that 70% of all Americans, including 46% of republicans want congress to de-fund the Iraq war? Health care is important, but people are dying needlessly. Get your priorities straight, or get out of the way!

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You can lead a republican to the truth, but you can't make him think it...

are important. However, there should be some urgent priorities at hand, now that Rome is truly burning...

Bush has more funding for this illegal war that is raping America but making money for all the war cronies, so of course, with the massive devaluation of the dollar [dollar? what dollar!!!], there's a tag sale of foreign interests gobbling up America.

When you ask yourself who is watching, who cares, and you come up with no one in this Administration, then ask yourself, doesn't it appear that this Administration WANTS this to happen? I think so.

See this article:

International Herald Tribune

Weak dollar prompts record foreign buyouts of U.S. companies
By Robert Weisman
The Boston Globe
Tuesday, October 2, 2007

BOSTON: European, Asian and Canadian companies are taking advantage of the weaker dollar to buy their U.S. counterparts at a record pace, increasing investment in the United States but also raising fears about a potential loss of jobs and autonomy.

"We could be looking at the world's largest tag sale if we continue to see declines in the dollar," said Donald Klepper-Smith, chief economist at DataCore Partners.

In the latest large deal aided by a weak dollar, Commerce Bancorp, which is based in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, agreed Tuesday to be acquired by Toronto-Dominion Bank of Canada in a cash-and-shares deal valued at $8.5 billion.

Nationally, the value of purchases of companies by non-U.S. buyers so far this year totaled $257.4 billion - more than in any full year since 2000, the height of the technology boom, according to Thomson Financial, a research firm in New York.

The buyouts are sparking anxiety in the United States, though their impact is complex. Foreign owners typically use acquisitions as an entry into the U.S. market and thus may be more willing than American buyers to invest in their new holdings, some economists say. But the risk is that they might also be quicker to cut back or consolidate U.S. operations when times get tough.

[Read the rest of the article at the link above.]

Reparations!?!

Sweet Jesus, Mary and Joseph, is this the best the Dems can do!?!

Reparations!?!

This Administration has lied us into a war that has killed over 3,000 and wounded more than 27,000 American soldiers in the past five years. It has authorized illegal wiretaps, approved the torture of unarmed prisoners, suspended the right of Habeas Corpus, violated international treaties, condoned the practice of extraordinary rendition and yet you're telling me that John Conyers still wants to focus some attention on getting government reparations from the American Civil War!?!

Are you freaking kidding me!?!

Now don't get me wrong, I believe that slavery was a terrible institution and should never have been sanctioned or protected under the laws of this country.

But I also believe that any reparations owed by the government back then have already been paid, in blood, by the 600,000 black and white American soldiers who gave their lives to remove the scourge of slavery from this country.

And who does old John Conyers propose to get these reparations from? Supposing that we, the people, are still the government, then there are plenty of people alive today whose ancestors had nothing whatsoever to do with the institution of slavery.

A quarter of my ancestors arrived at Ellis Island after the war, while the other quarter helped Columbus dock his boat, and have, I suppose, as much right to demand reparations as anyone.

And yet despite all that has gone wrong in the past five years, and with our very democracy hanging by a thread, it appears that old John still wants his 40 acres and a mule.

Give me a freaking break!!!

becomes completely worthless, we can afford to pay all sorts of reparations. If you really LOOK at who is buying up America, you will probably find the Carlyle group in the weeds. It was always the intention of the Bilderberg gang to destroy the US as a force in the World, and they are well on the way to accomplishing their objective. Meanwhile, it might be a good idea to LOOK at what else is going on. I suggest reading the op ed I just came across - it is a month old, but the situation has become more perilous if anything.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_sherwood_070909_machinery_in_place_f.htm

The only hope we have is that Bu$h has gotten tired of every job he ever had, and has never finished anything. But THIS one - a sinecure if there ever was one, with a vice who calls all the shots, and a Congre$$ loaded with toadies (or just toads?) who do the master's bidding while pretending to represent the people - may be different. THE MAN may decide he'd like to keep it - even if the fascist aggressor nation is NOTHING like the Country it pretends to be, and once was. May God help us. I don't think the Congre$$ can - or would if it could.

... Torture is an American Principle?

What should be an anathema to this Nation is slowly being codified by inaction by the Majority Party of "Just-US"; Republicrats. They've compromised away our Liberties, our Principles, our Values... supplanting them with aberrations of what an oppressed Nation is like. While Saddam did oppress the Iraqis, the American Government(BushCo and Congress) oppress people in far greater numbers around the world. In fact, like Saddam, they too have given the order to commit crimes against humanity, murder, pillage/plunder, poison the lands, hearts and minds of the people... except the people, this time, is the world.

But because we're America, they're untouchable? Infallible? Unimpeachable?

Better check those signing statements, Congressman.

U N A C C E P T A B L E !

It isn't in the numbers that are tortured or have been tortured, but in the very essence that somehow, it is justifiable. And in that, even one person tortured by America should be one person too many, as by then the torture of just one person can become representative of American policy. The President can act like Senator Craig and issue through affirmative statements, denials of his actions. However so, like Craig's ability to be caught, charged and admitted guilt on a case of soliciting anonymous sex with other men in a public restroom, Bush reads statements that seem to assert, "America doesn't torture... America has never tortured." Yet the proof, admittance and statements seem to contradict their revisioned reality.

Isn't it time to call B.S. on this pile of B.S.?

p.s.
Support America.
GO SHOPPING...
And buy a Table!
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I M P E A C H
THEM BOTH !!!

I honestly think we've got some higher priorities than this right now. Furthermore, I remain unconvinced that reparations would actually change anything. I've got no trouble with studying the issue, but I think we should be working on ending the war, ending torture, restoring habeas corpus, providing healthcare to all our citizens, rebuilding New Orleans, repairing our bridges (except that one in Alaska), revoking the PATRIOT Act, etc. long before we start talking about reparations.

EVERYONE who is about to think of becoming an American Mercenary (untouchable killer-for-hire) in Iraq or Afghanistan, should read this month's (October) HARPER'S, pp 74 - 77. Yeah - you MIGHT make $600.00 per day - if you live to collect it - but over a thousand of them haven't, and THEIR deaths are NOT listed as part of the Military stats, since they are State Department employees. Also, they have NO insurance, NO benefits, and if they are crippled, THEY pay for repair. If they are "Wrongfully" killed (how do you kill a mercenary 'wrongfully?') their families have to pay a quarter of a million for the "Right to sue - " with NO guarantees that they might win - (and with so MANY Bu$h appointed 'judges', the odds are very good they'd lose - - -) all in all, unless you are completely alone in the world and even then with no other means of support, it would be at least intelligent to think three times about this 'tempting' idea, and then refuse to die for dollars. It's difficult to spend money after you're dead, and remember - the pitcher that goes to the well too often frequently gets broken. Blackwater does not give one small damn about the cannon fodder it hires, and neither do any of the 179 other "Private Security Companies" furnishing a large part of the US killing machine in the Middle East.

how can we trust them to protect us?

Senate passes intelligence bill after Democrats back down on presidential briefings, CIA jails
10/05/2007 @ 9:37 am
Filed by Larisa Alexandrovna

After a stalemate of over two years, the Senate passed the 2008 Intelligence Authorization bill Wednesday, with Democrats ceding a key provision regarding pre-war Iraq intelligence that Republicans had decried.

Sources close to the Senate Intelligence Committee say one of the compromises Democrats made to ensure the bill’s passage was to remove language demanding the White House turn over all Presidential Daily Briefings on Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion. Democrats are said to have been hoping to establish whether President Bush mischaracterized intelligence in the lead-up to the conflict.

“The provision on the PDBs was dropped because Republicans objected and were blocking consideration of the bill,” a Senate source said Wednesday.

The request for the PDBs, which also included briefings for President Clinton on Iraq, was part of what is known as Phase II of the Senate investigation into Iraq prewar intelligence, the source added.
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You can lead a republican to the truth, but you can't make him think it...

Why Not Impeachment?

By Robert Parry
October 5, 2007

The disclosure that the Bush administration secretly reestablished a policy of abusing “war on terror” detainees even as it assured Congress and the public that it had mended its ways again raises the question: Why are the Democrats keeping impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney “off the table”?

After the Democratic congressional victory last Nov. 7, Washington Democrats rejected calls for impeachment from rank-and-file Democrats and many other Americans, considering it an extreme step that would derail a bipartisan strategy of winning over Republicans to help bring the Iraq War to an end.

That thinking got a boost on Nov. 8, the day after the election, when President Bush announced the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the appointment of former CIA Director Robert Gates, who had been a member of the Iraq Study Group and was believed to represent the “realist” wing of the Republican Party.

One Democratic strategist called me that day with a celebratory assertion that “the neocons are dead” and rebuffed my warning that Gates had a troubling history of putting his career ahead of principle, that he was a classic apple-polisher to the powerful. [See the Consortiumnews.com’s Archive, “Who Is Bob Gates?”]

The Democrats also missed the fact that Rumsfeld submitted his resignation the day before the election – not the day after – along with a memo urging an “accelerated draw-down of U.S. bases” in Iraq from a high of 110, to 10 to 15 by April 2007, and to five by July 2007.

In other words, Rumsfeld’s ouster didn’t signal Bush’s new flexibility on ending the war, as the Democrats hoped, but a repudiation of Rumsfeld for going wobbly on Iraq.

Even when the Rumsfeld memo surfaced in early December, the Democrats ignored it, sticking to their wishful script that the Rumsfeld-Gates switch marked a recognition by Bush that it was time to begin extricating U.S. forces from Iraq.

Those rose-colored glasses got smudged badly when Bush instead announced in January that he was ordering an escalation, sending more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq.

But instead of responding with their own escalation – and putting impeachment back “on the table” – the Democrats opted for a strategy of wooing moderate Republicans to mild-mannered legislative protests.

As an opening shot in this Nerf-ball battle, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid fired off a symbolic resolution to express disapproval of Bush’s “surge,” a meaningless gesture that Republicans kept bottled up for weeks making the Democrats look both feckless and inept.

Dangling Moderates

The failed “anti-surge” resolution should have clued in the Democrats to what was in store. The congressional Republicans would keep dangling the prospect that a handful of moderate Republicans finally might abandon Bush’s war policy.

But, like the end of a rainbow that keeps receding as one pursues it, the promise of moderate Republicans switching sides could never be reached.

The final act of legislative disillusionment came on Sept. 19 when Sen. John Warner, R-Virginia, reneged on a commitment to support a bill by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Virginia, to guarantee longer home leave for combat troops.

Warner said he reversed himself after he was lobbied by Defense Secretary Gates. “I endorsed it,” Warner said. “I intend now to cast a vote against it.”

With Warner’s help, Republicans blocked Webb’s amendment on a procedural vote that fell four votes short of the 60 needed.

Neoconservative pro-war Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Connecticut, hailed the defeat of Webb’s proposal as proof “Congress will not intervene in the foreseeable future, … that Congress doesn’t have the votes to stop this [Bush] strategy of success from going forward.”

Soon, the Republicans were stampeding the Democrats into supporting condemnations of MoveOn.org for its “General Betray Us” ad and into urging Bush to adopt an even more belligerent posture against Iran by labeling its Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Hillary Prods Bush to Go After Iran.”]

Still, despite nearly a full year of futility in challenging Bush’s war – as public approval of the Democratic Congress sank to near record lows – the leadership kept the issue of impeachment off the table. It was as if national Democrats had concluded that the American people admired timidity and incompetence.

New Slap

Now, President Bush has slapped the Democrats in the face again by misleading them on his continuing policy of allowing harsh interrogations (that many would call torture) of terror suspects. Bush apparently is confident that the Democrats will swallow whatever humiliation he serves up.

The New York Times revealed on Oct. 4 that the Bush administration only pretended to repudiate earlier legal opinions that Bush had the right to abuse and torture detainees. Secret memos from 2005, which reaffirmed that right, were kept from Congress.

“When the Justice Department publicly declared torture ‘abhorrent’ in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations,” the Times reported.

“But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

“The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.” [NYT, Oct. 4, 2007]

The Bush administration achieved its sleight of hand on torture policy by purging traditional conservative lawyers, such as former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith and former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who had resisted White House assertions of virtually unlimited powers for Bush as Commander in Chief.

In 2004, those lawyers – under Attorney General John Ashcroft – mounted a remarkable rebellion against the White House theories of an imperial presidency. Goldsmith and Comey objected to the legality of several anti-terror operations approved by Bush, including the memos permitting torture and warrantless wiretaps.

Their opposition to Bush’s program for warrantless spying on Americans led to a dramatic showdown when then-White House counsel Gonzales and White House chief of staff Andrew Card went to Ashcroft’s hospital room where he was recovering from surgery. They urged him to overrule Comey who had balked at reauthorizing the spying, but Ashcroft refused.

Soon, the dissident Justice Department lawyers were headed out the door. Ashcroft, Comey and Goldsmith all resigned and were replaced by more compliant lawyers, led by Bush’s longtime legal adviser Gonzales.

The Times reported that the memo reaffirming Bush’s broad authority over treatment of detainees was signed by Steven Bradbury, who followed Goldsmith as head of the elite Office of Legal Counsel, the Justice Department office responsible for opinions relating to issues of presidential authority.

Unlike other lawyers in that sensitive job, Bradbury also has emerged as a vocal defender of Bush’s detention policies and wiretapping operations. In an interview with the Times, Bradbury said, “In my experience, the White House has not told me how an opinion should come out.”

However, the Times also reported that the White House kept Bradbury on a tight leash by delaying his formal appointment in hopes of avoiding another situation like the one with the independent-thinking Goldsmith.

Harriet Miers, who replaced Gonzales as White House counsel, “decided to watch Bradbury for a month or two. He was sort of on trial,” one Justice Department official told the Times.

After the Times’ article appeared, congressional Democrats – feeling misled again by the White House – demanded to see the confidential memos on interrogations. But Sen. Christopher Bond of Missouri, ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the White House would resist turning over the memos.

At some point, the congressional Democrats may have to face up to the hard choice before them: either put impeachment of Bush and Cheney back “on the table” or accept that the United States has ceased being a constitutional Republic governed by the principle that no man is above the law.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

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You can lead a republican to the truth, but you can't make him think it...

H.R. 333 is the way to tell who is an adherent to the Constitutional Oath of Office, and who is a traitor, be he/she "Republican" or "Democrat."

The point is NOT to get rid of Cheney; the point is to find out who - Democrat or Republican - to get rid of in next year's Primary Elections!

ADHERENCE to the Oath of Office is the important point. ANYONE who will not vote to impeach Cheney is a violator of his Oath to DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION!

Are we so far down the slippery slope toward Dictatorship that we can tolerate a Legislative Branch full of TRAITORS?

(One of the fears in Congress may be that actual impeachment proceedings brought against Cheney may cause the activation of the false flag "Terrorist" attack that will "authorize" Bu$h to declare Martial Law, and cancel the General Elections which threaten to re-establish America on its founding principles, and such fear may be justified - BUT - it's probably going to happen anyway, and maybe an evident groundswell of support for the removal of the Dickster would prevent it!)

The ONLY tool we have at present to identify the TRAITORS in the Congre$$ is the move to impeach Cheney. HOW WILL WE KNOW WHO TO OPPOSE IN THE PRIMARIES IF THEY DO NOT IDENTIFY THEMSELVES???

Come on - MOVE 333, and let's find out, before the point becomes moot!

While our democracy lies broken and bleeding out in the corner, our Congressmembers concern themselves with tangential issues. While they attempt to put bandaids on the wounded toes of Democracy, the wounded heart of Democracy lies bleeding out:

• “…Watergate would not have played out the same way today because Congress no longer performs its oversight role, said Carl Bernstein, one of the journalists famous for uncovering the story.”

"…The difference with today is that the system did its job. The press did its job. The court did its job. The Senate committee did its job," Bernstein said Saturday. "There’s been great reporting on this president. But there’s been no oversight. We have a Democratic Congress now and there’s still no oversight."

Congress: When we quit listening to your words and just look at your actions—we know you for what you are. You are not the solution, you are the problem.

What is most shameful about our democratic majority in the congress is their inability to articulate any arguments that are compelling to the American people.

Bush: Expanding SCHIP beyond its original intent is wrong.

Pelosi: It was a bi-partisan bill.

Bush makes a compelling argument and Pelosi/Reid say NOTHING.

How about some articulation of the issue, the numbers of uninsured children and the reasons (greed for profits) for the increasing scarcity of health insurance that make expansion of SCHIP necessary.

The Democratic Leadership is nothing. Hillary is "in bed" with corporate interests and talks like a robot, and she is our "front runner".

This all sucks.

We've been warned.

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THEM BOTH !!!