Yo George
Tori Amos – “Yo George” (Speedbliss bushwacked mix)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCsojSpdMyw[/youtube]
Sunday Bloody Sunday
Memorial Day is the day to remember those who died in defense of this country.
The American dead in Iraq were not defending our country. Their deaths represent an even more significant tragedy.
(Broken bottles under children’s feet
Bodies strewn across the dead end street
But I won’t heed the battle call
It puts my back up
Puts my back up against the wall)
They died for causes that no-one has been able to articulate faithfully or honorably.
(There’s many lost, but tell me who has won.)
Comfort the troops, support their families.
(The trench is dug within our hearts
And mothers, children, brothers, sisters
Torn apart)
Bring them home.
(And its true we are immune
When fact is fiction and tv reality
And today the millions cry
We eat and drink while tomorrow they die)
Bush mashup – Sunday Bloody Sunday:
(How long, how long must we sing this song?)
So Impeach Gonzales
President Bush won’t fire his long-time friend U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales… he has too much to lose. He’s used to being able to say – “Here’s how I want it to be – you figure out the legal stuff.”
On Monday President Bush once again expressed his support: “I stand by Al Gonzales.” He accused Senators involved in the push for a no-confidence vote against Gonzales as engaging in “pure political theater,” despite the fact that many Republicans as well as Democrats have called for and/or support his resignation.
According to James Comey, who was acting Attorney General when Ashcroft was in the hospital, Gonzales and then chief-of-staff Andrew Card tried an end run around him by secretly visiting Ashcroft there in the middle of the night. Who knew? Ashcroft, whatever his faults, refused to reauthorize the secret wiretapping program. Notice how long he lasted…
In nominating Alberto Gonzales to be the next attorney general, President Bush has selected a man with a long record of giving him the kind of legal advice he wants. Unfortunately, that advice has not always been of the highest professional or ethical caliber. Gonzales is perhaps best known for a controversial January 2002 memorandum to the president in which he argued that Geneva Convention proscriptions on torture did not apply to Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners, and that the conventions are, in fact, “obsolete.”*
Gonzales is supposed to be working for the American people. He’s supposed to be running the Department of Justice. Let’s be serious. He’s the legal arm of Bush. In 1994, he was named general counsel to Texas Governor George W. Bush, and in 1997 appointed by Bush as Secretary of State of Texas, and in 1999 named to the Texas Supreme Court by the then-Gov. He’s been with Bush all the way.
He has largely succeeded in destroying the Department of Justice – was that the intent? Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty (Comey’s successor) recently resigned. Professionals that still try to work there are demoralized. They are also surrounded by inexperienced hacks and cronies – like Monica Goodling. Sheesh. How many graduates of Robertson or Falwell U work over there anyway? Do we have workers from Halliburton, Exxon, and Enron too?
Even before the attorney firings, which were clearly motivated by a right-wing agenda, there was enough to impeach him on.
Gonzales is not just Bush’s yes man. I wonder if Bush might be Gonzales’ yes man. Maybe he and Cheney… no, that’s just speculation.
Whatever. Like Cheney, Gonzales is one scary dude. He has actively subverted the Constitution while under oath to protect and defend it.
His role is to promote executive power. He has argued for presidential powers of a “unitary executive” (sounds like a king or a dictator, right? right!). Constitutionally speaking, Bush is commander in chief of the Army and Navy – but not the commander of every government employee, and certainly not commander of the citizenry.
On Gonzales’ advice (and I’m thinking, under significant direction) President George W. Bush has added objections to laws he has signed into law – they basically say that it’s the law, unless he decides it’s not. With Gonzales’ approval, Bush has withheld requested information – on dozens of issues – from Congress. Executive Order 13233, drafted by Gonzales and issued by George W. Bush on November 1, 2001 attempted to place limitations on the Freedom of Information Act by restricting access even to the records of former presidents.
In violation of the spirit of America (not to mention various U.S. statutes and international treaties), Gonzales authored the torture memos, giving a green light from the top for the use of overly-aggressive interrogations for enemy combatants. Oddly, there are no POWs at all. The definition of an enemy combatant is anyone Bush labels as an “enemy combatant” – including U.S. citizens. Since the first wave of what will be the continuing scandal of Abu Graib (you ain’t heard nothin’ yet), we’ve outsourced much of our torture. You may have heard something about that.
Gonzales wrote the Presidential Order which authorized the use of military tribunals to try terrorist suspects, and has fought for shortened or endlessly deferred trials for enemy combatants. He has stated that he doesn’t believe that habeas corpus is constitutional. We should close Guantanamo immediately – for a lot of reasons – and tell detainees what they are charged with – or call them POWs and give them those rights. They are American prisoners. They should be in Levenworth or another high-security prison under American law.
Gonzales had a heavy role in approving electronic surveillance without a warrant – in defiance of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (at least – we still don’t know how far that has gone or will go). I won’t even get into the multiple issues revolving around the so-called Patriot Acts.
Gonzales’ testimony has been misleading at best. He has not been honest or forthright. Yet unlike Monica Goodling, he doesn’t even have the decency to openly plead the fifth. He giggles at times as he dances around the questions he’s been asked. He’s confident. Isn’t it odd that Bush continues to stonewall against asking him to resign?
Congress has one option: Impeach him! While you still can!
Democracy for America and Greenwald have set up a petition to demand that Congress get serious about holding an errant executive branch to account. Check out the Brave New Films video and sign on:
Impeach Gonzales
http://impeachgonzales.org/
We, The Undersigned, urge the House Judiciary Committee to begin the process of impeachment of US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, in accordance with Article II, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, which provides for removal of the President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States. We believe the process will prove that Atty. General Gonzales has committed High Crimes and Misdemeanors, including the abuse of power and violation of the public trust, both impeachable offenses.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGlOBPNr7Kg[/youtube]
State of Synchronicity
I have always loved the idea of synchronicity. I heard this song for the first time tonight as I contemplated whether to watch the State of the Union Address:
Prodigal son
by Jan GloecknerIf you find you keep slipping on your tongue
well I got some suggestions to offer you pick one
you can tie it round your neck, like a prodigal son
but you won’t win the game cause it’s already woncould of helped a man who carried his cross
but you sat back and cursed him like you were the boss
thought you won big from the roll of the toss
but you cant win the game cause you already lost
US Money Drain
A must-read article by Terry Jones (of Python fame). Yes, they have “made a killing.”
Early this year the Bush administration is to ask Congress to approve an additional $100bn for the onerous task of making life intolerable for the Iraqis. This will bring the total spent on the White House’s current obsession with war to almost $500bn – enough to have given every US citizen $1,600 each. I wonder which the voters would have gone for if given the choice: shall we (a) give every American $1,600 or (b) spend the money on bombing a country in the Middle East that doesn’t use lavatory paper?
Of course, there’s another thing that George Bush could have done with the money: he could have given every Iraqi $18,700. I imagine that would have reduced the threat of international terrorism somewhat. Call me old-fashioned, but I can’t help thinking that giving someone $18,700 brings them round to your side more quickly than bombing the hell out of them. They could certainly buy a lot of lavatory paper with it.
Who are the winners? The ones who walk away with our money.
- No competitive bidding for contracts in Iraq
- Rampant overcharging
- Payment for unfinished jobs
- Accounting oversight stripped from the Iraq spending bill.
- No provision to penalize war profiteers who defraud US taxpayers
- Executive protections and interventions for war profiteers
Deconstructing Neocon Propaganda on Terrorism
A must read: “The Clash of Civilizations Doesn’t Exist… Yet” by Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted September 1, 2006.
The neocons who are pushing a Clash of Civilizations are mirror-images of the terrorists that inspire their hyperbolic fear — they are just as irrational and just as great a threat to our security.
To the extent that some terrorist groups have recently turned their eyes to us, it’s not a matter of hating our freedoms or our women’s bare shoulders. It’s because we’ve supported many of those repressive regimes — often with troops on the ground — from Indonesia to Iran.
Consider this: in the epic struggle between East and West, some of our staunchest allies are the undisputed champs in spreading violent Islamic extremism. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan established fundamentalist, anti-Western madrassas all across the world, funneled gobs of cash to extremist groups, and nurtured and supported them in their infancy. It wasn’t just random individuals within those countries; Saudi Arabia made it a foreign policy priority to spread its brand of Wahhabism, mostly to counter the perceived threat of Pan-Arabism and other anti-colonial ideologies. Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI — sometimes called a “state within a state” — not only supported the Taliban in Afghanistan but funded, equipped and helped train some of the most notorious terror groups that grew out of that country in the 1990s. Talk all you want about Syria and Iran supporting Hezbollah, these are the great terror-sponsoring states, and they’re on the side of the Western democracies.
What’s more, the West isn’t all that unified in this great existential struggle to save itself from destruction. A recent poll of citizens in the United Kingdom, our most loyal ally and a country that largely believes the Clash of Civilizations meme, found that — “by a margin of more than five to one — the public wants Tony Blair to split from President George W. Bush and either go it alone in the ‘war on terror’, or work more closely with Europe.” Just 14 per cent believed “Britain should continue to align itself with America.” A Pew Global Attitudes survey in June found that in Spain, supposedly a target of “Islamic Imperialism” and the victim of one of the most spectacular terror attacks ever, “four times as many people oppose the war on terror as support it (76 percent to 19 percent).”