W Trailer - The Film by Oliver Stone...

The trailer for Oliver Stone's new movie - "W"

Why I Believe Bush Must Go by Senator George McGovern

As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president.

After the 1972 presidential election, I stood clear of calls to impeach President Richard M. Nixon for his misconduct during the campaign. I thought that my joining the impeachment effort would be seen as an expression of personal vengeance toward the president who had defeated me.

Today I have made a different choice.

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment. The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising.

But what are the facts?

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged -- perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion -- by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon administration. But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election. The nation would be much more secure and productive under a Nixon presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in our national history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?

How could a once-admired, great nation fall into such a quagmire of killing, immorality and lawlessness?

It happened in part because the Bush-Cheney team repeatedly deceived Congress, the press and the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had nuclear arms and other horrifying banned weapons that were an "imminent threat" to the United States. The administration also led the public to believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks -- another blatant falsehood. Many times in recent years, I have recalled Jefferson's observation: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

The basic strategy of the administration has been to encourage a climate of fear, letting it exploit the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks not only to justify the invasion of Iraq but also to excuse such dangerous misbehavior as the illegal tapping of our telephones by government agents. The same fear-mongering has led government spokesmen and cooperative members of the press to imply that we are at war with the entire Arab and Muslim world -- more than a billion people.

Another shocking perversion has been the shipping of prisoners scooped off the streets of Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other countries without benefit of our time-tested laws of habeas corpus.

Although the president was advised by the intelligence agencies last August that Iran had no program to develop nuclear weapons, he continued to lie to the country and the world. This is the same strategy of deception that brought us into war in the Arabian Desert and could lead us into an unjustified invasion of Iran. I can say with some professional knowledge and experience that if Bush invades yet another Muslim oil state, it would mark the end of U.S. influence in the crucial Middle East for decades.

Ironically, while Bush and Cheney made counterterrorism the battle cry of their administration, their policies -- especially the war in Iraq -- have increased the terrorist threat and reduced the security of the United States. Consider the difference between the policies of the first President Bush and those of his son. When the Iraqi army marched into Kuwait in August 1990, President George H.W. Bush gathered the support of the entire world, including the United Nations, the European Union and most of the Arab League, to quickly expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The Saudis and Japanese paid most of the cost. Instead of getting bogged down in a costly occupation, the administration established a policy of containing the Baathist regime with international arms inspectors, no-fly zones and economic sanctions. Iraq was left as a stable country with little or no capacity to threaten others.

Today, after five years of clumsy, mistaken policies and U.S. military occupation, Iraq has become a breeding ground of terrorism and bloody civil strife. It is no secret that former president Bush, his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, and his national security adviser, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, all opposed the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: "I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans." Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot.

As former representative Elizabeth Holtzman, who played a key role in the Nixon impeachment proceedings, wrote two years ago, "it wasn't until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) -- and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country's laws -- that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate. . . . A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law -- and repeatedly violates the law -- thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors."

I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in the opening decade of the 21st century. This recovery may take a generation and will depend on the election of a series of rational presidents and Congresses. At age 85, I won't be around to witness the completion of the difficult rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I'd like to hold on long enough to see the healing begin.

There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have sacrificed that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as the ones we faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II. We must be a great nation because from time to time, we make gigantic blunders, but so far, we have survived and recovered.

anmcgove@dwu.edu

Rep. Weiner Joins Call for Cheney Impeachment Hearings

I applaud Rep Weiner (NY 9) for taking this stand with fellow grassroots democrats who want Bush/Cheney investigated and held accountable for their high crimes...No one is above the law...Way to go..!

Read original...

On Thursday, Congressman Anthony Weiner told Bob Fertik of Democrats.com that he would sign onto Congressman Robert Wexler's letter to Chairman John Conyers urging the commencement of impeachment hearings for Dick Cheney. Wexler, together with Congress Members Luis Gutierrez and Tammy Baldwin, hopes to have a majority of Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee sign the letter.

Of the four committee members named above, only Baldwin is among the six committee members and 25 total congress members backing Congressman Dennis Kucinich's resolution for the impeachment of Cheney. The other five Judiciary Committee members are Hank Johnson, Maxine Waters, Keith Ellison, Steve Cohen, and Sheila Jackson Lee. If these nine committee members sign the letter to Conyers that Wexler hopes to deliver early in January, another 12 Democrats, not counting Conyers, will still not have joined the position of 80 to 90 percent of Democratic voters.

On November 6th, Conyers himself voted against tabling impeachment. So did Congress Members Brad Sherman, Mel Watt, Bobby Scott, and Artur Davis. If those members heed the call of their constituents, Wexler will have a clear majority of 13-8. The other 8 include the relevant subcommittee chair Jerrold Nadler, plus Congress Members Delahunt, Berman, Boucher, Lofgren, Sanchez, Schiff, and Wasserman-Schultz. Of these, only Nadler signed on, during the previous Congress, to then ranking member John Conyers' resolution calling for a preliminary impeachment investigation.

All of these committee members can be contacted and thanked or encouraged to sign on at

Take action -- click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:
Impeach Cheney Now

http://www.davidswanson.org

Talk by Naomi Wolf - The End of America

10 Steps to Fascism
Naomi Wolf, author of The End of America - A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy.
2. Create secret prisons where torture takes place.
3. Develop a thug caste or paramilitary force not answerable to citizens.
4. Set up an internal surveillance system.
5. Harass citizens' groups.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release.
7. Target key individuals.
8. Control the press.
9. Declare all dissent to be treason.
10. Suspend the rule of law.

Sound familiar to you..??

h/t to: Yellowcake Walk

Countdown Special Comment: Torture Part 1 and 2...

Keith at his best...Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein are sell-outs and enablers for the criminal enterprise known as the Bush Administration...

PROTEST VIGIL at Senator Schumer's Residence - November 6 at 6 pm

TUESDAY, NOV 6th, 6:00 pm

PROTEST VIGIL at Senator Schumer's residence: 9 Prospect Park West (corner of President Street in Park Slope)

o Protest Schumer's support of Michael Mukasey - who will support Bush's continued use of torture.

o Protest Schumer's increasing support of military action against Iran and Bush's attempt to launch a new war.

o Protest Schumer's continuing support of funding for the war against Iraq.

Senator Schumer, abandoning his own party and angering many of his constituents, has announed that he will support the nomination of Mukasey. This, despite Mukasey's repeated refusal to state, categorically, his opposition to waterboarding, a form of torture. Mukasey also stated his belief that President Bush has the right to ignore laws passed by Congress in his capacity of Commander-In-Chief, thus showing that he would continue the drift toward authoritarian rule which has become a hallmark of the Bush Administration.

Futhermore, Schumer, originally one of the strongest supporters of the war in Iraq , has been supportive of the increasing bellicose plans of Bush and Cheney to foment a new and even more dangerous war against Iran. He voted in favor of the Kyl-Lieberman bill which many experts beliee Bush can use as justification to launch a new war and he refused to join 30 other Democrats in supporting the Webb bill which warns the President that he has no authority from Congress to take military action against Iran.

Now is the time for Brooklynites to express their anger and concern for Schumer's increasingly pro-war and anti-democratic positions. The election of November 2006 demonstrated clearly that Americans want to end the war in Iraq and reverse the disastrous course of the Bush Administration. Charles Schumer is ignoring the will of those voters and is serving, instead, the interests of George Bush which is to pursue the war, launch new ones and undermine our democratic rights.

** Please attend the protest vigil this Tuesday, November 6th at 6pm outside Schumer's residence at 9 Prospect Pk West.

** Please contact all your friends, family and colleague so that hundreds will gather to protest the Senator from New York who ignores the will of his constituents.

** Call Charles Schumer to tell him he must change his position and oppose Mukasey as nothing short of our constitution and democracy are at stake. Call now Congressional switchboard, ask for Congressman Schumer's office: (800) 828-0498 or direct: (202) 224-6542

For more information on the vigil, please call Brooklyn For Peace at (718) 624-5921

If you are outside the NYC Metro area, please contact all your friends, family and colleagues to put together a midday vigil outside one of Schumer's district offices in your area.

Thank you!

Frances Anderson

New York State Coordinator

Progressive Democrats of America

The Daily Show: Double Impact...

Jon Stewart tries to reconcile recent statements made by White House Press Secretary Tony Snow to those he made two months ago...Will the lies from this Administration ever end..?

Queens DA Richard A. Brown: Statement by Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown at JFK Terror Plot...

Newsday.com: Credibility of JFK Terror Case Questioned by Carol Eisenberg...

When U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf described the alleged terror plot to blow up Kennedy Airport as "one of the most chilling plots imaginable," which might have caused "unthinkable" devastation, one law enforcement official said he cringed.

The plot, he knew, was never operational. The public had never been at risk. And the notion of blowing up the airport, let alone the borough of Queens, by exploding a fuel tank was in all likelihood a technical impossibility.

And now, with a portrait emerging of alleged mastermind Russell Defreitas as hapless and episodically homeless, and of co-conspirator Abdel Nur as a drug addict, Mauskopf's initial characterizations seem more questionable -- some go so far as to say hyped.

"I think her comments were over the top," said Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland. "It was a totally overstated characterization that doesn't comport with the facts."

Greenberger said he has no argument with police pursuing and stopping the alleged plotters.

"I think they were correct to take this seriously," he said. "... But there's a pattern here of Justice Department attorneys overstating what they have. I think they feel under tremendous pressure to vindicate the elaborate counterterrorism structure they've created since 9/11, including the Patriot Act."

Mauskopf declined to comment Tuesday, but Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) dismissed criticism of law enforcement as "the price of success when you haven't been attacked in six years. We've gone from criticizing them for not doing enough immediately after 9/11 to now criticizing them too much."

But some say it is time for a more nuanced public discussion. Terrorism expert Peter Bergen said he doesn't consider the airport plot or most of the recent homegrown cases serious threats but believes law enforcement officials are right to pursue them.

"Obviously they're talking about stuff," he said. "But did they have the capabilities or training to do it? The answer is obviously not. It seems to me the reason the London plot worked is these guys had gone to an al-Qaida training camp. ... To become an effective terrorist, generally you have to go to a training camp. Timothy McVeigh was an effective terrorist because he could draw on his years of military background."

In this case, the alleged plotters had no money and never succeeded in hooking up with the head of an Islamist group in Trinidad called Jamaat al Muslimeen, according to the criminal complaint. While alleged mastermind Defreitas told the FBI informant that he learned to make bombs in Guyana, there is no other indication of technical expertise. Friends say he supported himself by selling incense on street corners and collecting welfare.

What, then, is the line between informing and scaring the public -- and is there a political cost in crossing it?

Steven Simon, a terrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the government's hyperbolic descriptions -- whether of this case or of the alleged plot to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago -- could erode public confidence in law enforcement and lead to confusion about the terror threat.

"First, it creates the public impression that the adversary is just a bunch of losers who do not have to be feared," he said. "Second, the fact that these hapless people are angry enough to seek to attack the U.S. raises the issue of other more competent, well-organized groups that might be escaping police detection."

Which is not to say that the threat is not real.

The law enforcement official chagrined by Mauskopf's characterization said that just because the airport plotters had no expertise doesn't mean they couldn't have inflicted pain -- whether catastrophic or not.

"What everyone in law enforcement is struggling with since 9/11 is finding the balance between the traditional crimefighting and counterterrorism methods," said the official, who asked not to be named. "In ... crime-fighting, something has happened, you investigate, and you arrest. ... In terrorism, it's all about prevention.

"This guy wanted to cripple JFK International Airport. ... It's not really useful in the overall scheme of things to wonder whether he would have achieved anything. Because unless you're the one standing guard at the tank farm, and you're going to stop the thing, it's pure speculation. ... Isn't the whole point that we want to stop these folks before they try to hit us?"

Countdown with Keith Olbermann...Alberto Gonzales: History Repeats Itself..Gonzo vs Gonzo...

Rocky Mountain News - Columnist: Paul Campos: Loose Cannon...

April 24, 2007

Two years ago, Georgia Thompson, a 55-year-old midlevel civil servant with no interest in politics, was assigned the task of helping to decide what travel agency the state of Wisconsin would use. The bidding process came down to two contestants: Adelman Travel and Omega Travel.

Adelman was the low bidder, and the selection committee also concluded it would provide higher quality service than Omega. But because of a poorly designed procedure that gave great weight to which bidder had the most impressive Power Point presentation, Omega finished slightly ahead of Adelman in the committee's initial overall scoring process.

Thompson suspected her administrative superiors would be annoyed if the contract were awarded to a bidder offering a lower-quality product at a higher price, so she persuaded the committee to allow rebidding on a best and final basis, as state law allowed. After its new bid, Adelman was awarded the contract.

Eighteen months later, Thompson found herself in a federal prison, with her career destroyed and her life savings spent. She ended up there because Steve Biskupic, the U.S. attorney for Milwaukee, spent more than a year convicting her of an imaginary crime.

Biskupic's initial theory was that Thompson steered the contract to Adelman because Adelman's owners had (perfectly legally) contributed $10,000 to Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle's re-election campaign, and that she had been bribed to reward Adelman.

This theory had a few problems.

Read entire column...

BobGeiger.com: The Saturday Cartoons

BobGeiger.com: The Saturday Cartoons

Welcome to Pottersville: Won't Get Fooled Again Redux

Welcome to Pottersville: Won't Get Fooled Again Redux

Bob Geiger's Saturday Cartoon Roundup...

Bob Geiger's Saturday Roundup of Political Cartoons...click here

Bob Geiger's Saturday's Roundup of Political Cartoons...

Bob Geiger's Saturday's Roundup of Political Cartoons...

Mark Fiore's Animation - Gone Fishing

Mark Fiore's Animation - Gone Fishing 3/22/2007

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Must Go..!

As Sonny and Cher sang back in the 60's, "The beat goes on, the beat goes on, Drums keep pounding a rhythm to the brain La-de-da-de-de, la-de-da-de da"...but the beat may be grinding to a halt for the Bush Administration.

It is so unmistakably clear that Alberto Gonzales has repeatedly lied to Congress and the American people about what occurred with the U.S. attorney firings that now even some of the most loyal Bush sycophants are begrudgingly acknowledging the facts.

But what is blatantly clear is that this pattern of deceit, dishonesty and mendacity has been exhibited by the Bush Administration throughout it's six years in office. This is not an aberration in any way, shape or form, this has been the script for the Bush presidency and the actions of the Attorney General in this abuse of power case are par for the course with this Administration.

There is one thing and just one thing distinguishing this U.S. attorneys scandal from all of the other would-be scandals over the past six years and that is that the Democrats now have subpoena power and seem ready to wield it's power by forcing the administration to give public sworn testimony before committees and disclose actual evidence and documents, rather than simply issue their unscrutinized and non-investigated denials of wrongdoing to a rubber-stamp Republican Congress and that evidence offered demonstrates that the claims are true.

If you recall, in the past, this is how every scandal transpired, first questions about Administration conduct were raised, whereupon, present and past Administration officials would deny the wrongdoing. Then Karl Rove and Dick Cheney would start Administration officials selectively and voluntarily disclose exculpatory documents. Then they would appear before a milquetoast Congress, to assure everyone that prudent safeguards are in place, then deny any wrongdoing again, and lastly claim the conduct in question is used only for only proper purposes. More often than not they would foist national security and protecting the country against terrorism.

Then, according to script, the Administration followers led by the Republicans formerly controlling Congress; such as Senator Pat Roberts-R-Kansas and Senator Mitch McConnell-R-Kentucky; would insist that no investigation was warranted because the Bush Administration has made clear that there are safeguards in place protecting us and everything is being done for proper purposes. Congressional Republicans then would block any and all Congressional investigations, compel no disclosure of evidence, do nothing to investigate the claims against the Administration. And, finally the scandal ends, unresolved.

This has been the Administration's modus operandi and the same distinctive pattern has repeated itself over and over from when the Administration lost one of our most sophisticated spy planes to the Red Chinese Air Force before 9-11, to post 9-11 with controversies over secret and illegal surveillance programs spying on American citizens, to torture, black sites and rendition of prisoners of war which constitute war crimes in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the US Constitution.

Congressional Republicans have blocked all investigations during the Bush presidency, insisting that we can trust him and his Administration, and they have proceeded along, lying to Congress and the country with complete and utter impunity.

Getting back to the U.S. attorneys case, everything proceeded according to script, Alberto Gonzales did what he and other Bush officials have always done, issue false statements about what they did in order to conceal their wrongdoing and lie to everyone about what our Government is doing.

And had it not been for the forced disclosure of internal DOJ emails and other documents - something which never would have occurred prior to the November, 2006 election with the Republican majority - the same thing here would have happened: thusly, Alberto Gonzales and other top DOJ officials would have lied about what they did and why they did it and nobody would have been able to prove it either way.

The only thing that has changed is that there is now some minimal amount of oversight and already, thank goodness, within a mere three months, that oversight is finally being exercised by the Democrats and our country's Attorney General stands revealed as a serial liar in the politicization of the US Justice Department.

That is why our Founding Fathers felt that oversight was so critically important because they instinctively did not trust government and never trusted government officials to act properly when they can act in secret and with no checks. Oversight is fundamental to a functioning democracy.

So the November 2006 election has already proven that elections have consequences and the people have spoken, therefore I would encourage the Democratic-led Congress to continue to use their oversight powers to shine the light behind the curtain which has been the story of the Bush Administration.

Finally, I call upon President Bush to demand the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. If that is not forthcoming, Congress must use it's impeachment power to rid our country of this dishonest Attorney General.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Must Go..!

Sunday Video Funnies...

Tom Tomorrow - This Modern World

See original cartoon here...