Colbert Was Brutal to Bushie

Stephen Colbert was brutal to Bushie at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. (Scroll down for links to the video.)

Colbert ripped the Great Decider into miniscule bloody shreds. Only a few feet away from Colbert, the pResident's splotched and botoxy red face appeared to be in imperial pain.

Said Colbert, "When the president decides something on Monday, he still believes it on Wednesday - no matter what happened Tuesday."

Among his many close-at-hand targets, Colbert tore into Scalia, McCain, Tony Snow and the media.

"Fox believes in presenting both sides of the story — the president’s side and the vice president’s side."

The segment on Helen Thomas and her still unanswered question was a nice tribute to America's bravest journalist.

And to think the Great Decider had to sit through it all! The indignity!

Something is seriously wrong with the monarchy.

But you can hear Colbert and see the Great Decider's red face over at Crooks and Liars where there is a discussion by people who saw the entire scandalous show on CSPAN. Or you can see a shorter/edited version at One Good Move.

I hear CSPAN will replay the entire brutalizing Bushie event later today.

UPDATE: Everybody's talking about the courage, or unmitigated gall, of Stephen Colbert. The Moderate Voice has a nice round up from the left and the right. Also, see the E&P.

UPDATE 2: I just watched it again. Gawd, Colbert is fearless! Only in America do you find your best and bravest journalists over at Comedy Central. (With the notable exception of Helen Thomas.) CNN has been playing the Bush the Clown segment of the dinner all day and ignoring Colbert's Goring of the pResident. And isn't it funny how everybody on the internets is doing the exact opposite? Perhaps MSM will awaken a little bit tomorrow, I mean Colbert gave them such a BIG CLUE: Reality has a liberal bias. But stay tuned this week as Stephen Colbert's ratings soar. Question: Who set it up so that Colbert would have the last word?

You can see all of Colbert's Goring of the pResident in these three video installments, one, two, three. And here's a transcript.

Bush Colbert Video Stephen Colbert Fox News Tony Snow King George Helen Thomas War White House Mission Accomplished

David Brooks: Stuck in Adolescence

Today, the conservative NY Times columnist, David Brooks imagines that because he's stuck in adolescence, we all are. It's good for a laugh.

Lunch Period Poli Sci

David Brooks Brooks

Rich: Bush of a Thousand Days

by Frank Rich

LIKE the hand that suddenly pops out of the grave at the end of "Carrie," the past keeps coming back to haunt the Bush White House. Last week was no exception. No sooner did the Great Decider introduce the Fox News showman anointed to repackage the same old bad decisions than the spotlight shifted back to Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury room, where Karl Rove testified for a fifth time. Nightfall brought the release of an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll with its record-low numbers for a lame-duck president with a thousand days to go and no way out.

The demons that keep rising up from the past to grab Mr. Bush are the fictional W.M.D. he wielded to take us into Iraq. They stalk him as relentlessly as Banquo's ghost did Macbeth. From that original sin, all else flows. Mr. Rove wouldn't be in jeopardy if the White House hadn't hatched a clumsy plot to cover up its fictions. Mr. Bush's poll numbers wouldn't be in the toilet if American blood was not being spilled daily because of his fictions. By recruiting a practiced Fox News performer to better spin this history, the White House reveals that it has learned nothing. Made-for-TV propaganda propelled the Bush presidency into its quagmire in the first place. At this late date only the truth, the whole and nothing but, can set it free.

All too fittingly, Tony Snow's appointment was announced just before May Day, a red-letter day twice over in the history of the Iraq war. It was on May 1 three years ago that Mr. Bush did his victory jig on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. It was May 1 last year that The Sunday Times of London published the so-called Downing Street memo. These events bracket all that has gone wrong and will keep going wrong for this president until he comes clean.

To mark the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion last month, the White House hyped something called Operation Swarmer, "the largest air assault" since the start of the war, complete with Pentagon-produced video suitable for the evening news. (What the operation actually accomplished as either warfare or P.R. remains a mystery.) It will take nothing less than a replay of D-Day with the original cast to put a happy gloss on tomorrow's anniversary. Looking back at "Mission Accomplished" now is like playing that childhood game of "What's wrong with this picture?" It wasn't just the banner or the "Top Gun" joyride or the declaration of the end of "major combat operations" that was bogus. Everything was fake except the troops.

"We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools," Mr. Bush said on that glorious day. Three years later we know, courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers, that our corrupt, Enron-like Iraq reconstruction effort has yielded at most 20 of those 142 promised hospitals. But we did build a palace for ourselves. The only building project on time and on budget, USA Today reported, is a $592 million embassy complex in the Green Zone on acreage the size of 80 football fields. Symbolically enough, it will have its own water-treatment plant and power generator to provide the basic services that we still have not restored to pre-invasion levels for the poor unwashed Iraqis beyond the American bunker.

These days Mr. Bush seems to be hoping that we'll just forget every falsehood in his "Mission Accomplished" oration. Trying to deflect a citizen's hostile question about prewar intelligence claims, the president asserted at a public forum last month that he had never said "there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein." But on May 1, 2003, as on countless other occasions, he repeatedly made that direct connection. "With those attacks the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States," he intoned then. "And war is what they got." It was typical of the bait-and-switch rhetoric he used to substitute a war of choice against an enemy who did not attack us on 9/11 for the war against the non-Iraqi terrorists who did.

At the time, "Mission Accomplished" was cheered by the Beltway establishment. "This fellow's won a war," the dean of the capital's press corps, David Broder, announced on "Meet the Press" after complimenting the president on the "great sense of authority and command" he exhibited in a flight suit. By contrast, the Washington grandees mostly ignored the Downing Street memo when it was first published in Britain, much as they initially underestimated the import of the Valerie Wilson leak investigation.

The Downing Street memo — minutes of a Tony Blair meeting with senior advisers in July 2002, nearly eight months before the war began — has proved as accurate as "Mission Accomplished" was fantasy. Each week brings new confirmation that the White House, as the head of British intelligence put it, was determined to fix "the intelligence and facts" around its predetermined policy of going to war in Iraq. Today Mr. Bush tries to pass the buck on the missing W.M.D. to "faulty intelligence," but his alibi is springing leaks faster than the White House and the C.I.A. can clamp down on them. We now know the president knew that the intelligence he cherry-picked was faulty — and flogged it anyway to sell us the war.

The latest evidence that Mr. Bush knew that "uranium from Africa" was no slam-dunk when he brandished it in his 2003 State of the Union address was uncovered by The Washington Post: the coordinating council for the 15 American intelligence agencies had already informed the White House that the Niger story had no factual basis and should be dropped. Last Sunday "60 Minutes" augmented this storyline and an earlier scoop by Lisa Myers of NBC News by reporting that the White House had deliberately ignored its most highly placed prewar informant, Saddam's final foreign minister, Naji Sabri, once he sent the word that Saddam's nuclear cupboard was bare.

"There was almost a concern we'd find something that would slow up the war," Tyler Drumheller, a 26-year C.I.A. veteran and an on-camera source for "60 Minutes," said when I interviewed him last week. Since retiring from the C.I.A. in fall 2004, Mr. Drumheller has played an important role in revealing White House chicanery, including its dire hawking of Saddam's mobile biological weapons labs, which turned out to be fictitious. Before Colin Powell's fateful U.N. presentation, Mr. Drumheller conveyed vociferous warnings that the sole human source on these nonexistent W.M.D. labs, an Iraqi émigré known as Curveball, was mentally unstable and a fabricator. "The real tragedy of this," Mr. Drumheller says, "is if they had let the weapons inspectors play out, we could have had a Gulf War I-like coalition, which would have given us the [300,000] to 400,000 troops needed to secure the country after defeating the Iraqi Army."

Mr. Drumheller says that until the White House "comes to grips with why it did this" and stops "propping up the original rationale" for the war, it "will never get out of Iraq." He is right. But the White House clings to its discredited fictions even though their expiration date is fast arriving. There are new Drumhellers seeking out reporters each day. The Fitzgerald investigation continues to yield revelations of administration W.M.D. subterfuge, president-authorized leaks included. Should the Democrats retake either house of Congress in November, their subpoena power will liberate the investigation of the manipulation of prewar intelligence that the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts, has stalled for almost two years.

SET against this reality, the debate about Donald Rumsfeld's future is as much of a sideshow as the installation of a slicker Fleischer-McClellan marketer in the White House press room. The defense secretary's catastrophic mistakes in Iraq cannot be undone now, and any successor would still be beholden to the policy set from above. Mr. Rumsfeld is merely a useful, even essential, scapegoat for the hawks in politics and punditland who are now embarrassed to have signed on to this fiasco. For conservative hawks, he's a convenient way to deflect blame from where it most belongs: with the commander in chief. For liberal hawks, attacking Mr. Rumsfeld for his poor execution of the war means never having to say you're sorry for leaping on (and abetting) the blatant propaganda bandwagon that took us there. But their history can't be rewritten any more than Mr. Bush's can: the war's failures were manifestly foretold by the administration's arrogance and haste during the run-up.

A new defense or press secretary changes nothing. The only person who can try to save the administration from itself in Iraq is the president. He can start telling the truth in the narrow window of time he has left and initiate a candid national conversation about our inevitable exit strategy. Or he can wait for events on the ground in Iraq and political realities at home to do it for him.

Frank Rich Bush Rumsfeld Fox News Tony Snow King George Iraq War Mission Accomplished Rich

Dowd: Say Uncle, Rummy

by Maureen Dowd

Even some State Department officials thought it was like watching a cranky, eccentric uncle with an efficient, energetic niece.

Rummy was ordered to go to Iraq by the president, but he clearly has no stomach for nation-building, or letting Condi run the show. He seemed under the weather after a rough overnight ride on a C-17 transport plane from Washington into Baghdad. And Condi's aides were rolling their eyes at the less than respectful way the DefSec treated the SecState as she tried to be enthusiastic, in her cheerful automaton way, about what she considers the latest last chance for Iraq.

A reporter in Baghdad asked Rummy about the kerfuffle when Condi talked of "thousands" of tactical errors in Iraq. Rummy later noted that "I don't know what she was talking about, to be perfectly honest" and that anyone who said that had "a lack of understanding" about warfare. She's just a silly girl, after all.

He could have taken the opportunity to be diplomatic about the diplomat, but he's incapable of that, so he just added more fuel to the fire.

"She's right here, and you can ask her," he said, pointing to Condi, who said she had not meant errors "in the military sense." She must have meant mismanagement in the civilians-mucking-up-the-military sense.

The former "Matinee Idol," as W. liked to call him, is now a figure of absurdity, clinging to his job only because some retired generals turned him into a new front on the war on terror. On his rare, brief visit to Baghdad, he was afraid to go outside Fortress Green Zone, even though he yammers on conservative talk shows about how progress is being made, and how the press never reports good news out of Iraq.

If the news is so good, why wasn't Rummy gallivanting at the local mall, walking around rather than hiding out in the U.S. base known as Camp Victory? (What are they going to call it, one reporter joked, Camp Defeat?)

In further evidence of their astute connection with the Iraqi culture, the cabinet secretaries showed up there without even knowing the correct name of their latest puppet. It turned out that Jawad al-Maliki, the new prime minister-designate, considered "Jawad" his exile name and had reverted to Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

On the cusp of the third anniversary of "Mission Accomplished," Rummy was still in denial despite the civil war, with armed gangs of Shiites and Sunnis going out and killing each other and Balkanizing whole communities.

When a reporter asked him what the U.S. had to do to get the militias under control and stop the sectarian dueling, he answered bluntly: "I guess the first thing I have to say is we don't, the Iraqis do. It's their country. It's a sovereign country. This is not a government that has an 'interim' in front of it or a 'transition' in front of it. It's a government that's in for a period of years and undoubtedly, unquestionably, will be addressing the question as to how they can best provide for the security of all of their people."

Yeah, let's leave it up to what's-his-name. We broke it. What's-his-name can fix it.

The assertions that Iraq is largely peaceful were belied yesterday by our own government. A State Department report on global terrorism counted 8,300 deaths of civilians in Iraq from insurgent attacks — more than half of all those killed by terrorists worldwide — and noted that violence is escalating. The elections have clearly not quelled the violence, and terrorists are said to be trying to turn Iraq's Anbar province into a base for Al Qaeda and other militants. (And since it's our State Department, you've got to figure they're soft-peddling it.)

April was the most lethal month for U.S. soldiers this year; at least 67 died.

The Bush II hawks were determined to restore a Reaganesque muscular, "moral" foreign policy, as opposed to the realpolitik of Bush I. But with no solution in sight, Congress is pressing for some realpolitik. With W.'s blessing, lawmakers are sending his father's old consigliere, James Baker, to Iraq to look for a way out.

As Iran vows to go ahead with its nuclear ambitions, the administration finds itself relying for help on the very people it steamrolled and undermined before the Iraq war: the U.N. and international arms inspectors.

"The Security Council is the primary and most important institution for the maintenance of peace and stability and security, and it cannot have its word and its will simply ignored by a member state," Condi said after a NATO meeting on Thursday.

Rummy may get prickly with his office niece, but who else but the automaton could make that threat with a straight face?

Maureen Dowd Condi Rice Rumsfeld Iraq War Rummy Iran Bush Dowd

Neil Young - 'Living With War' - Listen Here

Neil Young -- Living With War -- Listen -- To the entire album!

... Won't need no stinkin' war .... Impeach the pResident...





Bush Neil Young Impeach the President Living With War Audio Music War Impeach Bush

Krugman: The Crony Fairy

by Paul Krugman

The U.S. government is being stalked by an invisible bandit, the Crony Fairy, who visits key agencies by dead of night, snatches away qualified people and replaces them with unqualified political appointees. There's no way to catch or stop the Crony Fairy, so our only hope is to change the agencies' names. That way she might get confused, and leave our government able to function.

That, at least, is how I interpret the report on responses to Hurricane Katrina that was just released by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

The report points out that the Federal Emergency Management Agency "had been operating at a more than 15 percent staff-vacancy rate for over a year before Katrina struck" — that means many of the people who knew what they were doing had left. And it adds that "FEMA's senior political appointees ... had little or no prior relevant emergency-management experience."

But the report says nothing about what caused the qualified people to leave and who appointed unqualified people to take their place. There's no hint that, say, President Bush might have had any role. So those political appointees must have been installed by the Crony Fairy.

Rather than trying to fix FEMA, the report calls for replacing it with a new organization, the National Preparedness and Response Agency. As far as I can tell, the new agency would have exactly the same responsibilities as FEMA. But "senior N.P.R.A. officials would be selected from the ranks of professionals with experience in crisis management." I guess it's impossible to select qualified people to run FEMA; if you try, the Crony Fairy will spirit them away and replace them with Michael Brown. But she might not know her way to N.P.R.A.

O.K., enough sarcasm. Let's talk about the history of FEMA.

In the early 1990's, FEMA's reputation was as bad as it is today. It was a dumping ground for political cronies, headed by a man whose only apparent qualification for the job was that he was a close friend of the first President Bush's chief of staff. FEMA's response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 perfectly foreshadowed Katrina: the agency took three days to arrive on the scene, and when it did, it proved utterly incompetent.

Many people thought that FEMA was a lost cause. But Bill Clinton proved them wrong. He appointed qualified people to lead the agency and gave them leeway to hire other qualified people, and within a year FEMA's morale and performance had soared. For the rest of the Clinton years, FEMA was among the most highly regarded agencies in the federal government.

What happened to that reputation? The answer, of course, is that the second President Bush returned to his father's practices. Once again, FEMA became a dumping ground for cronies, and many of the good people who had come in during the Clinton years left. It took only a few years to transform one of the best agencies in the U.S. government into what Senator Susan Collins calls "a shambles and beyond repair."

In other words, the Crony Fairy is named George W. Bush.

So what's the point of creating a new agency to replace FEMA? The history of FEMA and other agencies during the Clinton years shows that a president who is serious about governing can rebuild effective government without renaming the boxes on the organizational chart.

On the other hand, the history of the Bush administration, from the botched reconstruction of Iraq to the botched start-up of the prescription drug program, shows that a president who isn't serious about governing, who prizes loyalty and personal connections over competence, can quickly reduce the government of the world's most powerful nation to third-world levels of ineffectiveness.

And bear in mind that Mr. Bush's pattern of cronyism didn't change after Katrina. For example, he appointed Julie Myers, the inexperienced niece of Gen. Richard Myers, to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement — an agency that, like FEMA, is supposed to protect us against terrorism as well as other threats. Even at the C.I.A., the administration seems more interested in purging Democrats than in improving the quality of intelligence.

So let's skip the name change for FEMA, O.K.? The United States will regain effective government if and when it gets a president who cares more about serving the nation than about rewarding his friends and scoring political points. That's at least a thousand days away. Meanwhile, don't count on FEMA, or on any other government agency, to do its job.

Paul Krugman Bush Bill Clinton FEMA Cronyism King George Katrina Impeach Bush Bushgate Krugman

Neil Young's 'Impeach the President' Lyrics

Lyrics to Neil Young's Impeachment Song

"Let's Impeach the President"
By Neil Young

Let's impeach the president for lying
And leading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door
He's the man who hired all the criminals
The White House shadows who hide behind closed doors
And bend the facts to fit with their new stories
Of why we have to send our men to war

Let's impeach the president for spying
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones
What if Al Qaeda blew up the levees
Would New Orleans have been safer that way
Sheltered by our government's protection
Or was someone just not home that day?

Let's impeach the president
For hijacking our religion and using it to get elected
Dividing our country into colors
And still leaving black people neglected
Thank god he's racking down on steroids
Since he sold his old baseball team
There's lot of people looking at big trouble
But of course the president is clean
Thank God

Via the Impeach Bush Coalition

Bush Neil Young Impeach the President Impeach Bush

Anti-Gay Lawmakers Tied to Focus on the Family

The notorious crusading anti-gay duo, Sen. David Fowler (R) and Rep. Chris Clem (R) appear to be on the path to some serious monetary gain from their religious-based crusade against marriage rights for all.

While this state readies itself for a painfully divisive November when citizens will vote on Amendment 1, a constitutional amendment that will forever ban same-sex marriage rights, two of the state's leading anti-gay lawmakers appear to be making career moves toward full time heterosexist positions in the private sector.

This state's legislative body is a part time endeavor. Thus, Sen. Fowler and Rep. Clem must confine their tax-payer funded work on behalf of rightwing religious zealots to a part time basis.

When David Fowler and Chris Clem announced that they will not seek re-election this year, there were the usual mumblings about spending more time with families. Turns out, the crusading anti-gay duo will be spending more time with James Dobson's 'family', or Focus on the Family.

While ostensibly representing the citizens of Tennessee, Fowler and Clem have been getting real cozy with Dobson's Focus on the Family. Sen. Fowler has already accepted a job with Focus on the Family affiliate, Family Action Council of Tennessee (recently incorporated) . In the story pasted below, a spokesperson for the Colorado based Focus on the Family brags that the rightwing Christian group can now claim 33 of these state affiliates.

At present, Boy Wonder, Rep. Clem (member of the Christian Legal Society!) will apparently confine himself to merely serving on the board of the Tennessee affiliate.

So, with a little help from Colorado, Republican state lawmakers will be leading the private sector effort to pass this state's anti gay marriage ballot initiative. And at least one Republican legislator will be paid by rightwing religious bigots for leading the campaign to pass Amendment 1.

Apparently there is money to be made in legislating homophobia.

Knox News Sentinel:

NASHVILLE — Two Tennessee legislators who have spearheaded anti-gay measures are joining a group that is leading the effort to pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

State Sen. David Fowler, R-Signal Mountain, has accepted a job as executive director of the Family Action Council of Tennessee. The group is associated with Colorado-based Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian advocacy group that opposes gay rights.

Eventually Fowler will become a lobbyist for the group, but he said he will have to wait a year to do that because of the new ethics law.

Rep. Chris Clem, R-Lookout Mountain, is going to serve on the board of the Family Action Group of Tennessee.

Both lawmakers announced earlier this year they wouldn't seek re-election. Fowler said he plans to move to Nashville for his new job.

Fowler, 47, said one of his top priorities in his new job will be promoting passage of the state Marriage Protection Amendment, scheduled for the November ballot. The proposed amendment, which seeks to ban same-sex marriage, was pushed by Fowler in the General Assembly.

"It will allow me to engage fully in those issues that really brought me to the legislature in the first place without the distractions of all the other things we must do, discuss and debate up here," Fowler said.

Clem last year sponsored a bill to ban homosexuals from adopting children, which was ultimately defeated in a House committee.

Other social and fiscal conservative causes championed by Fowler include opposing an income tax and the lottery, restricting abortion rights and supporting an effort to fire teachers who taught evolution as fact.

The Family Action Council of Tennessee is the 33rd such organization in the country, according to Focus on the Family's Brad Miller, who said Fowler is "well known across this state for his support of the family and the moral values that promote a culture conducive to building strong families."

Republican Rep. Bo Watson of Hixson is running unopposed for Fowler's traditionally Republican District 11 after Democratic qualifier Jim Hall announced this week he's dropping out of the race.

Join the campaign to VOTE NO on Amendment 1

Email:
Sen. David Fowler
Rep. Chris Clem

David Fowler Chris Clem Amendment 1 Same-sex Marriage Gay Homophobia Gay Marriage Ballot 2006 Tennessee Focus on the Family

Stuck With Bush

Reckless Bush
by Bob Herbert

If George W. Bush could have been removed from office for being a bad president, he would have been sent back to his ranch a long time ago.

If incompetence were a criminal offense, he'd be behind bars.

But that's just daydreaming. The reality is that there are more than two and a half years left in the long dark night of the Bush presidency — nearly as long as the entire time John Kennedy was in office. The nation seems, very belatedly, to be catching on to the tragic failures and monumental ineptitude of its president. Mr. Bush's poll numbers are abysmal. Republicans up for re-election are running from him as if he were the bogyman.

Callers to conservative talk radio programs who were once ecstatic about the president and his policies are now deeply disillusioned.

The libertarian Cato Institute is about to release a study titled "Power Surge: The Constitutional Record of George W. Bush." It says, "Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power." While I disagree with parts of the study, I certainly agree with that particular comment.

In the current issue of Rolling Stone, Sean Wilentz, a distinguished historian and the director of the American Studies program at Princeton University, takes a serious look at the possibility that Mr. Bush may be the worst president in the nation's history.

What in the world took so long? Some of us have known since the moment he hopped behind the wheel that this reckless president was driving the nation headlong toward a cliff. The worst thing he did, of course, was to employ a massive campaign of deceit to lead the nation into a catastrophic war in Iraq — a war with no end in sight that has already claimed tens of thousands of lives and inflicted scores of thousands of crippling injuries.

When he was a young man, Mr. Bush used the Air National Guard to hide out from the draft in a time of war. Then, as president, he's suddenly G. I. George, strutting around in a flight suit, threatening to wage war on all and sundry, and taunting the insurgents in Iraq with a cry of "bring them on."

When the nation needed leadership on the critical problem of global warming, Mr. Bush took his cues from the honchos in the oil and gasoline industry, the very people who were setting the planet on fire. Now he talks about overcoming the nation's addiction to oil! This is amazing. Here's the president of the United States scaling the very heights of chutzpah. The Bush people and the oil people are indistinguishable. Condoleezza Rice, a former Chevron director, even had an oil tanker named after her.

Among the complaints in the Cato study is that the Bush administration has taken the position that despite validly enacted laws to the contrary, the president cannot be restrained "from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror."

This view has led to activities that I believe have brought great shame to the nation: the warrantless spying on Americans, the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the creation of the C.I.A.'s network of secret prisons, extraordinary rendition and the barbaric encampment at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in which detainees are held, without regard to guilt or innocence, in a nightmarish no man's land beyond the reach of any reasonable judicial process.

The sins of the Bush administration are so extensive and so egregious, they could never be adequately addressed in a newspaper column. History will be the final judge. But I've no doubt about the ultimate verdict.

Remember the Clinton budget surplus?

It was the largest in American history. President Bush and his cronies went after it like vultures feasting in a field of carcasses. They didn't invest the surplus. They devoured it.

Remember how most of the world responded with an extraordinary outpouring of sympathy and support for America in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11?

Mr. Bush had no idea how to seize that golden opportunity to build new alliances and strengthen existing ones. Much of that solidarity with America has morphed into outright hostility.

Remember Katrina?

The major task of Congress and the voters for the remainder of the Bush presidency is to curtail the destructive impulses of this administration, and to learn the lessons that will prevent similar horrors from ever happening again.

Bob Herbert Bush Nixon Censure Bush King George Iraq Impeach Bush War Herbert

Covering Dirty Snow

Steven Leser reports that Tony Snow's comments have been deleted from Free Republic. Snow is, reportedly, a regular commenter at the notorious rightwing site. The Free Republic is a slime-site so repulsive that you can find pictures of Madeline Albright's face pasted on top of nude bodies. Don't ask how these morons treat their grandmothers. The Holy Christian Bushies don't shock me much anymore, but if Tony Snow does indeed frequent Freeperville, I am genuinely stunned by the company the White House Press Secretary keeps. (There's a reference in the comments here to Snow as member of maturity-challenged Freeperville.)

According to Lesser, "Mr. Snow was a regular poster over at Free Republic and as one can see from the link and quote below, overnight when it was announced he would be the new press secretary, the mountain of information Mr. Snow had submitted and had posted on the site disappeared. What is he hiding? What sorts of comments is he afraid might see the light of day?"

Hat tip to Jen at Donkey o. d.

On a related note, Think Progress points out: "The White House is trying to spin Snow’s criticism by saying it’s evidence that Snow isn’t afraid to be honest. That’s fine. But that means that people who are being honest say things like “George Bush is something of an embarrassment."

Heh. I can hardly wait to see what Jon Stewart does with this.

Bush Tony Snow Press Secretary White House Republicans GOP Bushgate Impeach Bush President Bush Free Republic

Reining In Justice Scalia

by Adam Cohen

"You know what I say to those people? That's Sicilian."
—Justice Antonin Scalia

Justice Antonin Scalia has gone too far — and he keeps on doing it.

He made national headlines recently for making a gesture that may or may not be obscene. If it wasn't obscene, it was certainly coarse and undignified.

He recently called those who disagree with his unconventional views of the Constitution "idiots."

His public statements often make him sound more like a political partisan than a judge. He is particularly bad on the subject of Bush v. Gore, the decision that put President Bush in the White House, a low point in the Supreme Court's history that Justice Scalia should not be pulling down any lower.

Worst of all, Justice Scalia refuses to abide by the basic principles of recusal, the law that forbids judges from hearing cases in which they are not impartial, or will not be viewed as impartial. A few weeks ago, he took part in a case involving the rights of detainees after making inflammatory statements that seriously called his fairness into question.

Justice Scalia is certainly hurting his own reputation. After one of his ethical lapses involving Vice President Dick Cheney, Jay Leno joked on "The Tonight Show" about an "embarrassing moment" when Mr. Cheney visited the White House — "Security made him empty his pockets and out fell Justice Antonin Scalia!"

Read the whole thing

Graphic seen at Bartcop.

Adam Cohen Scalia Cheney SCOTUS Bush v. Gore Bush Cohen

Jesus Wept Because Peace Takes Courage

by MzNicky

For the past year Ava Lowery has been creating video clips and posting them to her web site, Peace Takes Courage. For many of them, the 15-year-old Alabama girl uses simple, brief captions in white against a stark black page as the visual backdrop for photographs—the kind you’ll never see on CNN or MSNBC.

Accompanied by well-chosen musical selections, these works are short, to-the-point, and very moving expressions of Lowery’s feelings about the Iraq war and the Bush administration. The heartbreaking “Someone’s,” for example, mixes images of the broken bodies of US soldiers, Iraqi soldiers, and Iraqi civilians with the Cranberries’ haunting “Zombie.”

Lowery’s most recent piece - WWJD? - has created some buzz lately—and not just because of its entry into a contest at Huffington Post. This clip features images of mangled, bloodied Iraqi children as a lone child’s voice, and then a chorus, sings "Jesus Loves Me." It ends with Scripture, from the Beatitudes: "Blessed are they who mourn"; "Blessed are the meek"; "Blessed are the peacemakers."

But the piece has not received unanimously glowing reviews. Matthew Rothschild at The Progressive writes that, in addition to death threats, Lowery has received such e-mails as the following:

“It’s people like you who need to f**king die and get raped while your corpse rots in the sun...F**k you, I would jack off on your parents if I could. If you don’t like the team, get out of the park. That means take ur small dick and get the f**k off of my homeland you faggot chocolate gulper.”

“You are a TRAITOR to your country and should be executed for treason. All you do is bitch about the US. If you hate it so much, why don’t you GET THE F**K OUT.”

“Why don’t you go masterbate [sic] to a pic of [Cindy] Sheehan and f**k off.”

Well, you can’t please everyone, I guess. Such is the artist’s life.

Jesus wept. Or at least, that’s what I think he would do. I guess God-fearing patriots who terrorize a teenager with anonymous obscenity and threats must get their talking points from a different Bible—perhaps the King George version?

______

See some of Ava Lowery's work: Impeach the Decider; The Time is Now; Broken Promises; WWJD?

Visit Ava Lowery's website: Peace Takes Courage

Peace War Bush War Crimes Ava Lowery Peace Takes Courage Alabama 2008 Iraq Impeach Bush

posted by egalia for MzNicky

Snow Job at the White House: Said Bush 'Impotent'

"George Bush has become something of an embarrassment."

--Tony Snow, Incoming
White House Press Secretary

It's official, Fox News has confirmed that the man who called pResident Bush "impotent" and "an embarrassment" is to be the new White House Press Secretary. Heh. When did the Bushies decide to start writing scripts for Jon Stewart at the Daily Show, you ask?

Bushie's soon-to-be new press secretary has a long and well-documented record of denigrating and insulting his new boss, the pResident .

The Fox News commentator has called his new boss, "an embarrassment" and "passive" and has even charged that Republicans "wish [Bush] would stop cowering under the bed."

Think that's pretty snide? Snow has gone lower:

"[Bush] stunned a friendly audience by barking out absurd and inappropriate words, like a soul tortured with Tourette’s."

"The English Language has become a minefield for the man, whose malaprops make him the political heir not of Ronald Reagan, but Norm Crosby."

"No president has looked this impotent this long when it comes to defending presidential powers and prerogatives."

Impotent? Heh. We think Snow is pretty good at striking the swaggering Commander-in-Chief where it really really hurts. And we know how much it hurts the son to be accused of the father's wimpy factor crime.

Already, conservatives are cheering Snow on with SNL-ish remarks like, "It will be good to have a fair and balanced press secretary."

Can we expect to see a Fair and Balanced banner in Mission Accomplished colors behind the White House Press Secretary podium? Or a Fox News logo?

Obviously, people have been fired and had their CIA identities revealed for speaking less critically than Tony Snow. Good luck to the Fox News representative in his new job of defending what he once denigrated.

Where better than Fox News to find such a man?

But the really interesting questions are:

Was Harriet Miers in charge of picking the new White House Press Secretary?

And when exactly are the Bushies are going to learn to google?

Thanks to the wonderful folks at Think Progress, who have lots more from the mouth of Tony Snow because they know how to google!

UPDATE: Raw Story reports that Tony Snow thinks racism is no big deal: "Here's the unmentionable secret," Snow said on an October 2003 edition of Fox News Sunday, "racism isn't that big a deal anymore." Snow argued that "no sensible person supports" racism, arguing that the problem is "quickly becoming an ugly memory."

Guess the Bushies are not aiming to raise their single digit poll numbers among blacks.

Bush Tony Snow Press Secretary White House Republicans GOP Bushgate Impeach Bush President Bush Impotence

Dowd: Bush's Concession

A Prius in Every Pot
by Maureen Dowd

It's taken over five years, but George W. Bush finally made a concession speech to Al Gore.

He conceded that America needs to conserve, by buying hybrid vehicles and developing new energy sources.

Trying to calm the yips in his party and the country over exploding gasoline prices, the president sounded a bit like a wild-eyed Ozone Man himself yesterday, extolling the virtues of alternative fuel derived from cooking grease, sugar, grass, wood chips, soybean oil and corn.

But then he got ahold of himself. "You just got to recognize there are limits to how much corn can be used for ethanol," he said, standing in front of a bucolic mural. "After all, we got to eat some."

You could run a fleet of S.U.V.'s on the gas that W. was spewing about fuel. Bill Clinton would have been more likely to crack down on fast food than W. and Dick Cheney would be to crack down on Big Oil.

Even the usually supportive Wall Street Journal editorial page chastised Republicans for putting on "Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi fright wigs" to shout about corporate greed and market manipulation.

W.'s big move was to ever so slightly beef up a federal investigation into oil company price manipulation that's been under way since Katrina. "It's a great idea," said the Democratic leader, Senator Harry Reid. "So good that we passed a law last year calling for that."

Price manipulation could explain the marginal — why gas went from, say, $2.70 to $2.90 — but not why gas went from $1.40 to $2.70. That's more about fundamental forces: Chinese and Indian demand, markets spooked by Iran's threats, Nigeria's unrest, Venezuela's talk of nationalizing its oil industry, and the Pentagon's bungling of the restoration of Iraq's infrastructure.

Gasoline prices may be hurting average folks, but the oilers who helped put the Boy King and the Duke of Halliburton in office with lavish donations are enjoying record profits and breathtaking bonuses.

The Oilmen in the Oval, incompetent in so many ways, have brilliantly achieved one of their main objectives: boosting the fortunes of the oil industry and the people who run it.

All those secret meetings the vice president had back in 2001, letting the energy and oil big shots help write our energy policy — one that urged more oil and gas drilling — worked like a charm. In all their years in government, Mr. Cheney and the Bushes have never done anything to hold the oil companies' feet to the fire, or get Americans' feet off the gas pedal.

As Representative James Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, noted, "The Republicans are the party with the keys to the executive washrooms of Halliburton, Exxon and the big oil corporations."

Consider Lee Raymond, the recently retired chairman and chief executive of Exxon. Recently, we learned about his stunning secret compensation: he got more than $686 million from 1993 to 2005, according to a Times story, which calculated: "That is $144,573 for each day he spent leading Exxon's 'God pod,' as the executive suite at the company's headquarters in Irving, Tex., is known."

The only oil baron who isn't cashing in these days is Saddam. We pulled up to the pump in Baghdad and plunked down $10 billion a month, and we're still not getting any gas out of it. Instead of easing our oil dependence and paying for Iraq's reconstruction, the bungled invasion and subsequent nuclear sparring with Iran have left even Republicans looking for Priuses.

The last time W. began wringing his hands about our addiction to oil — in the State of the Union address — the vice president was dismissive about the notion of sacrifice afterward. And the energy secretary clarified the president's words, saying they shouldn't be taken literally and that the idea of replacing Middle East oil imports with alternative fuels was "purely an example."

Even if W. shows up on TV in a gray cardigan, it's patently preposterous for the Republicans to make this argument, after selling us on the idea that it's our manifest destiny to get into giant cars and go to giant Wal-Marts and giant Targets and buy more giant bags of stuff. Now they're telling us to squeeze into tiny electric cars and compete for precious drips of oil with the Chinese and Indians who are swimming in enough of our dollars to afford cars.

The U.S. could have begun developing alternative fuels 30 years ago if Dick Cheney hadn't helped scuttle an ambitious plan in the Ford administration.

By the time these guys get gas from cooking grease, global warming will have us cooked.

Maureen Dowd Bush Cheney Global Warming Oil Gas Haliburton Lee Raymond Climate Science Al Gore Republicans Dowd

President Gore: Day One

via Aaron Freeman at Huffington Post

Al Gore Bush War Crimes Tennessee Democrats President Gore 2008 Gore

God's Foreign Policy Approved by 32 Percent

Our free falling pResident suggests he and his foreign policy are directed by God.

Yet Bushie's job approval rating is now at 32 percent and appears to be headed for the embarrassing 20s.

And this from a Christian nation!

CNN:

In the telephone poll of 1,012 adult Americans carried out Friday through Sunday by Opinion Research Corporation for CNN, 32 percent of respondents said they approve of Bush's performance, 60 percent said they disapprove and 8 percent said they do not know. . .

It was one of four conducted within the past 10 days that have yielded similar results: a Pew Center poll carried out April 7-16 gave Bush a 35 percent approval rating; a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll carried out last Tuesday and Wednesday gave him a 33 percent approval rating; and an American Research Group poll carried out Tuesday through Friday gave him a 34 percent approval rating.

Crooks and Liars has the video of our dear leader's God Shapes MY Foreign Policy speech, if you can stomach it. (via the Daou Report)

Graphic seen at 10,000 Monkeys and a Camera.

Bush Job Approval Poll War Republicans Democrats Bushgate Impeach Bush President Bush

A Progressive Movement in Tennessee

Nell Levine, of TAP, shares her thoughts on the project of building a cross class and cross race movement for social change here in Tennessee. I've pasted an excerpt below.

You'll hear lots more about the vast liberal conspiracy in this red state if you show up at Compass III, the state wide gathering of progressives here in Nashville later this week.

If you want to win this cultural war, you can't afford to miss it.

Is Transforming Tennessee a Lost Cause?

It is easy to write off Tennessee as a lost cause if you look at the results of the 2004 election and the statistics. George W. Bush won in our state by a sizeable majority. Tennessee is at or near the bottom nationally in education, environmental protection and the condition of children and women. It has the highest sales tax in the nation and our Governor has instituted the largest healthcare dis-enrollment in the nation’s history.

Despite these statistics (or maybe because of them), Tennessee has played a significant role in the history of social change in this nation. It was the 36th state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920 that gave women the right to vote. The sit-ins of the early 1960s in Nashville helped to launch the civil rights movement. Highlander School in east Tennessee has played an historic role by training Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks and many others in non-violent civil disobedience as well as economic and environmental justice.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was organizing the Poor People’s campaign when he was shot in Memphis in 1968 during the sanitation workers strike. King realized that getting the vote was but the first step in empowering and liberating people. The next step was passing laws that would make it possible for all Americans to earn a decent living.

Although it has been almost 40 years since King was shot, many of the problems that King saw in American society have not yet been eradicated: poverty, lack of affordable housing, lack of health care, inadequate public schools, a toxic environment, wars and violence, a flawed criminal justice system and a growing wealth gap.

In the words of Gene Nichol, dean of the University of North Carolina School of Law “The South has proved to be the native home of American poverty. It continues to sustain the highest poverty rate and the lowest average income of any section of the country. Nearly 14 percent of Southerners are poor and our income levels fall thousands of dollars below national averages ….Yet, ironically, we frequently elect public officials who pander to the wealthy and cripple the social structures available to the poor. Southern leaders often seem to specialize in undermining democracy while giving the back of their hands to meaningful equality. We produce more poverty and more politicians who are untroubled by it than the rest of the nation.” (Where We Stand: Voices of Southern Dissent, p. 62-63).

Approximately one child in five lives in poverty in Tennessee and the numbers are higher in the African American community. Over 40% of TennCare enrollees are African American. Although the black middle class has grown since the days of the civil rights movement, the legacy of racism in Tennessee continues to manifest itself in black poverty, black/white health disparities and the disproportionate number of blacks in the penal system. We cannot build a true movement for social change in our state without dealing with these issues.

The Tennessee legislature continues to be run by a “good old boy” network that is slow to move in a progressive direction. There is no “liberal” caucus in the Tennessee legislature. The closest thing to this is the Black Caucus, but it can be easily dismissed as a “special interest” group. Obviously, if we are going to get progressive legislation passed, we need to elect some progressive legislators.

Read the whole thing . .

Tennessee Progressives Social Change Progressive Movement Red State Poverty Liberal Caucus Race Class Tennessee Democrats 2006 TAP Compass III

Are Straight Males Fit to Hold Public Office?

Like we keep saying, the raging male hormones so prevalent in the hypermasculine Daddy Party are our biggest problem. And Dems who emulate the Daddy Party are our second biggest problem.

No wonder this country is such a violent and hyper-competitive mess.

Testosterone Impairs Judgement

Belgian researchers found that the more testosterone a man has, the worse his judgment is likely to be in making financial and business decisions, in certain circumstances.

Researchers at the University of Leuven tested straight male students 18 to 28. Some of them were shown nice landscape paintings; the others were shown pictures of hotties. Then they all played a little money game that's really a lab model for competitive behavior like hunting or food sharing.

The men who had just seen pictures of pretty women made dumber money choices than the men who'd looked at pretty scenery. And the dumbest choices of all were made by men who had looked at pretty women AND had the most testosterone. Which means that Mata Hari had the formula - distract 'em and defeat 'em.

The best -- and underreported -- part of this experiment is how the researchers determined which men are loaded with testosterone:

By comparing the length of the index finger to the ring finger. The longer the ring finger in comparison to the index finger, the likelier that the man in question has high testosterone levels.

The implications are tremendous: on the first date, a woman can check out his hand as he reaches across the table for his drink, and size him up in a heartbeat. Prospective employers can assess whether the guy's nature below the waist will affect his judgment above the neck. FBI and CIA recruiters - check the digits and judge his judgment.

Cheney Bush Bushgate GOP Raging Male Hormones Daddy Party Republicans Democrats

Osama's Crusade in Darfur

by Nicholas D. Kristof

Those of us who want a more forceful response to genocide in Darfur should be sobered by Osama bin Laden's latest tape.

In that tape, released on Sunday, Osama rails against the agreement that ended Sudan's civil war with its Christian and animist south and accuses the U.S. of plotting to dispatch "Crusader troops" to occupy Darfur "and steal its oil wealth under the pretext of peacekeeping." Osama calls on good Muslims to go to Sudan and stockpile land mines and rocket-propelled grenades in preparation for "a long-term war" against U.N. peacekeepers and other infidels.

Osama's tape underscores the fact that a tougher approach carries real risks. It's easy for us in the peanut gallery to call for a U.N. force, but what happens when jihadis start shooting down the U.N. helicopters?

So with a major rally planned for Sunday to call for action to stop the slaughter in Darfur, let's look at what specific actions the U.S. should take.

Read the whole thing

Nicholas Kristof Bush bin Laden Darfur Chad Kristof Genocide

Potheads and Sudafed

Once in a while even John Tierney gets it right (see full column below). The war on drugs - brought to you by the "Republican narcs" - is destroying the lives of good people.

Did you hear about the teenager who got life for smoking a joint - in America?

And wasn't it remarkable that the FDA chose to release their politically motivated judgement on medical marijuana on 4/20, the national pot smoking holiday? The Drug War Rant has a good post about the FDA's rejection of science and embracement of reefer madness and another one on 'why the FDA is irrelevant.'

Increasingly, scientists are asking: What are the feds smoking?

Meanwhile, here in Tennessee the government is in the habit of seizing the bank accounts and the homes of citizens long before they've had their day in court. The seizures are based solely on police reports which allege that marijuana was found. The state seems to specialize in seizing the homes of cancer patients allegedly caught with medical marijuana. Who needs a state income tax when you are free to steal the property of your most vulnerable citizens?

But what's this about Chong selling bongs to Cheney's Secret Service guards?

Potheads and Sudafed
by JOHN TIERNEY

Police officers in the 1960's were fond of bumper stickers reading: "The next time you get mugged, call a hippie." Doctors today could use a variation: "The next time you're in pain, call a narc."

Washington's latest prescription for patients in pain is the statement issued last week by the Food and Drug Administration on the supposed evils of medical marijuana. The F.D.A. is being lambasted, rightly, by scientists for ignoring some evidence that marijuana can help severely ill patients. But it's the kind of statement given by a hostage trying to please his captors, who in this case are a coalition of Republican narcs on Capitol Hill, in the White House and at the Drug Enforcement Administration.

They've been engaged in a long-running war to get the F.D.A. to abandon some of its quaint principles, like the notion that it's not fair to deny a useful drug to patients just because a few criminals might abuse it. The agency has also dared to suggest that there should be a division of labor when it comes to drugs: scientists and doctors should figure out which ones work for patients, and narcotics agents should catch people who break drug laws.

The drug cops want everyone to share their mission. They think that doctors and pharmacists should catch patients who abuse painkillers - and that if the doctors or pharmacists aren't good enough detectives, they should go to jail.

This month, pharmacists across the country are being forced to lock up another menace to society: cold medicine. Allergy and cold remedies containing pseudoephedrine, a chemical that can illegally be used to make meth, must now be locked behind the counter under a provision in the new Patriot Act.

Don't ask what meth has to do with the war on terror. Not even the most ardent drug warriors have been able to establish an Osama-Sudafed link.

The F.D.A. opposed these restrictions for pharmacies because they'll drive up health care costs and effectively prevent medicine from reaching huge numbers of people (Americans suffer a billion colds per year). These costs are undeniable, but it's unclear that there are any net benefits.

In states that previously enacted their own restrictions, the police report that meth users simply switched from making their own to buying imported drugs that were stronger and more expensive, so meth users commit more crimes to pay for their habit.

The Sudafed law gives you a preview of what's in store if Representative Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, succeeds in giving the D.E.A. a role in deciding which new drugs get approved. So far, despite a temporary success last year, he hasn't been able to impose this policy, but the F.D.A.'s biggest fear is that Congress will let the drug police veto new medications. In that case, who would ever develop a better painkiller? The benefits to patients would never outweigh the potential inconvenience to the police.

Officially, the D.E.A. says it wants patients to get the best medicine. But look at what it's done to scientists trying to study medical marijuana. They've gotten approval for their experiments from the F.D.A., but they can't get the high-quality marijuana they need because the D.E.A. won't allow it to be grown. The F.D.A. actually wants to know if the drug works, but the D.E.A. is following the just-say-know-nothing strategy: as long as researchers can't study marijuana, they can't come up with evidence that it's effective.

And as long as there's no conclusive evidence that medical marijuana works, the D.E.A. and its allies on Capitol Hill can go on blindly fighting it. Representative Mark Souder, the Indiana Republican who's the most rabid drug warrior in Congress, has been pressuring the F.D.A. to crack down on medical marijuana. Last week the agency finally relented: in return for not having to start busting anyone, it issued a statement stressing the potential dangers and lack of extensive clinical trials establishing medical marijuana's effectiveness.

The statement was denounced as a victory of politics over science, but it's hard to see what political good it does the Republican Party.

Locking up crack and meth dealers is popular, but voters take a different view of cancer patients who swear by marijuana. Medical marijuana has been approved in referendums in four states that went red in 2004: Nevada, Montana, Colorado and Alaska. For G.O.P. voters fed up with their party's current big-government philosophy, the latest medical treatment from Washington's narcs is one more reason to stay home this November.

John Tierney Medical Marijuana FDA War on Drugs Drug Tax Tennessee Tierney Republican Narcs DEA

Illinois Dems Working on Impeachment

I hope Dems everywhere are paying attention.

Chicago Sun Times:

SPRINGFIELD -- Leave it to the Democratic-controlled state Legislature to find an obscure way to attempt to oust President Bush.

State Rep. Karen Yarbrough (D-Maywood) has sponsored a resolution calling on the General Assembly to submit charges to the U.S. House so its lawmakers could begin impeachment proceedings. It would be the first state legislature to pass such a resolution, though the measure faces a dim future in a Republican-controlled Congress.

"This is absolutely ridiculous," said John McGovern, a spokesman for U.S. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). Only the U.S. House can formally initiate impeachment proceedings.

Yarbrough is hoping to get the U.S. House's attention through her grass-roots effort. She already has picked up two co-sponsors to her legislation, Democratic state Representatives Eddie Washington (Waukegan) and Sara Feigenholtz (Chicago).

According to the resolution, Bush has "willfully violated his oath of office" by manipulating intelligence to start the war in Iraq, leaking classified national secrets and authorizing illegal spying on American citizens.

"This president has acted like an emperor," Yarbrough said.

To support her legislation, Yarbrough is relying on a provision from Jefferson's Manual, a procedural handbook written by Thomas Jefferson as a supplement to U.S. House rules.

....Vermont Democrats agreed earlier this month to urge lawmakers to approve it at the state level.

UPDATE: California and Pennsylvania too!

Joining Illinois, California has become the second state in which a proposal to impeach President Bush has been introduced in the state legislature. And this one includes Cheney as well.

California Assemblyman Paul Koretz of Los Angeles (where the LA Times has now called for Cheney's resignation) has submitted amendments to Assembly Joint Resolution No. 39, calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney. The amendments reference Section 603 of Jefferson's Manual of the Rules of the United States House of Representatives, which allows federal impeachment proceedings to be initiated by joint resolution of a state legislature.

Bush Republicans Democrats Bushgate Impeach Bush Illinois Vermont California Pennsylvania

Carnival of Feminists XIII

The Carnival of Feminists XIII is up over at I See Invisible People. While I haven't had time to read it yet, it looks like a great one.

Terry writes:

"The theme for this issue of Carnival of Feminists is 'Feminisms and Challenges.' Finding our voices and demanding dignity and self-determination is always an uphill battle, but for some women that difficulty is augmented by personal issues–medical, mental health, aging and physical disability–which make the battle more difficult."

Hat tip to Lingual Tremors .

Feminism Carnival of Feminists

Historic Lefty Conference In Nashville April 28-29

If you're a progressive, liberal, or lefty and live in the state of Tennessee, you do not want to miss the upcoming statewide gathering of progressives.

If you can make it to only one progressive event this year, this is the one! This lefty conference is your chance to meet, strategize and form alliances with progressives from across the state. The more often we get together, the sooner that new progressive era will get here. And just in case you haven't noticed, that new progressive day needs to get here pretty damn quick or the rightwingers are going to blow the friggin' planet to pieces.

The Compass III Conference, sponsored by the Tennessee Alliance for Progress (TAP), will be held in Nashville on Friday and Saturday, April 28-29, 2006.

I've pasted below some of the highlights of the conference; they are taken from the TAP website where you can read more.

Compass III Conference: A Statewide Gathering of Progressives

Sponsored by Tennessee Alliance for Progress, all concerned citizens, activists and advocates working for social, economic and environmental justice in Tennessee are invited to participate in two days of networking, strategizing, issue workshops and fun. We will be discussing our vision for the future of Tennessee, developing a strategy to make that vision a reality and building community.

The key progressives in the state will be in attendance. You don't want to miss what promises to be THE progressive gathering in Tennessee in 2006!

Strategy Session: Building a Movement for Social Change in Tennessee, Friday, April 28th - 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Tennessee's major progressive leaders come together for a day-long discussion on creating a long-term strategy to move Tennessee in a new direction. This session will be facilitated by David Hunt, principle trainer for the Midwest Academy, the nation's oldest and most prestigious organizing training institution. David has been trained in many small and large group facilitation methods which serve him well as a nationally sought after speaker, facilitator, trainer, planner, thinker and community and organization builder. David's energetic, charismatic and fun loving spirit will create an opportunity for us to reflect, enjoy, learn and grow together as we resolve conflict, plan strategically and organize powerfully. All conference participants are invited to attend this important session.

TAP Dance & Celebration, Friday, April 28th - 7 to 10:30 p.m.
SPIN, 918 Main Street in East Nashville. Live music, silent auction, TAP Awards, delicious food, cash bar, etc.

People's Day at Compass III, Saturday, April 29th - 8 am to 4 p.m.

9:15-10:30 Session I: Panel discussion, How do we build a multi-racial, multi-class, multi-issue progressive movement through cooperation in Tennessee?

Mornning Workshops:
Workshop 1- Beyond Punishment in Tennessee’s Criminal Justice System
Workshop 2- Tennessee’s Education Crisis
Workshop 3- Health Care: TennCare and Beyond
Workshop 4- Spiritual Progressives: Beyond Religious Right and Secular Left
Workshop 5– Who is Speaking for Working People in Tennessee?
Workshop 6– Blogging 101

Afternoon Workshops:
Workshop 1- Democratizing the Media and the Message
Workshop 2- Creating An Environment that Works & Provides for All of Us
Workshop 3- The Status of Women in Tennessee: An Update
Workshop 4– Can a Progressive Win An Election in Tennessee?
Workshop 5– Tennessee’s New Immigrants: Myths and Realities
Workshop 5– Tennessee’s New Immigrants: Myths and Realities

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: JIM HIGHTOWER, Saturday, April 29th at 2:45 pm, $10.00 (or Free with Full Conference or Saturday-only Registration).

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of Thieves In High Places: They've Stolen Our Country And It's Time to Take It Back, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.

....end of pasted highlights....

I hope to see you and/or meet you at this important and historic event!

Here's an earlier post about the legendary progressive hero, Jim Hightower.

Vast Leftwing Conspiracy Jim Hightower TAP Conference Progressive Conference Nashville Tennessee Compass III Tennessee Progressives

Herbert: 35 Years Later

by Bob Herbert

Presidents and politicians may worry about losing face, or losing votes, or losing their legacy; it is time to think about young Americans and innocent civilians who are losing their lives. -— John Kerry on Iraq

Boston: Saturday was the 35th anniversary of John Kerry's appearance as a young Vietnam veteran before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. During his testimony, Mr. Kerry called for an end to the war in Vietnam and famously inquired: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

He marked the occasion Saturday with an important and moving speech before an audience crammed into historic Faneuil Hall. The speech took on even more poignancy as it became known over the weekend that at least eight more American G.I.'s had been killed in Iraq.

I've felt all along that Democratic politicians, including Senator Kerry, have hurt themselves with their muddled messages on Iraq. Most elected Democrats have been petrified almost to the point of paralysis by their fear of being seen as soft on national security. So they've acquiesced to one degree or another in a war that in their heads and in their hearts they knew was wrong.

In his speech on Saturday, Senator Kerry, who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, gave the impression of a man who had found a voice he'd been seeking through trial and error for a long time, perhaps since that springtime day in Richard Nixon's Washington in 1971.

"I believed then," he said, "just as I believe now, that the best way to support the troops is to oppose a course that squanders their lives, dishonors their sacrifice and disserves our people and our principles." He repeated his call for a complete withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq by the end of this year, and offered an uncompromising defense of the right of all Americans — including retired generals — to engage in "untrammeled debate and open dissent" on the war.

"I come here today," he said, "to affirm that it is both a right and an obligation for Americans to disagree with a president who is wrong, a policy that is wrong and a war in Iraq that weakens the nation."

He described the war as "rooted in deceit and justified by continuing deception." And in a comparison with Vietnam, he said it is time now to get past "the blindness and cynicism" of political leaders who would continue to send "brave young Americans to be killed or maimed" in a war that the country had come to realize was a mistake. By the time he testified in 1971, he said, "it was clear to me that hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen — disproportionately poor and minority Americans — were being sent into the valley of the shadow of death for an illusion privately abandoned by the very men who kept sending them there."

(In a private discussion, Mr. Kerry and I talked about the many thousands of American G.I.'s who were killed in Vietnam after it had become widely known that victory would not be achieved. Barry Zorthian, the public information officer for U.S. forces in Vietnam in the mid-1960's, has noted that American losses nearly doubled between 1969 and the end of the war. He was never convinced, he said, that "those last 25,000 casualties were justified.")

Mr. Kerry also warned against allowing the war and the fear of terror to change the character of the United States. He received a standing ovation when he said, "The most dangerous defeatists, the most dispiriting pessimists, are those who invoke September 11th to argue that our traditional values are a luxury we can no longer afford."

In an interview after the speech, I asked Mr. Kerry about the secret prisons being run by the C.I.A. and the practice of extraordinary rendition, in which terror suspects are abducted by the U.S. and sent off to regimes skilled in the art of torture.

He said he believed these policies were violations of the Geneva Conventions, then added: "But the more important thing is that they are violations of our values, violations of our principles. Who are we to run around the world saying protect the Falun Gong or somebody else's right to speak out, and then we're willing to take people without knowledge of [guilt or] innocence and throw them into torture situations. I think that's reprehensible."

Bob Herbert Bush Nixon Kerry CIA King George Torture Iraq Impeach Bush War Herbert

Friends of Cheney (heh)

Thanks to Al Rodgers at dkos !

Cheney 2006 Election Cheney Joke Impeach Bush Republicans Bush Bushgate

Jittery Republicans to Bush: Dump Cheney

The "jittery Republicans" think they can save their election year ass by replacing the Cheney monster with Condi Rice. But it is very difficult to believe that George W. Bushie could ever bring himself to break his Tammy Wynette Stand By Your Man code of honor. Besides, who would be in charge of the country if 'The Decider' dumped the Cheney monster?

Jittery Republicans: Dump Cheney Monster for Rice

REPUBLICANS are urging President George W Bush to dump Dick Cheney as vice-president and replace him with Condoleezza Rice if he is serious about presenting a new face to the jaded American public.

They believe that only the sacrifice of one or more of the big beasts of the jungle, such as Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, will convince voters that Bush understands the need for a fresh start.

The jittery Republicans claim Bush’s mini-White House reshuffle last week will do nothing to forestall the threat of losing control of Congress in the November mid-term elections. . . .

“If the Democrats win either the House of Representatives or the Senate it will be death and torment. It will be horrible for Bush,” said [Fred] Barnes [of the Weekly Standard]. A Democrat win could lead to moves to impeach Bush for leading the country to war on allegedly false pretences, or at the very least, to bog down the president’s legislative programme until he leaves office in 2008.

Only one two-term victor has been more unpopular than Bush at a similar six-year stage in his presidency — Richard Nixon in the months before he was impeached.

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