My President Staged a Coup, and All I Got Was This Lousy Orange T-Shirt

The gentle journey jars to halt,
The drifting dream is done;
The Deadly, that we thought were dead,
Stand waiting, every one.
(Walt Kelly, For Lewis Carroll and the Children)

The political news, to be frank, has been so unrelentingly ghastly as to render me speechless for some weeks. Instead, I've retreated happiily to spending my creative time in the 12th century with Eleanor of Aquitaine, researching, drawing and writing an eight page web comic for submission to DC's Zuda comics project. Now I emerge from my marmot hole to find Bush still posturing (if a bit stiffly), and Cheney still grabbing more and more power for the Executive, his delayed revenge for the Church committee's reining in the CIA. Al Qaeda thrives in the environment created for them by a clumsy America. Gonzales is gone, but Michael Mukasey can't quite bring himself to say that a president can't break the law. These things anger us, but we cannot claim surprise; these are all cases of a scorpion acting like a scorpion, true to its nature.

Worse than these, perhaps, is the Congress' inability to put the brakes on an monarchist president. They don't have the votes, even for something as clear cut as Bush's veto of health insurance for poor children while spending billions in Iraq. How, then, will they find enough members to understand what's at stake in Bush's suspension of habeas corpus, rendition and torture without hindrance, domestic spying without judicial oversight? This mealy-mouthed generation of Democrats cannot rebel without asking permission first, or apologizing afterwards.


"Trust me", says the scorpion when he asks the frog for a ride across the river, and then when he stings the frog, the frog is naive enough to profess surprise. Again and again, President Bush has told the Congress, "Trust me to know what I'm doing," ignored their edicts, and used "signing statements" (more than all other presidents combined) to make bold his intention to do exactly what he wanted to do in the first place. Is this not "contempt of Congress"?

Wake me when they're ready to recognize that Bush's coup has reached the level of "treason, high crimes and misdemeanor". We cannot impeach the creature for simple incompetence-- that's the American people's fault, in voting for him-- but how can it be that this popinjay has skated over the law again and again, without breaking the ice?

My Impeachment Letter, Mark One: "Every little bit helps." said the mouse, as he peed in the ocean...

John Conyers over in the 14th Michigan District says he would consider House impeachment proceedings if he had three more Congressmen ask him to do so. There are Democratic operatives so mercenary as to put impeachment off the table in order to have Bush as a punching bag in 2008. There's a lot of exhaustion from being run ragged by the patented Rove Truth-Is-What-I Make-It Machine, a feeling that impeachment wouldn't be worth the time and money spent over the next year and six months. (While we're being honest, if we start pulling troops out of Iraq today, it will still be more than a year before we're out... and thirty years before the Supreme Court shifts.)

Kalamazoo, a little island of progressive politics in Southwest Michigan, is outvoted by five other more conservative counties in the 6th Congressional District. We are "represented" by Republican Fred Upton of the Whirlpool Uptons, who blessedly avoids making a fool of himself on the national airwaves, stays in office by voting the party line, keeping the Dutch-German farmers indifferent and mollifying the Dick Cheney Republicans of Portage. Mostly he stays under the radar and doesn't piss anybody off. Fred voted to impeach the dastardly Clinton, but wouldn't vote for impeachment now if you caught Cheney with his arm up a live boy or a dead girl. What the hell, I wrote him a letter anyway:

Hon. Fred Upton
Washington D.C. Office
2183 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515

In 1988, you voted for the impeachment of William Clinton on what I presume were well-considered, lawful reasons. I am writing you today to urge the same level of patriotism and regard for our country as regards the impeachment of Vice-President Richard Cheney, and the possible impeachment of President George W. Bush.

I am sure you are all too well acquainted with the domestic complaints against both the President and Vice-President. These might be debated point by point, and I suspect you and I would fall on different sides of the same issues.

However, both sides of the political aisle must acknowledge the extralegal actions of Vice-President Richard Cheney and President George W. Bush as regards the president’s role as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, and the appropriation of unrestrained power by Vice President Cheney. It seems clear from both the public and private record that the leaders of this administration have presumed imperial powers as regards making war and the expenditure of lives and treasure.

These constitute high crimes, misdemeanors, and abuse of Constitutional authority. The Constitution, Sir, is not going to defend itself. It is your unfortunate duty, thrust upon us by time and circumstance, to acknowledge these extraordinary circumstances and to vote for articles of impeachment when they are brought up by the House Judiciary Committee.

Sincerely,
etc.

It's Not About the Fired Attorneys; It Was About Stealing the 2004 Election

Does anyone else think Alberto Gonzales looks like the young Peter Lorre in M? Or the unctuous "Dr. Einstein" in Arsenic and Old Lace?

Gregory Palast, the BBC and PBS Now are tracking a Republican program that used junk mail to challenge, delay and block likely Democratic voters in Ohio and Florida. The program was also used to challenge black university students and oops, keep active duty servicemen from voting in 2004. The GOP sent thousand of pieces of junk mail to registered voters in black neighborhoods, marked "Do Not Forward", and then used the undelivered mail to challenge the addressee on Election Day 2004. This included mail to students at their (predominantly black) college addresses in August, and soldiers who had left for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Who ran it, and how high did it go? A person of interest is Tim Griffin, chief of communications for the Bush-Cheney campaign and protege of the lovely and talented Karl Rove, who was appointed US Attorney for Arkansas but then conveniently resigned two hours after John Conyers asked the BBC to send him the documentation for its story.

The popular press still hasn't picked this up. They're still focused on the simpler storyline of Alberto Gonzales as clumsy liar-- but this is the big story, the thread that leads into our generation's surrender to corruption. This is what I think Conyers, Leahy and Spector-- and Kennedy, on the Senate end-- are tugging at like crabgrass.

SUPPORT H.R. 333: THE IMPEACHMENT OF DICK CHENEY

Here are the gory details, the supporting documents for the impeachment of Vice-President Richard Cheney for high crimes and misdemeanors.

Dennis Kucinich has been dismissed by the media as a "fringe" candidate of the loony left, even though this action is eminently sane compared with the prevarications of the Congressional leadership. I myself have called him a "vegetarian vampire" and considered him too twee for the blue collar vote, even though his support for polka and kielbassa (and cute third wife) should prove his bona fides as a populist, when compared with Bush's playing cowboy on a hastily remodeled pig farm with a manslaughter suspect.



So far these 14 Representatives support H. R. 333, Articles of Impeachment Against Dick Cheney:
Yvette Clarke
William Lacy Clay
Keith Ellison
Bob Filner
Jesse Jackson Jr.
Hank Johnson
Dennis Kucinich
Barbara Lee
Jim McDermott
Jim Moran
Jan Schakowsky
Maxine Waters
Lynn Woolsey
Albert Wynn

Speaker Nancy Pelosi's phone number is (202) 225-0100, but as the daughter of a Baltimore politician, she thinks impeachment a waste of time . The House Judiciary Committee can be contacted here.

Right Foot Blue, Left Foot Yellow

Won't it be interesting if Vice-President Cheney were pulled down not by the war, not by his political enemies, not by collusion with energy executives, not by sweetheart deals for Halliburton, but by a little thing like the Libby case?

Ignoring Joseph Wilson's report on yellowcake in Africa would have sufficed; cherry-picking the facts worked in dismissing every other informed opponent of the war. Instead, Cheney's inability to tolerate dissent led him to elevate Wilson's importance as a critic. This led to Cheney, or the people around him, outing Wilson's wife as some kind of senseless payback. Now there's a mad scramble of middle aged people trying to cover their asses like a deranged game of Twister.

COMMONPLACE BOOK, JULY: Current Readings and Quotations of Interest

***
“But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.” – first letter of Paul to the Corinthians

***

As President Bush gets off the helicopter in front of the White House, he is carrying a baby pig under each arm.
The Marine guard snaps to attention, salutes, and says: "Nice pigs, sir."
The President replies: "These are not pigs, these are authentic Texan Razorback Hogs. I got one for Vice-President Cheney, and I got one for Defense Secretary Rumsfeld."
The Marine again snaps to attention, salutes, and says, "Nice trade, sir."

***
"With the release of Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of the Christ' the suffering of Jesus will finally be seen the way God intended, in air-conditioned comfort with nachos and a cherry coke." (internet signature, original author unknown)

***
“...lived on the corner of Cool Street and Goofy Bastard Avenue.”
( from the blog Comics Should be Good)

***
“Given the strong negative feelings that voters have about Congress — in a recent Times poll, just 23 percent of those surveyed approved of the job lawmakers were doing — it is startling how few races are expected to be competitive this fall. This is largely because of increasingly sophisticated partisan gerrymandering that uses high-powered computers to draw lines that in many cases make voters all but irrelevant.” –NY Times, 6/29/06

***
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours." -- Sir Charles Napier to Hindus practicing suttee, 1782-1853

***
“Don't forget, it took less than two weeks after the unveiling of Janet Jackson's right boob at the Super Bowl before the president's congressional cronies were holding hearings on the matter -- but it took 14 months before Bush caved to public pressure and allowed the 9/11 Commission to be formed.”
– Ariana Huffington

***

Addington, Cheney’s chief of staff and longtime principal legal adviser, advocates the "New Paradigm," a legal theory resting "on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars share — namely, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it. Under this framework, statutes prohibiting torture, secret detention, and warrantless surveillance have been set aside."
....Even many conservatives are flabbergasted. Says Mayer:
Bruce Fein, a Republican legal activist, who voted for Bush in both Presidential elections, and who served as associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department, said that Addington and other Presidential legal advisers had "staked out powers that are a universe beyond any other Administration. This President has made claims that are really quite alarming. He’s said that there are no restraints on his ability, as he sees it, to collect intelligence, to open mail, to commit torture, and to use electronic surveillance. If you used the President’s reasoning, you could shut down Congress for leaking too much. His war powers allow him to declare anyone an illegal combatant. All the world’s a battlefield — according to this view, he could kill someone in Lafayette Park if he wants! It’s got the sense of Louis XIV: ‘I am the State.’
-- from an article by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker
***
“President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.
Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ''whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.
Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush's assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty ''to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ''execute" a law he believes is unconstitutional.
-- Charlie Savage, Boston Globe Staff,April 30, 2006

*** I. Conspiracy to Defraud Congress & the American People:

Lying to Congress & the American people about the reasons for the Iraq war; exceeding Presidential authority in violation of Article II of the Constitution and the War Powers Act

A. Lying about the urgency of the threat from Iraq
B. Lying about the Iraq-al Qaeda connection
C. Lying about the status of Iraq's nuclear program
D. Lying about uranium from Niger
E. Lying about aluminum tubes
F. Lying about chemical & biological weapons
G. Lying about unmanned aerial vehicles
H. Lying about mobile weapons labs
I. Conspiracy


II. Conspiracy to Commit Criminal Negligence & Obstruction of Justice:

A. Ignoring warnings about 9/11
B. Obstructing investigations into 9/11
C. Conspiracy


III. Conspiracy to Violate the Rights of Citizens & Residents of the United States:

A. Detaining without charge
B. Denying the right to a fair, speedy, public trial
C. Denying the right to habeas corpus
D. Misusing the NSA to spy on citizens, violating the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution & the FISA
E. Conspiracy


IV. Conspiracy to Violate the Intelligence Identities Protection Act & the Espionage Act, and Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice:

A. Allowing the disclosure of the name of Valerie Plame Wilson
B. Lying to the American people about the President's role in the disclosure
C. Obstructing justice by lying about the President's personal, direct knowledge of the leak
D. Conspiracy


V. Conspiracy to Violate International Laws that Carry the Full Force of U.S. Law Under the United States Constitution:

A. International Law
B. Nuremberg Tribunal Charter
C. Geneva Conventions
D. Torture
E. Rendition
F. Illegal Invasion of Iraq
G. Conspiracy


VI. Conspiracy to Abuse Power, Violate the U.S. Constitution, & Commit Criminal Negligence:

A. Abuse of power - Separation of Powers - "Unitary Executive"
B. Criminal negligence - Katrina
C. Criminal negligence - Failure to protect U.S. military service members in combat zones
D. More here - treaties, environment, etc.
E. Corruption
F. Conspiracy
(The Chicago chapter of the National Lawyers Guild)


***
Give me the glass, and therein will I read.
No deeper wrinkles yet? hath sorrow struck
So many blows upon this face of mine,
And made no deeper wounds? O flattering glass,
Like to my followers in prosperity,
Thou dost beguile me! Was this face the face
That every day under his household roof
Did keep ten thousand men? was this the face
That, like the sun, did make beholders wink?
Was this the face that faced so many follies,
And was at last out-faced by Bolingbroke?
A brittle glory shineth in this face:
As brittle as the glory is the face;

Dashes the glass against the ground
For there it is, crack'd in a hundred shivers.
Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport,
How soon my sorrow hath destroy'd my face.

***

Capitalism is the most barbaric of all religions. - Mark Stewart

***
"I don’t think one’s novels should be too political," Greene said when I asked if his weren’t. "But, I mean, politics do come into them. Politics come into our lives. I think to exclude politics from a novel is excluding a whole aspect of life.... Virginia Woolf, I mean, certainly wouldn’t have introduced politics. I began to get a little tired of Virginia Woolf, you know. Mrs. Dalloway going shopping up Regent Street and the thoughts which went through her head. I reacted rather against her by being a storyteller. You see, my mother was a cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson, and I’d like to think that I’ve followed in his tradition. I’ve reacted against the Bloomsbury circle."
-- Graham Greene

***
"In the last decade or so, the tendency at Marvel has been intensely conservative; comics like the X-MEN have gone from freewheeling, overdriven pop to cautious, dodgy retro. What was dynamic becomes static - dead characters always return, nothing that happens really matters ultimately. The stage is never cleared for new creations to develop and grow. The comic has turned inwards and gone septic like a toenail. The only people reading are fanboys who don't count. The X-MEN, for all it was Marvel's bestseller, had become a watchword for undiluted geekery before the movie gave us another electroshock jolt. And in the last decade, sales fell from millions to hundreds of thousands."
-- Grant Morrison, who restored the “X” mythos to life– and literary importance-- again in a series called “New X-Men”, available in trade paperback; after three years, almost all of Morrison’s ideas have been forgotten, and the X-books are again unreadable by anyone outside of geekdom, with the exception of Joss Whedon’s “Uncanny”.

***
Buffy asserts the power of metaphor and the imagination to embody human reality. Her fans will grow up with a more lively and purposeful awareness than those brought up on the dull delinquencies of Grange Hill or Hollyoaks. For these American teens are right: the demons are real. I once spoke at an American school and, completely ignoring the content of my speech, one 12-year-old boy earnestly asked me if I believed in vampires. "No," I said quickly, glancing at his teachers. But then, glancing at my conscience, I added: "Not exactly ..." (Brian Appleyard, The Sunday Times)

With that in mind, here's the 27B Stroke 6 guide to detecting if your traffic is being funneled into the secret room on San Francisco's Folsom street.

If you're a Windows user, fire up an MS-DOS command prompt. Now type tracert followed by the domain name of the website, e-mail host, VoIP switch, or whatever destination you're interested in. Watch as the program spits out your route, line by line.

C:\> tracert nsa.gov

1 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 12.110.110.204
[...]
7 11 ms 14 ms 10 ms as-0-0.bbr2.SanJose1.Level3.net [64.159.0.218]
8 13 12 19 ms ae-23-56.car3.SanJose1.Level3.net [4.68.123.173]
9 18 ms 16 ms 16 ms 192.205.33.17
10 88 ms 92 ms 91 ms tbr2-p012201.sffca.ip.att.net [12.123.13.186]
11 88 ms 90 ms 88 ms tbr1-cl2.sl9mo.ip.att.net [12.122.10.41]
12 89 ms 97 ms 89 ms tbr1-cl4.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.122.10.29]
13 89 ms 88 ms 88 ms ar2-a3120s6.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.123.8.65]
14 102 ms 93 ms 112 ms 12.127.209.214
15 94 ms 94 ms 93 ms 12.110.110.13
16 * * *
17 * * *
18 * *

In the above example, my traffic is jumping from Level 3 Communications to AT&T's network in San Francisco, presumably over the OC-48 circuit that AT&T tapped on February 20th, 2003, according to the Klein docs.

The magic string you're looking for is sffca.ip.att.net. If it's present immediately above or below a non-att.net entry, then -- by Klein's allegations -- your packets are being copied into room 641A, and from there, illegally, to the NSA.

Of course, if Marcus is correct and AT&T has installed these secret rooms all around the country, then any att.net entry in your route is a bad sign.

Posted by Kevin Poulsen

***

"The things said most confidently by advanced persons to crowded audiences are generally those quite opposite to the fact." -- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

***
"The person who cares the least controls the relationship." (Unknown)

***
Wisdom found on a mens’ room wall:
"No matter how good looking she is, someone, somewhere, is sick and tired of her shit."

IS ANYONE SURPRISED?

Of course no one-- well, maybe Ted Stevens or Bill Frist, both of whom are sure their tin god had his reasons. Since we already knew this, the question will be how long it takes for the networks to put this in their leads.

Bush Told Cheney to Discredit Diplomat Critical of Iraq Policy by Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian UK, Thursday 06 July 2006:
President George Bush directed his vice-president, Dick Cheney, to take personal charge of a campaign to discredit a former ambassador who had accused the administration of twisting prewar intelligence on Iraq, it emerged yesterday.

The revelation by the National Journal, a respected weekly political magazine, that Mr Bush took a personal interest in countering damaging allegations by the former ambassador, Joe Wilson, reveals a White House that was extraordinarily sensitive to any criticism of its prewar planning. It also returns the focus of the criminal investigation into the outing of a CIA agent to the White House only weeks after the senior aide Karl Rove was told he would not face prosecution.

The Journal said Mr Bush made the admission in a July 24 2004 interview in the Oval Office with the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, who is leading the investigation into the outing of the CIA agent, Valerie Plame. Ms Plame is married to Mr Wilson, who says her cover was broken in retaliation after he accused the administration of knowingly using false information on Saddam Hussein's weapons programme....

ITMFA.

FEINGOLD TO DEMOCRATS: L'AUDACE! L'AUDACE! ET TOUJOURS L'AUDACE!!!

An AP article tells us that Feingold's and Conyers' talk about censure and impeachment is raising their populararity with Democratic voters, but not with party functionaries.

The theory is that too much talk about censure will incite the Republican faithful to swarm to Bush's defense. News flash: the Republican faithful would swarm to Bush's defense if he were caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl. The censure proposal is supposed to hurt, not help, the Democrats in the House and Senate election. It distracts from Bush's other troubles, it delights the RNC. Don't make them mad, the Leiberman Democrats say, or rather, whine, as if Feingold was angry at Bush for lying about a friendly blowjob instead of merely subverting the Constitution, killing thousands, suspending habeas corpus, ordering warrantless searches, legalizing torture and driving the nation into a ditch.

One wonders at what point the Democratic Party WOULD speak up for the Constitution and the preservation of the Republic.

Feingold responds in the article: "I welcome their attempt to make a campaign issue of the question of whether there will be accountability for the president's breaking the law," he said. "They will remind people every minute that the president thumbed his nose at the law."

What are the Democrats waiting for? Will they take a stand only when they have a majority? This cowardice masquerading as caution is worse than contemptuous. L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace!

See also: Will Someone Please Give Him a Blowjob so We Can Impeach Him? , Weimar America, Democrats Looking for Their Lost Balls , and others

GIVE 'TIL IT HURTS

YOU... MY SWEET IMPEACHABLE YOU...

For weeks now I've been trying to puzzle my way through the language of the Johnson, NIxon, and Clinton articles of impeachment. Maybe someday I'll understand why Bush remains, well, unimpeachable.

Now some uncredited genius has used the power of the Church Sign Generator to explain in one short phrase why the Congress hesitates:
(Brought to public awareness by Eric Pfeiffer at Wonkette)



The mills of the gods grind slow, but I'm told that they grind exceedingly small.

See also Meddling Kids, Don't Question Me, Too Many Changes, You Stupid Earth People! Your Stupid Minds!, Ming the Merciless, Accidental Truth

BUSH and the NSA: DON'T QUESTON ME.

Sad to say, our only overseas communications this year involved the wedding of Maureen and Michel, bridesmaid dresses and the wrenching loss of our house rabbit Fanny. No enemies list for pipsqueaks like me this year. The bloggers at The Washington Note sure were eager to know who was on the list, but that was December 16, and by now the list is about as exclusive as toilet paper.

The New York Times, under the stewardship of Arthur Pinch "Rich and Powerful People are Nice to Me, Therefore We Trust Them" Sulzberger, waited until Christmas weekend to reveal that Bush's spying without a warrant was NOT limited to people who might have stood next to a terrorist once. It seems the National Security Agency has without court-approved warrants, been plugged right into tapping directly "the American telecommunication system's main arteries".

And John Conyers-- a Michigan boy, I'm pleased to say-- was first on the board to utter the "I" word, impeachment, in public. Too bad fellatio wasn't involved, or Henry Hyde could jump on there with him. Does anyone else think it odd that a drunken woman picked this week of all weeks to start a public bar fight with Mrs. Conyers?

Of course, the American telecommunications corporations rolled over like micturating daschunds to help the NSA get in the electronic back door. And lots of "concern" has been expressed by judges and agents, but not enough concern for more than one of them to resign.

"Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda." Is there anyone who believed that? Well, the lickspittle Attorney General, of course. And Idaho. Cheney doesn't believe in anything, he just bulliies you into this week's party line. He's kind of like a short, balding Patsy Stone-- "Don't question me!" And Rumsfeld, the very avatar of arrogance, thinks EVERYONE'S stupid and can't even brook the mildest line of questioning from an NPR reporter without insulting the interviewer. Sadly, this tells us more about Rumsfeld's insecurities than he wants us to know.

The Bush administration says it wants "to detect terrorist plots before they can be carried out". The consensus of the people-who-know-better-than-me seems to be put us at a 70% chance of a terrorist attack with a weapon of mass detruction on US soil within the next 10 years. Nothing in Bush's efforts is likely to better those odds; indeed, this adminstration seems determined to increase the terrorist population. See Also: Jekyll & Hyde President, , St. George vs, the Pagan Knight, ,Missing Link, ,NeoCon Blogging, , Hating the French, The Worms Turn