Sunday, July 08, 2007

(Hopelessly) Spineless on Sudan

It irritates me that Kristof still holds a slim belief that Bush will somehow, someway, miraculously begin to live up to what he says or has said -- past or present. Perhaps Kristof is trying to appear journalistically neutral.

Whatever the reason, it should be more than evident to anyone with a shred of functioning brain tissue that The Shrub never has and never will live up to his word. His words are a political convenience and nothing more; any professed commitment to honor them evaporates into the thin air of their utterance. What is more, Bush-words spin the truth, twist the facts, mislead, and misinform -- he can never be "taken at his word."

It is time to insist that this incompetent, dangerous, little tyrannical puppet be removed from our government along with his evil puppeteer, the King of VICE (President) Cheney. Sadly, nothing beneficial will be accomplished in Darfur or anywhere else until that happens.


Spineless on Sudan
By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times
In May 2006, President Bush declared: “The vulnerable people of Darfur deserve more than sympathy. ... America will not turn away from this tragedy.”

Since then, Mr. Bush has turned away — and 450,000 more people have been displaced in Darfur. “Things are getting worse,” noted Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a human rights campaigner in Sudan.

One of the most troubling signs is that Sudan has been encouraging Arabs from Chad, Niger and other countries to settle in Darfur. More than 30,000 of them have moved into areas depopulated after African tribes were driven out.

In the last few months, Sudan’s government has given these new arrivals citizenship papers and weapons, cementing in place the demographic consequences of its genocide. And if Sudan thinks it has gotten away with mass murder in Darfur, it is more likely to resume its war against southern Sudan — which seems increasingly likely.

Within Darfur, aid groups have increasingly become targets, and in April alone three aid workers were shot and 20 were kidnapped, while hijackers tried to seize aid workers’ vehicles at a rate of almost one a day. As for African Union peacekeepers, seven of them were shot dead the same month — so they’re in no position to rescue aid workers.

The cancer has also been spreading into Chad and the Central African Republic, compounding each country’s intrinsic instability. Last month a 27-year-old French woman, Elsa Serfass, on her first assignment with Doctors Without Borders, was shot dead in C.A.R. as she drove through an area where militias had been burning villages. So Doctors Without Borders has had to suspend much of its work in the area.

Something similar is happening in eastern Chad. Mia Farrow, the actress — who has shown a toughness about genocide that no Western leader has — has just returned from her sixth visit to the region and says that eastern Chad now feels like Somalia.

“Pick-ups with machine guns bolted onto the rear and loaded with armed, uniformed men careen through the dusty streets terrorizing people,” she told me. “No one knows who they are.” While Ms. Farrow was visiting the town of Abéché, an elderly guard at a U.N. compound there was killed and two people were badly beaten.

Then there’s rape. Ever since Sudan began the genocide, it has been using rape to terrorize populations of Africans — and then periodically punishing women who seek treatment on charges of adultery or fornication.

So far this year, at least two young women have been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery. As Refugees International puts it in a new report: “The government is more likely to take action against those who report and document rape than those who commit it.”

Much of the news on Darfur has been a bit optimistic lately, because it has focused on recent flurries of international diplomacy. While it’s true that China is belatedly putting some pressure on Sudan to admit international peacekeepers, at the same time China continues to supply Sudan with the guns used to slaughter Darfuri children. China also just signed a 20-year agreement to develop offshore oil for Sudan, and in April China pledged “to boost military exchanges and cooperation” with Sudan.

Let’s hope that athletes who go to Beijing for the Olympics next year will wear T-shirts honoring the victims of the genocide that China is underwriting.

In the burst of diplomatic activity, one person who stands out is Nicolas Sarkozy, the new president of France. Mr. Sarkozy is pushing to send a European Union force, including many French troops, to stabilize Chad and the Central African Republic. If they arrive by October, as planned, they just might pull those two countries back from the brink of collapse.

In contrast, Mr. Bush has been letting Darfur rhyme with Rwanda and Bosnia. For years, Mr. Bush’s aides have discussed whether he should give a prime-time speech on Darfur to ratchet up the pressure; he still hasn’t. Laura Bush just completed a four-nation swing through Africa, but she didn’t include a visit to any of the areas affected by the Darfur crisis.

Ultimately, the only way the genocide will end will be with a negotiated political settlement — but the only way to get that is to put much more pressure on Khartoum.

So how about if Mr. Bush invites Mr. Sarkozy — along with Gordon Brown, Hu Jintao and Hosni Mubarak — for a joint visit to Chad and C.A.R. to meet Darfuri refugees? Maybe Mr. Sarkozy could lend Mr. Bush and the others a little backbone.

Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
Technorati tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

America: SICKO Society

Another Krugman MUST READ op ed follows.

By the way, if you haven't yet seen Michael Moore's "SICKO" yet, do. If you see only one film this year -- see "SICKO." It ought to be required viewing for every citizen in this country.

The film will move you. It will surprise you. It will make you think. It will make you angry. Most important, it hopefully will make you DO SOMETHING: lobby your representatives loudly and ceaselessly for Universal Health Care.

Health Care Terror
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
These days terrorism is the first refuge of scoundrels. So when British authorities announced that a ring of Muslim doctors working for the National Health Service was behind the recent failed bomb plot, we should have known what was coming.

“National healthcare: Breeding ground for terror?” read the on-screen headline, as the Fox News host Neil Cavuto and the commentator Jerry Bowyer solemnly discussed how universal health care promotes terrorism.

While this was crass even by the standards of Bush-era political discourse, Fox was following in a long tradition. For more than 60 years, the medical-industrial complex and its political allies have used scare tactics to prevent America from following its conscience and making access to health care a right for all its citizens.

I say conscience, because the health care issue is, most of all, about morality.

That’s what we learn from the overwhelming response to Michael Moore’s “Sicko.” Health care reformers should, by all means, address the anxieties of middle-class Americans, their growing and justified fear of finding themselves uninsured or having their insurers deny coverage when they need it most. But reformers shouldn’t focus only on self-interest. They should also appeal to Americans’ sense of decency and humanity.

What outrages people who see “Sicko” is the sheer cruelty and injustice of the American health care system — sick people who can’t pay their hospital bills literally dumped on the sidewalk, a child who dies because an emergency room that isn’t a participant in her mother’s health plan won’t treat her, hard-working Americans driven into humiliating poverty by medical bills.

“Sicko” is a powerful call to action — but don’t count the defenders of the status quo out. History shows that they’re very good at fending off reform by finding new ways to scare us.

These scare tactics have often included over-the-top claims about the dangers of government insurance. “Sicko” plays part of a recording Ronald Reagan once made for the American Medical Association, warning that a proposed program of health insurance for the elderly — the program now known as Medicare — would lead to totalitarianism.

Right now, by the way, Medicare — which did enormous good, without leading to a dictatorship — is being undermined by privatization.

Mainly, though, the big-money interests with a stake in the present system want you to believe that universal health care would lead to a crushing tax burden and lousy medical care.

Now, every wealthy country except the United States already has some form of universal care. Citizens of these countries pay extra taxes as a result — but they make up for that through savings on insurance premiums and out-of-pocket medical costs. The overall cost of health care in countries with universal coverage is much lower than it is here.

Meanwhile, every available indicator says that in terms of quality, access to needed care and health outcomes, the U.S. health care system does worse, not better, than other advanced countries — even Britain, which spends only about 40 percent as much per person as we do.

Yes, Canadians wait longer than insured Americans for elective surgery. But over all, the average Canadian’s access to health care is as good as that of the average insured American — and much better than that of uninsured Americans, many of whom never receive needed care at all.

And the French manage to provide arguably the best health care in the world, without significant waiting lists of any kind. There’s a scene in “Sicko” in which expatriate Americans in Paris praise the French system. According to the hard data they’re not romanticizing. It really is that good.

All of which raises the question Mr. Moore asks at the beginning of “Sicko”: who are we?

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.” So declared F.D.R. in 1937, in words that apply perfectly to health care today. This isn’t one of those cases where we face painful tradeoffs — here, doing the right thing is also cost-efficient. Universal health care would save thousands of American lives each year, while actually saving money.

So this is a test. The only things standing in the way of universal health care are the fear-mongering and influence-buying of interest groups. If we can’t overcome those forces here, there’s not much hope for America’s future.

Photo Credit: Paul Krugman. (The New York Times)

Also See:

Technorati tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

In Case You Missed It....

Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Live Bad, Go Green

By Thomas L. Friedman
The New York Times
Over dinner with friends in London the other night, the conversation drifted to global warming and whether anything was really being done to reverse it. One guest, Sameh El-Shahat, a furniture designer, heaped particular scorn on programs that enable people to offset their excessive carbon emissions by funding green projects elsewhere. “Who really checks that it’s being done?” he asked. And how much difference does it really make?

But then he hit on an ingenious idea: If people really want to generate money to plant trees or finance green power, why not have them offset their real sins, not just their carbon excesses? We started to play with his idea: Imagine if you could offset the whole Ten Commandments.

No, really, think about it. Imagine if there were a Web site — I’d call it GreenSinai.com — where every time you thought you had violated one of the Ten Commandments, or you wanted to violate one of them but did not want to feel guilty about it, you could buy carbon credits to offset your sins.

The motto of Britain’s Conservative Party today is “Vote Blue, Go Green.” GreenSinai’s motto could be: “Live Bad, Go Green.” That would generate some income.

Here’s how it would work: One day, you’re out in the backyard mowing the lawn and suddenly you covet your neighbor’s wife. Hey, it happens — that’s why “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” is one of the Ten Commandments. No problem. You just go to GreenSinai.com and buy 100 trees in the Amazon or fund a project to capture methane from cow dung in India — and, presto, you’re free and clear.

Obviously there would be a sliding scale. Taking God’s name in vain or erecting an idol might cost you only a few solar water heaters for a Chinese village, whereas bearing false witness or stealing would set you back a pilot sugar ethanol plant in Louisiana.

As for adultery, well, I think that’s where the big money could be made. My guess is that we could achieve a carbon-neutral world by 2020 if we just set up a system for people to offset their adultery by reversing deforestation of tropical rain forests or funding mega wind and solar power systems in China and India.

O.K., O.K., more seriously, I raise this issue of carbon offsets because they’re symptomatic of the larger problem we face in confronting climate change: everyone wants it to happen, but without pain or sacrifice. On balance, I think carbon-offsetting is a good thing — my family has purchased offsets — if for no other reason than it directs resources toward clean technologies that might not have been funded and, therefore, moves us down the innovation curve faster.

But the danger, argues Michael Sandel, Harvard’s noted political philosopher, “is that carbon offsets will become, at least for some, a painless mechanism to buy our way out of the more fundamental changes in habits, attitudes and way of life that are actually required to address the climate problem.”

“If someone drives a Hummer and buys carbon offsets to salve his conscience, that is better than driving the Hummer and doing nothing,” added Mr. Sandel, author of “The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering.” “But it would be even better to trade in the Hummer for a hybrid. The risk is that carbon offsets will make Hummers seem respectable rather than irresponsible, and distract us, as a nation, from harder, bigger changes in our energy policy.”

People often refer to the current climate buzz as “a green revolution,” but the very term revolution suggests a fundamental break with past habits, attitudes and public policies. Yet, when you suggest a carbon tax or a higher gasoline tax — initiatives that would redirect resources and change habits at the scale actually needed to impact global warming — what is the first thing you hear in Congress? “Impossible — you can’t use the T-word.”

A revolution without sacrifice where everyone is a winner? There’s no such thing.

Katherine Ellison wrote a wonderful piece on this topic for Salon.com in which she quoted Stephen Schneider, the Stanford University climatologist, as saying: “Volunteerism doesn’t work. It’s about as effective as voluntary speed limits. No cops, no judges: road carnage. No rules, no fines: greenhouse gases. We’re going to triple or quadruple the CO2 in the atmosphere with no policy. I don’t believe offsets are just a distraction. But we’ll have failed if that’s all we do.”

There’s a saying at the Pentagon that “a vision without resources is a hallucination.” For my money, the green revolution today is still a hallucination.

Photo Credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
Technorati tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted by at 3 comments:
Labels: ,

A Hair Beyond John Edwards' Hair

MoDo adds to her series of "fluff" op eds and her obsession with everything you never wanted to know and couldn't care less about about asking John Edwards.

C'mon, Mo. Raise the bar.

Phantom at the Opera
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times
Here are five things you might not know about John Edwards:

¶He never saw a single episode of “The Sopranos.”

¶He doesn’t like the opera, but his favorite musical is “Phantom of the Opera.”

¶His first date with Elizabeth was dancing at the Holiday Inn in Durham or Chapel Hill — he can’t remember which — sometime after which she made an ironclad rule that politicians should never dance.

¶He became a lawyer because as a kid he loved watching “Perry Mason,” “The Defenders” and “The Fugitive.” (Richard Kimble really needed a lawyer.)

¶His top sex symbol is a fellow North Carolinian, Andie MacDowell.

John Edwards has not written soulful poetry, like his old running mate John Kerry or his current rivals Barack Obama and Dennis Kucinich. And he says that “if I have a Saturday off, I’m not going to the ballet.”

His approach to culture tends to be geographic — lots of Southerners, especially North Carolinians — and thematic, embracing subjects that dovetail nicely with the campaign trope of Two Americas.

After Mr. Edwards told George Stephanopoulos that “The Trial of Socrates” by I. F. Stone was “a wonderful book,” Bob Novak jumped on him, claiming that he had chosen a book by a “radical” journalist “identified as a covert Soviet agent.”

I tell the Democrat that Poppy Bush drolly told the story about his ’64 Texas Senate race, when a John Birch Society pamphlet suggested that Barbara Bush’s father, the president of McCall Publishing, put out a Communist manifesto called Redbook.

He laughs and says of Bob Novak, “Wait till he finds out I also like Langston Hughes.”

“There was a really beautiful piece about African-Americans and rivers,” Mr. Edwards says. “And another one that starts something like, ‘My old man is a white old man, my mother’s black.’ I thought it was really well done.” Those are from Hughes’s poems “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Cross.”

Though he’s often compared to a Southern lawyer out of John Grisham, and he says he used to “blow through” Grisham novels, Mr. Edwards doesn’t read him much anymore. The literary character he is “inspired” to identify with is, of course, Atticus Finch.

He likes Kaye Gibbons’s novel “A Virtuous Woman.” “She’s from North Carolina,” he says. And he enjoyed “Cold Mountain” by Charles Frazier, another North Carolinian. “That was set in North Carolina,” he says. Right now he’s reading nonfiction, “The Race Beat,” by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, a chronicle of civil rights press coverage in the South.

He says the paintings in his house are by Southern artists, including North Carolinians named Joe Cave and James Kerr.

Asked about his Hollywood dream girl, natch, she’s a North Carolinian. “She’s in those skin commercials,” he says. “She was in ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral.’ ” And his favorite actress is Glenn Close, who had to dub Andie MacDowell’s lines in her first big part, “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan,” because her Southern accent was so thick.

Fave actors? Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. (Don’t tell Bob Novak.)

He doesn’t watch much TV, he says, except when his son Jack gets him to watch “Jimmy Neutron,” or Elizabeth gets him to watch “Boston Legal” and “Brothers & Sisters” (a show he likes).

He loves Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who once defended the right of rich pols like him to talk about poor people. He says he’s seen his fellow Southern lawyer Fred Thompson on “Law & Order” a time or two when flipping channels to get to sports. “I’m a huge Tar Heels fan,” he says. “I know way too much about basketball and football.”

Movies? “ ‘Shawshank Redemption,’ ” he says. “I loved ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ ‘Schindler’s List.’ And on a much lighter note, ‘Old School.’ ”

He may look like Bobby Sherman, but as a teen he liked the Allman Brothers, the Doors and the Stones. Now he plays U2, Springsteen and Dave Matthews on his iPod, “mostly compilations.” He says he’s not particularly fond of Celine Dion, whose “You and I” is Hillary’s insipid jingle.

Recalling his first date with Elizabeth, in law school, he says: “I was such a classy guy, I took her to the Holiday Inn to dance. It was loud. Elizabeth made fun of me for weeks for taking her there. Elizabeth thinks the two rules you always use in politics are: Don’t dance. And don’t wear hats.”

Especially not if you’ve got such a fabulous haircut to show off.

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
Technorati tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

The Bush Legacy


The sooner Bush is impeached, the sooner his legacy will be irrefutable to even the most diehard Bushie loyalist.

Frank Rich sums up The Shrub's legacy in the title of today's Times op ed: "A Profile in Cowardice."

As always, Rich's op ed is a "must read."


A Profile in Cowardice
By Frank Rich
The New York Times

THERE was never any question that President Bush would grant amnesty to Scooter Libby, the man who knows too much about the lies told to sell the war in Iraq. The only questions were when, and how, Mr. Bush would buy Mr. Libby’s silence. Now we have the answers, and they’re at least as incriminating as the act itself. They reveal the continued ferocity of a White House cover-up and expose the true character of a commander in chief whose tough-guy shtick can no longer camouflage his fundamental cowardice.

The timing of the president’s Libby intervention was a surprise. Many assumed he would mimic the sleazy 11th-hour examples of most recent vintage: his father’s pardon of six Iran-contra defendants who might have dragged him into that scandal, and Bill Clinton’s pardon of the tax fugitive Marc Rich, the former husband of a major campaign contributor and the former client of none other than the ubiquitous Mr. Libby.

But the ever-impetuous current President Bush acted 18 months before his scheduled eviction from the White House. Even more surprising, he did so when the Titanic that is his presidency had just hit two fresh icebergs, the demise of the immigration bill and the growing revolt of Republican senators against his strategy in Iraq.

That Mr. Bush, already suffering historically low approval ratings, would invite another hit has been attributed in Washington to his desire to placate what remains of his base. By this logic, he had nothing left to lose. He didn’t care if he looked like an utter hypocrite, giving his crony a freer ride than Paris Hilton and violating the white-collar sentencing guidelines set by his own administration. He had to throw a bone to the last grumpy old white guys watching Bill O’Reilly in a bunker.

But if those die-hards haven’t deserted him by now, why would Mr. Libby’s incarceration be the final straw? They certainly weren’t whipped into a frenzy by coverage on Fox News, which tended to minimize the leak case as a non-event. Mr. Libby, faceless and voiceless to most Americans, is no Ollie North, and he provoked no right-wing firestorm akin to the uproars over Terri Schiavo, Harriet Miers or “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.

The only people clamoring for Mr. Libby’s freedom were the pundits who still believe that Saddam secured uranium in Africa and who still hope that any exoneration of Mr. Libby might make them look less like dupes for aiding and abetting the hyped case for war. That select group is not the Republican base so much as a roster of the past, present and future holders of quasi-academic titles at neocon think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute.

What this crowd never understood is that Mr. Bush’s highest priority is always to protect himself. So he stiffed them too. Had the president wanted to placate the Weekly Standard crowd, he would have given Mr. Libby a full pardon. That he served up a commutation instead is revealing of just how worried the president is about the beans Mr. Libby could spill about his and Dick Cheney’s use of prewar intelligence.

Valerie Wilson still has a civil suit pending. The Democratic inquisitor in the House, Henry Waxman, still has the uranium hoax underlying this case at the top of his agenda as an active investigation. A commutation puts up more roadblocks by keeping Mr. Libby’s appeal of his conviction alive and his Fifth Amendment rights intact. He can’t testify without risking self-incrimination. Meanwhile, we are asked to believe that he has paid his remaining $250,000 debt to society independently of his private $5 million “legal defense fund.”

The president’s presentation of the commutation is more revealing still. Had Mr. Bush really believed he was doing the right and honorable thing, he would not have commuted Mr. Libby’s jail sentence by press release just before the July Fourth holiday without consulting Justice Department lawyers. That’s the behavior of an accountant cooking the books in the dead of night, not the proud act of a patriot standing on principle.

When the furor followed Mr. Bush from Kennebunkport to Washington despite his efforts to duck it, he further underlined his embarrassment by taking his only few questions on the subject during a photo op at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. You know this president is up to no good whenever he hides behind the troops. This instance was particularly shameful, since Mr. Bush also used the occasion to trivialize the scandalous maltreatment of Walter Reed patients on his watch as merely “some bureaucratic red-tape issues.”

Asked last week to explain the president’s poll numbers, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center told NBC News that “when we ask people to summon up one word that comes to mind” to describe Mr. Bush, it’s “incompetence.” But cowardice, the character trait so evident in his furtive handling of the Libby commutation, is as important to understanding Mr. Bush’s cratered presidency as incompetence, cronyism and hubris.

Even The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, a consistent Bush and Libby defender, had to take notice. Furious that the president had not given Mr. Libby a full pardon (at least not yet), The Journal called the Bush commutation statement a “profile in non-courage.”

What it did not recognize, or chose not to recognize, is that this non-courage, to use The Journal’s euphemism, has been this president’s stock in trade, far exceeding the “wimp factor” that Newsweek once attributed to his father. The younger Mr. Bush’s cowardice is arguably more responsible for the calamities of his leadership than anything else.

People don’t change. Mr. Bush’s failure to have the courage of his own convictions was apparent early in his history, when he professed support for the Vietnam War yet kept himself out of harm’s way when he had the chance to serve in it. In the White House, he has often repeated the feckless pattern that he set back then and reaffirmed last week in his hide-and-seek bestowing of the Libby commutation.

The first fight he conspicuously ran away from as president was in August 2001. Aspiring to halt federal underwriting of embryonic stem-cell research, he didn’t stand up and say so but instead unveiled a bogus “compromise” that promised continued federal research on 60 existing stem-cell lines. Only later would we learn that all but 11 of them did not exist. When Mr. Bush wanted to endorse a constitutional amendment to “protect” marriage, he again cowered. A planned 2006 Rose Garden announcement to a crowd of religious-right supporters was abruptly moved from the sunlight into a shadowy auditorium away from the White House.

Nowhere is this president’s non-courage more evident than in the “signing statements” The Boston Globe exposed last year. As Charlie Savage reported, Mr. Bush “quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office.” Rather than veto them in public view, he signed them, waited until after the press and lawmakers left the White House, and then filed statements in the Federal Register asserting that he would ignore laws he (not the courts) judged unconstitutional. This was the extralegal trick Mr. Bush used to bypass the ban on torture. It allowed him to make a coward’s escape from the moral (and legal) responsibility of arguing for so radical a break with American practice.

In the end, it was also this president’s profile in non-courage that greased the skids for the Iraq fiasco. If Mr. Bush had had the guts to put America on a true wartime footing by appealing to his fellow citizens for sacrifice, possibly even a draft if required, then he might have had at least a chance of amassing the resources needed to secure Iraq after we invaded it.

But he never backed up the rhetoric of war with the stand-up action needed to prosecute the war. Instead he relied on fomenting fear, as typified by the false uranium claims whose genesis has been covered up by Mr. Libby’s obstructions of justice. Mr. Bush’s cowardly abdication of the tough responsibilities of wartime leadership ratified Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to go into Iraq with the army he had, ensuring our defeat.

Never underestimate the power of the unconscious. Not the least of the revelatory aspects of Mr. Bush’s commutation is that he picked the fourth anniversary of “Bring ’em on” to hand it down. It was on July 2, 2003, that the president responded to the continued violence in Iraq, two months after “Mission Accomplished,” by taunting those who want “to harm American troops.” Mr. Bush assured the world that “we’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.” The “surge” notwithstanding, we still don’t have the force necessary four years later, because the president never did summon the courage, even as disaster loomed, to back up his own convictions by going to the mat to secure that force.

No one can stop Mr. Bush from freeing a pathetic little fall guy like Scooter Libby. But only those who paid the ultimate price for the avoidable bungling of Iraq have the moral authority to pardon Mr. Bush.

Photo Credit: Frank Rich. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Also See:

Technorati tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Saturday, July 07, 2007

Impeach Dick Cheney


SIGN THE PETITION.

That's right, we said the "I" word. And you should be saying it too -- to your family, your friends, your neighbors, your pets and the hearty 26% of Americans who somehow still believe the Bush/Cheney team more worthy of sitting in the Oval Office than an undisclosed location stripped of all authority to further damage the country we love.

You'll want to say it even more after watching our video [below] with the evidence for impeachment right there.



Dick Cheney has been a malevolent force on the checks and balances of American government for over six years. He has
subverted government processes to lead us into this tragedy in Iraq, and is now seeking to do the same with Iran. Two
countries, mind you, he did business with while CEO of Halliburton.

We are at an important moment in American history. For if we don't take action in light of the High Crimes and Misdemeanors committed by one Richard Cheney, we might as well throw the word away. Because there will never be a time when it is more justified.

SIGN THE PETITION.

14 representatives already support H. Res 333, the articles of Impeachment against Dick Cheney. Your signatures will be used to get other House members to to sign on. We are working with a substantial and growing coalition led by Democrats.com and AfterDowningStreet.org.

Let's make this travesty a turning point in our history. Please join us in restoring democratic principles to our government by
IMPEACHING DICK CHENEY.

Sincerely,

Robert, Cliff, Paris, Jim G and the entire
Brave New Films team

For more great Dick Cheney video, visit Brave New Films.org.

Also See:

  • Strike the root!

  • Why impeachment of Cheney and Bush is imperative:
    "Impeaching, convicting and removing Dick Cheney and George W. Bush from office goes beyond punishing them for their crimes. It goes to sending a message to their successors, assuming there will be successors come January 20, 2009, that no one is above the law and failure to 'preserve, protect and defend' the US Constitution, criminality and corruption will not be tolerated...."
  • A place to push impeachment - Los Angeles Times

  • Time Is Right for New Pentagon Papers:
    "Sitting next to West and Gravel, Ellsberg repeated the plea that he is making in speeches all over the United States: 'The equivalent of the Pentagon Papers exist in safes all over Washington, not only in the Pentagon, but in the CIA, the State Department and elsewhere. My message is to them: Take the risk, reveal the truth under the lies of your own bosses and your superiors, obey your oath to the Constitution, which every one of those officials took, not to the commander in chief, but to the Constitution of the United States.'..."
  • A President Besieged and Isolated, Yet at Ease - washingtonpost.com

  • The Subcommittee on the Constitution | AfterDowningStreet.org:
    "Dennis Kucinich did an end run around Nancy Pelosi, introducing a bill to impeach Cheney in April (HRes 333). It is aquiring cosponsors and has now been referred to the subcommitte on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. Here is a link to the subcommitte's web page...."
  • Editor & Publisher | Editorials Hit Libby's Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card:
    "The bloggers, politicians, and TV pundits weighed in quickly Monday after President Bush took the surprisingly sudden step of commuting Lewis "Scooter" Libby's 30-month prison sentence for perjury and obstruction of justice in the CIA leak case. Now newspaper editorials are appearing, and nearly all of them have condemned the Bush act...."
  • The Historical Origins of Impeachment | The Intentions of the Framers
    The following is from a report written and released by the Judiciary Committee in 1974 in the aftermath of the Watergate crisis: “In the [Virgina] convention George Mason argued that the President might use his pardoning power to ‘pardon crimes which were advised by himself’ or, before indictment or conviction, ‘to stop inquiry and prevent detection.’ James Madison responded: ‘[I]f the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds tp believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty.’”
  • David Sirota: Why Washington's Pundits Are Scared of You:
    "...at some point in the last few years, things changed. The people - those sheep that the Heroic Herders like Krauthammer and Will bravely corralled, those unwashed masses that the Courageous Cleansers like Klein and Friedman valiantly scrubbed down - the people found their own power through the Internet, through thousands of blogs like this one, through newsletters, through alternative media and - gasp! - through actual organizing. The pundits have lost their ability to order the people's representatives around. They have lost their ability to rule. In short, they have been stripped of their 'ocracy' - and we are led to believe that means we are experiencing a national or even global crisis...."
  • Tom Paine Would Impeach Them | John Nichols, The Nation:
    Paine and his contemporaries were brave in facing a tyrant named George. We must follow in their footsteps.
Technorati tags: , , , , , ,
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Friday, July 06, 2007

ACLU Slams Appeals Court Decision in NSA Surveillance Case

Court Allows Bush Administration to Continue Illegal Wiretapping:
CINCINNATI - In a 2-1 decision, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals today dismissed a legal challenge to the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program. The challenge was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of prominent journalists, scholars, attorneys and national nonprofit organizations who say that the unchecked surveillance program is disrupting their ability to communicate effectively with sources and clients.

Even though the plaintiffs alleged a well-founded fear that their communications were subject to illegal surveillance, the court dismissed the case because plaintiffs could not state with certainty that they had been wiretapped by the National Security Agency.

The following quote can be attributed to ACLU Legal Director Steven R. Shapiro:

“We are deeply disappointed by today’s decision that insulates the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance activities from judicial review and deprives Americans of any ability to challenge the illegal surveillance of their telephone calls and e-mails. As a result of today’s decision, the Bush administration has been left free to violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which Congress adopted almost 30 years ago to prevent the executive branch from engaging in precisely this kind of unchecked surveillance.

“It is important to emphasize that the court today did not uphold the legality of the government’s warrantless surveillance activity. Indeed, the only judge to discuss the merits clearly and unequivocally declared that the warrantless surveillance was unlawful.

“We are currently reviewing all of our legal options, including taking this challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the meantime it is now more important than ever for Congress to engage in meaningful oversight.”

On June 27, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy issued subpoenas to the White House, Vice President and the Justice Department for documents about warrantless surveillance. The deadline for compliance is July 18.

Today’s decision is online at:
www.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/07a0253p-06.pdf

Also See:

  • Adam Liptak, New York Times reports:
    "A divided federal appeals court yesterday dismissed a case challenging the National Security Agency’s program to wiretap without warrants the international communications of some Americans, reversing a trial judge’s order that the program be shut down.

    The majority in a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, ruled on a narrow ground, saying the plaintiffs, including lawyers and journalists, could not show injury direct and concrete enough to allow them to have standing to sue.

    Because it may be impossible for any plaintiff to demonstrate injury from the highly classified wiretapping program, the effect of the ruling was to insulate it from judicial scrutiny. Thus, the program’s secrecy is proving to be its best legal protection...."
Technorati tags: , , , , ,
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Sacrifice Is for Suckers

Again, people, impeachment is the only answer....

Sacrifice Is for Suckers
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
On this Fourth of July, President Bush compared the Iraq war to the Revolutionary War, and called for “more patience, more courage and more sacrifice.” Unfortunately, it seems that nobody asked the obvious question: “What sacrifices have you and your friends made, Mr. President?”

On second thought, there would be no point in asking that question. In Mr. Bush’s world, only the little people make sacrifices.

You see, the Iraq war, although Mr. Bush insists that it’s part of a Global War on Terror™, a fight to the death between good and evil, isn’t like America’s other great wars — wars in which the wealthy shared the financial burden through higher taxes and many members of the elite fought for their country.

This time around, Mr. Bush celebrated Mission Accomplished by cutting tax rates on dividends and capital gains, while handing out huge no-bid contracts to politically connected corporations. And in the four years since, as the insurgency Mr. Bush initially taunted with the cry of “Bring them on” has claimed the lives of thousands of Americans and left thousands more grievously wounded, the children of the elite — especially the Republican elite — have been conspicuously absent from the battlefield.

The Bushies, it seems, like starting fights, but they don’t believe in paying any of the cost of those fights or bearing any of the risks. Above all, they don’t believe that they or their friends should face any personal or professional penalties for trivial sins like distorting intelligence to get America into an unnecessary war, or totally botching that war’s execution.

The Web site Think Progress has a summary of what happened to the men behind the war after we didn’t find W.M.D., and weren’t welcomed as liberators: “The architects of war: Where are they now?” To read that summary is to be awed by the comprehensiveness and generosity of the neocon welfare system. Even Paul Wolfowitz, who managed the rare feat of messing up not one but two high-level jobs, has found refuge at the American Enterprise Institute.

Which brings us to the case of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby Jr.

The hysteria of the neocons over the prospect that Mr. Libby might actually do time for committing perjury was a sight to behold. In an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal titled “Fallen Soldier,” Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University cited the soldier’s creed: “I will never leave a fallen comrade.” He went on to declare that “Scooter Libby was a soldier in your — our — war in Iraq.”

Ah, yes. Shuffling papers in an air-conditioned Washington office is exactly like putting your life on the line in Anbar or Baghdad. Spending 30 months in a minimum-security prison, with a comfortable think-tank job waiting at the other end, is exactly like having half your face or both your legs blown off by an I.E.D.

What lay behind the hysteria, of course, was the prospect that for the very first time one of the people who tricked America into war, then endangered national security yet again in the effort to cover their tracks, might pay some price. But Mr. Ajami needn’t have worried.

Back when the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity began, Mr. Bush insisted that if anyone in his administration had violated the law, “that person will be taken care of.” Now we know what he meant. Mr. Bush hasn’t challenged the verdict in the Libby case, and other people convicted of similar offenses have spent substantial periods of time in prison. But Mr. Libby goes free.

Oh, and don’t fret about the fact that Mr. Libby still had to pay a fine. Does anyone doubt that his friends will find a way to pick up the tab?

Mr. Bush says that Mr. Libby’s punishment remains “harsh” because his reputation is “forever damaged.” Meanwhile, Mr. Bush employs, as a deputy national security adviser, none other than Elliott Abrams, who pleaded guilty to unlawfully withholding information from Congress in the Iran-contra affair. Mr. Abrams was one of six Iran-contra defendants pardoned by Mr. Bush’s father, who was himself a subject of the special prosecutor’s investigation of the scandal.

In other words, obstruction of justice when it gets too close to home is a family tradition. And being a loyal Bushie means never having to say you’re sorry.

Photo Credit: Paul Krugman. (The New York Times)
Technorati tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted by at 4 comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

A National Gut-Check: Who Lives Better?

By Timothy Egan
Guest Columnist
The New York Times
"One of the memorable scenes in 'Sicko,' Michael Moore’s latest cinematic provocation, comes from France, where he shows doctors in their little white cars making house calls — for free.

But it’s not just France. When we lived in Italy some time ago, a doctor came to our farmhouse rental on Easter Sunday morning to diagnose a stomach ailment. He charged nothing.

Let’s stipulate that Moore is a one-sided pamphleteer, with a bit of Mark Twain and Pat Robertson in his schtick. But like all propagandists, his job is not to find some objective truth, but to anger, challenge, ask hard questions.

With Independence Day just passed, a good nationalist shouldn’t be afraid to answer those questions. So, who lives better, us or them?

In Italy, this was a regular parlor game when friends came to visit. Inevitably, after a few days of taking in our new world — a village public school for the kids, neighbors who opened the doors of their ancient homes to us, a lengthy siesta every afternoon — our houseguests would side with the Italians. I would counter for the U.S.A., to keep the argument alive.

The Italians won on health, family and food. The United States was better on race and opportunity.

With health care, the anecdotal often carried the argument. One day, a tenant farmer named Sergio, our neighbor, woke with a terrible eye infection. He was full of pain, unable to see. Sergio got world-class care in Florence. After three days of attentive fussing in the hospital, he came home entirely well and without a bill.

Had he showed up at any American hospital — poor, no insurance — well, good luck. Especially in a place like Texas, where 30 percent of adults lack health insurance and what can pass for medical care is a get-in-line form of triage.

But even with insurance, Americans are stuck with what may be the worst of all systems: one that lets a handful of corporations make life-and-death decisions, with incentive to dump and deny.

Little wonder that the United States ranks 37th in effectiveness of health care. Italy ranks 2nd. This is a country that can’t form a government to last longer than the soccer season, and yet, they make our medical system look barbaric.

If our system doesn’t kill you — see the infant mortality and life expectancy rates, bringing up the rear — it can put you in the poorhouse. Medical catastrophes are the leading cause of bankruptcy, and most of those are people who have some insurance, clinging to the frayed edge of the middle class.

O.K., so what about leisure? Americans spend nearly a third of their disposable income on good times, baby. But we can’t relax. Sorry — no time. Lunch averages 31 minutes. And the U.S. ranks dead last among 21 of the world’s richest countries when it comes to guaranteed days off, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Most Americans don’t even use their allotted days of leisure. The Italians take 42 vacation days a year — No. 1 in the world. The average American takes 13.

A quarter of Americans receive no vacation at all. And it’s not like we don’t need it: one in three are chronically overworked. We even work 100 hours a year more than the Japanese.

President Bush has it figured out, with his month off at the ranch. But for a profile in clueless, Bush set the mark when he lauded as truly American some citizen who told him she had to work three jobs. Ain’t that something?

Ah, but what about taxes? Europeans pay more than we do, to fund that free health care. Take that, Euro-trash, while lying on the beach. And yet, our tax system is approaching Gilded Age disparity. Listen to Warren Buffett, the third richest man in the world. Last year, he was taxed at 17 percent of his taxable income, he said last month. His receptionist paid nearly twice that, at 30 percent.

Where America shines is with our multiracial society and the easy access to opportunity. It was jarring to listen to otherwise thoughtful Tuscans denigrate Ethiopian immigrants or even their Sicilian countrymen.

By contrast, nothing made me prouder than telling Italians that I came from a place with an African-American mayor and a Chinese-American governor. Or that I grew up in a big Irish-American family with little money.

A patriot should not be afraid to have this debate, vigorously — after a nap.

Timothy Egan, a former Seattle correspondent for The Times and the author of 'The Worst Hard Time,' is a guest columnist."
Technorati tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,

Censure? Not Good Enough.


Larry Lipman reports in "Wexler: Censure Bush Over Libby":
"Rep. Robert Wexler says President Bush's commutation of Scooter Libby's prison sentence "is nothing short of (a) political quid pro quo, and Congress must go on record in strong opposition.

Wexler has drafted a resolution to censure Bush and plans to introduce it when Congress returns next Tuesday. A censure is a rare public reprimand but does not carry any other penalty...."
Sorry, Representative Wexler. Censure is not enough. It has become abundantly clear that his administration doesn't respond to criticism from anyone and has done its best to stonewall Congressional investigations, subpoenas, inquiries and oversight. Do you really think that they give a hoot whether or not Congress censures Bush's decision to commute Libby's sentence?

The only thing that will stop the gross abuses of power, the corruption, and the lies propagated by this administration is impeachment.

Polls show that the majority of the American people are in favor of it. The often repeated Democratic Party excuse that "impeachment would not be good for the country" is not only dead wrong -- the opposite is true.

Impeachment is the only thing that will hold this administration accountable and prevent subsequent administrations from committing the same abuses. Impeachment is the most efficient way not only to end the abuses, but to begin extricating our troops from Iraq. Impeachment is the best way to restore the American public's quickly waning faith in Congress. Impeachment is the quickest way to begin to repair our tarnished image around the world.

Contrary to party spin, impeachment would be the single most positive thing you could do for this country. There is no downside.

So why, we must ask, is impeachment of Bush and Cheney still, despite new administration abuses daily, off the Democratic leadership's table? Anyone care to venture a guess?

Photo Credit: Rep. Robert Wexler. (PalmBeachPost.com)

Also See:

Technorati tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

How To Create Real 4th of July Fireworks:



Demand Bush/Cheney Resign!

Also See:



Technorati tags: , , ,
Posted by at 1 comment:
Labels: , , ,

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Bush And Cheney: Resign Now



Thanks to Crooks and Liars for posting tonight's Special Comment by Keith Olbermann: "You Ceased to be the President of the United States." Tonight's comment is not only one of Olbermann's most powerful and timely; it is literally the only thing that kept me from chartering a plane to anywhere but the USA after watching Snow-Job's press conference and Bush's "statement" about his commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence. (I don't know about the rest of you, but It was blatantly obvious to me that there was a voice (Karl Rove?) in Bushie's ear feeding him every carefully-selected-to-protect-him-legally-and-politically-word; it was as maddening as it was pitiful.

Then along comes Olbermann, and immediately I am reassured that I am not the only person on earth that realizes that we are allowing criminals to reside in OUR WHITE HOUSE.

Watch Keith for yourself. There is also a transcript available at the same link.

Then please, act. Demonstrate, protest, demand Bush/Cheney resign, demand they be impeached, whatever you have to do to rid this country of the vermin who have sabotaged it.

Technorati tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted by at 2 comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

2008: Time For A Change?

Maureen Dowd's satirical take on Bill and Hillary in today's Times op ed begs the question, "Do we really want another term with the Clintons in the White House? The time was never more right for new blood, folks -- no more Bushies and no more Clintons, been there, done that.

The question is will anyone emerge with the credentials and ability to execute a bold, positive vision for the country? Or will be faced in 2008 with yet more lesser-of-two-evil politico choices? Sure looks as though that's the way we're headed, doesn't it?

One House, Two Presidents, a Million Melodramas
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times
Hillary looks over at her husband.

He’s in a pretty good mood. He just finished a grilled chicken sandwich from the Dairy Queen near Grinnell, and as a reward for eating healthy, she gave him a bite of her Snickers Blizzard. Crowds all over Iowa have been clamoring for him. Here in the privacy of their black S.U.V., driving through flat Iowa farmland with the press bus trailing, she senses an opportune moment to iron out a few wrinkles.

As Bill works on The New York Times crossword puzzle, Hill tugs on the sleeve of his black shirt in what she hopes is a playful manner.

“Sweetie,” she says, smiling brightly. “Everything’s going really well. You abide by your five-minute limit and talk only about me. You’re still having a little trouble getting that adoring smile down. In fact, on our first stop you actually looked bored and fidgety while I was talking. But I think we solved that problem today by having you leave the stage as soon as I start speaking. If you can just refrain from looking so longingly at the microphone, our pas de deux will be perfect!”

Her smile fades. “Of course,” she frowns, “there was that awkward moment when I said Bush should not have commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence because he was elevating cronyism over the rule of law, and there you were, Mr. Elevate-Cronyism-Over-The-Rule-of-Law, sitting on a stool right behind me in that look-at-me Crayola yellow shirt, reminding everyone of that passel of pardons you sneaked in under the wire, including one for that fugitive tax-evader Marc Rich, whose ex-wife was your fund-raiser and whose lawyer was — can it get any worse? — Scooter Libby! And as soon as we get out of cow country, you’ve got to start dialing for dollars. How could that pest Obama outraise us by $10 million?”

Bill looks dolefully at her, his pen poised in midair. “What’s a seven-letter word for ball-and-chain,” he asks. “Hillary?”

“ ‘Partner,’ ” she replies briskly. “Now listen, Bill, this is important. Everyone’s asking what your role in my administration will be, and I think it’s time we figure that out.”

“Oh, baby,” he says, taking her hand. “Don’t fret over me. I’ll be as happy as a tick on Al Gore. I’ll resolve some little conflicts here and there, stop some genocides, powwow with Tony Blair in the Green Zone. Maybe I’ll be U.N. Secretary General, or some little thing like that.

“You focus on the big stuff, sweetcakes. I’ll just be hanging with Vernon in the East Wing, or maybe in a suite at Blair House, organizing some spouse retreats. I think I could learn a lot from Cécilia Sarkozy. French, after all, is the language of diplomacy. And I could do some bipartisan outreach with, oh, I don’t know, maybe Fred Thompson’s wife? She seems smart.”

“You know, hon,” Hillary says, shaking off his hand. “Hillaryland has some ideas about Billville.”

“I have ideas, too,” he interrupts, excitedly. “I can redecorate the family quarters, get Kaki Hokersmith to come by with some leopard-skin swatches, get rid of all that boring stuff Laura Bush brought in after we left. Put up my Salma Hayek poster. Maybe have an open bar in the Lincoln Bedroom. Call it Club Mandela.

“I’ve been the first black president, the first female president and now I’m going to be the first man who’s First Lady, with my own staff of ladies — ”

“BILL!” Hillary shouts. “Enough! Hillaryland has spoken. You’re not going to have your own office in the East Wing or your own staff there. And don’t even think of pulling a Cheney and destroying the visitor logs. We’re going to set up a desk for you in the Oval. In Hillaryland, we say: Keep your friends close but your husband closer. You’ll have a nice little room of your own in the pantry. You were, after all, the guy who put the pant in pantry.”

“That sounds great, my little Arkansas watermelon,” he coos. “I love the time I spend with your big gang of chicks. But alas, I’ll have to be out of the country a lot of the time as your roving ambassador.”

“Speaking of roving, don’t even think about going on your Hollywood rat pack’s planes after I’m elected,” she snaps. “Strictly Air Force for you, mister, with extra federal marshals. You promised me two terms after your two terms, and I’m not going to get that if you’re caught Burkling or Binging. And Hillaryland wants you to use the title Mr. Ambassador after the corona— , I mean, inauguration. Two presidents in one White House will be too confusing.”

Her voice softening, she asks, “Do you know what your First Lad project will be?”

“ ‘Just Say Yes?’ ” he proffers. Going back to his crossword puzzle, he asks, “Do you know an eight-letter word for `loving wife?’ ”

“Overlord,” she replies, smiling lovingly.

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
Technorati tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted by at 2 comments:
Labels: , , ,

Website That Predicted London Bombs an Intelligence Agency Front

Paul Joseph Watson (informationliberation) reports:

Fellow jihadist forums claim Al Hesbah infiltrated and controlled by ISI, CIA

An Islamic website that carried a doomsday message that "London shall be bombed" before the discovery of two crude car bombs in London last week was notorious for having long been infiltrated and controlled by intelligence agencies and spooks who were trying to entrap suspected terrorists.

Hours before London explosives technicians dismantled a large car bomb in the heart of the British capital's tourist-rich theater district, a message appeared on one of the most widely used jihadist Internet forums, saying: "Today I say: Rejoice, by Allah, London shall be bombed," reported CBS News on Friday.

The website in question, Al Hesbah, has been attacked by other similar jihadist Internet forums for being a tool of intelligence agencies to monitor and entrap Islamic extremists.

The Al-Tajdeed website launched a campaign in March of last year in an attempt to expose Al Hesbah for "serving Arab and Western intelligence agencies, as well as exposing the founders of the famous Al-Ansar website (www.al-ansar.org), including the operator known as "Irhabi 007" and other members of the Global Islamic Media Front," according to a report by Gabriel Weimann, professor of communication at Haifa University, Israel.

This was also reported by The Intelligence Summit, a non-profit group that monitors Islamic websites.

According to the Jamestown Foundation, suspicions were cast that the Saudi ISI (which is wholly controlled by the CIA) had infiltrated Al-Hesbah and gleaned information leading to the rapid arrests of suspects linked to the attack on the Abqaiq oil facility in February 2006.

The website was subsequently suspended after two of its foremost users, Muhammad al-Zuhayri and Muhammad Tamallat, were exposed as intelligence agents.

It is by no means conclusive, but certainly interesting that a website charged with being a front for Western and Arab intelligence agencies was the venue for the proclamation that London would be bombed hours before the car bombs were actually discovered.

Related Articles:

Technorati tags: , , , , , ,
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: ,

Arrested Development

This is America. This is American freedom. This is Bush World:

Harassed in the Classroom
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times
Michael Soguero was a first-rate principal at Bronx Guild High School. He loved his job, and he loved teaching in New York. He has not blamed the New York City Police Department for his departure to a school in Estes Park, Colo. Nevertheless, the facts are the facts.

Back on Feb. 3, 2005, a student came running into Mr. Soguero’s office at Bronx Guild to say that a police officer was in a classroom. “I jumped up and ran to the classroom,” Mr. Soguero told me in an interview last week. “I found this officer, Gonzalez, exchanging words with a female student.

“Everyone is sitting down except for the teacher and these two. The girl was saying, ‘What did I do? What are you talking to me about?’ ”

What was about to unfold was another episode of bizarrely excessive police activity inside a New York City public school.

The girl, who was 16, had apparently uttered a curse word in a hallway. While that is undoubtedly inappropriate behavior, it is hardly a criminal offense. The police officer, Juan Gonzalez, who was part of a security task force assigned to the school, had followed the girl into the classroom.

Mr. Soguero quieted things down and asked the officer to leave the room, which he did. “I got the girl to sit down and I told her I would talk to her later to address this,” Mr. Soguero said. He thought the crisis was over.

The principal was shocked when he walked out of the classroom. Officer Gonzalez was waiting and made it clear that he wanted the girl arrested.

“He told me,” said Mr. Soguero in the interview, “that I had two minutes to ‘bring her out here.’ I said, ‘I’m not bringing her out here.’ ”

The angry officer, according to Mr. Soguero, barged past him and into the classroom. “I followed him,” said Mr. Soguero, “and he’s pushing desks aside, walking through students to get at her, disrupting everything. She’s sitting in a chair. He grabs her arm, her left arm with his right hand, and he’s reaching back to grab his cuffs. At that point I walked around him and physically stood in between the two of them.”

This sort of thing, the police wildly overreacting to behavior by schoolkids that is not criminal, happens much more often than most New Yorkers realize. Officer Gonzalez behaved as if he were rounding up the James gang. He arrested the girl. He arrested Mr. Soguero. And he arrested a school aide who had tried to come to the principal’s defense.

Mr. Soguero was handcuffed in full view of everyone — students, teachers, staff — and marched out of the school. Later the police paraded him in front of news photographers in a humiliating “perp walk.”

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly supported Officer Gonzalez, telling reporters at the time, “The principal was simply wrong.”

But that was not the case. There was no evidence that a crime had been committed, and the charges were later dropped. Mr. Soguero, who was suspended by school authorities at the time of his arrest, was allowed to resume the post of principal.

Now, more than two years after the incident, I learned from the Police Department that Mr. Gonzalez is indeed a problem officer, despite the initial knee-jerk support he received from the commissioner, from the Bronx district attorney, Robert Johnson, and from others in the criminal justice system.

In response to a query last week, Commissioner Kelly’s office disclosed that Officer Gonzalez is currently on “modified assignment.” His gun and badge have been taken away. But the department declined yesterday to disclose further details.

The Soguero incident is among many outlined in a report from the New York Civil Liberties Union titled “Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Schools.” Students, teachers and principals who have done nothing wrong are frequently harassed, abused and in some cases arrested and jailed by cops who are supposed to be on the lookout for criminal activity.

It’s common for police officers to belittle and curse at students. And many students have complained about “pat-downs” and intrusive searches by the police.

This is part of what appears to be a widespread campaign of police harassment against young people in New York, especially young people who are black or Latino.

If Rudy Giuliani were mayor, much of the city would be in an uproar over this kind of behavior by the police. Instead, all we’re hearing is a disturbing silence.

Photo Credit: Bob Herbert. (The New York Times)
Technorati tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Monday, July 02, 2007

This July 4th: Put away the flags

By Howard Zinn
The Progressive
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

These ways of thinking -- cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on -- have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours -- huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction -- what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.

That self-deception started early.

When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession."

When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: "It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day."

On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our "Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence." After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: "We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country."

It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war.

We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, "to civilize and Christianize" the Filipino people.

As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: "The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness."

We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.

Yet they are victims, too, of our government's lies.

How many times have we heard President Bush tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for "liberty," for "democracy"?

One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail in 2004 that God speaks through him.

We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.

We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.

Howard Zinn, a World War II bombardier, is the author of the best-selling "A People's History of the United States" (Perennial Classics, 2003, latest edition). This piece was distributed by the Progressive Media Project in 2006.
Hat tip to Al B.

Technorati tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Should YOU Be President?

From positivepress.com:
"Who should you really support? Here at Attitude Media we don't believe the American Presidential election should be decided by personality, or gender, or who has the best sound bites. If you agree with us that issues matter, then take the following objectively designed short survey to see which of the leading candidates most agree with your position on a wide variety of issues - and also who least agrees with those positions - you may be surprised!

We also rank you, as if you were running for president, and see how your positions rank according to the votes of other survey takers...."

Here are my test results:

Your Presidential Candidate Rankings

Below are the presidential candidates listed with the "best matching" candidates first. The candidate at the top is the one that would provide the closest answers to the ones you provided in the survey.

Dennis Kucinich
John Edwards
Barack Obama
Hillary Clinton
Bill Richardson
Ron Paul
John McCain
Mike Huckabee
Mitt Romney
Rudy Giuliani

Overall Presidential Candidate Rankings

Below are the presidential candidates listed with the "best matching" candidates first, using the average matching score for every user that's taken the survey (a total of 14366 submissions).

Candidate Average Score

Ron Paul 4.05
YOU 3.28
Bill Richardson 2.47
Barack Obama 2.35
Hillary Clinton 2.35
John Edwards 1.64
Dennis Kucinich 0.75
Mike Huckabee 0.43
Mitt Romney 0.43
John McCain -0.86
Rudy Giuliani -1.07

Your Turn. READY? Take the test and see what you're made of: Click Here.

Technorati tags: , ,
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: ,

White House Misrepresents Cheney's Classification Authority

Steve Aftergood of Secrecy News reports:
"The White House press office and some Bush Administration critics are insisting that the 2003 executive order on classification policy endowed the Vice President with a unique status and classification powers identical to those of the President himself.

But that's not what the executive order says."
Technorati tags: , , , , ,
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , ,

New NSA Whistleblower Speaks

David Swanson | Truthout:
"A former member of US military intelligence has decided to reveal what she knows about warrantless spying on Americans and about the fixing of intelligence in the leadup to the invasion of Iraq...."
Technorati tags: , , , , , ,
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

BREAKING: Bush Commutes Sentence of Libby From Prison

This is disgusting and unacceptable. Yet one more reason Bush/Cheney should be impeached. Click on the link to the right and send a letter to your representative telling him/her so.

"Bush Spares Libby From Prison:
President Bush commuted the sentence of former aide I. Lewis Libby Jr., sparing him from a 30-month prison term. Mr. Libby was convicted of lying to authorities and obstructing the investigation in the C.I.A. leak case...."

Watch Bush in the following clip address his staff on ethics in January of 2001 and see how well he lives up to his own words:



Then take Joe Biden's advice:
"...Last week Vice President Cheney asserted that he was beyond the reach of the law. Today, President Bush demonstrated the lengths he would go to, ensuring that even aides to Dick Cheney are beyond the judgment of the law.

It is time for the American people to be heard.

I call for all Americans to flood the White House with phone calls tomorrow expressing their outrage over this blatant disregard for the rule of law.

202-456-1414

Remind George Bush what he told staffers during a swearing in ceremony for White House staff back in January 2001:

"[We] must remember the high standards that come with high office. This begins with careful adherence to the rules. I expect every member of this administration to stay well within the boundaries that define legal and ethical conduct. This means avoiding even the appearance of problems. This means checking and, if need be, double- checking that the rules have been obeyed. This means never compromising those rules. No one in the White House should be afraid to confront the people they work for, for ethical concerns, and no one should hesitate to confront me as well. We are all accountable to one another. And above all, we are all accountable to the law and to the American people."


Technorati tags: , , ,
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)