The Misuse of Hope

Just listening to the news that according to the Pentagon, Iran had some part in an attack on US soldiers in Iraq. Bush likely hopes this will put the kibash on Congressional Democrats' plans to stop the escalation and redeploy or even the lesser non-binding resolutions. Those against bringing Iran into the war hope that the state of our military will prevent it, but when has riduculousness of idea and plan ever stopped Bush. I think they are being optimistic.

Liebermann is allowing himself to be used by republican political operatives going around selling the Bush war escalation as the only plan that "holds the hope of success."

Hope.

We're often told by self-help books and coaches that it's the most important thing to have. However, is it enough and can it be harmful if it's not based in reality?

In the February 2007 issue of Harper's (not yet available on Harper's website), Barbara Ehrenreich wrote an essay in which she starts out with the line "I hate hope." Ehrenereich goes on to describe the self-help industry sale of hope to people to help them lose weight and otherwise improve their health, find those who are unemployed or underemployed jobs, improve career success, get through bereavement and increase wealth. She also describes Bush's use of dubious optimism to get through foreign policy challenges (temporarily at least, I guess).

Now, Ehrenreich says, the "marketing of optimism" has moved into the academic world and describes conferences on Happiness Studies and new college courses on positive psychology. While much of the advice, she describes as unnocuous (such as advice to smile more and greet coworkers), she grows more concerned at the push away from reality. She says, "[i]t's not enough to manifest positivity through a visibly positive attitude; you must establish it as one of the very structures of your mind, whether or not it is justified by the actual circumstances." However, she cites experts that remind us that our negative and pessimistic thoughts are vestigal from our days as cave people surviving in a very rough world and they come in handy to prevent us from killing ourselves even in the modern world.

Of course, Ehrenreich is not arguing against all positive thinking and sees it's value in our mental and physical health and I agree that visualization can work in a limited way and acknowledge studies that show positive thinking helps in some health situations (although it didn't work for my friend and co-worker, Patty who lost her battle with pancreatic cancer last year because it was what it was even though she fought as hard as she could). Ehrenreich is just proposing a more realistic way of looking at hope and points out the dark side of baseless and unbridled optimism. Through this positivity trend, we have become crueler to victims of real tangible bad circumstances and we more often feel worse because we now also have to feel bad about feeling bad.

Politically, I think that false optimism is at work in pro-war and pro-corporate Bush administration as a means of controlling dissent. Bush is said to be selling his "surge" as "give war a chance," meaning that we can hope that one more "surge" will break the grinding escalation of the civil war. That's dangerous because the facts do not bear out the hope and even if you thought at any point since the presentation of his "surge" that one last chance couldn't hurt, think again and think of his wish to escalate into Iran and his baiting of Iran's already unstable leader.

Nationally, the false hope movement has given us a flood of wealth upward and hope, but nothing more downward. People are sold tax cuts and the hope the cuts will help them, but in fact, the tax cuts only help the wealthiest of Americans. Bush's health care plan of tax deductions and HSAs provide false hope of help with the high cost of health care, but in reality provides very little to those who need it most because they don't have the income to fund the savings accounts or pay the taxes on which they are supposed to be saving. While unlikely to really help our health care access crisis, the Bush health care proposal may actually make the situation worse by eliminating traditional tax incentives for businesses that provide employee health benefits, incentizing them to discontinue such benefits. Then, Bush and the oil industry contrarians (among whom Kirk is mentioned in the late 1990s according to the CEI website) worked to give the world false hope that global warming was just an illusion of Al Gore's or maybe even beneficial, while the facts are proving out otherwise. The worst example of the false hope of the Bush Administration is the abandonment of the victims of Hurricane Katrina who were given false hope by Bush in his 2006 State of the Union Address and squat in the 2007 version. The least example is the continued hope folks have that they will escape their bad situations by winning the lottery. The press eats up the stories, but few win and many who do have bad results.

Barack Obama called his latest book the Audacity of Hope and I don't take issue with its stories or suggestions or even its title because Obama is talking about real life hope-- real reasons for it and real things we have to do to create and actualize it. It's the fake, theatre-as-reality sort of hope that I think is hurting this country. We're being offered hope instead of facts and hope instead of solutions, and no actual facts and no real solutions. The only goal is the creation of hope itself, so Bush, Cheney, Kirk and friends can go about their own business and maintain their power.

Ehrenreich, a cancer survivor, concludes that she perfers to replace hope with being actually cancer-free and "draws strength from the 'refusal to hope'" She concludes, "To be hope-free is to acknowledge the lion in the tall grass, the tumor in the CAT scan, and to plan one's moves accordingly." I agree. I'd rather have the facts and a real strategy before wishes of false hope anyday.

Obama has a plan!

Key elements of the Obama plan (see here too), as outlined in a fact sheet attached to the statement, follow...

Stops the Escalation: Caps the number of U.S. troops in Iraq at the number in Iraq on January 10, 2007. This does not affect the funding for our troops in Iraq. This cap has the force of law and could not be lifted without explicit Congressional authorization.

De-escalates the War with Phased Redeployment: Commences a phased redeployment of U.S. troops out of Iraq not later than May 1, 2007, with the goal that all combat brigades redeploy from Iraq by March 31, 2008, a date consistent with the expectation of the Iraq Study Group. This redeployment will be both substantial and gradual, and will be planned and implemented by military commanders. Makes clear that Congress believes troops should be redeployed to the United States; to Afghanistan; and to other points in the region. A residual U.S. presence may remain in Iraq for force protection, training of Iraqi security forces, and pursuit of international terrorists.

Enforces Tough Benchmarks for Progress: These 13 benchmarks are based on President Bush’s own statements and Administration documents and include:

Security: Significant progress toward fulfilling security commitments, including eliminating restrictions on U.S. forces, reducing sectarian violence, reducing the size and influence of the militias, and strengthening the Iraqi Army and Police.

Political Accommodation: Significant progress toward reaching a political solution, including equitable sharing of oil revenues, revision of de-Baathification, provincial elections, even-handed provision of government services, and a fair process for a constitutional amendment to achieve national reconciliation.

Economic Progress: Requires Iraq to fulfill its commitment to spend not less than $10 billion for reconstruction, job creation, and economic development without regard for the ethnic or sectarian make-up of Iraqi regions.

Should these benchmarks be met, the plan allows for the temporary suspension of this redeployment, subject to the agreement of Congress.

Congressional oversight: Requires the President to submit reports to Congress every 90 days describing and assessing the Iraqi government's progress in meeting benchmarks and the redeployment goals. [This is actually a statement of current law.]

Intensified Training: Intensifies training of Iraqi security forces to enable the country to take over security responsibility of the country.

Conditions on Economic Assistance: Conditions future economic assistance to the Government of Iraq on significant progress toward achievement of benchmarks. Allows exceptions for humanitarian, security, and job-creation assistance.

Regional Diplomacy: Launches a comprehensive regional and international diplomatic initiative – that includes key nations in the region – to help achieve a political settlement among the Iraqi people, end the civil war in Iraq, and prevent a humanitarian catastrophe and regional conflict. Recommends the President should appoint a Special Envoy for Iraq to carry out this diplomacy within 60 days. Mandates that the President submit a plan to prevent the war in Iraq from becoming a wider regional conflict.

Corporate America

As Bush continues to bait the nut job in Iran to invade Iraq (bring it on, eh?) and takes more control over governmental enforcement agencies by executive order (here too) to prevent enforcement of environmental, health and safety legislation except at his pleasure, Congress continues to free fall into being merely an advisory committee. Even the non-binding resolutions against war escalation are still sitting stagnant in the Senate. For all his bravado of last week, Hagel might need to have that shoe horn issued to himself.

And for all those still arguing that Olmert continuing to buy into Bushism and avoid working with its neighbors is good for Israel, they are isolating themselves from the world even more and that cannot be good for the Israeli people, although great for the arms dealers.

The only ones not listening to Bush and not letting him be the decider are the corporations for which he's worked so hard.

Do you think one day this new dictatorship Bush has fashioned will fall, not to left wing liberalism, but to the very corporations he empowered? Will countries one day be named after these corporations as sports stadiums and roads are now?

Put up a harder fight than most members of Congress

Poor Barbaro.

Right ite ite Wing Math

Some of you want to know how many anti-war protesters showed up in Washington DC last Saturday and perhaps a few want to know how many counter-pro-war-protesters also showed. With the corporate media reporting, you can never really be sure, so as a public service here on the blog I thought I’d take a page from Tom Lehrer and a guy I knew in high school, and offer a brief lesson in the New Math of right wing media reporting. Specifically, how they count the number of protesters at an Out of Iraq Rally.

Now remember how we used to do that, if you’re under 85 or your parents owned a private plane, you’d fly over the crowd and take a picture, square off sections and count heads in a couple and average it out, but if you’re over 85 or didn’t have a plane, you’d carry around a pad of paper and have several pens and go around asking people in any given square mile ‘who’s in your group?’ and average it out, but in the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand you need to make the point that the war’s ok with most Americans even when it’s not, so here’s what you do:

You can’t make the number so very small
That it looks like blatant lying,
So you start with Tens of Thousands
And to see if that flies.
You look around to the right wing bloggers
And make sure they bought it,
And if they did, which they probably will,
You subtract 100,000 and see if that flies on the other channels,
And if it doesn’t, You
Regroup, and you change the number to please the skeptics,
By adding back 50,000,
And by also taking away the number of celebrities counted,
You keep the number suitably low.
Is that clear?

Now instead of showing a wide shot of the crowd,
That would belie your numbers,
You keep your photographer’s lens
At eos 350D + ef 100 f2.8
And the advantage is
That you can also shoot a caterpillar on a flower at that stop,
But flowers stand for peace,
So you probably will look for the counter-protesters instead.

From the counter-protest,
You find a couple of right-wing morons,
To make them look less like crocks,...
(and you know why none of them are in Iraq themselves?
cause they’re all suffering from unseen injuries and diseases, right.)
You have to find a passer-by,
And interview him as if he’s with their group,
And then change the lens to 35mm before taking the picture
At and angle designed to include passers-by and folks fromthe original protest,
And that leaves hundreds if not thousands of counter-protesters...

Well, there were really six.
But the photo showing more is the important thing.

Now go back to the crowd,
And it looks thinner here at the beginning.
Because by this time they’ve moved toward the end,
And that leaves 30,000...?

Everybody get one?
Not bad for the first try!

Hooray for right wing math,
Right-ite-ite wing-math,
It wont do you a bit of good to actually count.
So we make it simple,
So very simple,
That a child could do it! (But kids usually don’t lie about stuff like that. So we leave it to the right-wing press.)

Now the answer we got is 64,000, because we took out 100,000
To round out the number,
And the corporate editor forgot to reserve 7 character spaces on the page
But, don’t panic.
Because the right wing bloggers will subtract 10,000 more
And you can cite their sources,
And pretend you didn’t know otherwise, or
Ignore the questions like they were inappropriate to ask,
And explain the numbers once again to confuse the skeptics.
Shall we have another go at it?
Hang on.

64,000? How did they get 64,000? Some will cry.
Well, 64,000 could be the number, don’t you see if you didn’t count anyone holding a sign
(well, ask a valid question, and you'll get a silly answer in the right-wing press.)

From the liberal press (or what’s left of it)
The claim is a quarter of a million,
And they say probably a little more,
And they say there were protests in other cities,
Or, in other words,
They have no idea because they don’t have the tools,
And they don’t have the press,
So it doesn’t matter.
So you take away 100,000 to round out the number,
And another 100,000 for the right wing bloggers.
Now you’re back to the 50,000,
And you’re left with 10,000,
but they were probably just on-lookers,
And that leaves...?

Now, don’t be angry.
Don’t be sad!
Whoever was there, it won’t really matter
Because Bush is the decider
And, in any event, sucked away the press with his recent surge
In the Shiite holy city of Najaf (winning hearts and minds by removing those pesky bodies).

Hooray for right wing math,
Right-ite-ite wing-math,
It wont do you a bit of good to actually count.
So we make it simple,
So very simple,
That a child could do it! (But kids usually don’t lie about stuff like that. So we leave it to the right-wing press.)

Come back next year.
We’ll still be at war
And we can count the crowds using long division.
Now there’s got to be someone around
Who can make this count even better next time.
Using quantum mechanics,
The math of atomic and subatomic level crowds.

Global Change

Bush couldn't say "global warming" during his state of the union address, so he substituted "global change" because as we all know the republicans work with semantics and not reality. He decided the fix was a surge in measures to reduce gasoline consumption by 20 percent in 10 years including increased production of alternative fuels and increased auto efficiency standards.

Philip Clapp, President of the National Environmental Trust, said of Bush's proposal:

The numbers are calculated to sound big and impressive but the President is being just as intransigent on global warming as he is on Iraq, ignoring Congress, major business leaders, and the public, who have called for action.

The President's proposals will contribute almost nothing to stopping global warming. They will allow our carbon emissions to grow by 14 per cent over the next 10 years.

Scientists say some of his specifics are worse then what we have now. Coal based liquid fuel is more polluting than the gasoline we use now and making ethanol from wood chips contributes to deforestation.

Many scientists also feel that reductions in auto emissions don't mean much unless we also put a cap on carbon emissions from “smokestack” industries and utilities or tax emissions, but despite calls for the same from various corporate CEOs, the Bush administration has still refuses this suggestion. Read here about one corporation's campaign to disinform the public on global warming. Read here and here about Mark Kirk's global warming past.

Can We Pry the Majority from the Margins?

A majority of Americans would like to see an end to both the Iraq War and the Bush administration and yet the conversation is still for most practical purposes being controlled by the administration and its small band of followers.

Discussion about ending the Iraq War was easily moved off the Iraq Study Group Plan and onto escalation. The Senate (except for Teddy) has hogtied itself with a web of non-binding resolutions against the war conflicting only in their degree of wishy-washiness. Today's protests were heavily attended by known liberal celebrities and the few courageous representatives that attend such things, but none of the Democratic presidential frontrunners showed their faces, except Kucinich--if you can call him a frontrunner, and we need not even begin to discuss which republican leaders showed up............uh.............the usual zero and no one expects any of them either which in and of itself is sad when you really think about it.

The conversation about impeachment pretty much ended before it got started with Pelosi's pre-election no-impeachment coments, Vermonters worry their impeachment resolution will make the state look bad, the Illinois resolution dropped out of sight, and new congressmen telling us that dropping the subject is part of "learning the ropes" in Congress.

Coversations about illegal spying on Americans often end with polls showing that most Americans would rather sacrifice their rights (if they even know what these rights are) for an empty promise of temporary security. The sanctity of our constitutional rights were once considered the most important part of being American. Heck, even television's Andy Taylor explained it to Opie fairly well back in the early-mid-sixties. Opie had taped a jailhouse prisoner talking to his attorney to give to his dad and Andy deleted the tape without listening to it. Click on the link to see the exchange between this pillar of mid-twentieth century Americana and his television son.

So, how is it that basic American freedoms and the majority of Americans have been marginalized? One answer has to be the media. Right-wing extremists were smart enough to know the value of owning the media and now they control the definitions with a virtual machine of talking point dissemination and it doesn't seem to matter how ridiculous the talking points are in the ability of folks to internalize them. The definition of "moderate" has moved sharply to the right and now a moderate is someone who won't take funding away from a war based on lies and maintained for the benefit of corporate profiteers and someone who thinks we may have to suspend the First, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amedments on the word of a known liar who has named himself The Decider. A 21st century Andy Taylor would likely be rewarding Opie for taping the prisoner's discussion with his lawyer rather than giving the original admonishment.

Once the definitions are set, it's hard for people to step away from the bandwagon even if that bandwagon was falsely created. I recently read an article (that I cannot seem to find now and will cite when I find it) that reminded me that pretty much up until modern times, it would have been deadly for a person to take a stand against the powerful, so few did it. Even our founders realized that they needed to hang together or surely they would hang alone.

Then, there's the penchant of the anti-War, anti-Bush majority for marginalizing itself. Even though this majority against the war and the Bush administration consist of your friends, family, co-workers and neighbors, the guy dressed like a gitmo detainee with the black hood always seems to get the national news interview, hood on, before the soccer mom with 5 kids or the elderly grandma. The fringe issues (and I'm not saying many of them are not valid in and of themselves) with the loudest, media-seeking champions get more attention than they should, pushing away many who would otherwise be on their side on the war and other Bush administration issues. Sometimes I think this marginalizing effect is exactly why the right bias media often gives more time and space to the proponents of fringe issues. I know I'll get clobbered for this next statement, but I think those of us hoping to see an end to the war and a peaceful and lawful end to the Bush administration, need to get more media savvy and seize the day of our mainstreamness. We need to emphasize that we represent the majority, keep focus on the main issues and tightest cases, and put our most mainstream folks up front.

The only other hope is that, while he's given up impeachment rhetoric, Conyers is still peeling that legal onion, the argument being that once all the facts are out there, ending the war and impeachment will be all that any reasonable person would find left to do. I'll continue to hope that Adams was correct when he said: "The law, in all vicissitudes of government, fluctuations of the passions, or flights of enthusiasm, will preserve a steady undeviating course; it will not bend to the uncertain wishes, imaginations, and wanton tempers of men."

We've given the keys to the (shoe) store to the thieves

Here's the best nutshell description of the Libby case I've found. It's from FindLaw:

Libby is now charged with repeatedly lying to a federal grand jury about his role in the smearing of Wilson. In particular, Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald will argue that Libby lied to the grand jury about what he said to various journalists -- in order to portray himself as the innocent recipient of news about Plame's identity that came from news reporters. In fact, Fitzgerald alleges, Libby was actively disseminating that information, coming out of the Administration itself, to new reporters, as part of a propaganda campaign to prop up Administration policy.

Critics of the prosecution claim that Fitzgerald is criminalizing hardball politics, and that it is outrageous to prosecute Libby, given that he was not actually responsible for Plame's CIA status becoming public. Armitage was, and it turns out that his disclosure of Plame's identity was inadvertent. Thus, the whole episode Fitzgerald was originally charged with investigating was ultimately non-criminal in nature.

There is an old adage, "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up" - and lots of folks have gone to jail thanks to prosecutors who took the adage to heart. The Libby case presents a bit of a twist: How far should we go to prosecute the cover-up of a non-crime?

The writer of the piece, Ed Lazarus goes on to argue that the prosecution of the cover-up case is important because "truth matters - now more than ever."

I agree with Lazarus in this because we have a former White House heavy duty insider, Ari Fleischer with immunity in a criminal case; we have testimony that the Vice President "personally directed the effort to discredit" Joe Wilson and recent comments by Sen. Jay Rockefeller that Cheney "exerted "constant" pressure on Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to stall an investigation into the Bush administration's use of flawed intelligence on Iraq." At the same time, as Lazarus points out, the government has sought and exercises, and many people are willing to give them, extraordinary power to surveil us, hold and torture prisoners, send our troops to war, and make other extraconstitutional decisions about war and national security. So, basically we have given up the keys to the store to the very thieves against which we were supposed to be protected by constitutional procedure. I would add to Lazarus' argument, however, that the problems we are seeing with Bush, Cheney, Fleischer, Gonzales and others are exactly why our founders warned us about so giving up the keys.

Another chapter to this story needs to be written by Congress which must investigate, probably through Waxman's Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Problem with Waxman's committee is only that it has waaayyy too much to do which is what Lazarus is getting at here. We're supposed to trust this government, but we know we cannot trust them to tell the truth about starting warS or spend our money wisely or have at least a good strategy for their bad war or warn our first responders about environmental dangers or allow our scientists to give us good information or something even so sensitive as our soldiers' deaths and the list goes on and on.

Mark Kirk is alternately taking credit for and whining about a bill (not his own bill of course because he still cannot get enough votes for a bill to punch his way out of a wet brown paper bag) that recently passed punishing members of congress who are felons by taking away their pensions. What does Kirk think about the scheming and lies that got us into Iraq, squander our money and keep us there? We'll never know because he's still too busy trying to figure out how to work the automatic shoe stretcher.

More questions than answers today

Do you think your voice is heard in our government?
Who speaks for you?
Do you mind when organizations claim to speak for you?
Do you think DC and the territories should have a vote?
What do you do to make your voice heard?
Do you think we are in a constitutional crisis?
Do you think we need a new constitutional convention?
Do you think technology can make our government more democratic or are the risks too great?

Also, does anyone know what this shenanigans about Kirk's amendment to the bill giving only a ceremonial vote to DC and other territories was all about and why John Boehner thinks he gets to complain about rules when he presided over one of the worst rule-breaking congresses of all time?

Hey Mark, I wear a 5B!

Since the lies he helped Bush spread about Iraq have been debunked, Mark Kirk has been unwilling to discuss the War with his constituents apart from an occasional "stay the course" to the BBC radio. He recent made an isolated statement about a surge in diplomacy rather than a surge, but supported the status quo in Iraq at the same time, all the while continuing to refuse any discussion with the district on the issue.

Many Tenth District constituents expressed early concern about the Iraq war in letters to Kirk and he generally responded with attitudinal, paternalistic letters assuring us that he was in a position to know and saw the intelligence indicating WMD in Iraq. He answered similarly in his debate with Hank Perritt and somehow managed to avoid the question completely in his debate with Dan Seals. He's said very little since, but now seems to be on board for Bush's Irresponsible War Part II in Iran and still he has scheduled no town hall meetings or listening sessions in the district on war or any other issues.

So, as Chuch Hagel suggested for some senators, time for Mark to get that job at a shoe store. Hagel said this Wednesday while addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

What do you believe? What are you willing to support? What do you think? Why were you elected? If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes. This is a tough business. But is it any tougher, us having to take a tough vote, express ourselves and have the courage to step up on what we’re asking our young men and women to do? I don’t think so.

Sadly, Hagel was only talking about another low level of bravery non-binding resolution.

Hey Mark, since we no longer expect you to even discuss support for (or even why you won't support) H.R. 353, Rep. Markey's bill to stop funding the war (the house version of Ted Kennedy's bill--the only binding piece of legislation to stop Bush's escalation), I wear a 5B and I've been looking for something like this for spring:

State of the Lies

Note: Sorry about all the blogger problems earlier today. I think I'm going to have to cut my archives down and move to new blogger some time soon.

Anyway....

I didn’t hear much new in Bush’s speech. He’s going to pretend to balance the budget and whatever he does do will be on the backs of hardworking Americans. He’s gunning for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Why is corporate welfare never considered an entitlement that has to be eliminated?

The public schools will be private soon with no plan on what to do with the kids whose parents won’t be able to afford private school even with the vouchers or where such schools are not available and I guess, with everything in the private sector, segregation will be ok too.

Health care? Forgetabout it. There is nothing new here. It’s all tax cuts, health savings accounts that notoriously help only those with healthy six-figure incomes, and restrictions on malpractice lawsuits leaving the seriously injured with nothing. Those who cannot afford health insurance likely don’t pay too much in taxes either, so most folks will get pennies or nothing back, and more will be pushed out of employer plans as health care incentives to employers are to be reduced under Bush’s plan.

As for immigration, it’s all slave labor to Bush with his guest worker program.

Bush the new environmentalist? With Cheney sitting behind him, and a history of increasing dependence, that is unlikely.

He then went into a shameless lecture on 9/11 and terrorism neglecting to mention his actions that increased the number of terrorists and gave them refuge in Iraq while overblowing the thwarted British airline terrorist plot and underblowing the resurgence of Al Quaeda in Afghanistan. The terrorist working group is just another of his attempts to strip Congress of its war role. No mention of diplomacy until Webb began talking. I thought maybe Cheney was muttering back there something like "Who needs diplomacy when war works so well for us?" Anyone else notice that Cheney and Bush drank from their water glasses in sync?

Only thing new from prior years, we already knew about. His new war with Iran and the story for it sounded suspiciously familiar to the story we got for Iraq.

Condi looked downright annoyed while he was talking about the Middle East. Wonder what that was all about. Maybe even she’s getting tired of all the lies or maybe she didn’t like Pelosi getting all the fashion attention. Bush wore a blue tie. Cheney wore a purple one. Getting away from red. It's probably the only truly bi-partisan thing they have planned.

More important than tonight’s annual lie fest were this afternoon’s opening arguments in the Scooter trial. Apparently, someone has already spilled on Cheney. Fitzgerald is peeling the onion. Is a vice president’s perjury about national security matters less offensive to Americans than a president’s perjury about sex with Monica? I’d guess we’re about to find out. How does Cheney look in orange?

Al Gore Gets It -- We Are Operating Panet Earth Like a Business in Liquidation

I'll just come out and say it now. I like Barack a lot, like John Edwards well enough, and I could live with Hillary, but I'm hoping Al Gore runs. Al's my favorite candidate and he was also my favorite in 1992. Here's just one of the reasons I think Al's the best choice to lead this country out of the Bush quagmire. Al gets it. We no longer know how to measure real value, and as a result, have sold our American business tradition of hard work, smarts, continuous improvement, real competition, and fairness to corporations that are running a liquidation sale with not only our environment, but our workers, our products and services. It also operates on our foreign policy and the way we treat the poor, children, students, seniors and others in need.

It's the short term, funnel all the money to the top, corporate thinking that is killing this country. Check out just about any corporation on Yahoo Finance and you can see all the insider transactions (left hand column), all those stock option trades of the top managers and executives. What do corporations do to finance sending all that money to a small elite group? They short cut processes, downgrade products, reduce R&D, fail to keep up with technology, downsize till it hurts and then downsize some more, cut pay and benefits eliminating any shred of employee loyalty that is left.

Specifically, Gore is talking about accounting for more different types of value and encouraging more long term and global thinking in assessing what has value. One example would be taking environmental impact into account as a commodity that has value. This sort of accounting could be, not only be a boon to customers and workers, but even to shareholders as they get return for real value.

Under current thinking of what makes up value, business owners who put money back into their businesses, their products and services, communities and employees, and who work for continuous improvement and environmentally sound processes and products get squeezed out by the Wal-Marts of the world. In the long run, by allowing this to continue, we are downgrading our livestyles and our value and the next generation will be living cut rate lives and some other country will take up the lead. Then, the corporations will move there and ruin that country if its people allow it to happen like we seem to be doing so far.

All this operates on the rest of our lives because our inability to value things in our society correctly causes us to run a cut rate war in Iraq not equipping our soldiers appropriately or making policy as the situation requires, but as keeps the oil and no-bid war contracts flowing, discouraging teens from higher education based on the anecdotal experiences of a few celebrities (while the real argument is that the corporations prefer low level, low paid workers anyway), cutting help to the needy and pricing medicines out of senior's reach all in the name of keeping that corporate money funneling to the top.

Thing about running a liquidation sale is that it presupposes an end and I'd like to think we are not yet at our end. I don't understand why so many Americans accept that we are.

Talk about the Bears!

and the republican hopefuls?

You can be mad at Hillary for her war votes or worry that Barack is an unknown quantity (despite a voting record in the Senate and the IL Statehouse and a book that pretty much describes how he thinks about almost everything) or wonder if Al is up to it again, but compared to this motley crew of republicans, Hillary, Barack, Al, John E., Bill, Tom, Wes, even Joe, and Dennis are all terrific candidates:

John McCain: Tried to sell himself as a moderate in 2000 despite an extremist pro-corporate voting record and lost only because the Bush folks were more hateful than his folks were. Now, he want to win at all costs, so he's hired the nasty Bush folks to get him in. Despite a seemingly credible stand against torture, he compromised with the Bush administration. Now, he's eyeball deep in the "surge".

Sam Brownback: Eeeek. One of the primary revisionist historians of our Age of Reason Revolution, this staunch right-wing, extremist religion nutcase would have this country ruled by Christian law, his version. He's campaigning on the "compassionate conservatism" line folks bought about Bush in 2000. For all his fake compassion, he wants a regressive flat tax, cuts in education and social programs, but corporate welfare is just fine. He's for the flag, but againt civil rights and liberties that the flag represents and government wiretapping is just great by him. Choice or stem cell research? Forgetabout it. Now, he's against the Iraq war escalation (or not), but was otherwise for the war all the way along and against all measures proposed in the past to check the President's authority and make him accountable (see for yourself by searching him here and here). Here's some additional information on his past voting record. Here's a bit from a Rolling Stone article about him:

Brownback believes America is entering a period of religious revival on the scale of the Great Awakening that preceded the nation's creation, an epidemic of mass conversions, signs and wonders, book burnings. But this time, he says, the upheaval will give way to a "cultural springtime," a theocratic order that is pleasant and balmy. It's a vision shared by the mega-churches that sprawl across the surburban landscape, the 24-7 spiritual-entertainment complexes where millions of Americans embrace a feel-good fundamentalism.

Rudy Giuliani: Supposed to be America's Mayor after 9/11 and the least offensive of the bunch being pro-choice and pro-stem cell research and not a gay-basher, but he favors Bush's surge in Iraq likening it to his efforts to reducing crime in NYC and some feel his 9/11 heroism was more due to great press than reality given many of the cuts he made in New York prior to the attack caused some of the first responder problems. Here's more info on him. Maybe locating the Office of Emergency Management inside the World Trade Center wasn't the smartest thing.

Jeb Bush: Yup, looks like they may even try to shove another Bush down our throats. See here too. They are going to sell him based on his brother's alleged stupidity. Jeb is supposed to be the smart one.

So go ahead and argue away for your favorite or against your least favorite Democrat, but keep these fellows in the back of your mind.

Then There's Al

Do you think Al should run? I got this email today:

Announcing the AlGore.org Meetup Organizer Program

----------------------------------------

Grassroots activists around the country are working now to ensure Al Gore will run in 2008 – - and win. Why not join them? Become part of our new Meetup Organizer Program! Meetups have become The Way for grassroots activists to organize. Becoming a Draft Gore Meetup Organizer will give you an easy, highly visible way to find other committed Gore supporters in your area. Once you hook up, you can strategize, organize and make the Draft Gore movement a reality. To make it easier for you participate in this exciting program, AlGore.org will pay the Meetup.com fees of the first 100 Meetup Organizers who register through us.

How the program works: Follow the link below to fill out our Meetup Organizer Volunteer form. Our Meetup Task Force will contact you promptly to give you a prepaid coupon code to pay for the first six months of Meetup fees for your group. We'll also help you create your new Draft Gore group at Meetup.com. Once you've registered your group, you will receive materials and support from AlGore.org to help you have successful meetups. Click here to join our Meetup Organizer Program: http://www.algore.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=437&Itemid=320

Have more questions about being a Meetup Organizer? Check outMeetup.com's Organizer F.A.Q. page: http://www.meetup.com/help/organize/

Thank you for your support!-Dylan MaloneCo-Founder
AlGore.org
AlGore-08.com

China's Bad Weather

You probably already know that China sent a missile up into space and shot down one of their own weather satellites, understandable if their weather has been as bad as it's been in our central plaines. However, this missile was really shot into space to show the US that China can compete in Bush's Star Wars arms race. The sad part about this one is that it represents another missed diplomatic opportunity for the Bush administration. See here too.

Of course, Mark Kirk's only concern with China has been their recognition of US corporate patents.

As it goes, we missed opportunities for diplomacy with Iraq, Iran, Syria (recommended by the Iraq Study Group and ignored by the Bush administration), N. Korea and China.

In 1991, Bush's father made a speech in which he talked about the new world order of post-Cold-War, war and diplomacy. At the time, he seemed to be justifying globalization and the first Iraq war while using the language of peace and unity against aggression from smaller states and terrorism and what sounded like common sense efforts to end the "micro-management" of defense and diplomacy. However, in retrospect, and since a lot of the same players have been involved in both the Bush I and Bush II administrations, like Dick Cheney, it seems that what they really meant and what they were setting the stage for was keeping Congress out of its traditional role in defense and international matters, preemptive war, nuclear proliferation and madman diplomacy.

Hillary!

Dear Ellen Beth,

I'm in. And I'm in to win.

Today I am announcing that I will form an exploratory committee to run for president.

And I want you to join me not just for the campaign but for a conversation about the future of our country -- about the bold but practical changes we need to overcome six years of Bush administration failures.

I am going to take this conversation directly to the people of America, and I'm starting by inviting all of you to join me in a series of web chats over the next few days.

The stakes will be high when America chooses a new president in 2008.

As a senator, I will spend two years doing everything in my power to limit the damage George W. Bush can do. But only a new president will be able to undo Bush's mistakes and restore our hope and optimism.

Only a new president can renew the promise of America -- the idea that if you work hard you can count on the health care, education, and retirement security that you need to raise your family. These are the basic values of America that are under attack from this administration every day.

And only a new president can regain America's position as a respected leader in the world.

I believe that change is coming November 4, 2008. And I am forming my exploratory committee because I believe that together we can bring the leadership that this country needs. I'm going to start this campaign with a national conversation about how we can work to get our country back on track.

This is a big election with some very big questions. How do we bring the war in Iraq to the right end? How can we make sure every American has access to adequate health care? How will we ensure our children inherit a clean environment and energy independence? How can we reduce the deficits that threaten Social Security and Medicare?

No matter where you live, no matter what your political views, I want you to be a part of this important conversation right at the start. So to begin, I'm going to spend the next several days answering your questions in a series of live video web discussions. Starting Monday, January 22, at 7 p.m. EST for three nights in a row, I'll sit down to answer your questions about how we can work together for a better future. And you can participate live at my website.

Sign up to join the conversation here: http://www.hillaryclinton.com/action/conversation

I grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of America, where I learned that we could overcome every obstacle we face if we work together and stay true to our values.

I have worked on issues critical to our country almost all my life. I've fought for children for more than 30 years. In Arkansas, I pushed for education reform. As first lady, I helped to expand health care coverage to millions of children and to pass legislation that dramatically increased adoptions. I also traveled to China to affirm that women's rights are human rights.

And in the Senate, I have worked across party lines to get billions more for children's health care, to stop the president's plan to privatize Social Security, and to make sure the victims and heroes of 9/11 and our men and women in uniform receive the fair treatment they deserve. In 2006, I led the successful fight to make Plan B contraception available to women without a prescription.

I have spent a lifetime opening opportunities for tens of millions who are working hard to raise a family: new immigrants, families living in poverty, people who have no health care or face an uncertain retirement.

The promise of America is that all of us will have access to opportunity, and I want to run a 2008 campaign that renews that promise, a campaign built on a lifetime record of results.

I have never been afraid to stand up for what I believe in or to face down the Republican machine. After nearly $70 million spent against my campaigns in New York and two landslide wins, I can say I know how Washington Republicans think, how they operate, and how to beat them.

I need you to be a part of this campaign, and I hope you'll start by joining me in this national conversation. Visit my new website at HillaryClinton.com to learn how you can join in:

http://www.hillaryclinton.com/

As we campaign to win the White House, we will make history and remake our future. We can only break barriers if we dare to confront them, and if we have the determined and committed support of others.

This campaign is our moment, our chance to stand up for the principles and values that we cherish; to bring new ideas, energy, and leadership to a uniquely challenging time. It's our chance to say "we can" and "we will."

Let's go to work. America's future is calling us.

Sincerely,

Hillary Rodham Clinton

We're not supposed to remember

Mark Kirk is making some fake moderate hay with his latest comment on the so-called Iraq surge:

I advised against the proposed troop surge. The best way forward for the United States in the Middle East is to assemble a diplomatic surge that far exceeds any troop surge.

I'd just like to remind everyone that it wasn't so very long ago when diplomacy was the last thing on Kirk's mind, like when he made his spring/summer '06 tour of district synagogues with his "Israel is gone" story; you know, the one where you're sleeping and wake up to a call, or your're brushing your teeth on a normal everyday, and your brother or friend or someone like that calls you to tell you that "ISRAEL IS GONE!!!!!".

Not exactly talk of diplomacy. Huh?

Everyone knew Kirk was going to various synagogues around the district telling the same story just changing the details like who makes the call and whether you were brushing your teeth or still sleeping. I heard him tell the story myself on June 4, 2006 (I think he used the teeth brushing and brother calls that day). Anyway, when I heard him tell the story, he was not advising the congregation to look to diplomacy. He was whipping up the crowd with fear imagery to get their votes and trust that he was not going to proceed with diplomacy, but beat them to a pulp. He wasn't all that specific on who the them was, but I think most in the crowd were thinking Iran.

So, sorry Mark, I just can take your call for diplomacy all that seriously and had real diplomacy been had years ago while you were still passing lies and warmongering, we'd all be in better shape today, including Israel.

H.R 6 Vote Today

H. R. 6 is the bill to end the oil company subsidies and encourage investment in alternative, less foreign dependent and cleaner energy sources. republicans are arguing that the bill is a tax increase and a violation of an anti-tax pledge many congressmen, including Mark Kirk signed and that it will benefit foreign oil in the short term. Yet another short-sighted argument against ultimate energy independence for this country from the profit laden oil companies. It is also another example of republicans working to equate fair taxes on hugely profitable corporations that take away from our people and our environment with taxes on plain old regular folks who are already overtaxed to begin with. Time for the plain old regular folks to wake up and realize it's these goofy anti-tax pledges that keep them paying higher energy prices and higher taxes and it's time for oil companies to give back to the society from which they take so much.

Looks like the vote was taken, but the roll call is not posted yet. If you catch it before me, please let us know how it went.

Kirk just voted no on consideration of the bill along with his non-moderate republican friends.

Are republicans having a civil war?

I just heard former Congressman and republican Joe Scarborough declare that congressional republicans are in open warfare. (Will Bush allow them to call it a civil war?) He's referring to the Biden/Hagel non-binding resolution that kinda, sorta, in a way, disapproves of Bush's Iraq War escalation, but still refuses to require the Congress to take its rightful constitutional position in matters of war.

In some ways, this seeming rift in the republican party is good news because the stone wall their continued lock step agreement put between Americans and their Constitution is breaking down. However, I find it still rather sad that none of them seem to care much about what is good for the country or looking for the right thing to do in Iraq. They are still playing for what's left of their shredded political capital. I'd also point out here that Bush and the republican party would all be better off had they been more interested in governing the country than using fear, secrecy, racism and greed to acquire political capital and actually had real discussions about the reasons and cost/benefit of going into Iraq--for the country, not their political careers, profits and power.

Alberto Gonzales apparently is reading my blog and agreed that the best case for impeachment of Bush and Cheney lay in their violation of FISA and the 4th Amendment with their NSA sping program. Here's his uh... never mind letter. It has been pointed out, however, by Brent Mesick of CCCLE that "the new agreement between the Bush Administration and the court is secret, so we do not know the court's level of oversight nor the administration's ability to obtain blanket warrants."

In the meantime, Mark Kirk still hiding under the bed on the issue of Iraq, hates college students and voted against the interest rate reductions for undergraduate student loans. Maybe he didn't get invited to the frat parties back in his undergrad days and this is his revenge served up cold.

A note to subscribers

I've heard a couple of reports from Feedblitz subscribers that they have been kicked off. I think what happens is that if you ignore or delete the emails, after a while it presumes you are not interested and kicks you off. You can re-sign-onto Feedblitz or just come to the homepage whenever you want to take a look. Sorry for the confusion.

War for profit

Sometimes, when I think about all the corporate war profiteering and the downright stupid way our corporations kept Iraqis unemployed so they could hire cheaper foreign workers, the taxes avoided by corporations, but paid by middle Americans I wonder if we should make the corporations benefitting from the war adopt military divisions like they adopt highways and sports arenas. Maybe if Halliburton had to pay for the Halliburton 3rd Infantry Division, and the division wore uniforms with the Halliburton logo, and we got a few shots on the news of that logo shot up now and again, the war would be an entirely different story....but maybe not. I haven't decided if that would be a good idea or not because theses goofy corporations would probably start real wars against each other for market share or take their employees as POWs.

Maybe a better way to check the war profiteering would be to pass the Senate's Honest Leadership and Accountability in Contracting Act of 2006 or War Profiteering Prevention Act of 2007 or the House's Clean Contracting Act of 2006.

Ending the war profiteering would not only save taxpayers money, but it would end the huge incentives corporations have for promoting war through their campaign PACs that send large dollars to war supporting candidates. It has also been suggested that the Iraqis are having so much trouble accepting the democracy we have brought to them because along with it came trade and market agendas that they do not accept, job loss through free rather than fair trade, loss of control over their oil fields and privatization and foreign ownership of their economy.

Funny, Kirk never mentioned in his war sale speech that we were fighting to divi up the Iraqi economy among our many outsourcing and non-taxpaying corporations. Maybe he was unavoidably detained the day he meant to tell us about it.

BREAKING: Our Ba-Rock Star is In

UPDATE: Sign up for Barack here!

Dear Friend,

Watch Barack's statement on forming a Presidential Exploratory Committee

As you may know, over the last few months I have been thinking hard about my plans for 2008. Running for the presidency is a profound decision - a decision no one should make on the basis of media hype or personal ambition alone - and so before I committed myself and my family to this race, I wanted to be sure that this was right for us and, more importantly, right for the country.
I certainly didn't expect to find myself in this position a year ago. But as I've spoken to many of you in my travels across the states these past months; as I've read your emails and read your letters; I've been struck by how hungry we all are for a different kind of politics.

So I've spent some time thinking about how I could best advance the cause of change and progress that we so desperately need. The decisions that have been made in Washington these past six years, and the problems that have been ignored, have put our country in a precarious place. Our economy is changing rapidly, and that means profound changes for working people. Many of you have shared with me your stories about skyrocketing health care bills, the pensions you've lost and your struggles to pay for college for your kids. Our continued dependence on oil has put our security and our very planet at risk. And we're still mired in a tragic and costly war that should have never been waged.

But challenging as they are, it's not the magnitude of our problems that concerns me the most. It's the smallness of our politics. America's faced big problems before. But today, our leaders in Washington seem incapable of working together in a practical, common sense way. Politics has become so bitter and partisan, so gummed up by money and influence, that we can't tackle the big problems that demand solutions.

And that's what we have to change first.

We have to change our politics, and come together around our common interests and concerns as Americans.

This won't happen by itself. A change in our politics can only come from you; from people across our country who believe there's a better way and are willing to work for it.

Years ago, as a community organizer in Chicago, I learned that meaningful change always begins at the grassroots, and that engaged citizens working together can accomplish extraordinary things.

So even in the midst of the enormous challenges we face today, I have great faith and hope about the future - because I believe in you.

And that's why I wanted to tell you first that I'll be filing papers today to create a presidential exploratory committee. For the next several weeks, I am going to talk with people from around the country, listening and learning more about the challenges we face as a nation, the opportunities that lie before us, and the role that a presidential campaign might play in bringing our country together. And on February 10th, at the end of these decisions and in my home state of Illinois, I'll share my plans with my friends, neighbors and fellow Americans.

In the meantime, I want to thank all of you for your time, your suggestions, your encouragement and your prayers. And I look forward to continuing our conversation in the weeks and months to come.

Sincerely,
U.S. Senator Barack Obama

Yes, Charles Stimson, facts are stubborn things

UPDATE: Stimson apologized Wednesday, Jan 17, but I'm not all that impressed. He probably just buckled under the pressure. Here's what he wrote to Washington Post:

I apologize for what I said and to those lawyers and law firms who are representing clients at Guantanamo. I hope that my record of public service makes clear that those comments do not reflect my core beliefs.

I don't know. He works for an administration that has made no secret of its distain for Constitutional rights, so no, his record doesn't scream core belief in the Sixth Amendment to me.
***************************
One of my favorite stories of legal history has made the news again, the story of John Adams and Josiah Quincy defending the British soldiers who shot up some colonists during the Boston Massacre in 1770. It's in the news again today because Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Charles Stimson, suggested that corporations should not employ attorneys who do pro bono work representing the accused detained at Guantanamo in a twisted attempt to turn lawyers away from such clients.

The question is why we defend people accused of bad deeds and the answer comes from Adam's closing argument. As it turned out, the facts in the Boston Massacre case showed that the British soldiers were taunted until either they were acting in self defense or provoked to the point where murder was not the appropriate charge. Had they been quickly convicted and hanged, Bostonians might have been momentarily happy and self righteous, but justice would not have been done and the framework to do justice would have been irreparably damaged. In his closing, Adams described the nature of law and justice:

I will enlarge no more on the evidence, but submit it to you.-Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence: nor is the law less stable than the fact; if an assault was made to endanger their lives, the law is clear, they had a right to kill in their own defence; if it was not so severe as to endanger their lives, yet if they were assaulted at all, struck and abused by blows of any sort, by snow-balls, oyster-shells, cinders, clubs, or sticks of any kind; this was a provocation, for which the law reduces the offence of killing, down to manslaughter, in consideration of those passions in our nature, which cannot be eradicated. To your candour and justice I submit the prisoners and their cause.

The law, in all vicissitudes of government, fluctuations of the passions, or flights of enthusiasm, will preserve a steady undeviating course; it will not bend to the uncertain wishes, imaginations, and wanton tempers of men. To use the words of a great and worthy man, a patriot, and an hero, and enlightned friend of mankind, and a martyr to liberty; I mean ALGERNON SIDNEY,who from his earliest infancy sought a tranquil retirement under the shadow of the tree of liberty, with his tongue, his pen, and his sword, "The law, (says he,) no passion can disturb. Tis void of desire and fear, lust and anger. 'Tis mens sine affectu; written reason; retaining some measure of the divine perfection. It does not enjoin that which pleases a weak, frail man, but without any regard to persons, commands that which is good, and punishes evil in all, whether rich, or poor, high or low,'Tis deaf, inexorable, inflexible. On the one hand it is inexorable to the cries and lamentations of the prisoners; on the other it is deaf, deaf as an adder to the clamours of the populace.

Counsel brought out the facts of the case and the law operated on those facts to lead to ultimate justice even if it was not the justice originally predicted before the facts were uncovered by competent counsel on both sides. That is our system and the reason it's worth all the time and expense, and even the risk that some will escape justice, is because those speedy trials without compentent counsel can lead to gross injustice which leaves a cloud of suspicion on the system that embitters the people it governs and ultimately makes their governance impossible.

As interesting as Adams dramatic closing argument are counsel's writings about providing the defense against the common wishes of the colonists. Upon word of his acceptance of the case, Quincy's good name was publicly attacked and he received a stern letter from his parents admonishing him for ruining his (and their) reputation and worrying them so. Quincy responded:

Let such be told, Sir, that these criminals, charged with murder, are not yet legally guilty, and therefore, however criminal, are entitled, by the laws of God and man, to all legal counsel and aid; that my duty as a man obliged me to undertake; that my duty as a lawyer strengthened the obligation.

This is what Adams had to say about the defense in a 1773 diary entry:

I had no hesitation in answering that Council ought to be the very last thing that an accused Person should want [i.e., be without] in a free Country. That the Bar ought in my opinion to be independent and impartial at all Times And in every Circumstance. And that Persons whose Lives were at Stake ought to have the Council they preferred: But he must be sensible this would be as important a Cause as ever was tryed in any Court or Country of the World: and that every Lawyer must hold himself responsible not only to his Country, but to the highest and most infallible of all Trybunals for the Part he should Act.

Twenty-first Century lawyers are lucky that, although lack of understanding by the general public and dubious intentions of the administration lead us down this path again, we have the American Bar Association and state bar associations still sticking up for the right to counsel and counsel's right to provide it. Stimson's comment shows how out of touch with American law and tradition this administration truly is.

Mark Kirk pushes for war against Iran as he did with Iraq

Well here it is and who's surprised. As he shilled for the President's Iraq War, now he begins his sale of the Iran War. Kirk says its about defense of Israel and the Geneval Conventions, but Iran is the same threat to Israel now as it was a year or two years ago and we all know he couldn't give a flying fig about the Geneva Conventions. So, what's the big change?

His boss is starting the Iran war. (Here's the NYT story.)

And by the way, the Israelis feel no safer under the Bush/Kirk war plan.

One thing you have to say about Mark Kirk, he's very reliable when Bush and war are concerned. There's no Bush war he won't work to sell.

Bush: It's my ball and if you don't play my way, I'm taking it home

That's pretty much what Bush is saying to Congress on Iraq War escalation:

"Do you believe as Commander in Chief you have the authority to put the troops in there no matter what the Congress wants to do," 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley asks Bush in the short clip uploaded to the CBS News web site Friday night.

"I think I've got, in this situation, I do, yeah," Bush said.

"Now I fully understand they will," Bush continued, "they could try to stop me from doing it, but, uh, I've made my decision and we're going forward."

Thing is, it's not Bush ball, it's our ball and to use a sports analogy (which sports analogies I usually hate) he's just the ballboy. Congress is the manager. We're the owners. Authority for that is the US Constitution (game book?) which gives Congress the power over appropriations, the existence and organization of federal departments and agencies, confirmations of executive and judicial nominees, and the power “[T]o make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”

How does Congress exercise it's oversight authority over the President? They investigate and hold hearings, then legislate based on their findings and, of course, political give and take. There's a group called the Congressional Research Service that helps. It's supposed to be an objective, non-partisan research service and is comprised of experts from various fields such as law, economics, foreign affairs, public administration, social and political sciences, and natural sciences. It's mission is to be an non-partisan research and analysis service for Congress and, while it was created many years prior, it exists under the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 and the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970.

In 1978, after Vietnam, Watergate and Nixon's resignation made it pretty clear that Congress needed to do a better job in its oversight duties, the CRS together with the assistance of staff from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO), wrote a document called the Congressional Oversight Manual to:

A. Ensure Executive Compliance with Legislative Intent
B. Improve the Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Economy of Governmental Operations
C. Evaluate Program Performance
D. Prevent Executive Encroachment on Legislative Prerogatives and Powers
E. Investigate Alleged Instances of Poor Administration, Arbitrary and Capricious Behavior, Abuse, Waste, Dishonesty, and Fraud
F. Assess Agency or Officials’ Ability to Manage and Carry out Program Objectives
G. Review and Determine Federal Financial Priorities
H. Ensure That Executive Policies Reflect the Public Interest
I. Protect Individual Rights and Liberties
J. Other Specific Purposes such as review agency rulemaking processes, monitoring the use of contractors and consultants for government services; promoting cooperation between the branches; etc.

The manual, updated last year, cites constitutional authority for congressional oversight of the executive and also cites statutory authority for various oversight mechanisms including laws for establishment of the GAO, the Inspector General, chief financial officers in all cabinet departments and some of the larger agencies and laws for federal whistleblower protection, review of federal advisory committees, and budget review. The manual is pretty easy to read and lists all it's authority with citations and is sort of a how to manual. It lists the oversight processes, describes the parties that engage in oversight adn the tools they use. It breaks down the oversight processes into:

• Budget -- authorization (estimates from the various committees) and appropriation (contracts and borrowing) procedures;
• Authorization -- statutes that "create and shape", and reauthorize or end, governmental programs;
• Appropriations -- statutory controls over the purpose for which funds may be used, funding level for enforcing agencies, time limits on fund availability, caps on funds available for certain uses, and shifting funds and non-statutory controls that are suggestive in nature and include "comments in committee reports and in hearings, letters to agency heads, and other communications give detailed instructions to agencies regarding committee expectations and desires."
• Investigatory -- considered implied by Constitution and historic from British law and with these described purposes: “to ensure honesty and efficiency”. “secure information that assists Congress in making informed policy judgments”; and to “aid in informing the public about the administration of laws.”
• Confirmation -- "to probe the qualifications, independence, and policy predilections of presidential nominees " and establish a record to create greater accountability (the Senate is even supposed to follow up "to ensure that the nominee fulfills any commitments made
  during confirmation hearings";
• Impeachment -- "a technique of last resort when conventional forms of oversight fail" which would be about...now after 6 years of no congressional oversight and a congress apparently hogtied by its own need for frequent re-election that always seems to override its need to govern.

Former White House Counsel, John Dean wrote an article for FindLaw about CRS and the Congressional Oversight Manual as recently updated exploring these processes and some of the tools as seen by one of the manual's authors, Lou Fisher, who wrote a very detailed article about the various oversight powers, processes and tools including Contempt Power, GAO investigations and the little used 7 member rule (Act of May 27, 1928, ch. 901, § 2, 45 Stat. 986, 996 (1928).) "requiring '[e]very executive department and independent establishment of the government,' upon request of 'any seven members' of the House Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, or 'any five members' of the Senate Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, to 'furnish any information requested of it relating to any matter within the jurisdiction of said committee.'" In his article, Fisher came to an interesting conclusion:

[J]ournalists and even academics seem to think that if the president announces that information falls within the categories of military, diplomatic, or "sensitive national security secrets," the other two branches should back off. If the courts want to do that, they may retreat in the face of such presidential claims. Congress should not. The Watergate tapes case concerned access to information by the judiciary, not Congress.440 Lawmakers, with specific constitutional duties over issues involving the military and national security, have no reason to defer to such presidential arguments.441

Dean concluded his article with a discussion of "The Executive Privilege Shield" used ultimately unsuccessfully by his boss, Nixon, recommending that Congress, faced by executive stonewalling, take its argument that Bush and Cheney are obstructing its rightful oversight authority to the people. My concern is that the people no longer seem to understand separation of powers and congressional oversight authority having bought the idea that the Executive is the owner and we are the ball boys and girls, ore even sadder, the soldiers in his personal army in his war for political capital.

Israel, Iraq, Vietnam and Kirk

Our cranky friend found an article: Many Israelis think that US policy in Iraq is making them less safe. Experts at Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies did an evaluation and came to the conclusion that the small benefit of getting rid of Saddam is overshadowed by the bad effects of the US looking weak and the destabilizing effects of the war in the entire region and strengthening Hamas. I wonder which one of Kirk's staffers is going to email Tel Aviv University and threaten them over this one. Caryn Garber's gone from Kirk's office, isn't she?

Another friend sent over this article on how Vietnam worked for Nixon, so Bush is trying it too. All they have to do is look like they want Iraq to succeed, even if they fail and wait for 2008 so they can blame those nasty Democrats who didn't want Iraq to succeed. You can still find bunches of articles that blame the Democratic congress that finally stopped the Vietnam war funding for the loss and betrayal of the corrupt S. Vietnamese government. Are Americans stupid enough to fall for this one again. Probably. The article suggests that the Democrats get off script and turn the discussion to how Iraq is hurting out ability to go after the 9/11 terrorists. republicans don't want to go after terrorists content to go after Obama rather than Osama. However, this argument does lead straight to Iran and another war that would make Bush's day.

republicans posting on this site are all in a tiz about Kirk's statement on Thursday against the escalation of the Iraq War. We're supposed to see how wonderful Kirk is, but I don't think this represents anything other than Kirk trying to get on record with something his district agrees with in a relatively politically painless way. He has cover from other republicans backing off lame duck Bush, so he's going for it. All this represents is that Kirk manipulates his votes to balance his situation between a district that basically disagrees with him on most issues and his republican cohorts who require his loyalty for campaign financing. In the Pioneer Press article Kirk said: "entirely focused on the 10th Congressional District of Illinois", yet he has still not scheduled our first townhall meeting with him, ever. He probably doesn't want to answer questions about his role in the spread of lies about intelligence that led up to the war. He is a naval intelligence officer; he's in a position to know, right? That's what he sold the district on, so I guess he must have known. Question is did he know it was all false and, if so, why was he willing to spread false stories?

Kirk also talked about the line item veto he wants so Bush gets to really squash congress. Hey Mark, the line item veto is an unconstitutional violation of separation of powers.

Above all shall that man be above it, who can commit the most extensive injustice?

Here is a link to the Tenth Dems Newsletter containing my article about impeachment on page 8. If nothing else, check out the cute picture of Democat on page 7.

I won't repeat my article here, but expand on some of the ideas.

It is just time to impeach Bush and Cheney. Impeachment is not a political device for political gain and I take that very seriously as an attorney. This is for the protection of our country from exactly the type of threat the framers supposed, sex with an intern in the Oval Office...uh...no, real high crimes and misdemeanors (Constitution at Art. II Sec. 4) of the sort that subvert the constitution and threaten our democracy.

Bush has been at war since he took office and not just with Iraq. He's been at war with what he calls that "damn piece of paper", our US Constitution. He's presided over the taking away of our 1st Amendment rights, our 4th Amendment rights, our 5th Amendment rights and our 6th Amendment rights. But he had congressional help with all that. What he's done all by himself in the Unitary Executive mansion is illegally spy on Americans, refuse to comply with duly enacted laws and push us into a war based on intentional lies and intentional non-compliance with both the War Powers Act and the Iraq War Authorization Resolution itself, and perhaps now another war, now with Iran, without any authorization whatsoever.

So what types of acts constitute the "high cr