Political Waves » Good and bad

Good and bad — buzz and whine

March 14th, 2008

The dollar has tanked, the Dow is plummeting and everybody is as twitchy as a cats tail. But not our Dubby — he’s confident, cocky and pissy at the public response, although he did [finally] acknowledge that we’re going through “tough times.” He was just on TV putting out a wrathy objection to Congress wanting a reasonable bail-out for those who are losing their homes — he says … and I quote … that he’s “deeply concerned about LAW and regulation that will make markets harder to recover.”

Imagine! Bush concerned about the law!!!!

He’s obviously not concerned about money:

The Bush Debt: $7.7 Trillion
ThinkProgress

Cost passed on to future generations
Seattle PI

No, Dubby’s spending OTHER people’s money [many not even born] so he’s not locked up over it, is he! Chuck Schumer held a press conference directly after Dub’s statement and he said … “the president is on a different economic plan than most Americans.” Amen!

Even the densest citizen can’t turn a blind eye to how horrific is the continuing onslaught of damage, directly at the hands of George Bush and his Republicans. The last link here is another that tells us that Conservatism is dying [it’s a tough article to format, so open to read;] one can only hope. Their constant whining has turned into the kind of drone you hear when mosquito’s discover your picnic — John McRib, presidential presumptive, said today that Al Queda might just amp things up in Iraq [day late, dollar short commentary, dude!] in order for the LIBERALS to beat him out in his bid [buzz, buzz, “mememe,” buzz, egomaniacal whine, buzz!] I’d sure like to see this kind of idiotic dialogue consigned to the trash heap forever more. At least the commentator in the piece noted that war escalation USED to work FOR the Pubs, not against them — Pub fatigue is the culprit, and there’s no going back in this cycle! That’s the good news.

The bad? Here are a few other egregious things Dubby’s been up to — he and Hillary apparently have the same marching orders for their window of opportunity … “everything but the kitchen sink.” [Maybe the sink too!]

After the links there’s an interesting pro-active “to do” list … after we get where we’re going … and if we have any money left … yadda. You can go to OpEdNews and add your suggestions if you want — it’ll take a village!

Your bonus read includes two articles on the “secret session” just held in Congress, the first in 25 years, the 6th in its history … on [shhhhh!] FISA. You’ll find a Kucinich interview last.

Jude

President weakens espionage oversight
Charlie Savage, Boston Globe

Pentagon cancels release of controversial Iraq report
Warren P. Strobel, McClatchy Newspapers

Ozone Rules Weakened at Bush’s Behest
EPA Scrambles To Justify Action
Washington Post

EPA Closure of Libraries Faulted for Curbing Access to Key Data
TruthOut

U.N. official denied access to Iraq prisons
LA Times

Pentagon Accused of Doctoring Guantanamo Tribunal Evidence
TruthOut

New Evidence in Siegelman Case Points to Republican Cabal
TruthOut

Conservatism Is Dying
Eric Lotke, OurFuture.org
March 13th, 2008

A Post-Bush/Cheney To-Do List of Herculean Proportions
Rob Kall, OpEdNews
March 13, 2008

As soon as Bush slithers out of the Whitehouse, the next president, presumably a Democrat, unless the Dems totally screw up, will have a huge cleanup job.

Athena Advises Hercules on How to Clean Out the Mythical Augean Stables
[open link for picture]

The task of cleaning up Bush’s mess is one of mythical, Herculean proportions. Hercules came to a creative solution that was totally outside of the box.

Hercules was ordered to clean the stables of King Augeus, which had not been cleaned in years. This is an image from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia (approx. 460 BC) portraying Olympia advising Hercules on how to clean the stables by diverting a river to course through the stables. The new president and the 111th congress will need to be equally creative and out of the box.

Hillary and Barack both talk about the mess they’ll need to clean up. It would be useful to put together a list of things to-do, to recover from the Bush-Cheney disaster.

Here’s my shot at it. I’m hoping you’ll help fill it in using the comments.

-Get projections of the impact of continued problems caused by Bush Admin policy and widely report them as soon as possible so the public knows what to expect and who to blame.

-Reach out to leaders who are further left than your inner circle in building your team. Liberals and progressives are a growing portion of the population. If Obama is the winner, then part of his defeat of Hillary will be a repudiation and rejection of the right wing DLC policies she championed.

-Dump all of Bush’s political appointees. Do it immediately, in the first weeks in office. These political hacks, many former directors or lobbyists for industries they are supposed to regulate, have little or no retention value. Fire them all on Day One. Use career employees temporarily, replacing them with qualified appointees as soon as possible. Draw upon leaders who have advocated for stronger regulation.

-Urgently re-evaluate all the most important statistics used to report key numbers the people, businesses, industries and others depend upon. Identify changes in policies for calculating those numbers. Assume that Bush and Cheney have used statistics and revisions of the way things are counted to mislead and lie. Re-calculate them using the older, former formulae and policies to see just how bad the situation is, compared to the lies, distortions and deceptions Bush and company have perpetrated.

-Call for whistleblowers. Declare a period where whistleblowers are safe from repercussions and will be secure in their jobs. Ask them to identify any partisan activities, any policies of hiding or partially reporting important information. Congress should hold hearings on this. Whistleblowers should be offered large rewards for coming forward.

-Convene meetings with consumer, environmental, social justice organizations to identify abuses of the Bush admin and the 107th, 108th and 109th congresses that might be quickly reversed.

-Start investigations of all missing monies– Iraq reconstruction funding, military, New Orleans/Katrina, 9/11.

-Set up a new, unimpeded 9/11 investigation.

-Call for congress to re-submit, immediately, all the bills that Bush vetoed.

-Reverse Every signing statement Bush wrote against laws passed by the 110th congress. Take a look at all the signing statements Bush wrote. See if he violated any laws passed by congress. Put all laws passed by the 109th and 108th congress under close scrutiny.

-Replace Mukasey with a tough, honest attorney general charged with investigating the corruption in the justice department first thing, with the target of prosecuting any and all who engaged in partisan political corruption.

-Bring in a replacement for the Secretary of Defense who will be tough and honest in appraising the current situation at the pentagon and in Iraq. Assume that the current top brass wave been promoted because of loyalty to Bush and that they are just about worthless.
-Immediately order the end of all torture throughout the military, prison and intelligence services. Encourage congress to resubmit the bill banning waterboarding. Encourage congress to toughen the law.

-Quickly demote all heads of the intelligence services, putting career employees temporarily in their place, quickly indentifying strong, tough replacements who are not rightwing partisans.

-Call for legislation that ends giving of special treatment and subsidies to any companies that avoid taxes by having headquarters outside the US.

-Call for legislation that taxes outsourced labor, particularly phone and internet-based services.

-Re-evaluate all policies that have abridged rights afforded by the constitution, by international agreements and treaties that the Bush admin has abrogated, including rights of prisoners held at Guantanamo.

-Eliminate all welfare to old energy companies, particularly oil companies. Start new programs that provide big tax incentives to research and investment in renewable energy sources, but not ethanol from corn, which is a losing solution.

-Cut off the massive funding Bush doled out to right wing churches. Assign investigators to check out abuses of megachurches that cross the political boundaries or that engage in commercial operations under the guise of their non-profit privileges.

-Set in motion policy and encourage legislation that blocks any further media consolidation and starts taxing all media companies that own too much media in a given area or category, so it is not profitable to do so. This will force them to divest.

-Put a steep tax on use of energy derived from “ancient sunlight” sources– oil, coal, gas. Use the tax to fund the Apollo program everyone has been talking about, to develop new technologies that make the US energy independent by 2020.

- Do something about the housing/mortgage problem, which will still be a major mess come January 2009.

- Tell Comcast and the telecoms that are trying to screw up the internet where to go and pass permanent legislation making internet neutrality mandatory and permanent, maximally protecting the internet from the encroaching threats it has been recently facing. The Dems owe it to the bloggers and internet users who stood up the worthless corpstream MSM media.

-Pass the CHIPS bill that Bush vetoed. And get started making health care available to every American… and don’t worry about stepping on the toes, on the spleens and kidneys of the for-profit health care industry.

-Give Michael Moore, Greg Palast, Josh Marshall, Thom Hartmann, Ray McGovern, Ann Wright, Sibel Edmonds, Joe Wilson, and some of the best whistleblowers and muckrakers congressional medals of honor for protecting democracy.

-Put together a department of voting integrity. Bring in voting integrity leaders who do not have computer industry conflicts of interest to lead and run it.

-Pass federal legislation requiring paper ballot counting and recount records for all federal elections. Ban DRE/all electronic voting. Investigate the companies, investigate voting irregularities in Florida, Ohio, and wherever else they’ve been raised. Put the FBI on it. Open up investigations into the 2000 and 2004 presidential votes.

-Last but not least, if impeachment has not been implemented, initiate an in-depth investigation of the crimes of Bush, Cheney and their appointees, aimed at indictment, sentencing and incarceration.

That’s my starter list. What would you include or change?

some additions, based on the comments:

-Repeal or drastically revise the Military commissions act and the patriot act to respect the constitution and democracy.

-Unlock secret presidential papers– move towards government transparency– starting at the top.

-Get our troops out of Iraq. Declare the Occupation a horrible mistake perpetrated by a rogue administration that used deception and lies to trick the US into supporting it. Frame the troops as tragic victims of this fraud. When you have been tricked and de-frauded you don’t continue to seek victory unless continue to be deluded or attempt to hide the fraud.

Bonus Read

Democrats Reject Telecom Immunity Ahead of Vote
Christopher Kuttruff and Simona Perry, TruthOut
Friday 14 March 2008

[open for references]

On Thursday night, the House held the first closed session meeting in 25 years in order to debate retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies who assisted the Bush administration in its warrantless surveillance program. [1] The session, requested by House minority whip Roy Blunt (R-Missouri), pushed back an upcoming vote (H.R. 3773) on updating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to today.

After the closed session, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer responded, “I did not hear any new information tonight that dissuades me from my very strong belief that the FISA bill House Democrats have produced - and which the House will vote on tomorrow - is a reasonable, thoughtful, appropriate piece of legislation that will ensure that the intelligence community has all the tools it needs to protect our nation, while also respecting the constitutional protections that Americans rightfully feel are so important.” [2]

The vote on H.R. 3773, to take place later today, has prompted a contentious debate, given key differences between legislation proposed by the House and Senate. The House version omits a retroactive immunity provision for telecom companies present in the Senate bill and also seeks to establish more judicial oversight of the administration’s surveillance program. [3]

The unusual, secret House session came a month after the February 17 expiration of the Protect America Act (PAA) of 2007, signed into law in early August. The temporary, controversial law stated “[the intelligence community] must no longer obtain court approval when the target of the acquisition is a foreign intelligence target located outside the United States.” [4]

The PAA came about six years after the inception of the administration’s secret surveillance program. On December 16, 2005, The New York Times reported that since shortly after September 11, 2001, the Bush administration, through the National Security Agency, has been eavesdropping on Americans and others inside the US without the necessary warrants. [5]

Six months later, Bloomberg contended this program started even earlier - about seven months before 9/11. [6] This crucial distinction came to light amidst a lawsuit against AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.

This chronology was confirmed by former Chief executive of Qwest Communications International Joseph P. Nacchio. In an October 13, 2007, article, The Washington Post wrote that Nacchio claimed “Qwest’s refusal to take part in [the administration’s surveillance program] led the government to cancel a separate, lucrative contract with the NSA in retribution.” [7]

President Bush has vehemently criticized the House for neither renewing the PAA, nor granting indiscriminate, retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies: “Congress should stop playing politics with the past and focus on helping us prevent attacks in the future.” Bush urged the House to take up the bill passed in the Senate, which included the immunity provision.

Many in Congress dismiss this sort of rhetoric as a gross mischaracterization, since, according to The New York Times, “the House proposal was understood to give the federal courts special authorization to hear classified evidence and decide whether the phone companies should be held liable.” [8]

In a February 23 radio address, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers firmly disputed the Bush administration’s claims that Congress is jeopardizing the safety of American citizens. “I introduced legislation that would have provided for a 21-day extension of the short-term [Protect America Act], which was otherwise due to expire on Saturday. Amazingly, the President opposed the extension, every House Republican voted against it, and the extension was defeated … The President and House Republicans simply can’t have it both ways. They cannot argue simultaneously that the temporary August law was essential to national security, and then turn around and engineer the defeat of an extension of it.” [9]

Conyers continued to downplay White House alarmism, stating, “well-established emergency provisions of the current surveillance laws are more than adequate to address any emergent threats.” Quoting Assistant Attorney General for National Security Kenneth Wainstein, Conyers notes, “‘[T]he directives that are in force remain in force until the end of that year.’ That means the orders can continue through 2009. He went on to say: ‘[W]e’ll be able to continue doing surveillance based on those directives.’”

Conyers concludes: “Democrats are committed to working on a bipartisan basis to finalize a strong law that will protect America while preserving the civil liberties of all Americans. We reject the proposition that there is a conflict between liberty and security. They can and must co-exist, and we are devoted to achieving this end.”

In a statement Wednesday, 19 Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee said, “We have concluded that the administration has not established a valid and credible case justifying the extraordinary action of Congress enacting blanket retroactive immunity as set forth in the Senate bill.”

House Holds Rare Secret Session on Spy Bill
DemocracyNow!
March 14, 2008

The House of Representatives postponed a vote on a spy bill Thursday after Democrats agreed to a request from Republicans to hold a rare secret session to discuss what they termed classified security matters. It marked the first time a secret session was held in a quarter of a century and only the sixth time in the House’s history. We speak with Ohio Congressmember Dennis Kucinich, who refused to attend the secret session. [includes rush transcript]

Guest: Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Democratic congress member from Ohio.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Thank you, Amy. I also, yesterday on the floor of the House, spoke in support of the winter soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan, and what they’re doing, I think, is so important here in Silver Spring.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, talk about what happened, only the sixth time in history did Congress, in a sense, go dark. C-SPAN went black, the screen.

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Right. Well, the—one of the Republican leaders said that he had some secret information that he had to communicate with rest of Congress, and so he asked the Congress to go into secret session. I went to the floor of the House in that preliminary session and pointed out that this hasn’t happened but five times in 182 years, and I said that there should be a very high bar that has to be passed before we go into secret session. As soon as I said that, the member of Congress who asked for it started to backpedal a little bit. It will be interesting to see what kind of gravity came out of that meeting. My guess is that it had more to do with the desire of the administration to try to push for the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act than it had to do with any compelling new information about national security.

AMY GOODMAN: The President and the Republicans wanting to push through legislation that would grant immunity to the telecom companies for spying on Americans?

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, that’s part of it, of course, but I’m thinking that yesterday there really was an attempt to try to basically use the procedure of a secret meeting to ratchet up the pressure to pass FISA and by—essentially, the Democrats called the bluff of the Republicans. And we’ll see if anything was produced in that meeting, because, actually, at any time Congress can vote to release the transcripts, make them public. And if that happens and it wasn’t a serious enough matter, there could be really extreme political repercussions, because we shouldn’t be going into secret session. I mean, there’s a reason why you don’t. You have a House of Representatives; it’s the people’s House. Transparency, it’s essential for a democracy. It’s very dangerous to have these things.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain how it works. 7:30, they sweep the Congress, all the members, to make sure you have no wires on you?

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Right. Well, everyone asked—you know, now, I haven’t been in one of these for years. I do not sign the pledge of, quote, “confidentiality,” unquote, because what you essentially do is you give up your conscience. And when you go into these meetings, if something is being told that’s a lie, you can’t go outside and say they lied to you.

But I will tell you this, Amy, that in the times that I went to these—when I was an early member of Congress, I’d go to these sessions, and, you know, they were lying to members. And they would—so then you would be told this information, they’d try to propagandize the members. You can’t go outside and talk about it, because you’d be violating the confidentiality. I just stopped going to them, because I realized that they were attempts to try to spin the members of Congress under the pretext of a national security secret. I think democracy functions much better in sunlight than in the dark.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Congressman Kucinich, I want to thank you very much for being with us today. We’re spending the hour with soldiers, with veterans, who have come here to the National Labor College to talk about their own experiences. Again, this against the backdrop, the surprise last night of the secret session of Congress.

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, you know, they’re telling their stories about a war that’s based on lies and the war that was concocted in secret. Here we are.

AMY GOODMAN: Can I ask you a quick question? In this presidential year, you were a presidential candidate. Big debate over Michigan and Florida. Your name, together with Hillary Clinton’s name, was on the Michigan ballot. What is your take on what should happen there and why Barack Obama, John Edwards did not have their name on the ballots then and what should happen now?

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, you know, I basically, you know, ignored the directive of the party leaders.

AMY GOODMAN: And so did Hillary Clinton.

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Yeah, right. And so, I think, you know, this is something that’s going to have to be worked out. I mean, the Democratic Party is going through a very dangerous period right now. Keeping that party together so it can be competitive in November is going to be a great challenge. And so, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have a lot of work to do.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you going to endorse someone?

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: You know, I reserve the right to do that. I haven’t made any decision yet.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressman Kucinich, thanks very much for joining us, the congressman from Ohio. He’s just won his Democratic primary in Ohio. He’s here at the Winter Soldier hearings that are taking place in Silver Spring, Maryland.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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