Keystone Kongress -- Is Gupta The Right Choice?

I was rather wondering if the #3 position for the Presidency was the right choice, John.

I mean out of a potential field of contenders numbering in the hundreds for the position of Speaker there was only ONE nominee?

And that was old off-with-their-tables Pelosi? What's up with that?

Here she is wearing her tahitian shooter marbles again...

Can't wait to start tightening my boa... I mean my belt again, babe.

But you'd think you guys could come up with something that looked like a legitimate debate, a responsible deliberative process, and a range of choices, wouldn't you?

Or is this all just a sham from beginning to end?

The Kennedys, Kings, and others, some just doing their patrioti duty, all tossed in holes in the ground and for what? For this? Off the table?

http://downingstreetmemo.com/memos.html

Why?

[Lead us not into temptation...]

Looks good in ads, commercials, etc. Cute guy, in a commercial sense, but I don't think he is, by any means, qualified to be the Surgeon General, which I take to be a very serious position and, for an individual who is deeply concerned for the health and welfare of the citizenry of this country -- without regard to the pharmaceuticals that have been/are part, in parcel, of the corporations that have been running this country. Obama needs to understand that.

In general, I think Americans have had it up to their gills with the "attractive," "charismatic" individuals who look "good" and produce little, if any, good, and have mostly been detrimental!

This country is at a "make it" or "break it" junction, on just about every level you can imagine. How near? Near collapse -- that's how near! The decisions that are made today will be the good or hell of tomorrow for this country.

It seems to me that the REAL problem has been and is that those in our government that serve of our tax-paying dollars have somehow lost touch with reality -- with the citizenry that they purportedly represent. I fear that this delusional state amongst our governmental electees, so to speak, will be the ultimate demise of this country.

"There is nothing to fear but fear itself."
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Field's Manual!

The author, a psychologist, and anti-torture activist, explains why in this meticulously documented and articulated article:

How the U.S. Army's Field Manual Codified Torture -- and Still Does

By Jeffrey S. Kaye, AlterNet. Posted January 7, 2009.

Buried in Appendix M of the Army Field Manual, the Guantanamo virus is spreading, and eradicating it will require all of us to spread the word.

In early September 2006, the U.S. Department of Defense, reeling from at least a dozen investigations into detainee abuse by interrogators, released Directive 2310.01E. This directive was advertised as an overhaul and improvement on earlier detainee operations and included a newly rewritten Army Field Manual for Human Intelligence Collector Operations (FM-2-22-3). This guidebook for interrogators was meant to set a humane standard for U.S. interrogators worldwide, a standard that was respectful of the Geneva Conventions and other U.S. and international laws concerning treatment of prisoners.

While George W. Bush was signing a presidential directive allowing the CIA to conduct other, secret "enhanced interrogation techniques," which may or may not have included waterboarding, the new AFM was sold to the public as a return to civilized norms, in regards to interrogation.

Before long, opponents of U.S. torture policy were championing the new AFM as an appropriate "single-standard" model of detainee treatment. Support for implementing the revised AFM, as a replacement for the hated "enhanced" techniques earlier championed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the CIA, began to appear in legislation out of Congress, in the literature of human-rights organizations and in newspaper editorials. Some rights groups have felt the new AFM offered some improvements by banning repellent interrogation tactics, such as waterboarding, use of nudity, military dogs and stress positions. It was believed the AFM cemented the concept of command responsibility for infractions of the law.

There was only one problem: the AFM did not eliminate torture. Despite what it said, it did not adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Even worse, it took the standard operating procedure of Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay and threatened to expand it all over the world.

The President of the National Lawyers Guild Marjorie Cohn has stated that portions of the AFM protocol, especially the use of isolation and prolonged sleep deprivation, constitutes cruel-and-unusual punishment and is illegal under the Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Convention Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Hina Shamsi, an attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project, has stated that portions of the AFM are "deeply problematic" and "would likely violate the War Crimes Act and Geneva," and at the very least "leave the door open for legal liability." Physicians for Human Rights and the Constitution Project have publicly called for the removal of problematic and abusive techniques from the AFM.

Yet, the interrogation manual is still praised by politicians, including then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, who in December 2007 said he would "have the Army Field Manual govern interrogation techniques for all United States Government personnel and
contractors." .. . . .

Jeffrey Kaye is a psychologist active in the anti-torture movement. He works clinically with torture victims at Survivors International in San Francisco. His blog is Invictus; as "Valtin," he also regularly blogs at Daily Kos, Docudharma, American Torture, Progressive Historians and elsewhere.

Please continue your read here

This is VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION concerning the future as to torture and we must make as many people aware as possible of this insidious effort to maintain torture as a part of our system and fight it TOOTH AND NAIL.

"There is nothing to fear but fear itself."
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Eight Years of Madoffs
By FRANK RICH

THREE days after the world learned that $50 billion may have disappeared in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, The Times led its front page of Dec. 14 with the revelation of another $50 billion rip-off. This time the vanished loot belonged to American taxpayers. That was our collective contribution to the $117 billion spent (as of mid-2008) on Iraq reconstruction — a sinkhole of corruption, cronyism, incompetence and outright theft that epitomized Bush management at home and abroad.

The source for this news was a near-final draft of an as-yet-unpublished 513-page federal history of this nation-building fiasco. The document was assembled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction — led by a Bush appointee, no less. It pinpoints, among other transgressions, a governmental Ponzi scheme concocted to bamboozle Americans into believing they were accruing steady dividends on their investment in a “new” Iraq.

The report quotes no less an authority than Colin Powell on how the scam worked. Back in 2003, Powell said, the Defense Department just “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ” Those of us who questioned these astonishing numbers were dismissed as fools, much like those who begged in vain to get the Securities and Exchange Commission to challenge Madoff’s math.

What’s most remarkable about the Times article, however, is how little stir it caused. When, in 1971, The Times got its hands on the Pentagon Papers, the internal federal history of the Vietnam disaster, the revelations caused a national uproar. But after eight years of battering by Bush, the nation has been rendered half-catatonic. The Iraq Pentagon Papers sank with barely a trace.

After all, next to big-ticket administration horrors like Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and the politicized hiring and firing at Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department, the wreckage of Iraq reconstruction is what Ralph Kramden of “The Honeymooners” would dismiss as “a mere bag of shells.” The $50 billion also pales next to other sums that remain unaccounted for in the Bush era, from the $345 billion in lost tax revenue due to unpoliced offshore corporate tax havens to the far-from-transparent disposition of some $350 billion in Wall Street bailout money. In the old Pat Moynihan phrase, the Bush years have “defined deviancy down” in terms of how low a standard of ethical behavior we now tolerate as the norm from public officials.

Not even a good old-fashioned sex scandal could get our outrage going again. Indeed, a juicy one erupted last year in the Interior Department, where the inspector general found that officials “had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.” Two officials tasked with marketing oil on behalf of American taxpayers got so blotto at a daytime golf event sponsored by Shell that they became too incapacitated to drive and had to be put up by the oil company.

Back in the day, an oil-fueled scandal in that one department alone could mesmerize a nation and earn Warren Harding a permanent ranking among our all-time worst presidents. But while the scandals at Bush’s Interior resemble Teapot Dome — and also encompass millions of dollars in lost federal oil and gas royalties — they barely registered beyond the Beltway. Even late-night comics yawned when The Washington Post administered a coup de grâce last week, reporting that Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne spent $235,000 from taxpayers to redo his office bathroom (monogrammed towels included).

It took 110 pages for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan research organization, to compile the CliffsNotes inventory of the Bush wreckage last month. It found “125 systematic failures across the breadth of the federal government.” That accounting is conservative. There are still too many unanswered questions.

Just a short list is staggering. Who put that bogus “uranium from Africa” into the crucial prewar State of the Union address after the C.I.A. removed it from previous Bush speeches? How high up were the authorities who ordered and condoned torture and then let the “rotten apples” at the bottom of the military heap take the fall? Who orchestrated the Pentagon’s elaborate P.R. efforts to cover up Pat Tillman’s death by “friendly fire” in Afghanistan?

And, for extra credit, whatever did happen to Bush’s records from the Texas Air National Guard?

The biggest question hovering over all this history, however, concerns the future more than the past. If we get bogged down in adjudicating every Bush White House wrong, how will we have the energy, time or focus to deal with the all-hands-on-deck crises that this administration’s malfeasance and ineptitude have bequeathed us? The president-elect himself struck this note last spring. “If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated,” Barack Obama said. “I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.”

Henry Waxman, the California congressman who has been our most tireless inquisitor into Bush scandals, essentially agreed when I spoke to him last week. Though he remains outraged about both the chicanery used to sell the Iraq war and the administration’s overall abuse of power, he adds: “I don’t see Congress pursuing it. We’ve got to move on to other issues.” He would rather see any prosecutions augmented by an independent investigation that fills in the historical record. “We need to depoliticize it,” he says. “If a Democratic Congress or administration pursues it, it will be seen as partisan.”

We could certainly do worse than another 9/11 Commission. Among those Americans still enraged about the Bush years, there are also calls for truth and reconciliation commissions, war crimes trials and, in a petition movement on Obama’s transition Web site, a special prosecutor in the Patrick Fitzgerald mode. One of the sharpest appointments yet made by the incoming president may support decisive action: Dawn Johnsen, a law professor and former Clinton administration official who last week was chosen to run the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice.

This is the same office where the Bush apparatchik John Yoo produced his infamous memos justifying torture. Johnsen is a fierce critic of such constitutional abuses. In articles for Slate last year, she wondered “where is the outrage, the public outcry” over a government that has acted lawlessly and that “does not respect the legal and moral bounds of human decency.” She asked, “How do we save our country’s honor, and our own?”

The last is not a rhetorical question. While our new president indeed must move on and address the urgent crises that cannot wait, Bush administration malfeasance can’t be merely forgotten or finessed. A new Justice Department must enforce the law; Congress must press outstanding subpoenas to smoke out potential criminal activity; every legal effort must be made to stop what seems like a wholesale effort by the outgoing White House to withhold, hide and possibly destroy huge chunks of its electronic and paper trail. As Johnsen wrote last March, we must also “resist Bush administration efforts to hide evidence of its wrongdoing through demands for retroactive immunity, assertions of state privilege, and implausible claims that openness will empower terrorists.”

As if to anticipate the current debate, she added that “we must avoid any temptation simply to move on,” because the national honor cannot be restored “without full disclosure.” She was talking about America regaining its international reputation in the aftermath of our government’s descent into the dark side of torture and “extraordinary rendition.” But I would add that we need full disclosure of the more prosaic governmental corruption of the Bush years, too, for pragmatic domestic reasons. To make the policy decisions ahead of us in the economic meltdown, we must know what went wrong along the way in the executive and legislative branches alike.

As the financial historian Ron Chernow wrote in the Times last week, we could desperately use a Ferdinand Pecora, the investigator who illuminated the history of the 1929 meltdown in Senate hearings on the eve of the New Deal. The terrain to be mined would include not just the usual Wall Street suspects and their Congressional and regulatory enablers but also the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a strangely neglected ground zero in the foreclosure meltdown. The department’s secretary, Alphonso Jackson, resigned in March amid still-unresolved investigations over whether he enriched himself and friends with government contracts.

The tentative and amorphous $800 billion stimulus proposed by Obama last week sounds like a lot, but it’s a drop in the bucket when set against the damage it must help counteract: more than $10 trillion in new debt and new obligations piled up by the Bush administration in eight years, as calculated by the economists Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz in the current Harper’s Magazine.

If Bernie Madoff, at least, can still revive what remains of our deadened capacity for outrage, so can those who pulled off Washington’s Ponzi schemes. The more we learn about where all the bodies and billions were buried on our path to ruin, the easier it may be for our new president to make the case for a bold, whatever-it-takes New Deal.
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You can lead a republican to the truth, but you can't make him think it...

Where would we be right now if Social Security had been privatized and invested in the Stock Market?

The cool thing about Government is, it isn't a business.

There are several ways to take advantage of this nifty feature that are worth occasionally bringing to mind. For example. ;

Insurance.

The way insurance works is, the company takes your money, then invests it. Earning profits. Sometimes When you suffer a loss, you make a claim. The insurance company then sells some of its' assets to raise money to pay a lawyer to go to court to defend the Itself against you. If you fail to hire your own lawyer, you lose, and the insurance company doesn't pay. If you do hire your own lawyer, the insurance company hires another. His job is to string things out until you run out of money, then you lose and the insurance company doesn't pay.

When Government steps in and takes over, the Insurance Company is deprived of clients and the obligation to pay. This causes much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Why? The Insurance Company still owns ALL of those investments it made using payments from its' clients. This is not a bad deal. Just ask Warren Buffet.

Government is just as capable of serving the client as business is.

Next thought : Why don't we pay for Car Insurance at the pump? If it were on a per gallon basis, everyone would have it. You couldn't hardly be accused of not having it. And seeing as the public point is that everyone SHOULD have it, indeed MUST have it, then it should be administered by the Government, as a public service.

Now, wouldn't that work much better?

I appreciate this forum.
Frosted Flake

Is Rep. John Conyers corrupt?
Submitted by John H Kennedy ... on Mon, 2009-01-12 23:14.

Rep. John Conyers (MI) has portrayed himself as a leading supporter of impeachment but in his job as Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee he has blocked impeachment for years.

Conyers promised to hold impeachment hearings after the election but broke his word. Conyers ignored a petition with over one million signatures asking for impeachment hearings. Conyers also ignored a number of other petitions that added up to another million or so signatures.

Now we find that Conyers was using a Republican operative involved in alleged vote rigging scams to maintain his congressional website.

More here: “GOP election stealers run Rep. John Conyers' Congressional Website" GOP Election Stealers Run John Conyers' Website
and at "GOP Technology Powerhouse eMerges Behind Firewalls on the Hill"
GOP Technology Powerhouse eMerges Behind Firewalls on the Hill
There are a multitude of progressive and Democratic website specialists available who could maintain Conyers' website. Why did he go to this GOP operative? Did Conyers' have a "behind the scenes" relationship with the GOP? Does this explain Conyers' refusal to hold impeachment hearings? Will we ever know? The only way Conyers can prove to the voters in his district that he wasn't playing games with impeachment is to start impeachment hearings prior to January 20th.

Cheney has admitted authorizing torture. In an interview with Brit Hume that aired on Fox News Sunday, President Bush admitted that he personally authorized torture.

Bush: I Personally Authorized Torture Of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Torture is prohibited by the US Constitution, Federal Law and by treaty in the Geneva Convention.

Defending the Separation of Powers and the House's Constitutional prerogative as the sole maker of Federal Laws and the Constitution's mandate to have them obeyed and enforced by the executive branch, is the responsibility of the US House, not Obama. What is Conyers waiting for?

If Conyers fails to allow impeachment to proceed before January 20th he will be remembered as the man who refused to use the power of his office to defend our Constitution, Rule of Law and Separation of Powers.

Conyers may claim that Speaker Pelosi took “impeachment off the table” but that excuse no longer has any credibility. Pelosi made her own decision to violate her oath of office. Rep. Conyers' decision to violate his own oath is a separate matter and is solely between Conyers and the Constitution. Conyers' excuse that “she made me do it” is rejected by all.

If the Illinois House can vote to impeach after only 90 minutes of debate, the Democrats in the 111th Congress can get impeachment hearings started before January 20th .

Conyers can stop the coming Bush pardons of those that advocated torture in our name by starting impeachment hearings. If Rep. Conyers is the patriot he claims to be, he will do so.

"There is nothing to fear but fear itself."
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Were you expecting another? Has there ever been another?

LikeTelevision Embed Movies and TV Shows

About just what you suppose. But simpler than you might suppose. It hasn't been simplified tho, it really is that simple.

Life is not a zero sum game. It is a tragedy so many view it as such.

I appreciate this forum.
Frosted Flake

Is The Keystone Kongress The Right Choice For America?

People, you are the referees. You don't make the laws, you don't enforce them, and you don't interpret them, but It's still your call because this is dealing with simple meanings of simple words, and altogether there's only about 20 or thirty to consider in this "hearing" which I shall underline below and which can be verified at this url.

http://usconstitution.net/const.html#Preamble

Who has authority, and therefor who has the blame, if America unwillingly underwrites violation of international laws?

Does the President's power of pardon apply to international law? Or does The Keystone Kongress under Miss Leadership (Nancy Pelosi) have power to enforce it?

Who ever has the power also gets the blame. Now let's take a peek at the operative principle under THIS Constitution (we know not what the hell these folks have been reading).

Article 2, Section 2 - Civilian Power over Military, Cabinet, Pardon Power, Appointments says (among other things):

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

Nothing about offenses against the laws of nations. And since Congress has let their chance of impeachment fall through the cracks as we discuss improvements to the next Presidink's Health care, and questions about his choices for various offices on which Congress has the final word anyway, so this boils down to whether or not Congress can deal with the sitting President's violations of international law AFTER he leaves office and AFTER he's pardoned everyone.

Appropriately labeled Article 1, Section 8 - Powers of Congress, we see in the list of powers, the following.

Congress shall have power... To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations;

[And while we're at it, one of the reasons they should have used their power of impeachment is because of the President's own power grab. How he has abused his "signing statements" can also be verified in the FIRST paragraph following the Preamble, but the issue here is the Keystong Kongress vs. the US Constitution which says in no uncertain termst that Congress shall have power...]

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

So unless I'm speaking some long lost dialect, I expect your conclusion will be the same as mine? But will they?

Then who's to blame!!

Is this or isn't it the United States of America?

Have we or have we not ordained THIS constitution, as people of the United States?

Does Congress or doesn't Congress have power to do anything more than get re-elected every two years, and is it a mere coincidence that the military is also subject to review and apportionment every TWO years?

John, maybe the founders saw you guys coming.

Keystone Kongress -- Why Compete?

Why should American workers compete with foreign labor when they could compete with American CEOs?

Congress (that's the "people's house") shall have power...

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
http://usconstitution.net/const.html

And as we can see, all the alternative energy startups have already decided against going into business because the price of oil has dropped again.

Put a FLOOR under the price of oil, Congress.

If you don't see your duty as protectionism of American workers, you are IN THE WRONG HOUSE!

Thanks.