing more than empty words covering for a lack of substantive effort. Let me explain.

President Clinton was a genius at co-opting issues from the Republicans. The reason is plain: if your party remains powerless to stop an issue from coming to the forefront, you've got to frame the debate according to your terms. So when Clinton sensed the Republican party was making inroads on their campaign to end affirmative action, Clinton came up with "mend it, don't end it" and saved affirmative action programs. When Clinton saw the GOP drive to destroy welfare, Clinton decided to "end welfare as we know it." Clinton was assailed from those on the left on both points, but those attackers miss the larger war. Clinton could not prevent attacks on affirmative action or welfare so he instead led those attacks. Clinton's changes on both issues were far less harsh and drastic than those desired by Republicans, however.

Bush is trying to do the same with the environment. Karl Rove and his Machiavellian cronies surely recognize the pending ecological disaster that we face due to our unholy dependence on oil. Global warming is close to becoming a catastrophe, but more important for the GOP, it's close to becoming a serious issue through which Democrats can retake control of the government. After major environmental disasters begin to befall the U.S., or oil prices simply spiral out of control, Democrats can point to the Oil-Funded Bush Administration as the reason why we are in such a mess. Democrats could point to Dick Cheney's secret meetings with oil executives when he planned energy policy.

Anticipating these events, Bush is now the one to lead the attacks on oil addiction. It's a pure stroke of brilliance for the GOP but will ultimately lead to more environmental havoc. Now Democrats cannot claim that Bush blindly ignored the issue for 8 years because Republicans will quickly point out that Bush told everyone we were addicted to oil. Instead of Democrats having an undeniable upper hand on the issue, the Republicans can now resort to their manipulation of the so-called "objective" press and confuse voters. Now the "objective" press won't report that Bush's environmental record is shameful, they'll instead point to the fact that both parties acknowledge a problem exists but have 2 radically different viewpoints about how to solve the problem. The Democrat solution will likely be grounded in science and reality; the Republican solution will be based upon finding other unhealthy pollutants, acquiring more oil through war, huge tax breaks to their corporate cronies and big talk followed by little results. Instead of reporting that the Democrat solution attacks the problem and the Republican solution doesn't, our corporate media will fail us by acting as if no one knows the real solution and both alternatives are equally plausible. That's not objectivity; that's just reporting both sides and failing to analyze whether one side might objectively be right. This is why our corporate media is a complete joke; they just print press releases and don't investigate. The antecdote often used to demonstrate the false "objectivity" of the corporate news is this: if the GOP announced that the sky is red and the Democrats said it was blue, the media's headline would be "Parties differ as to color of the sky" instead of reporting "Republicans lie about the color of the sky."

Democrats must take the initiative right now to go to town attacking Bush's deplorable environmental record. We cannot let his "addiction to oil" comment stand in a bubble without revealing the true nature of this Earth-hating administration. If we wait too long, Bush and the rest of the GOP will have permanently co-opted the issue from us. The environment cannot afford more Republican assaults upon it.

2006-01-30T11:38:00.000-08:00

Kill the Messenger (Or if you can't kill him, give him a high level appointment)

I really don't know what more to say about this, other than this is the ultimate example of corruption and conflicts of interests. The Jack Abramoff investigation, which has thousands of connections to the White House directly, has been effectively halted because Bush has appointed the chief prosecutor to a federal judgeship. What a nice way of ensuring that he won't/can't do anything to implicate the Criminal President or the Criminal Congress.

The Democrats are trying to use this disgusting appointment to get an independent prosecutor to conduct the investigation, as they should:

The timing of Mr. Hillman's nomination "jaundices this whole process," Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said in an interview. "They have to appoint a special counsel. I think there will be broad support for one."

Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, called the timing "startling" and said, "You have one of the chief prosecutors removed from a case that has tentacles throughout the Republican leadership of Congress, throughout the various agencies and into the White House."

2006-01-30T11:07:00.000-08:00

The Federalist Society Rejoices At Alito's Confirmation; Conservative "Reformation" Of the Court is Nearly Complete

I have often made the point that the Federalist Society is nothing more than the legal arm of the Republican party, a tool in the conservative movement (as they call it) or the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (as some of us call it.) Today's New York Times has an article explaining the utter delight in which the founding members of the Federalists take in Alito's nomination. Here's a snippet from the article:

Judge Alito's ascent to join Chief Justice Roberts on the court "would have been beyond our best expectations," said Spencer Abraham, one of the society's founders, a former secretary of energy under President Bush and now the chairman of the Committee for Justice, one of many conservative organizations set up to support judicial nominees.
He added, "I don't think we would have put a lot of money on it in a friendly wager."
Judge Alito's confirmation is also the culmination of a disciplined campaign begun by the Reagan administration to seed the lower federal judiciary with like-minded jurists who could reorient the federal courts toward a view of the Constitution much closer to its 18th-century authors' intent, including a much less expansive view of its application to individual rights and federal power. It was a philosophy promulgated by Edwin Meese III, attorney general in the Reagan administration, that became the gospel of the Federalist Society and the nascent conservative legal movement.
. . .
With grants from major conservative donors like the John M. Olin Foundation, the Federalist Society functioned as a kind of shadow conservative bar association, planting chapters in law schools around the country that served as a pipeline to prestigious judicial clerkships.

Make no mistake about it, the Federalist Society was created as a way for the Republican party to take firm control of the judiciary away from independant jurists. The group's law school chapters provide the breeding ground for future Republican appointees. No such group serves as a liberal counterweight. There are many liberal legal organizations, but none of them serve as the kind of "litmus test" that membership in the Federalist Society does. For those who would like to claim that the Federalist Society is non-political, I offer another tidbit from the New York Times:

Conservatives had begun planning for a nomination fight as long ago as that February meeting, which was led by Leonard A. Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society and informal adviser to the White House, Mr. Meese and Mr. Gray.

The founding members of the Federalist Society were mostly Reagan appointees who were determine to effectuate social change, not to provide some kind of new legal legitimacy. Theories such as originalism are but methods for the right-wing to rewrite the law without being totally obvious about it.

The revelation that emerged that Alito admitted that "the Constitution does not protect the right to abortion" was dealt with just as any corporate would shrug off negative news. The Federalist Society turned to their PR firm:

"It was a done deal," one of the Democratic staff members of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the staff is forbidden to talk publicly about internal meetings. "This was the most evidence we have ever had about a Supreme Court nominee's true beliefs."

Mr. Leo and other lawyers supporting Judge Alito were inclined to shrug off the memorandum, which described views that were typical in their circles, people involved in the effort said. But executives at Creative Response Concepts, the team's public relations firm, quickly convinced them it was "a big deal" that could become the centerpiece of the Democrats' attacks, one of the people said.

Judge Bork, a far-right conservative jurist whose nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by the Democratic Senate in 1987, is an active member of the Federalist Society and a huge proponent of Alito and Roberts. This is the same man who said that anytime you take away one person's rights, you necessarily take away another's. Apparently someone has the "right to segregate", under this demented quasi-logic. Bork loves Alito and Roberts:

"It has been a long time coming," Judge Bork said, "but more needs to be done."

What do Judge Bork and the rest of the Federalists mean as "more"? I'll tell you -- they want to overturn Roe v. Wade, they want to increase the power of big corporations, they want to continue to narrow down the Commerce Clause until it only protects the interests of "morality" (as Scalia claims it can), they want to ultimately eliminate the right to privacy, prevent any future social progress (as exemplified by the activist destruction of VAWA). None of these goals has anything to do with legitimate legal theory. Legal goals are procedural in nature, but the Federalists are more concerned with results.

I have a question for conservatives: how come "originalism" and other theories used by conservative jurists always result in acheiving conservative social change? How come originalism just happens to do away with laws protecting against spousal abuse and gun violence, but doesn't stop the federal government from telling states if they can allow medicinal cannabis? How come the interests of the rich are always favored? It's because legal theory provides but mere rationalizations for stealing rights and making the law work only for rich, white males.

2006-01-27T18:04:00.000-08:00

Ann Coulter Calls for the Assassination of Justice Stevens
The presence of frail liberal stalwart Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court is all that prevents extremist conservative domination of the Court. As is, the conservatives have 5 votes to the liberals' 4 votes; fortunately one of those conservatives -- Justice Kennedy -- is a somewhat honest, reasonable man who believes in the Constitutional protection of a woman's right to choose.

Justice Stevens is 85 years old. It's hard to imagine him surviving another 3 years on the court in order to have a potential Democrat President replace him. At least one Republican, however, thinks that Justice Stevens might live to see another Democrat President. And she has a solution.

While giving a speech at Philander Smith College, longtime right-wing psychopath Ann Coulter remarked that "We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' creme brulee."

Coulter quickly remarked that was a joke, as if that were enough to remedy her hate speech. Coulter jokes about the treasonous assassination of a Supreme Court justice, an event that could provoke a Constitutional crisis that could literally throw this country into a civil war. Now Coulter has the right to free speech, but this comes dangerously close to being unprotected speech.

At the bare minimum, the FBI should interview Coulter and place this one in her file. Coulter was a key mover in the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy's attempted political assassination of President Clinton. She was known as one of the "elves" who worked tirelessly to mold the corporate media into aggressively persuing the Lewinsky non-scandal. She has friends in the highest places of the conservative movement. I suggest that law enforcement should not take these threats likely. If such a horrendous event ever occurred, the Republican party would be free to obliterate any remaining vestiges of democracy.

In addition, Coulter should never be allowed to speak as a legitimate "pundit" on any news organizations. Her hateful rhetoric more closely resembles Osama bin Laden's than normal conservative pundits. Sean Hannity, no friend of mine, is nonetheless a legitimate pundit; Coulter is far from it. She's a hack and a professional liar. NBC, CNN, CBS and all the other mainstream news networks frequently feature Coulter on her show. They should do so no more. Her insane comment about Stevens warrants an immediate blacklist.

Coulter has previously called the Democrats "gutless traitors". She claimed the Democrats' behavior demonstrated that they "long to see U.S. troops shot, humiliated, and driven from the field of battle." During the Clinton administration, Coulter claimed the only question was whether to "whether to impeach or assassinate." That last assassination threat got her fired from MSNBC. After 9/11, Coulter said that "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."

I urge everyone with a moral compass, Republican or Democrat, to call or email CNN and demand that Coulter be banned from the airwaves. MediaMatters has set up a page here with CNN's contact info. People like Coulter are directly responsible for the demise of intelligent discourse in America. Coulter is propped up and financially supported the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Her role is to be as conservative as humanly possible so that other Republicans can point to her and say "See, they are people even more conservative than I am!" It's a scheme and it needs to be stopped.

2006-01-27T15:30:00.000-08:00

It's Time to Ban Handguns: The Comments

Earlier this week I argued that the time had come to ban handguns. I copied that blog entry onto my DailyKos page and got a whopping 187 comments. DailyKos is a mainstream lefty blog but the vast majority of the replies were negative. Some argued that if we ban guns, we should ban alcohol too; others went further off-track and argued that, as part of the 2nd amendment, citizens should be allowed to own advanced weaponry such as missiles and bombs in addition to guns.

Let me make one thing clear that I obviously didn't in my original post. My argument is more of a moral and thought based one than a pragmatic, realistic one. I for one know for certain that handguns will never be banned within my lifetime. The forces on the other side are simply too powerful to overcome. Most of the attacks I received centered around the fact that if Democrats try and ban handguns, we'll be finished as a political party. I agree. I'm not advocating Democrats take up this position; I am just using my morals and knowledge of the law to forward a legitimate opinion.

People's attacks on my free speech are quite troubling. Under the logic of my attackers, no one should have questioned slavery in 1800 because it would "finish" the Whigs as a political party. But I'm not advocating the Democrats adopt my position, I'm just advocating that we should, we must, we need to have this debate. It may be a loser in 2005, but our intellecutal sparring today could very well fix the laws in 2055. It is immoral of those to assail me simply for making a valid point.

Check out the full comments here. Here are some selected comments I received:

we need to get much better at enforcing our laws before writing new ones. that said if we collectively made firearms illegal ( exempting museum use ) I'd be ok with that. I don't need them I just like them. they are interesting historical pieces and target shooting is fun.
standard response to the 'guns are defensive' statements. sorry, as a well trained combatant by the military I can tell ya that if you carry a gun you most likely (~70% ) just armed your assailant; you also are more likely to escalate things. so no they aren't :P
. . .
My sister worked in an exchange program for japanese students wanting to learn english in the US. one of the students went trick-or-treating, dressed as john travolta ala saturdaynight fever.
evidently a paranoid man with a gun started gesturing to the kid to stop proceeding onto his property, but the kid did not understand english enough to understand, and just thought the man was fooling around, because it was Halloween. The man shot the kid and killed him as he walked up to the front door.
. . .

The Supreme Court has never agreed with your interpretation of the Second Amendment. This strikes me as strange, though, since the clause clearly pertains to "a well regulated Militia."

No fair, all you people trying to compare guns with alcohol, automobiles, doctors, and whatever else you have. By your logic, crack cocaine should be legal, since it kills less people than automobiles. The diarist's point is a cogent one: guns are manufactured for the purpose of shooting, and in the case of handguns, to shoot other people. Keep apples to apples.

Statistics involving the negligence of gunowners are not a convincing argument against gun ownership. If anything, they're a convincing argument against stupidity.

I have yet to see any statistics showing that gun ownership cuts down on violent crime. Policemen I know tell me that people who carry guns for protection are more likely to be shot, in their experience.

The root of the crime problem isn't guns - it's people. People will kill each other with baseball bats, if it comes to that.
. . .

A troll is someone who posts something to the net (originally newsgroups) in order to get people to respond and look stupid. It's modeled after the "trolling" technique of fishing, where they put out a line and move their boat along slowly waiting for a fish to bite. Basically, the guy that posted this intended to start controversy and arguments, and is probably sitting behind his computer jacking his **** off and laughing while seeing all the arguments he created here.

. . .

I decided against participating on this board after seeing all these posts where people defend gun ownership for hunting and target-shooting - AFTER bonds specifically qualified what s/he said in the diary.
If people are going to handle the discussion like that, on purpose, forget it. Maybe a lot of folks here are correct and there is just too much of a national fixation on guns for such policies to be implemented, or for the matter to even be discussed properly.

. . .

Handguns.... Not Guns... Handguns
Does anyone else see the distinction???
Just thought I would ask....

. . .
why not missle launchers?
How can you be serious about a revolution without access to modern weaponry?
. . .
The original post was made by Karl Rove.

2006-01-27T10:57:00.000-08:00

No Filibuster for Alito -- Who's to Blame?

Today, Sen. Reid announced the depressing truth that we've all been fearing: The Democrats lack the votes to mount a filibuster. Alito's rise to the Supreme Court assured, short of any stunning revelation this week, we are now left to figure out how this happened.

For those of you who don't know, a filibuster is a procedure that can permanently delay an "up or down" vote by the entire Senate. 60 votes are required to overturn a filibuster, but the Republicans only have 55 votes. The Democrats have 44 votes and usually get one more from Independant Jim Jeffords. Looking at these bare numbers alone, the Democrats have the power to filibuster any judicial nominee they choose.

Many liberal websites such as the highly informative Buzzflash have used these numbers to assail the Democratic leadership. Buzzflash called for Sen. Reid to resign for his failure to organize the Democrats and mount a successful filibuster. At first glance, I'd agree with them. Dig a little deeper, however, and it becomes clear that Sen. Reid did everything in his power to try and filibuster Alito. The problem is that although 44 Senators call themselves "Democrats," we don't have even 40 who are truly committed to our cause. The web's #1 blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga explains it better than I can:

Jeffords was a Republican and remains one of the two most conservative member of our caucus. We lose Nebraska's Ben Nelson more often than we get him because of local political factors. So we're down to 43.

43.

Not much of a margin for error, is it?

Then consider the solid-red-state Dems --

We have two Democrats in North Dakota, one in South Dakota, and one in Montana. In the South, we have two in Arkansas, two in West Virginia, and one in Louisiana.

That's nine Democrats who, like it or not, we are blessed to have in the Senate. Shit on them if you want, but would you rather the count be 43 or 34? But fact is, we're not going to get these guys 100 or even 80 percent of the time. That is, if we want any chance at remaining competitive in the Senate.

So Reid had to hold three of these nine Red-state-Dems plus Jeffords. He got Baucus to declare a "no" vote, which was a minor miracle in its own right. Jeffords will also vote "no". But a filibuster? Much tougher. Can he get three of those ten to not just vote "no", but take the much more explosive step of engaging in a filibuster?

The problem, as Markos points out, is that we just don't have enough "real Democrats" in the Senate. Although we can and should be infuriated at conservative Democrats who hold our party down, but the reality is that conservative Democrats are totally unavoidable. Moreover, we want conservative Democrats. Why? Because the alternative is having them defect to the Republican party. It's better to have them on our side part of the time instead of never having with us. The Democrats need to be a "big tent" party that accepts people of varying political pedigrees.

Now to be clear, I don't think the Democrats should adopt some kind of wishy-washy agenda that tries to offend no one and ends up inspiring no one. I think the party needs to move to the left and be agressive about it. That's a different statement than saying that we shouldn't have conservative Democrats and accept them into our party. We just shouldn't give them any power to control the broader national agenda.

Here's the real solution to prevent the Democrats from being unable to launch filibusters in the future: Elect more Democratic Senators. It's that simple. It we have 55 "real Democrats" and 5-10 conservative Democrats, we will have the power to control the Senate without any need to placate the conservative Democrats. This fall is a huge turning point in this country. I would argue that these midterm elections could possibily be the last chance to save our fragile democracy. If we can retake the Senate (it's not realistic to retake the House, but we can make gains) we can prevent Bush choosing any more wingnut Supreme Court justices in the Scalia/Thomas/Roberts/Alito mold. We can hold Bush accountable for his crimes and begin real investigation into the various scandals that the Republican party has ignored. We can prevent conservative legislation with a mere up or down vote that causes us no political headache. We can prevent Bill Frist's chilling promise to eliminate the filibuster.

Now some people might dsy that Republicans are more united than we are and that they would have no problem filibustering a Democrat if the numbers are the same. Perhaps so. The Republicans are run like a top level corporation and people like Karl Rove repeatedly make promises to politically destroy any Republican who steps out of line. Party loyalty is a good thing, but the Republicans immorally achieve it with their thinly veiled threats to moderate members of their caucus. On the other hand, moderate Republicans such as Arlen Specter would likely be very cautious about filibustering a Democrat. The real reason for the GOP's intense party loyalty, as I see it, is that the national Republican leadership has been highly effective at ensuring that the most conservative candidate wins in the primaries. This ensures a more conservative Senate that will more likely to side with the party. Another explanation is simply that conservatism is an ideology that favors power above all else, so it should be no suprise that members willingly sell out their own beliefs in exchange for retaining and increasing that power.

In conclusion, don't bash Sen. Reid. He's a tough talker and I think he's done a decent job. Instead, let's keep up the pressure on the Republicans about the ludicrous crimes of the Bush administration. United we stand, divided we fall.

2006-01-26T20:25:00.000-08:00

Was Congress "Fully Briefed" on Bush's Warrantless Wiretaps?

Bush and other Republicans have frequently made the argument that "Congress" was fully briefed on the Warrantless Wiretap program. Although this wouldn't change the illegal nature of the program, that statement is also totally false. The Washington Post says it best, so I'll leave it to them:

Bush and his top aides have repeatedly stressed that "Congress" had been briefed on the program over the past four years, but have often neglected to mention that the briefings were limited to the "Gang of Eight": the speaker and minority leader of the House; the majority and minority leaders of the Senate; and the chairmen and ranking Democrats on the two intelligence committees. And they were barred from taking notes or discussing what they heard with other lawmakers or their staffs.

2006-01-26T12:20:00.000-08:00

Responding to the Wingnuts

I've been trying to publicize my blog a bit more, including on right-wing websites. I've gotten some interesting responses, so I decided to respond in kind to one of them. I think these kinds of replies are a pretty good example of the hollowness of many Republican arguments:

First off, if a person is charged with a crime because of a warrantless wire tap then that person has a remedy within out court system. Also, 4th Amendment matters are decided by the Supreme Court and not Ted Kennedy, Michael Moore or some dumbass liberal blog.

Abe Lincoln tapped a telegraph for the same purpose Bush has. You are not gonna say Lincoln was a bad President?

The Lewinski scandal had everything to do with what Clinton was in trouble for in the private courts. If you think getting a BJ in the Oval Office is ok then you live in a sick twisted world and should seek help!

Go out and find a court that wants to indict Mr. Bush. Good luck!

Now I shall refute all 4 "arguments," if you can call them that.

First, people do indeed have a remedy in the court system, and yes, the Supreme Court is the ultimate arbitrer of the law. This isn't an argument, however. If I murder a man in cold blood and you tell me that's illegal, do I have a defense by saying "well that person's family has a remedy in the court system?" Of course not. We are debating the legality of the issue. This argument almost seems to be "No one know the law, it's the Supreme Court's job, so you have no business blogging about it." If that's the case, we should just stop printing newspapers or having any political discourse whatsoever.

Second, I don't know if the Lincoln comment is true, but its irrelevant for several reasons. Foremost, FISA didn't exist back then. There was no statute to violate. Did it violate the Fourth Amendment? Maybe so. It's distinguished from tapping a phone line, however, because there is a greater expectation of privacy via a phone than via a telegraph. Telegraph operators handled all messages so there was no real expectation of privacy. It's just like the fact that you give your phone number to the phone company so you have no expectation of privacy in regards to that. Regardless, this issue has nothing to do with whether Lincoln or Bush were bad presidents. The issue is whether Bush broke the law. Under this line of reasoning, a President can flagrantly violate the law as much as he pleases as long as he is a "good" President. That's nutty.

Third, the poster argues that getting a BJ in the oval office is a greater crime than massive warrantless wiretaps. In one instance, no one's rights were violated. In another, thousands of US citizens had their constitutional rights violated. There is simply no comparison. Further, my original point was simply that if Clinton gets impeached for perjury in a private civil suit, then Bush necessarily should be impeached for violation of a Congressional statute and the Fourth Amendment.

Also, I really don't care what goes on in people's private sexual lives. If you want to know the intimate details of another man's sexual escapades, then I think that "you live in a sick twisted world and should seek help!" Bush has done far more evil, disgraceful, disgusting things in the Oval Office such as conspiring with mega-corporations to rape the poor and devising strategies to mislead the American public into the phony Iraq war.

Fourth, the poster has no clue of the impeachment process. No court indicts the President to begin impeachment. The House of Representatives approve the Articles of Impeachment and the Senate holds a trial. This is an extra-judicial proceeding. Go read up on the law before making bogus arguments.

2006-01-26T08:45:00.000-08:00

New Evidence Reveals that Bush Knew He Was a Criminal

A remarkable turn of events has taken place this week in regards to the NSA Scandal. As you already know, the Bush administration decided to conduct warrantless wiretaps of American citizens in direct violation of the FISA Act. Bush had said, on video tape, that wiretaps require warrants.

On Monday of this week, former Bush NSA Director Gen. Michael Hayden said that Bush bypassed the FISA court because the probable cause standard was too high of a bar. Hayden admitted that the President's executive order allowed for wiretaps with less evidence than FISA did.

On Tuesday, a highly resourceful blogger named Glenn Greenwald revealed the results of an investigation he conducted into Hayden's claim. While the mainstream corporate press was content to simply file news reports based on press releases, Greenwald did some actual investigating and reporting. Greenwald discovered that in June 2002, Republican Senator Michael DeWine of Ohio introduced a bill that would have removed the 'high' probable cause standard that Hayden claimed provided the basis for Bush's executive order. Under the legislation, "reasonable suspicion" would have replaced "probable cause" for all wiretapping of non-US citizens.

So what did the Bush administration say in response to DeWine's bill? Did they hail it as a key, necessary part of the war on terror? No. Bush's lawyers told the Senate that the bill likely violated the Constitution and refused to support it:

The Department of Justice has been studying Sen. DeWine's proposed legislation. Because the proposed change raises both significant legal and practical issues, the Administration at this time is not prepared to support it.

The Department's Office of Legal Counsel is analyzing relevant Supreme Court precedent to determine whether a "reasonable suspicion" standard for electronic surveillance and physical searches would, in the FISA context, pass constitutional muster. The issue is not clear cut, and the review process must be thorough because of what is at stake, namely, our ability to conduct investigations that are vital to protecting national security. If we err in our analysis and courts were ultimately to find a "reasonable suspicion" standard unconstitutional, we could potentially put at risk ongoing investigations and prosecutions.

The practical concern involves an assessment of whether the current "probable cause" standard has hamstrung our ability to use FISA surveillance to protect our nation.
. . .

It may not be the case that the probable cause standard has caused any difficulties in our ability to seek the FISA warrants we require, and we will need to engage in a significant review to determine the effect a change in the standard would have on our ongoing operations. If the current standard has not posed an obstacle, then there may be little to gain from the lower standard and, as I previously stated, perhaps much to lose.

The bill never passed Congress. Although it wouldn't have removed all of the burdens that Bush claims FISA imposed -- because probable cause still would have applied to US citizens and the FISA court would need to dole out warrants based on reasonable suspicion -- the Bush administration's rejection of the bill reveals that they knew that warrantless wiretaps violated the law. It also refutes the argument that these warrantless wiretaps were necessary to fight terror because Bush claimed "the current standard has not posed an obstacle."

What's the 2006 Bush response? Pretty much ridiculous:

"The FISA 'probable cause' standard is essentially the same as the 'reasonable basis' standard used in the terrorist surveillance program," said spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos, using the term for the NSA program the White House has adopted. "The 'reasonable suspicion' standard, which is lower than both of these, is not used in either program."

Translation: Bush didn't want the 2002 bill because he wanted higher constitutional safeguards. If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you. First, no one really knows what the so-called "reasonable basis" standard is and whether it really is "essentially" the same as probable cause. Only secret Bush lawyers ever got to create and analyze the standard. No judge ever approved of it. Second, a Gen. Hayden was the head of NSA, the agency conducting the spying, and claimed that the "probable cause" standard was indeed part of the reason for Bush's subversion of the FISA law.

This next line of argument should be assailed by the mainstream press:

Justice officials also said that even under a different standard, the process of obtaining a surveillance warrant would take longer than is necessary for the NSA to efficiently track suspected terrorists.

Translation: If the law makes it tricky to do our jobs, we get to ignore the law. That's like saying I can legally speed to work if I am late. More importantly, the law did not make it tricky for the NSA to efficiently track suspected terrorists. FISA allowed the NSA to begin spying without a warrant and gave them a 72 hour window to obtain one. 72 hours is more than enough time to get a warrant. The Bush administration has a massive cadre of Federalist Society lawyers eager to do anything they can for the President. Obtaining these warrants requires perhaps an hour or two of work at best. Surely the President can just order some overtime instead of flagrantly violating a law of Congress. This line of argument posits that the President can break the law anytime he pleases if it is more convienient. This is a dangerous line of reasoning that all Americans must reject. Republicans should not want future Democrat Presidents to have this kind of power and I certainly don't want an extremist like Bush having that type of power.

In conclusion, Greenwald's story revealed a few things. First, bloggers are doing more actual news reporting than the corporate media. The Washington Post and LA Times covered the story today, 2 days after Greenwald broke the story. Second, Gen. Hayden's claim that "probable cause" provided too high of a bar directly contradicts the DeWine bill's rejection by the White House. Third, even if Bush didn't like current FISA law -- if he felt that "probable cause" was too high of a bar or that the FISA court process was too long -- the President had no right to rewrite the law inside of his cold, hateful mind. The President is not above the law. Congress makes laws and the Courts interpret them; the President's duty is just to enforce the law. When you consider that potential Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito favors giving the President even more powers under his insane "unitary executive" theory, it's a troubling time indeed.

Impeachment is the only option at this point. Bush has committed crimes that would potentially justify a prison sentence.

2006-01-25T09:11:00.000-08:00

It's Time to Outlaw Handguns
The Second Amendment only grants a communal right to have a well organized militia. Once the Federal government raised an army, the entire Amendment should have been voided; but an overreaching Congress decided to alter the text of the Amendment without putting it through the ratification process. The Supreme Court has never held that individuals have the right to bear arms via the Second Amendment, despite the propaganda of pro-death groups like the NRA.

Since the basis in law exists, I would argue that state legislatures and/or Congress should ban all handguns. These weapons are nothing more than killing machines that serve no legitimate, non-criminal purpose. Hunters do not use handguns, so the sporting argument fails to apply to a handgun ban. Law-abiding people who own handguns for "protection" are 22 times more likely to accidentally shoot a loved one than they will shoot a criminal. The Medical Journal of Pediatrics estimates that 1,400 children are killed by guns every year. We can squabble statistics, but there can be denying that but for handguns, thousands of people would still be alive. 3,000 people died on 9/11; that led to two wars, the massive erosion of our civil liberties and a universal dedication to opposing the evils of terrorism. But when many thousands more die from the terrorist at home -- handguns -- America is silent and doesn't do a thing.

I usually don't read news accounts of crime because they are sensationalistic and mostly irrelevant. But a recent story documented how an 8 year old boy found a handgun in a hidden container in his father's home and then used the gun to shoot a girl, nearly killing her. Worse, the father had taught his son how to use the firearm, likely for "protection" or "sporting" reasons. That grizzly education helped his son violently attack a fellow human being.

The other side of this debate will say that it's up to parents to be more responsible. I have a real problem with that argument because the logic of it necessitates more gun killings. Humans are flawed creatures. We make mistakes and it's unavoidable. Robotic machines may be incapable of error, but humans are not. Even if parents use 100% strict vigilance in protecting firearms, children will still find a way to find them and use them to kill others. Further, not all adults are created equal. As long as you aren't legally retarded or a convicted felon, the state allows you to own firearms. Many people with low IQs or simply a lack of foresight will inevitably use less than 100% strict vigilance in maintaining their firearms.

Do gun owners generally use vigiliance in securing the safety of their weapons? No. "A 2002 University of North Carolina study found 36 percent of gun owners with young children in the home reported keeping a firearm loaded; 50 percent of them failed to lock the weapon or store the ammunition in a locked box."

So if you want to defend the legality of handguns, you have to be comfortable with the unavoidable fact a certain percentage of guns will be used to accidentally kill people. You have to be comfortable with the fact that thousands die every year to maintain a "right" that provides people with no liberties. If you want to use guns for sporting, buy a rifle. If you want to protect yourself, buy a baseball bat. Handguns don't help do anything but kill innocents. If we are to respect life in this nation, we need to end these easily avoidable deaths.

2006-01-24T13:04:00.000-08:00

Scalia Chooses Federalist Society Over John Roberts...and Clarence Thomas is on the Take

This is an interesting article. Part of it is pure "dish" -- Scalia decided to skip Robert's swearing-in (the only Justice to skip) in favor of a high paid Federalist Society retreat. Part of this article is very troubling -- the fact that Supreme Court Justices, especially the conservative ones, accept gifts that one could argue influence their opinions. Here's the relevant portions of the article:

At the historic swearing-in of John Roberts as the 17th chief justice of the United States last September, every member of the Supreme Court, except Antonin Scalia, was in attendance. ABC News has learned that Scalia instead was on the tennis court at one of the country's top resorts, the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Bachelor Gulch, Colo., during a trip to a legal seminar sponsored by the Federalist Society.
Not only did Scalia's absence appear to be a snub of the new chief justice, but according to some legal ethics experts, it also raised questions about the propriety of what critics call judicial junkets.
. . .

Scalia spent two nights at the luxury resort lecturing at the legal seminar where ABC News also found him on the tennis court, heading out for a fly-fishing expedition, and socializing with members of the Federalist Society, the conservative activist group that paid for the expenses of his trip.

. . .
According to the event's invitation, obtained by ABC News, the Federalist Society promised members who attended the seminar an exclusive and "rare opportunity to spend time, both socially and intellectually" with Scalia.
. . .

"I think Justice Scalia should not have gone on that trip for several reasons," Gillers commented. "They are a group with a decided political-slash-judicial profile."

One night at the resort, Scalia attended a cocktail reception, sponsored in part by the same lobbying and law firm where convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff once worked.
. . .
An examination of the Supreme Court disclosure forms by ABC News found that five of the justices have accepted tens of thousand of dollars in country club memberships. And Justice Clarence Thomas has received tens of thousands of dollars in valuable gifts, including an $800 leather jacket from NASCAR, a $1,200 set of tires, a vacation trip by private jet, and a rare Bible valued at $19,000.

2006-01-24T10:16:00.000-08:00

Friends in Low Places

Jack Abramoff began his political career as a member of the College Republicans. It was the beginning of a career devoted to furthering the conservative movement at all costs. Today, this career has led to a scandal that reveals the corrupt nature of the Republican Party.

bramoff's work as a top Republican lobbyist led to three felony counts of conspiracy, mail fraud and tax evasion. There are multiple elements to this story, so let's break them down.

I. A REPUBLICAN SCANDAL

The Abramoff scandal is not a bipartisan scandal but is a Republican scandal. The corporate news media, partially because of the Right Wing Noise Machine and partially because of incompetence, has implicated both parties. The facts are otherwise. In fact, CNN stated today that the GOP claim that the scandal implicates both parties "does not seem substantiated by Federal Election Commission records."

Abramoff personally donated over $180,000 to political campaigns between 1998 and 2006. As this link and this link demonsrate, Abramoff gave 100% of these contributions to Republicans.

Some Democrats did, however, receive money from Abramoff's clients and associates. This doesn't mean that Abramoff donated to them. Indeed, the opposite is true. Abramoff defrauded his clients, many of which were Indian tribes. Native American tribes tend to support Democratic causes so it should not surprise anyone that they donated to Democrats. But these donations are not part of the scandal. It's the pay for play donations given exclusively to Republicans that form the heart of this scandal. Regardless, two thirds of the $4.4 million donated by Abramoff's associates went to Republicans. When you add in the 100% of his personal donations went to Republicans, this is clearly a Republican scandal.

Abramoff's personal memberships indicate his Republican beliefs. Abramoff personally led 3 organizations under the umbrella of the Heritage Foundation, a main player in the Vast Right Wing Conpsiracy. He was a member of the United Students of America foundation, a group dedicated to educating students on the need to defund political activism on campus and a group that funneled money to conservative causes.

Abramoff was an associate of many of Congress' top Republicans including Tom DeLay. He is a Republican powerhouse and there's no denying it.

II. ABRAMOFF AND BUSH

George W. Bush was a direct beneficiary of Abramoff's crimes. In fact, their close relationship hints that Bush knew about the crimes but didn't care.

First, Abramoff donated $100,000 to Bush's re-election campaign, a donation that marked him as a "Pioneer". Despite words to the contrary, Bush has donated just $6,000 of the $100K figure to charity and has kept the rest of the tainted cash.

Second, Bush has felt it necessary to lie about his relationship with Abramoff. Bush's spokesperson originally claimed that Abramoff was not present at a May 9, 2001 meeting with the President. Time magazine, however, confirms that photographs prove Abramoff's attendance at the meeting.

In fact, Time magazine has viewed 5 photographs that show Bush and Abramoff together. Unfortunately these photos have not yet become public, but when they are you can count on seeing them adorn this blog on a daily basis.

Abramoff was admitted to the White House several times for meetings with top aides, including one with Bush's chief aide Karl Rove. Abramoff met with over 200 top administration officials. Grover Norquist, a Republican operative famous for admitting that "my goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub,"wrote in a letter that he would be honored if Abramoff joined him for a meeting at the White House.

Last week, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan refused to answer questions about Abramoff's meetings in the White House unless reporters had "something specific" to discuss. The emergence of the Time magazine article gave them "something specific" indeed. McClellan's response? He cancelled yesterday's daily White House press briefing.

The Right Wing Lie Machine has been working in overdrive to lie about the scandal, mislead reporters and cover its tracks. I won't let them. Abramoff's corruption was but an example of the pay-for-play model of governance that the Republicans abide by. Bush needs to answer for his dealings with this shady criminal. The Democrats must not let this issue die. The Republicans run this country like criminals and Abramoff's acts provide the smoking gun.

My question to Republicans is this: why do you continue to support massive criminality in government? Between Bush's illegal warrantless wiretaps and the illegal acts of a Republican lobbyist, it's clear that the GOP simply has no respect for the rule of law. As a future lawyer, I am outraged by the Republican Party's disrespect for the laws that make this nation great. Every other American citizen should agree.

2006-01-23T12:59:00.000-08:00

33 Years of Choice

Unable to find a doctor willing to expose himself to criminal charges, a young girl's quest to avoid teenage motherhood takes a disturbing turn. She turns to the black market, composed primarily of drug dealers and weapons peddlers, to find someone willing to terminate her pregnancy. In the worst part of town, a dirty table in a musty room provides the girl with her only hope of choice.

All alone, the girl lays down on the cold table. She hands over a wad of cash. A man, lacking any medical experience, "sanitizes" his instrument by running it under hot water for a few moments. He then unravels his instrument, a rusty coat hanger, and plunges it inside the girl. The horrific tearing of her interior sends the girl into horrific pain. Blood gushes everywhere and the man starts to panic. Within minutes, the girl is no more. Her cold, emotionless, dead body is all that remains.

This story happened every day before Roe v. Wade guaranteed women the right to choose. Today is the 33 year anniversary of this landmark Supreme Court decision. The Court correctly forced states to follow the Constitution and uphold a woman's private right to make her own decisions regarding her medical care. Every poll indicates that a super-majority of Americans favor choice and oppose governmental restrictions on valid medical procedures.

But across a sea of red states, groups inspired by religion alone seek to enforce their beliefs and others. These radicals seek to change the law via a novel Constitutional theory. Under so-called "originalism," precedent means nothing and the only Constitutional interpretation that matters is that of the majority of the current Supreme Court. 33 years of established jurisprudence are irrelevant in the eyes of these madmen.

President Bush is the leader of this group. Today Bush publicly showed his flagrant disrespect for the rule of the law and the Supreme Court in general. Bush declared the anniversary of Roe v. Wade "National Sanctity of Human Life Day." Not only does this day contradict the law of the United States, it actively mixes religion with law:

When we seek to advance science and improve our lives, we must always preserve human dignity and remember that human life is a gift from our Creator. We must not sanction the creation of life only to destroy it.

What if you don't "remember that human life is a gift from our Creator" because you don't believe that? In Bush's version of America, you don't count. The Constitution itself doesn't count, only the religious beliefs of the minority in America who seek to replace the law with the King James Bible.

In his declaration, Bush brags about all the work he has done to weaken Roe and steal women's Constitutional rights:

America is making great strides in our efforts to protect human life. One of my first actions as President was to sign an order banning the use of taxpayer money on programs that promote abortion overseas. Over the past 5 years, I also have been proud to sign into law the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, and a ban on partial-birth abortion.

America is making great strides in Bush's efforts to steal women's rights in favor of flagrant violations of the separation between church and state. It's fundamentally un-American to use religion as the sole justification for undermining the settled law of the Supreme Court. Today is an important holiday and Bush's disgraceful proclamation is yet another reason why you can be certain that both Roberts and Alito will vote to overturn Roe.

2006-01-22T22:26:00.000-08:00

Do Condi and Colin Make the Republicans a Diverse Party?

I recently received the following comment:

you said "whites hold nearly all positions of power in our nation." . . . perhaps this is true in the democratic party, but it's not in the republican party. Examples that come to mind are, Collin Powell (Secretary of State) Condi Rice (National Security Advisor and Secretary of State), Alberto Gonzalez (Attorney General), Clarence Thomas (Sup Ct justice appointed by republican).

It appears it's the Democratic party which is responsible for "white people holding nearly all positions of power."

Well Tom's right that there are at least four non-whites in the Republican Party. I decided to research the percentages of minorities currently serving in elected office. There are 540 members of the Congress (House + Senate combined) but only 74 of them are minorities. This means that whites make up 86.3% of the House even though whites were only 75.1% of the population in the 2000 census. When you account for the fact that the percentage of whites has certainly decreased since the 2000 census, the property right granted by white skin becomes apparent. Minorities are underrepresented in most professions as well. For example, 90% of attorneys are white.

The senate.gov website reveals some numbers that prove which party is more diverse.

25 Hispanics are in the 108th Congress. 20 are Democrats, 5 are Republicans.

39 African-Americans serve in Congress. All are Democrats. Let me restate that. There are zero elected black Republican officials in the Federal Government.

7 Asians serve in Congress. 7 are Democrats, 0 are Republicans.

3 Native Americans serve in Congress. The Republicans finally have an advantage (albeit with a ludicrously small sample size) 2-1.

Altogether, 68 of the 74 non-whites in Congress are Democrats. 91.8% of the elected minority Congresspeople are Democrats. Tom's claim that the Republicans are the more diverse party is patently false.

But Tom is likely not alone in believing that the GOP really is more diverse. I'll tell you why. Just like a bad sitcom, the GOP knows the power of the token black guy. You bring in one or two blacks and suddenly people get the impression that your party isn't full of racists. All of Tom's examples -- Condi, Colin, Alberto Gonzales and Clarence Thomas -- are tokens. All four of these people are aggressively working to harm their race, but that's not the point. You can always find self-hating members of any group and the Republicans welcome those people. That's why you have the occassional gay Republican.

The Republicans don't have token minorities on board in order to win minority votes. Non-whites are more keen to the abuses of the Republican party and demonstrate that fact in massive numbers at the ballot box. Blacks voted for Kerry 9-1 in 2004; a majority of Asians and Latinos voted for Kerry as well despite Bush's victory. The reason for these token minorities is to make white people feel safer. Most whites abhor overt racism. People won't vote for a party that is openly racist, so the presence of Condi and Colin make moderate whites feel more comfortable voting Republican.

All of this isn't, of course, to say that Condi and Colin aren't perfectly qualified for their positions, despite their political leanings. It's just that the Republicans should have more minorities than the few token ones they do now. Clinton appointed double the minorities that Bush has when you factor in appointments that do not require Senate approval.

Most importantly, the number of non-white males working for your administration has nothing to do with what your policies do for non-white males. The pro-corporation, anti-affirmative action, anti-public schools, pro-tax cut, pro-war agenda of the Republican party aggressively favors the interests of those with entrenched privilege, aka white males, over those without, aka everybody else. The Democrats' overwheming advantage in minority representation in Congress, however, speaks volumes as to which party non-whites prefer.

The numbers for women are equally troubling and also reveal the Democrats' huge advantage in terms of representation.

2006-01-20T13:46:00.000-08:00

Free Speech and the Internet UPDATE

Yahoo! has chosen not to fight the Bush administration in the same way that Google has. In fact, Yahoo! turned over records to the White House this summer without a fight. This should not suprise anyone. Yahoo donates primarily to the Republican Party while Google doesn't give the GOP one cent.

NEVER search Yahoo. Never use their any of their website. I will try and stop even linking to Yahoo news stories. These people are part and parcel of the right wing conspiracy to control the information on the internet.

Big Brother is here.

2006-01-19T11:34:00.000-08:00

Free Speech and the Internet

I. Bush = Big Brother

The Bush administration's assault on privacy rights never ends. In one of the most chilling news stories I have read in some time, the Bush team has subpoenaed Google to find out details on what users type into the search engine.

This specific subpoena isn't terribily controversial. It concerns whether laws regarding child pornography work to prevent access. The problem is that if Google releases search engine details now, a terrible precedent will be established for future privacy intrusions.

Worse, the Bush legal team is predictably asking for much more information than needed for the case. The Attorney General has requested 1 million randomly selected Web addresses from various Google databases. This information will provide a massive amount of data that the government can study for various purposes. The discovery of popular search terms, for instance, could be used to increase the visibility of right-wing propaganda on the internet. Searches for anti-Republican party news could lead to the creation on FBI files on law-abiding Americans. (This website has likely led to the creation of a file on me.)

If Google must release these records, where does it end? Once it is established that the government may discover Google's records relating to criminal prosecutions, anything and everything on Google becomes fair game for government intrusion.

II. Self-Censorship

I mention self-censorship in order to highlight the challenges that people already face when it comes to free speech on the internet. Allowing the government intimate access to minute details of web surfing provides another, but totally unavoidable, barrier to free speech.

The biggest challenge that I face in blogging is that everything I post here will remain viewable to the public for the rest of my life. My goal is to become a Public Defender, hopefully here in San Francisco. This goal creates problems for me because I, on several occassions, have refrained from criticism of those in San Francisco politics for fear of repercussions down the road. Further, organizations that I am currently affiliated with could punish me for criticism I hurl towards them on this blog.

I don't think these limits that I've placed on my blogging are a good thing. My freedom of speech has already been slightly muted for fear of personal loss. To be fair and honest, I must at least inform my readers of this quandry. When it comes to national politics, I never hold anything back. I have no desire of attaining any national prominence nor do I have any fear or regrets about anything I've ever said. When it comes to local politics, I have held back on occassion. The scope of this blog is much larger than issues in little old San Francisco, so I don't think this is a huge harm. Still, I think it's more important to write the truth than withhold criticism for personal fear. As such, I have decided to stop self-censorship of local politics.

The only self-censorship I impose is with regards to organizations that I am a member. But let me get my message out on a particular issue, even if I cannot divulge the full scope of the facts. I attend law school at night as part of a larger evening program. Many of the students in this program with me attend school at night because we have to work during the day to support ourselves. Government loans don't even pay our entire tuition, so the system has been gamed in such a way as to make it virtually impossible for the poor to attain Master's Degrees of any sort. This is one of the key methods of entrenched privilege holding others out so that they can benefit for themselves. If the government would allow greater amounts for loans, I could quit my day job and devote myself to law school in the way that my comparatively wealthy peers can.

Most law schools do not offer night classes. This is another way of furthering the goal of keeping the rich wealthy and the poor in their place. Because of this disgusting reality, I am grateful to USF for providing a night program. However, our school does a poor job of meeting the needs of night students. Few classes are provided at night so our quality of education pales in comparison to that offered to day students. Nearly all groups at school hold all meetings in the middle of the day. As such, poor working students like me are excluded from these groups while rich trust fund kids get the experience and the access. The school takes no effort whatsoever to pressure these groups into ending the exclusion of working students from these groups. Grants for public interest work are only issued to those who are a member of a group that steadfastly refuses to meet in the evening. Another group carelessly scheduled an important event on a Friday without any consideration of the effect of such a change on working students. Our Student Bar Association exclusively holds massive student get-togethers during the working day. As a result of this disregard for poor students, I have less chance of getting a job as students with worse grades but more time to participate in extra curricular activities.

I doubt much of this interests many of you, but I decided to end part of my self-censorship and none of this really warrants its own post. I think it's worthwhile to remember that there is a concerted effort in America to create enough hurdles so as to make the "rags to riches" dream a myth. The rich stay rich because they have all the advantages; the poor stay poor because we get screwed every step of the way. I believe it's a crime against humanity to artificially limit the amount of loans people receive for education. Rich kids don't need loans so this doesn't change their situation, but it's helping keep poor people like me down. Loans are just that -- loans. If I want to get into more debt so that I can improve my education, the government should let me. The government, however, feels that it's more important to give massive tax cuts to the mega-rich and give corporate welfare to Halliburton than it is to temporarily lend me some money to improve my standing as a citizen.

America is no meritocracy and my law school experience is a case in point. People with wealth and access rise to the top; intelligence and hard work isn't nearly as important.

2006-01-18T13:04:00.000-08:00

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. vs. George W. Bush

On Monday, America celebrated a national holiday in honor of the legendary civil rights warrior and philosopher, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I negligently failed to recognize Dr. King on his birthday (January 15), so today I'm making up for it.

Let me begin by saying that Dr. King is the greatest historical figure in American history. Other greats such as Lincoln, FDR and Washington were all flawed men despite other achievements. Dr. King's separation from the intimate nature of politics kept him pure. Further, his motivations were to acheive fairness and a more moral America. Politicians necessarily have other motives behind their acts. Dr. King brought an articulate, relentless, hopeful voice to the Civil Rights Movement. He was a master orator who could change minds with his words. Dr. King's work helped unravel 200 years of evil and illegality that had led to the unconscionable segregation in the conservative south.

What the mainstream media and the Republican Party want you to forget today is two-fold: 1) Dr. King also was a passionate anti-war activist and champion of the poor ; 2) conservatives and the Republican Party fought his work at every turn.

I. THE ANTI-WAR CRUSADER FOUGHT FOR THE POOR

If Dr. King were alive today, one person would emerge as his polar opposite on all issues: George W. Bush. The Republican Party's love of entrenched privilege and hatred of the freedom movements of the 1960s stand diametrically opposed to Dr. King's message of equality for all peoples across race and class. Dr. King was a vehement anti-war activist who pointed out the moral bankruptcy of killing other men while ignoring the problems of poverty:

Now what are some of the domestic consequences of the war in Vietnam? It has made the Great Society a myth and replaced it with a troubled and confused society…It has given the extreme right, the anti-labor, anti-Negro, and anti-humanistic forces a weapon of spurious patriotism to galvanize its supporters into reaching for power, right up to the White House. It hopes to use national frustration to take control and restore the America of social insecurity and power for the privileged.

…It is disgraceful that a Congress that can vote upwards of $35 billion a year for a senseless immoral war in Vietnam cannot vote a weak $2 billion dollars to carry on our all too feeble efforts to bind up the wound of our nations 35 million poor. This is nothing short of a Congress engaging in political guerilla warfare against the defenseless poor of our nation.

When I first decided to take a firm stand against the war in Vietnam, I was subjected to the most bitter criticism, by the press, by individuals, and even by some fellow civil rights leaders. There were those who said that I should stay in my place, that these two issues did not mix and I should stick with civil rights. Well I had only one answer for that and it was simply the fact that I have struggled too long and too hard now to get rid of segregation in public accommodations to end up at this point in my life segregating my moral concerns.

For this noble stance, Dr. King would be called a freedom-hater who coddles terrorists by President Bush. For his fight in the civil rights movement, Dr. King would be called a reverse racist who fails to see the benefits of a color-blind society. For adovcating spending more money on the problems of poverty instead of optional warfare, Dr. King would be assailed as a socialist who hates the free market. For speaking out against cash giveaways to the rich in the form of tax cuts, Dr. King would be called a madman.

All Bush shares with Dr. King are words, and those are empty words coming from Bush. George Bush and the GOP have done nothing to help the problems of race relations other than to ignore them. His party has fought affirmative action for years by claiming that we have a level playing field in America. This despite the fact that half of our country was totally segregated just 40 years. This despite the fact that whites hold nearly all positions of power in our nation. This despite the fact that the evil blemish of slavery is but a few generations past.

The evils of war were opposed by Dr. King. A war of choice, when larger problems of poverty and racism persist at home, is even more appalling. Instead of spending billions fighting poverty, educating the nation and building up our country into something far greater, we have wasted all of it killing civilians and lining the pockets of immoral defense contractors. Dr. King would not let this evil stand unchecked.

II. THE REPUBLICANS' HATRED OF DR. KING'S IDEALS

Bush and his corporate tool cronies in the GOP have fought the poor at every turn. Dr. King would not have been silent; he would have fought the GOP's "War on the Poor." When Reagan cut social programs in the 1980s so that he could give huge tax cuts to the richest Americans, Dr. King would have protested. If Dr. King could see that the Republican Congress was about to confirm a man with an affiliation with a racist group, he would have protested.

This is nothing new nor accidental. Although he remained officially nonpartisan, Dr. King's only political allies lay in the Democratic Party. After JFK's victory in 1960, Dr. King took partial credit for his success:

"It is pretty conclusive now that the Negro played a decisive role in electing the president of the United States, and maybe for the first time we can see the power of the ballot and what the ballot can do...Now we must remind Mr. Kennedy that we helped him to get in the White House. We must remind Mr. Kennedy that we are expecting to use the whole weight of his office to remove the ugly weight of segregation from the shoulders of our nation."

The Democrats did not forget the help of African-Americans in (temporarily) preventing the future criminal Richard Nixon from taking office. JFK's baby was the Civil Rights Act; LBJ ultimately signed it into law. LBJ famously said that "we have lost the South for a generation" and he was right. A painful, but incredibly necessary, split emerged in the Democratic party. Racist Southern Democratic Senators led a filibuster that ultimately failed. The majority of these Democrats, known as "Dixiecrats," fled the party for the Republicans after the Civil Rights Act. Dr. King was instrumental in purging the Democratic party of its most racist and vile elements. The Republicans greeted these villians with open arms. Today, the Republicans have a solid majority in the still racist South.

King was a strong supporter of the Voting Rights Act. The George Bush White House, while publicly raving about the Act, undermines it constantly in practice.

Not suprisingly, conservatives everywhere fought against the establishment of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. Rep. John Conyers introduced legislation for a holiday four days after Dr. King's assassination. (Conyers remains in the House and is a hero in his own right.) The bill became stalled but Conyers faithfully reintroduced the legislation every single legislative session . Ultimately the Civil Rights Marches of 1982-1983 forced the creation of the holiday. Still, conservative states that had become GOP strongholds resisted the celebration of the great Dr. King. Republican Governor Evan Mecham of Arizona rescinded the holiday as one of his first acts in office. This evil man was later impeached for illegal campaign contributions. In 2000, GOP strongholds South Carolina and Utah finally enacted legitimate MLK holidays.

CONCLUSION

Dr. King was a man of peace, love and integrity. He constantly fought entrenched power and privilege in order to create a more fair America. Today's Republican want you to believe that optional wars and tax cuts for the rich create "freedom" that helps everyone. This sad message remains mostly unquestioned by modern progressive leaders. If Dr. King had not been murdered in cold blood, he'd be the number one soldier in the War on Corporate Evil.

Think about this: If you want to be a Republican, you have to oppose Dr. King.

2006-01-17T11:04:00.000-08:00

GOP Fights Gore's Straight Talk With Lies

Last post for the day. The GOP is flagrantly lying and mixing facts in order to smear Al Gore. No big suprise, but I wanted to refute their non-arguments before anyone else mentions them:

McClellan said the Clinton-Gore administration had engaged in warrantless physical searches, and he cited an FBI search of the home of CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames without permission from a judge. He said Clinton's deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, had testified before Congress that the president had the inherent authority to engage in physical searches without warrants.

"I think his hypocrisy knows no bounds," McClellan said of Gore.

The truth is that McClellan's ability to lie knows no bounds. Even the AP wouldn't allow McClennan's brazen lie to stand unchallenged:

But at the time that of the Ames search in 1993 and when Gorelick testified a year later, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required warrants for electronic surveillance for intelligence purposes, but did not cover physical searches. The law was changed to cover physical searches in 1995 under legislation that Clinton supported and signed.

I'll repeat this for all of you who still don't get it: Warrantless physical searches were LEGAL under FISA when Clinton ordered them. Warrantless electronic surveillance was illegal under FISA when Bush ordered them. Ergo, Clinton obeyed the law and Bush flagrantly violated it.

These liars need to start coming up with legitimate arguments and stop fighting battles through pure lies and deception. I honestly don't understand how any citizen, Republican or Democrat, could defend Bush's crimes. Their only defense is to lie and say "Clinton did it." That's like me getting caught for murder and saying "George Bush killed someone." No he didn't, and even if he did, that has nothing to do with the crime in question.

2006-01-17T10:00:00.000-08:00

The Radical Bloc Emerges: John Roberts Sides With Scalia and Thomas in His First Dissent

A remarkable thing happened today: by a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court upheld Oregon's assisted suicide law in Gonzales v. Oregon. The Court failed to overturn a previous decision that declared that individuals lack the right to die. However, the holding of this case ensures that the Attorney General cannot unilaterally determine that assisted suicide is not a "legitimate medical purpose" in order to punish doctors following a state law.

Justice Kennedy, the only remaining conservative on the court with a legitimate commitment to the rule of law, wrote that the "authority claimed by the attorney general is both beyond his expertise and incongruous with the statutory purposes and design." Ashcroft's stunning decision to expand his power was rejected and our nation is safer as a result of today's decision.

The real story lies beyond this case. Chief Justice John Roberts took part in Scalia's dissent; Clarence Thomas dissented separately. I predicted that Roberts will be somewhere between Scalia and Thomas months ago as others tried to claim that he would not be as conservative. This opinion indicates Roberts' view that the executive has expansive power beyond that which the Founders contemplated. More disturbing opinions will result in the future. For now, Justice Kennedy is all that stands between the rule of law and absolute tyranny. We need to hope, pray and wish that the 5 legitimate Justices remain on the Court until a Democratic President can appoint successors. Otherwise the rule of law may be lost forever.

2006-01-17T09:45:00.000-08:00

Al Gore: "It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored."

If the United States were a real democracy, Al Gore would be President and George Bush would be busy working for some evil mega-corporation like Halliburton. Gore got more votes in 2000 nationwide and would have gotten more votes in Florida if the Supreme Court hadn't prevented the counting of the votes. To be fair, Gore ran a poor campaign in 2000 and turned a landslide into a squeaker. Instead of embracing the remarkable record of the Clinton administration, Gore ran away from Clinton. Gore turned to Corporate Tool Joe Lieberman as his running mate, a horrible move that added nothing to the ticket. Gore tried not to be himself, i.e. a stiff, but he came off as awkward and strange.

After having his job stolen from him by the corrupt Rehnquist court, Gore changed. He started to do everything he could to help America. He came alive as himself, free of the constraints imposed by the corporate spotlight. Today, Al Gore is a bold hero who is not afraid to speak truth to those in power. He's my favorite Democrat and I believe he should be our Presidential nominee in 2008. He's got the experience, the clear message and the southern accent needed for election.

Yesterday, Al Gore gave a stunning speech in which he called out Bush for his crimes and provided a refreshing dose of straight talk. Here's a portion of Gore's speech; click here to view it in its entirety. If you would like to view the video instead, click here.

It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored.

So, many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences and join with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved. It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who challenged America to breathe new life into our oldest values by extending its promise to all our people.

On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped—one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during this period. The FBI privately called King the “most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country” and vowed to “take him off his pedestal.” The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide. This campaign continued until Dr. King’s murder.

The discovery that the FBI conducted a long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King’s life, helped to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping. The result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there is a sufficient cause for the surveillance. I voted for that law during my first term in Congress and for almost thirty years the system has proven a workable and valued means of according a level of protection for private citizens, while permitting foreign surveillance to continue.

Yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on “large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States.” The New York Times reported that the President decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program “without search warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic intelligence collection.”

During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the President went out of his way to reassure the American people on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission is required for any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in place. But surprisingly, the President’s soothing statements turned out to be false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed that the story was true, but also declared that he has no intention of bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end.

At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA’s domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently. A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government.

2006-01-12T20:22:00.000-08:00

Samuel Alito: In His Words

Here's what Alito had to say himself in his infamous job application in 1985:

I am and always have been a conservative and an adherent to the same philosophical views that I believe are central to this [Reagan] Administration. . . . I believe very strongly in limited government, federalism, free enterprise, the supremacy of the elected branches of government, the need for a strong defense and effective law enforcement, and the legitimacy of a government role in protecting traditional values. In the field of law, I disagree strenuously with the usurpation of the judiciary of decisionmaking authority that should be exercised by the branches of government responsible to the electorate. The Administration has already made major strides toward reversing this trend through its judicial appointments, litigation, and public debate, and it is my hope even greater advances can be achieved during the second term, especially with Attorney General Meese' leadership at the Department of Justice.
When I first became interested in government and politics during the 1960s, the greatest influences on my views were the writings of William F. Buckley, Jr., in the National Reveiw, and Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign. In college, I developed a deep interest in constitutional law, motivated in large part by disagreement with Warren Court decisions, particularly in the areas of criminal procedure, the Establishment Clause, and reapportionment. I discovered the writings of Alexander Bickel advocating judicial restraint, and it was largely for this reason that I decided to go to Yale Law School.

. . . Most recently, it has been an honor and source of personal satisfaction for me to serve in the office of the Solicitor General during President Reagan's administration and to help to advance legal positions in which I personally believe very strongly. I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.

. . . I am a life-long registered Republican . . . I am a member of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy and a regular participant at its luncheon meetings and a member of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton University, a conservative alumni group. During the past year, I have submitted articles for publication in the National Review and the American Spectator.

This is why the Republicans are frothing at the mouth.

2006-01-12T09:30:00.000-08:00

ALITO'S HATRED OF THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE AND THE EQUAL PROTECTION CLAUSE

Democrats Have All the Ammo They Need, If They Choose to Use It

As the Alito hearings reach day 4, so far no revelation has emerged that will sink his nomination, at least in the eyes of Democrats like Dianne Feinstein. The Democrats may have just decided that they don't want to attempt a filibuster because then Bill Frist will make good on his promise to eliminate it for good. On the other hand, if we have the power to filibuster but never use it, it's as good as dead. Two incidents in Judge Alito's past make him unfit for the Supreme Court and should be used as a basis for a filibuster:

1. Alito Explicitly Admitted that He Believes No Constitutional Right to Abortion Exists

In a 1985 "Personal Qualifications Statement" that Alito submitted as part of a job interview for Ronald Reagan's Solicitor General office, Alito wrote the following:

Most recently it has been an honor and source of personal satisfaction for me to serve in the office of the Solicitor General during President Reagan's administration and to help to advance legal positions in which I personally believe very strongly. I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect the right to an abortion.

The right-wing's lie machine is on overload regarding this statement. First, they claim it was part of his job to support the administration's policies. But he didn't have the job yet and he didn't have to mention this as some sort of "personal qualification." Second, and more importantly, Alito was not giving a personal opinion. The key word in his statement "legal" positions, not personal ones. Supreme Court Justices do not have personal opinions on constitutional issues. Here's an example that makes it painfully obvious. My personal opinion may be that abortion is immoral, but I might feel the constitution requires choice. My personal opinion may be that the death penalty is evil, but I might feel the constitution fails to forbid it. But one cannot have the personal opinion that the Constitution doesn't protect abortion, but feel that the Constitution does protect abortion. Alito expressly gave a constitutional opinion, not a personal opinion.

As an accomplished 34 year old, Alito should have known that this constitutional opinion would be known to the entire world forever. Perhaps in the midst of the Regan Revolution Alito thought that his interpretation would win him points. History, however, has shown the anti-choice crowd to be a distinct minority in the United States. As such, Alito should have to pay the price for his opinion and be filibustered. He's a lock to overturn Roe v. Wade if given the choice and that constitutes extreme judicial activism of the highest order.

2. Alito's membership in the Racist Organization "CAP"

In 1972, Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP) was formed as a classic old, rich, white boys network. It's main purpose was to discourage the admission of women and minorities, hence the name "Concerned". CAP's magazine, Prospect, contained some of the following hate:
"the makeup of the Princeton student body has changed drastically for the worse" "Everywhere one turns blacks and hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they're black and hispanic, the physically handicapped are trying to gain equal representation in professional sports, and homosexuals are demanding that government vouchsafe them the right to bear children."

The second comment was written in 1983 when Dinesh D'Souza, a well-known conservative liar and racist, was in charge of Prospect. Just 2 years later, Alito boasted about his membership in CAP in his hateful job application with Ronald Reagan. (Sidenote: It's almost like trying to join the mob. He had to brag about how many guys he's killed, which in this case is memberships in right-wing hate groups like CAP and the Federalist Society.) Most important, he touted his membership 13 years after graduating. Although he had an entire adult life to build new connections after school, his longtime membership in CAP indicates that it was of some importance to him. If he "could not recall" it, he wouldn't have been putting on his resume for over 13 years. It's just not plausible.

But that's the crock of shit lie that Alito and his right-wing cronies want you to believe. Alito claims he cannot recall membership in CAP. Circumstantial evidence proves this to be a lie and prevaricators have no place on this nation's highest court. Worse yet, CAP is committed to fighting the goals of Equal Protection and the fundamental rights that are essential to the Constitution.

CONCLUSION

Another scandal is his decision to rule in the Vanguard case even though he explicitly promised not to years before. In my opinion, however, conflicts of this sort are 1) unavoidable, since both Scalia and Ginsburg do it all the time, and 2) petty, at least in a Constitutional sense.

The issues of the Right to Choose and Equal Protection mean so much more to the debate. Americans are highly concerned about freedom of choice and equality of people across race and sex. Membership in a racial or sexist hate group should preclude entry onto this nation's highest court no matter your sorry excuse for joining. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that Democrats will filibuster. They talk of "concern" and "alarm" instead of anger and outrage. They talk of the Vanguard scandal instead of Alito's amazingly dumb admissions regarding his constitutional view of abortion. They talk of "thumbs up or down" votes instead of using the power they have to protect our Constitution from those who wish to destroy it.

Hope is not lost; even Corporate Tool Joe Lieberman hasn't publicly taken filibuster off the table. But knowing the Democrats in the Senate like I do, don't expect any brave stances. They'll sign off on Alito and then shrug their shoulders when young girls are dying in alleys from coat hanger abortions.

2006-01-09T08:30:00.000-08:00

Corporate Tool: Samuel Alito

Today the Senate begins its confirmation hearings for Samuel Alito. Since the Supreme Court upholds our fundamental rights, it's crucial to examine these lifetime appointments. Alito has an extensive record of favoring defendants in corporate lawsuits; I won't be dealing with those today, however. Two issues help expand corporate power in another way: the right to choose and the powers of the executive.

I. THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE

Stirring up religious fanatacism about abortion is a key way that giant corporations gain power. If Alito gets confirmed and later helps destroy the right to choose, the evil alliance between poor, uninformed religious people and giant, souless corporations will have won. Thinking religious people realize that the law should not enforce one group's religion upon the entire society. These people aren't the current branch of Republicans. Bush spoke in code during the 2004 election about abortion. Certainly the so-called "values voters" expected to see a change in the law in return for their vote. The far-right "Justice Sunday" is an example of a movement to change the Supreme Court.

So when a proven criminal and incompetent like George W. Bush nominates you, you are incredibly suspect. Alito's views on this subject are undeniable. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 case the re-affirmed the right to choose, Alito was on the losing side in the lower court. When he applied for a job with the Reagan administration, the smoking gun emerges:

"I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to abortion."

"I am and always have been a conservative and an adherent to the same philosophical views that I believe are central to this (Reagan) administration."

Republicans say that you can't take Alito at his word because he was applying for a job. This is a ludicrous argument for two reasons. First, the Republicans are basically saying that he lied but that's ok. Supreme Court Justices should be above that. Second, this is obviously a statement of his personal beliefs. His extensive membership in conservative organizations, his conservative jurisprudence and work for Republican administrations indicates that this statement is totally accurate. He explicitly stated he believes that the Constitution fails to protect the right to choose. For this alone he deserves filibuster.

The Republicans are comparing him to David Souter, a Republican appointment who turned out be to a centrist. This argument predictably fails. Souter spent his entire career in state politics. He served a mere 2 months on the Federal Circuit Court before getting a quickie appointment to the Supreme Court. Souter was considered the "stealth justice" because his record was so narrow. In retrospect, women's rights groups had every right to fear Souter. Fortunately, everything turned out ok. Alito is no Souter; Alito has 15 years of experience as an Appellate court judge.

II. THE CRIMINAL ADMINISTRATION

Alito has a long-standing commitment to viewing the power of the president as incredibly expansive. At a Federalist Society symposium in 2001, Alito endorsed the idea of the unitary executive. Alito, as a Reagan executive, argued that administration officials should have absolute immunity from liability for illegal wiretaps. The Supreme Court disagreed. In cases such as United States v. Lee, Alito interpreted the Fourth Amendment so as to neuter it.

All of this comes as President Bush has willfully violated FISA and committed several crimes. Alito could rule on some of these criminal acts should they reach the Supreme Court. Liberals such as Ted Kennedy have promised to question Alito about these, but it doesn't end there. Republican Senator Arlen Specter, the head of the judiciary committee, said the following on Face the Nation this weekend:

You have what appears to be a conflict between the president's claim of executive war powers to eavesdrop without a warrant, a conflict with what Congress has done on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And I think it is a fair inquiry, and I intend to press the question with Judge Alito as to how he would approch these issues on a jurisprudential base.

At least the questions will be broached. We should all listen, but keep in mind that Alito has a proven record of reading ambiguities in the law in favor of big corporations, a record of undermining fundamental rights and a record that includes extensive memberships in conservative groups like the Federalist Society.

Alito will likely be confirmed by the Senate. The widespread talk among craven, pathetic Democrats is that no filibuster is planned. Hopefully this is just strategy, but I will be sorely disappointed with our party if we roll over and let a wingnut like Alito destroy fundamental rights. Perhaps some Democrats are caving in to Bill Frist's threat to eliminate the filibuster should Democrats mount one against Alito. We can't be afraid of a fight.

2006-01-05T16:08:00.000-08:00

When Criminals Become Desperate

The lies of the Bush administration have reached an all-time high as the Republicans look to shift blame and avoid impeachment. Today, I'll briefly refute two outrageous lies that are being used to justify the Bush administration's criminal use of warrantless wiretaps.

GOP Lie #1: Revealing Bush's Use of Warrantless Wiretaps Helps the Terrorists

This one only appeals to people incapable of independant thought. Atrios spells it out:

No one has yet managed to explain how revealing that the administration illegally spies on American citizens without obtaining warrants, instead of legally spying on people after obtaining such warrants, damages national security.

Terrorists know that they could be spied on regardless of the legality of the method, so they take precautions against it. This argument finds no rational basis and its use only serves to make Republicans seem mentally challenged.

GOP Lie #2: Warrantless Wiretaps Would Have Prevented 9/11

Dick Cheney has resorted to the low tactic of saying that not only are warrantless wiretaps great, but they might have prevented 9/11. This is utter, complete nonsense. The FISA Court would have readily have issued warrants to conduct wiretaps on every single member of Al Qaeda. The problem, however, was that the Bush adminisration didn't care about Al Qaeda. Dick Cheney was the head of a terrorism task force that didn't meet even once after Bush's election in 2000.

This brings to mind another issue -- why has Bush escaped blame for 9/11? He was the President and his inept policies regarding terrorism led to the deaths of 3,000 people. Every single death is on his hands because he didn't do anything about terrorism. The corporate news media never questioned Bush; craven Democrats haven't either. But 3,000 people died on Bush's watch. He purposely ignored the Clinton administration's warnings that Al Qaeda would attack the United States. Let's use Cheney's disgusting, deplorable lie as an opportunity to reopen this question: why did Bush let 9/11 happen?

What steps DID you take to prevent 9/11, Mr. Bush? I'm waiting for an answer since you broached the subject.

2006-01-04T23:22:00.000-08:00

ILLEGAL SPYING PROGRAM PART OF LARGER CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE

NBC Caught in Orwellian Moment

Ever since the FISA story first broke last week, I've been suggesting that there's more to the story. As I suggested earlier, Bush likely subverted the right-wing FISA court in order to spy on his political "enemies." Like Nixon before him, "Bush's Enemy List" likely contained those in the media who performed objectively. Today, evidence of my theory emerged.

It seems likely that Bush used the illegal FISA program to spy on CNN's Christiane Amanpour. Amanpour is a respected journalist with contacts at the highest levels of world governance. Someone of her stature wasn't on the run or on the risk of leaving; there was simply no justifiable reason for failing to obtain a FISA warrant if there really was some chance that Amanpour lived a double life as a spy. The reality is that Amanpour is someone with a lot of information that Bush and his criminal cronies wanted. Amanpour is considered liberal and her husband used to work as senior official for President Bill Clinton.

To be certain, there is zero hard evidence that the Bush administration spied on Amanpour. But NBC's Andrea Mitchell seemed to think so today while interviewing New York Times reporter James Risen:

Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?
Risen: No, I don't. It's not clear to me. That's one of the questions we'll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don't know the answer to that
Mitchell: You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?
Risen: No, no I hadn't heard that.

Why would Mitchell publicly name Amanpour? Andrea Mitchell wouldn't stake her reputation and her job as a mainstream corporate news reporter without something to back it up. Clearly, she knows something that has not yet become public.

Perhaps it has something to do with a letter that the Republican chairmen of the Senate and House judiciary committees received today. Russ Tice, a whistleblower and former NSA agent, wrote the following:

I intend to report to Congress probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while I was an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency and with the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Clearly someone who knows something has started to talk. The subordinate officials of our nation's intelligence agencies may be the only thing that saves us from the criminals on top. The story, however, doesn't end here.

NBC News acted in true Orwellian fashion by rewriting history. Today they removed Mitchell's question regarding Amanpour from their official website's transcript, as if the question wasn't even asked. NBC later confirmed, however, that they are investigating the claim that Bush illegally spied on Amanpour.

A gigantic scandal is about to burst. The impeachment of President Bush may be inevitable. If Bush really did spy on corporate news reporters, that might be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Fellow Republicans would be tempted to abandon Bush's defense if the smoking gun emerges that Bush's crimes extended deep within our media. Then again, perhaps even these outrageous crimes will continue to be ignored.

2006-01-03T12:43:00.000-08:00

SUVs: Monsters Really Do Exist

As human effects upon the environment lead us on a course for disaster, most Americans remain oblivious to our impact upon the planet. The key example is that of Sport Utility Vehicles, aka SUVs. 20 years ago, only 2% of new vehicles sold were SUVs. Today, 25% of all new vehicles sold are SUVs. This massive increase in SUV popularity has come despite revelations regarding the ozone layer and rising gas prices. Although the danger to our environment has increased in the past 20 years, you sure wouldn't know it by gauging SUV sales.

SUVs are killers that need to be outlawed. Here are the reasons why:

1. SUVs are allowed, by law, to pollute more than normal cars.

Under federal law, the average fuel efficiency of passenger cars needs to be around 27.5 mpg. The average fuel efficiency for SUVs, however, need only be 20.7 mpg. Worse, this is only an average and SUVs are counted along with light trucks. Ergo, it's perfectly fine to have an SUV get 8 mpg as long as your auto company makes another light truck with an offsetting high mpg (ex, 30 mpg.)

The problem goes beyond global warming. According to suv.org, Sport utility vehicles can spew (by law) 30 percent more carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons and 75 percent more nitrogen oxides than passenger cars.

2. Giant SUVs, such as the Ford Excursion, have no fuel efficiency restrictions.

Perhaps most chilling is that the worst SUV polluters -- those that weigh over 8500 pounds -- are entirely exempt from fuel efficiency standards. These enormous gaz guzzlers are allowed to get 1mpg, if the auto makers want, and current federal law does nothing about it.

Ford is taking advantage of the lax federal standards because it's cheaper to build a gas guzzler than an efficient vehicle. The horrific Ford Excursion gets a measly 3.7 mpg in the city.

3. The American practice of driving SUVs instead of cars is a main cause of global warming.

Cars, trucks and SUVs are the source of 20% of U.S. C02 emissions. suv.org gives a clear example as to why driving an SUV instead of a car makes a big difference:

Today a car that gets approximately 27.5 mpg, like a Volkswagen New Beetle, will emit 54 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the burning of gasoline over its lifetime. An SUV that gets 14 mpg, like a Lincoln Navigator, will emit over 100 tons of CO2 over its lifetime.

If people would stop driving cars that get 14mpg, we would prevent millions of tons of CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere. The average fuel economy fell to 24 mpg in 2000; this was the lowest level in 20 years despite 2 decades of technological advancement. The cause? Increased SUV ownership.

4. Driving SUVs supports terrorism.

When you drive an SUV, you use more gas. When you use more gas, those who sell the gas reap increased profits. Many of the countries earning oil profits, such as Saudi Arabia, help support terrorism. Saudi Arabia was the principal financial backer of the Taliban for 5 years according to the right-wing Cato institute. The Taliban protected and supported Osama bin Laden. We all know that bin Laden's Al Qaeda network launched the 9/11 attacks upon America that killed over 3,000 people. Undoubtely, Saudi Arabia's level of financial commitment to the Taliban was based upon available cash resources. Americans eager to fuel up their SUVs increased the profits to Saudi Arabia and the Saudis passed those profits onto the Taliban.

Some will say that if driving SUVs supports terrorism, then so does driving any cars at all. On some level, that's true. But on the other hand, it's not realistic to expect Americans to stop driving all cars right away. It is realistic, however, to expect Americans to limit the amount of funds we give to groups that support terrorism. This can easily be done by switching from an SUV to a passenger car.

A while back, the Bush administration claimed that buying drugs helps support terrorism. That statement is mostly false. Only buying drugs that originate from international sources could possibily support terrorism. Most common drugs, such as marijuana, are grown exclusively in North America because the costs of transporting them across the ocean simply outweigh the benefits. Some drugs, such as opium and heroin, can originate in countries that support terrorism. This makes up a small minority of drugs that support terrorism. Gasoline, on the other hand, primarily comes from countries that support terrorism.

5. SUVs will probably kill you in an accident if you aren't driving one.

Before I debunk the bogus claim that SUVs are safer for the occupants of the SUV, let's make it clear that SUVs create huge dangers for those of us smart enough not to drive an SUV. More specifically, it's not the weight of the SUV but rather the raised design that contributes to deaths. The US Government's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration conducted research that concluded that 2000 people would still be alive today if they had been hit by a heavy car weighing the same amount as an SUV as opposed to being hit by an SUV. SUVs are twice as likely to kill in a crash than a heavy car of the same weight.

If you think the benefits of driving an SUV are worth 2,000 lives, you are a sick minded individual without a sniff of humanity.

6. SUVs are not safer for the occupants of the SUV.

The one myth about SUVs that continues to persist is that owning an SUV provides safety for your family. My own brother just bought an SUV based upon this premise. The idea is that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. You might as well not let your own family die, after all. A new study shows that premise is false.

State Farm Insurance and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia conducted a study that proves that SUVs are no safer than conventional cars. Increased risk of rollover fatalities negates any advantage from increased weight. So when you buy an SUV, you aren't helping save yourself -- you are just helping kill others and increase the chance that global warming will cause a catastrophe.

CONCLUSION

So what can we do? For starters, stop buying SUVs. They are among the least fuel efficient vehicles on the market and they result in an massive increase in auto fatalities. Even if you own an efficient SUV (and there are few on the market), there is no way to eliminate the problem of the increase in auto fatalities.

Buy the most fuel efficient car that you can. Drive it as little as possible. Spread the word about SUVs. And never quit just because you think one person can't make a difference.

FIVE WAYS TO FIGHT CORPORATE EVIL - SUV Edition

1. Don't own an SUV.

2. Drive as little as possible.

3. Buy the most fuel efficient car possible.

4. Email President Bush and tell him to pressure Congress to increase fuel efficiency.

5. Tell your friends to read this article here on the War on Corporate Evil.

2005-12-28T22:50:00.000-08:00

Federalist Society Member Says Bush Broke the Law

Robert Levy, a member of the conservative Federalist society and a Senior Fellow at the conservative Cato institute, has this to say about Bush's use of warrantless domestic wiretaps:

The text of FISA §1809 is unambiguous: “A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally engages in electronic surveillance … except as authorized by statute.” That provision covers communications from or to U.S. citizens or permanent resident aliens in the United States. Moreover, Title III (the Wiretap Act) further provides that “procedures in this chapter and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 shall be the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance … may be conducted.”

To be sure, FISA’s prohibition on unauthorized electronic surveillance applies “under circumstances in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy and a warrant would be required for law enforcement purposes.” §1801(f). Surely, U.S. citizens and permanent resident aliens have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their international phone calls and emails. Accordingly, warrants would be required for law enforcement purposes and, therefore, warrantless surveillance absent an authorizing statute would violate the FISA requirement.

In addition, he thinks Bush may have violated the Constitution:

First, Article II requires that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” He definitely has not done so with respect to FISA §1809. And even if he believes in good faith that §1809 is trumped by his war powers, his use of secret executive orders is not the manner in which he should discharge his obligation to defend the Constitution and execute the law. Instead, he should have made his case to Congress, expanding on the list of FISA grievances that he would like to have amended by the PATRIOT Act.

Second, the Fifth Amendment proscribes deprivation of liberty without due process. Liberty, as we know from the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Texas sodomy case, Lawrence v. Texas (2003), encompasses selected aspects of privacy. A Fifth Amendment challenge to the NSA program might transcend the question whether particular surveillance was “reasonable” in terms of the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.

Read the whole article at the Federalist Society website. Although he never mentions the word, Levy's argument makes a compelling case for an impeachment of Bush on several counts. A pro-Bush supporter, David Rivkin, gives his weak, quasi-factual counterpoint in the second half of the article. An example of the lies is the repetition of the right-wing falsehood that Clinton violated FISA. This link proves that's false, but the right-wing conspiracy didn't get so powerful by sticking to the facts.

2005-12-27T15:26:00.000-08:00

A Motive for Bush's Crimes Is Revealed -- When the Conservative FISA Court Questioned Wiretaps, Bush Stopped Obeying the Law

One of the big questions relating to President Bush's illegal use of warrantless wiretaps has been simple: why? The FISA Court is known to be dominated by conservative judges, for several reasons. The PATRIOT Act increased the size of the Court from 7 to 11; just like FDR's infamous court-packing plan, the PATRIOT Act allowed Bush to increase his hold over the FISA Court by appointing 4 new members. (Technically, Chief Justice Rehnquist appointed all members to the Court, but it's pretty clear where his allegiances laid.) Since 17 of the last 25 years have featured a Republican President, it should come to no suprise that Federal Courts in general are dominated by Republicans. I don't have the stats to prove it, but the vast majority of the FISA court are Republican appointees, generally ones who are extremely pro-government. In short, Bush should have had no problem getting the wiretaps he wanted.

But something different happened: even far-right jurists rejected Bush's use of wiretaps. Only 2 of the first 13,000 wiretap requests that the FISA court handled were modified, over a course of 22 years. 179 of the 5,645 of the requests under Bush, on the other hand, were modified; 173 of those occurred in 2003 and 2004 alone. 6 requests were outrighted rejected in the past 2 years -- until 2003, a request for a wiretap had never been rejected by the FISA Court.

To obtain a FISA court-approved wiretap, the government must show probable cause that the target of the surveillance is a member of a foreign terrorist organization or foreign power and is engaged in activities that may involve a violation of criminal law. Even under this lax standard, Bush wasn't able to meet it constantly. It appears that the Republicans decided upon a different course of action: ignore the FISA court and get wiretaps in other ways. The mere existence of the court, and the Bush administration's 5,645 requests for wiretaps, prove that the Bush administration knew of the court's legitimacy and powers. They knew that all wiretaps had to be cleared by the court; if they felt the court's blessing was unnecessary under Article II or under the War Authorization, they could have just stopped going to the court. They didn't do that because they knew that would be a red-flag alerting others to Bush's impeachable crimes.

So even the conservative FISA court refused to go along with Bush's wiretaps. Conservative in thought but still somewhat dedicated to the law, these jurists felt that they could not participate in Bush's criminal conspiracy to spy on law-abiding Americans. Bush's motive is finally revealed: he broke the law because even right-wing courts don't condone spying on anyone Bush pleases. Many of those who were spied upon were likely political enemies of the President. Bush treated the Presidency like a cheap excuse to dig up dirt and he broke the law in the process. Anyone who honors and respects the law should be appalled.

Even conservative legal minds such as Orin Kerr have come out and admitted that Bush broke the law. If he broke the law, the Republicans' own standard set by the Clinton impeachment mandates a similar impeachment trial for President Bush. Only this time, we actually have an impeachable offense. I expect the Republican arguments against Bush's lawbreaking to end soon because they lack any credibility whatsoever. It's painfully obvious that Bush broke the law; the law said to get warrants for wiretaps and Bush didn't. The new line of GOP arguments, I predict, will be that Bush's crimes do not rise to the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors." I would even expect them to point to the Clinton impeachment as an example of crimes that do not deserve impeachment, as incredibly circular and ludicrous as that sounds considering the Republicans held the torches during the Clinton Witch Hunt.

2005-12-25T15:17:00.000-08:00

CORPORATE TOOL - RANDY "DUKE" CUNNINGHAM

In November, Representative Duke Cunningham resigned in disgrace after pleading guilty to charges of bribery. He’s the epitome of a Republican – in bed with corporations and completely brazen. Cunningham was charged with felony conspiracy to commit bribery, mail fraud, wire fraud and tax evasion. Cunningham took at least $2.4 million in cash and gifts from these corporate contractors in exchange for aggressively pushing the interests of the Military Industrial Complex.

Randy Cunningham was a military expert who first made it big as a CNN commentator in the late 1980s. In 1990, GOP cronies convinced him to run for office against Democrat Jim Bates who was dealing with charges of sexual harassment. Cunningham promised to be “a congressman we can be proud of.” Cunningham would not make anyone proud. His love of violence and his affection for the bizarre are unmistakeable. He once called for Vietnam War Protestors to “be lined up and shot” and later called for House Democrats to also “be lined up and shot.” Yes, a Republican Congressman called for the mass execution of Democrats and no one cared. If a Democrat had done that, he’d be in Gitmo.

Cunningham would be revealed as hypocrite when it came to fighting the so-called “War on Drugs.” In September of 1996, Cunningham called out Bill Clinton for appointing what he felt were “soft on crime” judges. He wanted stiffer penalties and the death penalty for drug dealers. That’s right, the death penalty. However, Cunningham soon starting singing a different tune when his son was convicted of smuggling 400 lbs of marijuana across state lines. Despite the fact that his son tested positive for coke 3 times while on bail, Cunningham begged the judge for leniency. Another Republican who says one thing and does another.

In 1997, Cunningham helped force the Pentagon to build a $20 million machine to digitize documents. When the military delayed implementing the system, Cunningham called for the resignation of Lou Kratz, the Pentagon official supervising the program. The reason, of course, for Cunningham’s strange behavior is that the developer of the machine was a defense contractor lavishly granting him gifts.

In 1998, Cunningham told a group of prostate cancer survivors that a prostate test is “just not natural, unless maybe you’re Barney Frank.” Barney Frank is a fellow Congressman who happens to be gay. Cunningham’s blatant homophobia was celebrated by his fellow Republicans.

Cunningham only got caught because he was so brazen (he deposited a $70,000 check in his own bank account.) But the Republican culture of corruption extends beyond just Cunningham. The entire party takes the overwhelming share of political donations from defense contractors, insurance companies, energy companies and monopolist retailers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot. Strangely enough, the Republicans vote in lockstep with the interests of the leaders of those industries. The reality is that the entire Republican Party embezzle our tax dollars. It’s a kick back scheme – they take our tax dollars, give out enormous corporate welfare, then the big corporations give it right back to the Republicans. And we’re told that there’s no money for social programs.

The reason why we don’t have money for social programs is due to this particular brand of corporate evil. Shame on Representative Cunningham for getting caught, but shame on corporatist politicans everywhere for doing the exact same thing.

2005-12-22T11:49:00.000-08:00

Republican Senator Calls Out President Bush for His Crime

Even Republicans are starting to admit that Bush committed a crime by violating FISA. Here's a snippet regarding Sen. Chuck Hagel:

"Every president, that we know of, has complied with the law (FISA)," Hagel said. "No president is above the law. We are a nation of laws and no president, majority leader, or chief justice of the Supreme Court can unilaterally or arbitrarily avoid a law or dismiss a law. If the vice president holds a different point of view, then he holds a different point of view."

Based on the facts that are out there concerning whether domestic spying abuses were taking place, Hagel said, there was a "breakdown."

"I take an oath of office to the Constitution," he said. "I don't take an oath of office to the vice president, a president or a political party. My obligation and responsibility are to the people I represent and the country I serve. I do what I think is right for the people I represent and the country I serve." [...]

Hagel, referring to President Ronald Reagan, said people trusted him because he was not a "vitriolic person or one to impugn the motives of people who disagreed with him."

"Never did he do that," Hagel said. "There is no place for that in politics because it debases our system and our process. You can agree or disagree with your leaders and say whatever you like about your elected leaders and throw them out, but I do draw the line on the vilification and impugning of motives because someone disagrees with you."

Impeachment is the only way to deal with Presidential law breaking according to the standard set up by the Republicans' unlawful impeachment of President Clinton. This should be the #1 news story every day and the War on Corporate Evil will not relent until Bush is either out of office or behind bars. Criminals have no place in the White House.

2005-12-21T17:00:00.000-08:00

Senator Boxer Asks Presidential Scholars If Bush's Violation of FISA Amounts to An Impeachable Offense

The first steps have been taken. Read more.

2005-12-21T15:54:00.000-08:00

DEMOCRATS DEFEAT PLAN TO DRILL IN ARTIC NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE

Today, Senate Republicans were unable to come up with the necessary 60 votes to override a threatened Democratic filibuster on a Defense Spending Bill. The only reason Democrats threatened a filibuster was because Republican Sen. Ted Stevens attached a rider that would allow oil drilling in America's largest, most pristine environmental treasure -- the Artic National Wildlife Refuge. As such, the Democrats in the Senate are solely responsible for preventing the violent rape of ANWR by collosal oil corporations.

Although the media playing off the drilling in ANWR as a pet project of 82 year old Super Duper Corporate Tool Senator Stevens, the reality is that the entire Republican party has salivated at the chance to destroy the environment while simultaneously lining the pockets of their dear friends in the oil industry. In 1995, the Republicans passed drilling in ANWR as part of a filibuster-proof budget. Fortunately for the environment, President Bill Clinton vetoed the Republicans' evil plan.

We do not need to drill in ANWR. We wouldn't get any oil at all for 10 years and even then we would still rely heavily on foriegn imports. The U.S. Geological Service estimates that less than 1 year worth of oil lies under the refuge. One of the Republicans' favorite lies on the subject is that only 2,000 acres of the 1.5 million would need to be used for drilling. This is a total lie. As this map shows, the oil deposits are spread throught the Reserve. Drilling would be occuring over, essentially, the entire Refuge. Further, even if the actual pipelines only will make up 2,000 acres, that's not the only cost of drilling in ANWR. Roads, for one, would need to be built in places that have no roads. The delicate ecosytem of ANWR would be forever destroyed due to the massive human invasion.

Our dependence on foreign oil is a huge problem. But the remedy isn't just drilling for oil in every last place on Earth. That's like saying that a 600 pound man's hunger can only be satiated by buying 10 more Happy Meals. The solution is to get the fat man to lose weight. Similarly, our solution is to stop using oil in the long term and drastically cut back in the short run. All of you Republicans who are so concerned about "dependence on foreign oil" should stop driving your Earth-hating SUVs. You should start requiring auto manufacturers to produce more hybrids instead of the limited models presented today. You should demand that Republicans stop fighting increases in fuel efficiency. Cars are less fuel efficient today than 25 years ago, but the same Republicans allegedly concerned about "dependence on foreign oil" don't want to do anything to make us use less gas.

The bottom line: Republicans are lying about a concern that we are over-reliant on foreign oil. The truth is that they don't value the environment whatsoever and want to increase profits as much as possible for their cronies in the oil industry. Some focus group told them that the only way to sell the idea was by pointing to national security and reliance on foreign oil. Those arguments are completely bogus because Republicans could remedy those problems by encouraging conservation, which they refuse to.

2005-12-20T15:04:00.000-08:00

President Caught Lying on Tape -- The Law Mandates Impeachment

"A Wiretap Requires a Court Order. Nothing Has Changed." - George W. Bush, April 2004

You can see the video for yourself here. Bush's accurate statement of the law in April 2004 fails to comport with his current admission that his administration obtained wiretaps without warrants. President Bill Clinton, for example, comported with the federal law (FISA) requiring court orders for wiretaps.

President Clinton was impeached for perjuring himself during private litigation. A prima facie violation of FISA exists just by examining Bush's admission and the law itself. Without legal authority for a wiretap, it is a violation of the 4th amendment ban on unreasonable search and seizure. A constitutional violation, without question, amounts to a "high crime or misdemeanor." If Congress wants to maintain any degree of credibility and integrity, impeachment proceedings must begin soon. Even Corporate Tool Joe Lieberman seems to feel Bush broke the law. Our President is now a proven criminal.

This is the biggest scandal since Watergate, bar none. The American people need to rise up, mold public opinion, and use this crime to relieve Bush of the Presidency.

2005-12-20T08:42:00.000-08:00

Five Ways to Fight Corporate Evil, #2

1. Donate Something for the Holidays

This holiday season, it's important for everyone to give something to those less fortunate. I consider myself rather poor but I've decided that even I must do something, no matter how small. All of us seating in front of computers have, at the minimum, plenty of food, a place to live and power. We take these things for granted but many Americans are forced to do without. Corporate Evil is the cause of poverty in America and one great way to fight Corporate Evil is to help solve poverty. I'll be donating some food through my workplace; I urge you to find a similar outlet. However, be weary about who you give to. I specifically recommend avoiding the Salvation Army because of their homophobic hiring practices.

2. Ship Your Packages With the Postal Service, Forget UPS and FedEx

I know we all hate going to the Post Office. The lines can be long and the service may be slow. Nevertheless, it's infinitely better than helping support a Purveyor of Corporate Evil such as UPS and FedEx. FedEx donates 71% of their political contributions to the Republican Party. That's not chump change either -- FedEx gave over $1,000,000 last year to the Republicans. FedEx has gotten into serious trouble for racial bias and they refuse to offer domestic partner benefits to their employees. UPS, meanwhile, gave even more money to the GOP last year. 72% of UPS' contributions went to the Republicans for a staggering total of over $1.5 million dollars. Both of these companies are providing essential capital to the Republicans in their war on the common man. The U.S. Postal Service, meanwhile, doesn't donate to either political party and is a quasi-independent agency of the Federal Government. The USPS is the 3rd largest employer in the United States, so money spent there helps save American jobs.

3. Join ATLA

ATLA is the American Trial Lawyers Association. Even non lawyers should join this great group. Right now, the Republicans want to limit access to the courtroom at all costs. They want to prevent those injured from getting their "make whole" recovery because the ones doing the injuring are mostly giant corporations. Since the Republican Party exists only to further the interests of these massive corporations, they want to save their campaign donors money at all costs. A key component to any democracy is the ability of citizens to have fair access to the judicial system. So-called "tort reform" should really be called "Limiting damage awards to save wrongdoers money." ATLA is fighting this evil movement with all its might and they need our support. A student membership is only $15 per year and looks great on your resume. Please join now.

4. Email Bush and Tell Him to Stop Breaking the Law

Yesterday, President Bush gave an appalling press conference where he admitted to an impeachable offense and promised to keep doing more. The reality, however, is that President Bush has no legal authority for his spying. The same group of Republicans who were infuriated over President Clinton's supposed disrespect for the rule of law have no problem with Bush's flagrant violation. E-mail President Bush and tell him to stop breaking the law. Here's my e-mail:

Dear President Bush,

In recent days you have admitted to authorizing warrantless wiretaps of American citizens. You have done so despite the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Survelliance Act (FISA) that requires the Executive to go to a secret court to obtain these types of wiretaps. Although you imply that you had no other way to conduct the spying, the law allowed you to obtain authorization through a secret court whose findings would never become public. The head of this court, Judge David Sentelle of the D.C. Circuit, is a close ally of the Republican Party and would have certainly granted any authorization that you requested.

You explictly stated in your 12/18 speech and 12/19 press conference that the Constitution and the Congressional authorization of force gave you the legal authority to violate FISA. This is despite your speech on April 20, 2004 when you explicitly asserted "When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so." Neither the authorization of force nor the Constitution says that you may violate FISA and authorize warrantless wiretaps against anyone you please.

The concern on my behalf is that you didn't go to the secret court because you sought warrantless wiretaps against your political enemies. The keeping of an enemy list dates back to another Republican president who also flagrantly violated the law. As an American citizen, I demand that you, President Bush, adhere to the rule of law and stop subverting the courts and obtaining warrantless wiretaps illegally. Mr. Bush, the young people of this nation need to know that their President has respect for the law and authority. The message this sends our young people is frightening -- it's ok to break the law.

I hope you consider this letter thoughtfully and consider the impacts of your actions upon this great nation.

Sincerely,

Michael Alexander, A Concerned American Citizen

5. Join the United for Peace and Justice Legislative Action network

It's obviously time to leave Iraq. Even war hawk Rep. Murtha has called for our withdrawl. One of the best organizations that is fighting for us to leave Iraq is the United for Peace and Justice Legislative Action Network. Follow the link and join the network. You'll get e-mails notifying you of ways to fight the war and progress the group has made. It's not spam, trust me. We don't have much control over how wars are fought, so we need to band together to speak in one collective voice.

2005-12-19T13:31:00.000-08:00

Democrats: Get Your Act Together

A joke poll from the Ironic Times:

Despite polling which shows two-thirds of Iraqis want us to leave and a solid majority of Americans believe the war was a mistake, the President intentionally misled them, has no exit strategy and no plan for victory, and that we should begin withdrawing our troops, Democratic politicians are still waiting for which sign that it's safe to advocate bringing our troops back home?
A )	An armed revolution on the streets of all major U.S. cities.
B )	The arrest and trial of top Administration officials by the International Criminal Court.
C )	A coordinated attack on our troops by the insurgents and the Iraqi Security Forces.
D )	An armada of UFOs from Mars simultaneously blasting the message, "GET OUT!" from loudspeakers.
Hint: Most Democrats are big fans of "Star Trek."

2005-12-19T08:22:00.000-08:00

W Gives a Press Conference -- So Many Disgusting Lies, It's Pornography

Last night, President Bush gave a prime-time speech on how great things were going in the country. Spying? Not only is he not sorry, but he promises to keep it up. Illegal and immoral, but the man has chutzpuh. This morning, President Bush gave one of those rare press conferences; here's my analysis.

Bush on Iraq: Iraq, 9/11, Iraq, 9/11, Iraq, 9/11, Iraq, 9/11. Yes, George W. resorted to more phony connections between Iraq and 9/11. He no longer makes the mistake of simply lying and asserting some connection existed. Now he just talks about the two subjects simultaneously in order to convey the same message. Ignorant Americans tuning in for just a moment will still believe the connection exists. Here's an example of Bush's evil sleight of hand:

And we will keep working toward our goal of a democratic Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself.

Our mission in Iraq is critical to victory in the global war on terror. After our country was attacked on September the 11th, and nearly 3,000 lives were lost, I vowed to do everything within my power to bring justice to those who were responsible.

Bush on race: I love Black people. In fact, let's talk about the ownership society.... Bush quickly moves into private accounts as a way to fight racism. The thought, according to W, is that it will increase wealth transfers between generations. If private accounts actually increased wealth, that might be true. However, private accounts are just a way to drain social programs and funnel it into wealthy GOP stock market investors. In true GOP Corporate Tool fashion, Bush turned a conversation on race into one about destroying social security in favor of gambling on the stock market. You've got to give him credit for that one, even if it was deceitful, disrespectful and racist.

Bush on Phony Economic Indicators:
We added 215,000 new jobs in November. We've added nearly 4.5 million new jobs since May of 2003.

The unemployment rate is down to 5 percent; lower than the average of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

Sounds great right? No. During President Clinton's administration, the economy added an average of 236,000 jobs per month. That's just an AVERAGE, not a great total to brag about like Bush is trying with his pathetic 215,000 figure. Clinton presided over office when 23 months brought over 300,000 jobs created.

As for the unemployment rate, low unemployment doesn't mean a lot of good jobs. A lot of people have stopped looking for work; they are no longer counted as being "unemployed." Other people have taken lousy jobs at Wal-Mart and other low paying Republican supporters. Even though they are on government assistance and can't pay their bills, our stats consider them "employed." So you can just ignore the unemployment rate; it's a phony indicator that doesn't provide real information about how good our economy is doing.

Bush on spying: W takes the offense: If you talk about the spying program, you hate America and are helping the terrorists. Bush says the program is great, remember 9/11, it's helping us prevent another 9/11. "Shameful" was clearly the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy buzzword of the day. Bush chides reporters for revealing "sources" in the war on terror. Now, of course, Bush had no problem participating in the criminal conspiracy to destroy a source -- Valerie Plame. Still, Mr. President, isn't it illegal to spy on citizens?

As I mentioned in my remarks, the legal authority is derived from the Constitution, as well as the authorization of force by the United States Congress.

I'm checking the Constitution here...no mention of it being ok to spy on US citizens during times of war. Ok, let's check the authorization of force by Congress. Hmmm, no mention either of the legality of Bush's spy tactics. Well, sir, you lied. Bush's argument is that he's the commander-in-chief, the commander-in-chief must protect America, therefore anything Bush does that arguably protects America is legal. Under this line of reasoning, it would be ok for Bush to commit genocide in order to prevent another 9/11. Obviously that would be horribly illegal. Bush's disrespect for the rule of law is absolutely disgusting. He has no legal authority to spy on me.

Bush on the Patriot Act:

In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without this law for a single moment.

Bush provides no details whatsoever as to how the Patriot Act fights terror. The reason is that it DOESN'T fight terror and there is no objective evidence that shows it helps in the war on terror. Here's an example of more GOP smear tactics:

Most of the senators now filibustering the Patriot Act actually voted for it in 2001. These senators need to explain why they thought the Patriot Act was a vital tool after the September the 11th attacks but now think it's no longer necessary.

BECAUSE THEY NEVER READ IT IN 2001. The voting version of the bill, over 1000 pages, was issued just hours before the vote. It was not possible for any single person to read it and John Conyers admitted it in Fahrenheit 9/11. Bush is engaging in outright lies and deception by seizing on the American public's ignorance and our press corps' incompetence. Outrageous.

Bush on a Reporter named Jackson: He calls him "Action Jackson." Bush loves to use disrespectful nicknames when addressing people. It's a way of him saying "I'm superior to you and I can belittle you by giving you a funny name." No reporter could call the President "Bushie," but this President is a man of entrenched privilege who despises anyone with less power and influence than him. Contrast him with President Clinton. Clinton was a man who emerged from poverty. President Clinton didn't need to make fun of everyone around him in order to feel superior. That wouldn't be right; Bush doesn't care.

If you are still a Republican after listening to Bush's remarks this morning, there's no hope for you. A dimwit liar is running our country into the ground and our corporate press corps is laughing all the way down.

2005-12-15T13:00:00.000-08:00

Bush Won't Veto Ban on Torture

President Bush reversed course and said today that he will not veto the ban on torture which recently received over 90 votes in the US Senate. This is a huge victory for human rights everywhere. Although we will obviously defy the law and torture people anyways, it's an important first step in establishing a high level law to prosecute those who torture in the future.

Most importantly, Bush didn't do this because he realizes torture is immoral or doesn't work. He did it because he's wildly unpopular and his entire party, except for a few wingnuts , have called for the administration to stop its use of torture. Bush caved to political pressure in order to get some payback later on from McCain and his "moderate" GOP cronies in the Senate.

2005-12-15T08:21:00.000-08:00

Turning Point

The most important news event that occurred during my recent hiatus was Rep. John Murtha's call for a pullout from Iraq "as soon as practicable." Although we likely disagree on many things, I am 100% behind Murtha. There's an old Vulcan proverb: "Only Nixon could go to China." Similarly, only a conservative hawk like John Murtha could come out and say that it's time to leave Iraq. He's a long-time friend of the military, regardless of the administration. He's a Democrat, technically, but he's as far to the right on national defense as one can be. He voted for the Iraq war. But now, Murtha admits what the President won't: we made a mistake and it's take to get out. Further, Murtha offers a moral solution -- declare victory and leave. After all, we've accomplished the President's stated mission -- the removal of Sadaam Hussein and the assurance that WMD are not in Iraq.

There is no longer any reason for us to be in Iraq. Our troops are just providing targets for the insurgency. The insurgency only exists because of their hatred of American occupation. We are encouraging the war at this point by providing the only reason to fight. I've often made this point to friends: I hate George Bush, but if the USA were attacked and our country was occupied, I would gladly take up arms and defend my country and my President. The insurgents don't necessarily support Sadaam -- they just despise the idea of Iraqis living like captives in their own country.

An occupying force is destined to lose to the occupied. The occupied are protecting their homeland, the invaders are just doing their job. The occupied have the numerical advantage. The occupied is willing to do anything and everything possible to free their homeland, while the invaders are not. Murtha has likened the situation to the Revolutionary War. If the French remained in the USA after the war was over because we were not a "real democracy" yet, the founding fathers would have turned on the French.

Right now we are running the risk that Iraqis will associate democracy with American occupation. The people of Iraq are beginning to hate "democracy" because they believe that means occupation and foreign control of their homeland. We cannot let this happen. A year ago, I supported John Kerry and agreed that, while Bush lied to get us into Iraq, we could not leave until the job was done. A year later, thousands of troops and Iraqis have died and we are no closer to "finishing" the job. Shortly before Murtha's call for a pullout, I was already telling friends that I thought we needed to leave Iraq at once.

In 25 years when people look back at the Iraq War, Murtha's courageous stand will be seen as the turning point in the public consciousness that got us out of there. Before his call, virtually no politican called for us to leave; now a broad coalition of Democrats and some Republicans are calling for an exit. John Kerry provided the voice of the turning point in Vietnam when he bravely asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Murtha's statement is this war's turning point, but Kerry's question rings true for Iraq as well.

2005-12-14T16:13:00.000-08:00

What Did Bush Know and When Did He Know It

Strangely enough, George Bush has thus far escaped blame for the Plamegate scandal. But as I suggested two months ago, the real story concerns the President's involvement in the scandal. Just as was asked of President Nixon, we need to know 1) what Bush knew and 2) when he knew it. We are dealing with a massive loss of intelligence assets during the midst of the War on Terror, so this story should be front page news each and every day.

Now the Dark Lord of the Sith himself, conservative shill columnist Bob Novak, says that Bush knows who the source of the leak is and should admit it. Novak, if you recall, got this entire affair started to begin with when he leaked Plame's name in his godawful column. Novak is a major Washington insider, especially among conservatives, so if he is making this claim, you can bet there is truth to it.

Should Bush have been involved with Plame's outing, that would certainly constitute a "high crime and misdemeanor" giving rise to impeachment under the Bill Clinton standard. The corporate media needs to stop reporting about irrelevant shootings aboard airplanes and start doing actual investigating.

2005-12-14T08:39:00.000-08:00

Katrina’s Lingering Shadow

As a rising river bore down on New Orleans, city leaders made the decision to set off 30 tons of dynamite on the levee at Caernarvon, about 15 miles downriver from Canal Street. The explosion eased pressure on levees at New Orleans by speeding the water past the city, but it flooded St. Bernard Parish.

The flooding was horrific. In the midst of a horrible natural disaster, the leaders of New Orleans made a fateful decision. A plan was hatched to ease the pressure on the levees throughout the city: blow up other levees and flood impoverished St. Benard Parish. 30 tons of dynamite were purposely exploded on the levee at Caernarvon.

This is no conspiracy theory regarding Hurricane Katrina. The preceding was the true account of the Great Mississipi Flood of 1927.

Many people in the African-American community have accused the government of a repeat in 2005. Accounts of a large blast are widespread among locals in the lower 9th ward. Non-interested scientists, however, insist that there was no repeat of the 1927 event during Katrina. I don't believe the concurrent conspiracy theory either, but that's not the point of the story. Massive racism and poverty are so entrenched that the dynamite theory doesn't sound so far-fetched. The policies of the Republican party are doing essentially the same thing by destroying opportunity and entrenching privilege.

Just three and a half months after one of the worst natural disasters in American history, we seem to have forgotten. Republicans wouldn't stop chanting "9-11" because they successfully manipulated our fear to promote illegal wars. They want to forget Katrina as quickly as possible because the only thing anyone remembers is the poverty and the suffering.

The devastation of Katrina provided a rare opportunity to examine class inequalities in American society. The conservative plan for government necessarily leaves some people out in order to make the rich even wealthier. Capitalism is a great system, but without proper regulation it hurts the poor at the expense of the wealthy. Minimum safeguards should be provided for people so that individual merit can win out over entrenched privilege. Our current system is filled with inefficiencies because the people in power are not as smart or moral as they should be. People of low intelligence such as President Bush can fly through college if they have rich parents who can buy their children careers. The residents of the 9th ward in New Orleans had no such ability. A genius black girl has less of a chance for success than a stupid white male. This kind of society is going to lead to the destruction of the planet and horrendous suffering on the way there.

Katrina provided a grand opportunity to rethink poverty. Here are the words of the great, but highly flawed, Lyndon Johnson: "This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America." "This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America." Meanwhile, the Republican Party has never tried to do anything but oppress and exploit the poor. Tax cuts for the rich and cuts in social programs do not stimulate the economy but do result in millionaires becoming billionaires. Nevertheless, this became the Republican mantra when Reagan took control in the 1980s, and the War on Poverty was forgotten.

The issue of American poverty cannot be separated from the issue of race. Most of it these days isn’t through old-fashioned overt racism, but rather via institutional racism. The legacy of slavery persists today because 150 years, or 7 generations, is simply not enough enough time to undue the cycle of entrenched poverty. Similarly, President Bush comes from entrenched privilege due to his rich ancestors. As much as white America disagrees in order to feel better about their relative success, the legacy of slavery directly affects race relations in 2005.

New Orleans was a perfect example of tragedy of certain poverty and the disproportionate share of the suffering that African-Americans bear. Race played a direct role in the tragedy, contrary to what President Bush claims. Before Katrina, 18.4% of New Orleans residents were in poverty. For African-Americans, it was 35%. If that doesn’t sound so bad, here’s a chilling thought: for a family of 3, the poverty line is a combined household income of $16,090 per year. Certainly, huge masses of people make more than $16,090 per year and still struggle to take care of their basic needs. The racial imbalance is staggering. 21 percent of all children in the United States live in poverty, but 46% of African-American children and 40% of Latino children live in poverty.

The reality is that the rebuilding process is, itself, racist. Federal dollars went mostly to Republican cronies such as Halliburton. Karl Rove, after all, is in charge of the reconstruction effort despite having no qualifications to do so. The rebuilding is occuring in the rich, white neighborhoods. Meanwhile, poor neighborhoods such as the Ninth Ward remain toxic wastelands. The wooden neighborhoods will certainly need to be condemned; the plans for rebuilding are slow and sketchy. A report from the Urban Land Institute commissioned by Mayor Ray Nagin suggested that resources should be focused on the wealthier and less damaged areas of the city first. More dangerous was the report’s suggestion as to whether it made sense at all to repopulate areas such as the Ninth Ward that faced the worst flooding.

Before Katrina, African-Americans composed 65% of the New Orleans population. The Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates the new percentage will be 35-40 percent. Conservatives frothed at the mouth at the idea of using New Orleans as a testsite for a conservative New Deal. They wanted a city built for rich people and corporations. Plans for the poor were non-existent. This reflects the Republican tendency to believe in Social Darwinism in order to justify their entrenched privilege and success.

We can't let the government forget about the horrors Katrina's aftermath exposed.

2005-12-13T16:22:00.000-08:00

Bush : "I look at the newspaper"

In a pathetic attempt to dispel myths that he is intellectually lazy, President Bush claimed yesterday that "Every morning I look at the newspaper...I can't say I've read every single article in the newspaper. But, I definitely know what's in the news." "I'm very aware of what's in the news. I'm aware because I see clips. I see summaries."

The leader of the free world believes that he is fully informed because he "looks" at the newspaper and because he's seen news clips and seen summaries. As anyone can tell you, "reading" involves more than "seeing." Although that could just be use of Texas slang, Bush seems to be indicating that he believes he is informed because he glances at the news every now and then.

"I feel like I'm getting really good advice from very capable people, and that people from all walks of life have informed me and informed those who advise me.

First, if George Bush thinks he's getting good advice, I'd hate to see what bad advice is. After all, President Bush has been in office during a horrible economic downturn, a war of choice that has crippled our economy and destroyed our international reputation, not to mention his "advisors" who told him to ignore the threats of 9-11 and go on vacation instead.

Second, if George Bush thinks that "people from all walks of life" inform him, he's nuts. Bush has no connection, whatsoever, to the poor. He surrounds himself with yes-men of different flavors -- religious conservatives, tax cut conservatives, racist conservatives -- but that doesn't equate with "people from all walks of life."

This man has no business running a small business, let alone the greatest country on Earth. Shame on anyone who voted for this stunning example of incompetence.

2005-12-13T08:49:00.000-08:00

STATE OF CALIFORNIA COMMITS PREMEDITATED MURDER

"You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also…"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven."

- Jesus Christ, Matthew 5:38 -39

Just hours ago, the state of California executed Stanley Tookie Williams. By the state of California, I mean the people of California. Since I am one of the people of California, there is blood on my hands. My friends, we Californians killed Stanley Tookie Williams in cold blood. While Williams was a sick deviant, we are rational, sensible people who premeditated and deliberately killed Tookie.

Tookie Williams was a disgusting criminal. He committed four murders and created the Crips, one of the most deadly gangs in American history. In some ways, if we are going to execute anyone, Tookie deserves execution. On the other hand, Tookie has reformed his life by writing children's books discouraging gang violence. He has been nominated for Nobel Prizes in peace and literature. Many people say that if Tookie doesn't deserve clemency, no one does.

Yet, Tookie is no different than any other person on death row -- a terrible criminal, but also a human being with basic dignity. Human life is too valuable to be taken away for no reason whatsoever. Killing is wrong; that's the lesson I want my children to understand. Imperfect humans should not be deciding between life and death. The whole concept of clemency only exists because we feel so uncertain about the death penalty. If killing really was as great and accurate as its proponents claim, then there would be no need for clemency. After all, if the punishment was too harsh, that would have been sorted out at sentencing or during the appeals process. Clemency exists because people, even those in favor of the death penalty, realize that the system is flawed.

There is no way to rationalize the desire to kill criminals with the desire to prevent the killing of innocents. The criminal system has never been and never will be foolproof. We are humans; it's simply impossible. If you are to accept the death penalty, then you must necessarily accept the fact that innocent people will die at some point. You must accept that the benefits of killing criminals outweighs the costs of killing innocents. In the past 32 years, 119 condemned prisoners on death row have been later exonerated. If the conservatives had gotten their wish and the executions occurred sooner, a mass slaughter of innocents would have resulted.

Tookie Williams' killing presented an obvious injustice. His humanity and dignity was apparent; yet we had to pretend to deny it in order to kill the man. Going forward, we must use this tragic killing to reignite the debate over the death penalty and, someday, have it abolished. As liberals are beginning to recognize, the more successful argument is to emphasize that the death penalty doesn't work, not to emphasize our personal feelings about government sanctioned killing. There is simply no evidence that the death penalty serves any deterrent effect. In fact, all the evidence indicates the opposite. The death penalty is unnecessary because, as Pope John Paul II argued, modern prisons have made life in prison without parole a certain punishment. The financial costs from killing criminals are enormous and far outweigh the costs of life imprisonment. Florida spent $3.2 million per execution between 1973 and 1988. Texas officials acknowledged that it costs 3 times as much to kill a criminal than to pay for 40 years in a top security cell. Instead of going to better education so as to create less criminals, we redirect our money into purchasing instruments of death and hiring attorneys to justify that killing.

There is a brutalizing effect from the death penalty. A lesson is taught to every man, woman and child -- violence is an acceptable way to deal with problems and killing can be an acceptable form of punishment. This kind of violence is far worse than the cartoon violence of Mortal Kombat that Corporate Tool Joe Lieberman railed against.

There are more horrors behind the death penalty. Although the lethal injection process looks medicinal and antiseptic, it's not. Qualified medical professionals are not allowed to participate due to that pesky thing they call the Hippocratic Oath. Instead, prison workers don scrubs and guess their way into administering injections. Lethal injection has the highest rate of botched executions compared to any other method of killing. Further, it can be torturously painful, especially if untrained prison workers are the ones doing the killing. Tookie Williams' execution was, unfortunately, one of the botched executions. It took 12 minutes to find a vein; onlookers watched Williams wince in pain as the non-professional tried to inflict the killing poison. He writhed in pain during the killing. The act was vile and brutal.

The death penalty does not help the victims. Some victims suffer deep emotional trauma from the extended ordeal of an execution. Instead of moving on after a short trial, victims are forced to wait years in court for some kind of justice they will never truly acheive. Others feel responsible for the killing of the criminal.

In order to kill criminals, proponents need to be comfortable with the fact that those who kill whites are more likely to be executed than those who kill blacks. This fact is backed up by a 1990 GAO study. 50% of murders involve white victims, but 80% of death penalty cases involve white victims. 43% of those executed have been people of color; 55% of people on death row are non-white. There can be no denial of these facts: the death penalty punishes people more for killing whites and punishes non-whites more than whites.

During his legendary study that led to the Supreme Court's 1987 decision in McClesky v. Kemp, David Baldus found that Georgia prosecutors sought the death penalty for 70% of black defendants with white victims but only 15% of white defendants with black victims. 98% of prosecutors are white. In McClesky, the Supreme Court was asked to overturn the death penalty based on Baldus' statistics that proved the racist nature of the death penalty. The Court, in a 5-4 decision, declined. They accepted the statistics but claimed that it was outside of the court's province to strike down the death penalty based upon racial injustice that pervades our society. In a cruel twist of fate, Justice Powell, the author of the majority opinion in McClesky, decided 4 years later he made a terrible mistake and said he would have voted to abolish the death penalty if given a second chance.

Baldus has continued to try and use statistical evidence to prove that the death penalty is racist. In 1997, he showed that black defendants in Philadelphia were 38% more likely to receive the death penalty. The conservative Supreme Court refuses to act.

Finally, the death penalty simply does not comport with a Christian lifestyle. I do not profess myself to be a Christian, although I've gone through the steps to become a full-fledged Catholic, but the lessons of the Bible are still useful. Jesus specifically rejected the old way of the Old Testament and rejected "eye for an eye" and the use of the death penalty. In John 8, a sinner is about to be stoned. Jesus tells the crowd to "let he who has not sinned" throw the first stone. Even though Jesus himself has not sinned, he does not kill the woman. Death penalty proponents find no support for their desire to kill in the New Testament. Conservative Christians instead cite to Old Testament books such as Romans and Genesis, ignoring the fact that Jesus made a new covenant that changed much of Old Testament law. Conservatives need to stop being hypocrites regarding their religious beliefs.

Because it doesn't work, we need to get rid of the death penalty. Because killing is inherently immoral, we need to stop. Because we are better than criminals, we can't do this again. Murder is the unlawful killing of another, with malice. Malice can be the mere intent to kill. The Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment; several Supreme Court justices have argued that this prohibition makes the death penalty unlawful. Since we intended to kill Tookie Williams, an unlawful act under the Constitution, we committed murder with express malice. First degree murder can be reached if premeditation and deliberation was used in the killing. We planned the killing for years, we have a vengeful motive and we used a deadly manner of killing. So our murder was in the first degree. It's been an ugly day for us all.