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Resolution To Impeach VP Cheney Submitted
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) has submitted a resolution, HR 333, to impeach VP Dick Cheney on charges of "high crimes and misdemeanors." The charges were submitted on 24 April 2007. Congressman Kucinich has posted his supporting documents online, including a brief summary of the impeachment procedure (PDF), a synopsis (PDF), and the full text (PDF) of the impeachment resolution.
"Congressman Dennis Kucinich is invited to go hunting with Cheney."
In addition, once this road is crossed -- impeaching for , and every time the president/vp is in office, and a different party has a majority in the senate and house, you'll see an impeachment. It's the same thing that happened once the line was crossed with judicial appointments. Partisian politics has made almost every parties' political victory a Pyrrhic one for the American people. We get the shaft, while the politicians get rich fighting each other. We need a 3rd party...
Finally, does Kucinich this this will help him get elected President?
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
...but the problem is, this guy has less crediblity than the late Henry B. Gonzalez (D) San Antonio, TX who, on an almost monthly basis called for a Reagan impeachment all through the 80's.
This is nothing more than a political stunt, and only half a degree more effective than the Olympia city clownsil (Washington) passing a resolution calling for the impeachment of Bush.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Woa -- I think you're off base here on two levels.
One -- If you can't win, you still have to do it. You cannot let crimes go, even if you cannot succeed in convicting. The problem is not this president/VP. The problem is the next one. To not impeach is to say "if the congress isn't dominated by the other house, you can do anything you want."
Two -- Cheny's not the target. Cheney's going to have to defend himself, and his interactions with the president will come out. It's at least possible that real solid evidence against the president will emerge.
This isn't stupid, it's both the right thing to do, and may help land the big one.
Besides, even Republicans hate Cheney. He's an easier target.
...were're just constantly amazed that it is as bad as it is, and presumeit couldn't have always been like this. History tends to disagree - politics has always been a nasty, dirty, hellhole.
As a centrist, I would prefer neither end of the spectrum in the congress - we don't need a few more far-lefts to outweight the far-rights, we need less of both!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Then consensus would be needed to get ANYTHING done. I mean, it's not like we don't have enough laws already...this system could help curb the 'look at me' laws passed to make a politician look 'proactive' but which don't do anything really new.
Blar.
Between this news and Congress ordering the Prez to withdraw tropps from Iraq this morning, all I can say is that it's about G-D damned time someone stood up to these two. Maybe our country still has a chance?
Absolutely nothing.
Really, people, I'm all for removal of Bush and the neocons, but what are we going to do? Hope to get them replaced with Democrat neocons like Pelosi? Please, this is all silly. There's no hope for America.
the Political Inquirer
The test of the synopsis clearly tilts to the left.
Reading the Four 'articles' I do agree with most of what is said, but I have to stop and read when i get to article 4, stating that cheney has openly threatened Iran even though they pose "no threat". I dont think anything `could be further from the truth. Of any country out there who "may" (ill use that term) cause future harm or war to the united states, I can't think of any country who poses a larger threat, and that includes north korea. "President Tom" as i've heard him call, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a very dangerous and radical leader, who has openly (very openly) threated non muslim countries, including the USA, and frankly poses a bigger threat overall then saddam ever did. Any person who says such things publicly as "Israel should be wiped off the map" frankly worries me. Do i think they will attack one day? Who knows. Is it possible? Yes. Are they a threat... i would have to say yes. Saying they pose no threat is very irrational as they most definately do.
Perhaps Mr. Kucinich's altruism would be a little less suspect if he wasn't simultaneously running for president himself?
I'm not saying that he's not doing this for the very best of motives, but if one begins by presuming a purely malignant motivation for whatever Cheney's done, it would then be naked partisanship to assume anything but an equally malignant motivation for other politicians, no?
-Styopa
Within the compass of this letter, I can do no more than indicate, as concisely as I can, relevant considerations that must be taken into account if we are to discuss Richard B. Cheney's coprophagous, insidious indiscretions in a rational manner. Here's a quick review: The purpose of this letter is far greater than to prove to you how atrabilious and intransigent Cheney has become. The purpose of this letter is to get you to start thinking for yourself, to start thinking about how he thinks we want him to overthrow all concepts of beauty and sublimity, of the noble and the good, and instead drag people down into the sphere of his own base nature. Excuse me, but maybe he measures the value of a man by the amount of profit he can realize from him. That should serve as the final, ultimate, irrefutable proof that Cheney should think about how his invectives lead primitive slackers to produce a new generation of distasteful segregationists whose opinions and prejudices, far from being enlightened and challenged, are simply legitimized. If Cheney doesn't want to think that hard, perhaps he should just keep quiet. Although this may come as a surprise to some readers, if Cheney had lived the short, sickly, miserable life of a chattel serf in the ages "before technocracy" he wouldn't be so keen to burn books. Maybe he'd even begin to realize that when his lousy utterances are translated into plain, words-mean-things English, Cheney appears to be saying that we ought to worship loathsome control freaks as folk heroes. For me, this myopic moonshine serves only to emphasize how I cannot compromise with Cheney; he is without principles. I cannot reason with him; he is without reason. But I can warn him, and with a warning he must obviously take to heart: Almost every day, Cheney outreaches himself in setting new records for arrogance, deceit, and greed. It's truly breathtaking to watch him. An inner voice tells me that Cheney's loyalists are merely ciphers. Cheney is the one who decides whether or not to hurt people's feelings. Cheney is the one who gives out the orders to promote the vile ramblings of the worst types of dangerous scamps there are. And Cheney is the one trying to conceal how the real question here is not, "Where do self-serving vagabonds like him come from, and what are we going to do with them?". The real question is rather, "How far do his lies extend?" You see, if you looked up "venom-spouting" in the dictionary, you'd probably see his picture. Clearly, this is a lesson for those with eyes to see. It is a lesson not so much about Cheney's narrow-minded behavior, but about the way that Cheney's brethren claim to have no choice but to cause (or at least contribute to) a variety of social ills. I wish there were some way to help these miserable, malicious jerks. They are outcasts, lost in a world they didn't make and don't understand. All that we have achieved may now be lost, if not in the bright flames of sexism, then in the dense smoke of the lazy effusions promoted by spineless sciolists.
If we let Cheney attack the fabric of this nation, then greed, corruption, and ageism will characterize the government. Oppressive measures will be directed against citizens. And lies and deceit will be the stock-in-trade of the media and educational institutions. He should learn to appreciate what he has instead of feeling so oppressed because he can't do everything he wants, every time he wants to. Cheney is bound to have a rude awakening when he finally realizes how few people approve of his refractory obiter dicta. How does Cheney deal with this fascinating piece of information? He thoroughly ignores it.
Cheney's lies come in many forms. Some of his lies are in the form of taradiddles. Others are in the form of antics. Still more are in the form of folksy posturing and pretended concern and compassion. Certainly, Cheney's favorite tactic is known as "deceiving with the truth". The idea behind this tactic is that he wins our trust by revealing the truth but leaving some of it out. This makes us less likely to br
I'm confused. Has the Iranian government, at any time in the last 30 years, been the least bit friendly to the United States? How is it possible to negatively impact or 'destabilize' relations with a government whose foreign policy toward the US can be summed up as 'Death to the Great Satan'?
Iran is building up nuclear infrastructure. It's been doing it for years, usually in defiance of UN attempts to regulate said development. Some people say it's dangerous for the Iranians to do this, and that an Iran with nuclear capabilities is a threat to the interests of the United States.
In sum, Kucinich's position appears to be "I think Cheney lied about Iraq, so he must be a nasty lying liar about Iran, too." After all, no one with any common sense could imagine an nuclear Iran using its newfound clout to, for example, threaten US shipping or hold foreign nationals hostage. They've never, ever done anything like that before. Why is mean, old Cheney threatening the poor harmless Iranians?
i wasnt expecting a piece like that
Read radical news here
If you read the 3 articles of impeachment it is plain to see there is warrant for this action. The dems might not have the votes, but that is the point. Impeachment only works when it crosses partizan lines! We need to call, email, fax, and use morse code(for Sen. Stevens) the congress and senate. The only way they know how we feel is if we tell them. I employ you all, not to give up like I feel like doing everyday. Pick up the phone, make the phone ring off the hook, till they listen! Please post congress and senate contact information.
Are you referring to Section 3 of Article III? (It's the only part that comes close to making sense.) If so, you should re-read Article I, Section 8. It's not treason for Congress to be doing their job.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The original announcement was to be Tuesday at noon.
Cheney went to the hospital for a knee-blood-clot "emergency" in the morning.
So, Kucinich delayed it until 5 pm when it was obvious there was no emergency with Cheney's health.
The newsday got slammed with several other big stories:
- EU says Wolfowitz should go;
- UN says Bagdad surge not working;
- House passes War-funding with timetable;
- Cheney speaking at BYU (Utah) commencement w/ lots of protesters;
- Very Conservative (not neocon) New Hampshire voting for Civil Unions
So, yesterday/today is news-dense. The impeachment resolution had to compete.
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I'm fascinated that there's nothing about this on NY Times, CNN, or BBC.
What GP means is that he wants THE third party. You know, the one that agrees precisely with him, and therefore with all reasonable people.
Now that is an impeachment worth reading. The synopsis alone is a solid piece of attack.
Let's see if your congresscritters have enough spine left to do follow the facts. Though I fear we will soon find out how much money Haliburton is willing to throw around in order to keep their sock puppet in office.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
In The Sovereign Individual, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg make the case that governments as we currently know them are already obsolete, and the 'empire' known as the United States is in the process of dying.
While that seems a bit premature (plus, Davidson and Rees-Mogg have made prior predictions that have, at least not yet, come about), it can be argued that the inhabitants of the Roman Empire were not aware of its collapse until over a century after it ceased to have any effective control over most of its 'jurisdiction'. No one event can be pointed out as the pivot of the collapse, but we are seeing some parallels here and now -- including the modern equivalent of "bread and circuses" while trying to maintain military dominance of a crumbling empire.
Party squabbling and petty vendettas are merely symptomatic of the death throes of a government. I suspect the process is more or less inevitable (democracy is only possible until the citizens discover that they can vote themselves the proceeds of the treasury, and that has already happened here), but that doesn't mean that the powers that be will die quietly. The process is likely to be very painful for most of us.
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Kucinich is so far behind he needs something to get him in the headlines and appeal to the far-left base. The fact that he has the hottest wife in Congress isn't going to help.
Cheney is an Israeli spy, a traitor to the USA.
This guy must be hanged.
I urge all Slashdot readers to write their respective Congressional Representatives and voice their opinions. I have just done so.
I don't like Cheney and the majority of people might be wanting to get rid of him, but those aren't good reasons for impeaching him. Furthermore, he might indeed be guilty of impeachable offenses, but I do not feel that Kucinich has made that point. Not only is this a poorly thought out resolution, even the PDF is poorly rendered. It looks like a scanning device was used to render the PDF as it gets slanted after a couple pages. Doesn't he have anybody capable of generating a PDF from a .tex or .doc document?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The resolution would be "H.Res.333", not "H.R.333". If you want to read it in non-PDF form directly from the Library of Congress, look here.
if you think Pelosi is a neocon... you must be so far leftwards that you could teach Marx a few things.
...The same Kucinich who bankrupted Cleveland? At least Cheney knows how to make money!
Waiting for Cheney to be finished with his hospital business is just more evidence that it's a silly political move. Serving papers on a guy with immediate medical problems is suicide, even for Kucinich.
While Cheney may be a bad guy, I can't see how anything here amounts to justification for impeachment. All I see is a lot of "I don't like what he did" and "I think it hurts the country."
If we impeached presidents or removed congressmen and senators because we thought what they did was damaging to the country and not upholding the Constitution, the only business of Congress would be articles of impeachment. Harry Reid definitely needs to go on this score for his recent statements, as do those who voted for the Patriot Act, copyright extensions, McCain Feingold, the assault weapons ban and numerous other blatantly unconstitutional acts.
Not that I don't trust a politician to faithfully present God's honest truth or anything, but here is the actual text of the resolution:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:h.res .00333:
I've been following this story since last week when the plan was leaked and then through Wednesday's postponement due to concerns about Cheney's physical status and through yesterday's news conference. What blew me away was the total lack of coverage it was getting in any press. In particular NPR really made me feel let down. I listened to Morning Edition and All Things Considered non-stop for days and did not even hear the slightest mention of this while I sat through literally hours of interviews with neocon assholes like freaking William Kristol.
What a sad indictment of what has become of the broadcast media. The above posts that mention the re-alignment of the "center" way off to the right is clearly evidenced by this example. NPR has no time to even mention the beinning of an impeachment of Cheney but, on the other hand, there's plenty of time for a pleasant chuckling interview with Billy Kristol on the brighter side of McCane's chances on this so-called left leaning media outlet.
I wonder what happened to the statements Pelosi made just before the 2006 elections about how if the Dems got control they would not be going after impeachment. Or were they just meaning Bush impeachment and Cheney is free game?
Also I agree that Kucinich needs some BIG media pop to catch up to the Hillary/Barak league of play. This could be a desperation ploy, his personal love letter to the far left and whatnot.
In a far scarier development, consider that giving Bush a chance to put someone in the VP seat who could actually run might hurt the Democrats in 2008, here's why.
Bush appoints someone the RNC feels is a very solid contender. Then Bush allows that person the latitude to make changes and do things while Bush a;; but throws himself on any grenades under the auspice of "this was my problem before you even took the job". Fill in VP is seen as a person in there fixing problems, the perfect play to compliment most republicans current packaging and distancing from Bush.
IMHO the Democrats would be best served by just letting Bush and Cheney roll out this last year and a half as it gives them even more time to look bad.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Pardon my ignorance, but I'm a bit surprised that neither the BBC nor CNN has picked this up yet. Deliberate media-snub to shut it down, or no press release yet, or...? Anyone have a notion?
One would think that someone throwing down the word "impeachment" would be worth some notice.
Technological competence assures no more intelligence than any other form, just more elitism.
First of all, that's great news, but about six years too late to help anyone, I'm afraid.
Second, why are we wasting our time with this on SlashDot; tech news it is not.
The success of the impeachment effort, and its effect on politics, depends critically on whether they have anything real they can nail Cheney with.
The 93rd congress had 56 Democratic senators, 1 independent, and 43 Republicans. If Nixon's impeachment had gone to the Senate, and the vote split along strict party lines, Nixon would have won. But things looked bad enough for Nixon he just resigned.
The 110th congress has 49 (+1 sorta) Democrats, 1 independent, 49 Republicans. To convict, the Democrats would have to pick up sixteen Republican votes instead of 11 in 1972.
And lest we assume that the Republicans will have solidarity in support of their leader, we need only look the the recent Gonzales hearings, in which the truly aggressive questions came from the Republican side. Republican lawmakers are pissed at this administration for losing their majority. Senators in competitive seats are anxious to show they are independent of the Bush Administration.
Is this enough to get a conviction? No. There has to be evidence. If the evidence of a crime is there, if the crime is something that people care about (we're not talking semen stains here), then there is a real possibility of their getting Republican support, or more likely a resignation and pardon before they can be put to the test. Putting the Republican senators to the test would be such a betrayal of loyalty, the administration could expect little loyalty in return.
If they don't have anything, then the Democrats will have screwed themselves. The Republicans may have pleased their base with the Lewinsky affair, but they didn't do themselves any favor with the moderate and independent voters. The best thing for the Republicans would be to be able to point to the Democrats and say, "look, everybody does it."
If a reasonable, non-partisan person would conclude from the evidence that Cheney committed an impeachable offense, then it's a short disaster for the Republicans whether or not a conviction is returned. Republican senators will find themselves in a prisoner's dilemma: be loyal and share the pain, or defect and escape some of it.
In the end, the system will benefit because it eliminated a corrupt official and set an example for the current generation. The hurt to the Republican party would be considerable in the next election, but within a very short time they'll actually be in better shape than they are now, especially as the defecting Senators will make it possible for the party to disown the disgraced Cheney. Watergate didn't weaken them so disastrously after all; in less than a decade they won the White House, and with the exception of a few brief years in the Clinton administration, they always had the control of something, and at no time did they stop being influential.
The only scenario that bears risk the American political system is if there is impeachment, and the evidence is weak or the crime trivial. This would cause a tremendous apathy among swing voters, resulting in less competition. Overall, I think this favors the Republicans, who have stronger get-out-the-base systems than Democrats do.
All the other scenarios damage some individuals permanently, certain parties temporarily, and democracy not at all.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
OK, now I understand his comment.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
This is news for nerds?
I mean, that question has been asked for many a submission across the years - but this one really crosses the line. It isn't about technology, or YRO, or anything else 'slashlike'. It's pure politics and nothing else.
If this 'story' made the grade because of the firehose, I fear for the future of Slashdot.
Had to check the URL again, for a second I thought I was at the Daily Kos.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Practically everything that was said regarding Iraq's WMD prowess was also said by
... He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation ... And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction ... So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real..."
... chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies."
George Bush
John McCain
John Kerry
Bill Clinton
Hillary Clinton
Robert Byrd
Sandy "nothing in my underpants" Berger
Madeline "Kim Jung Ill seems a nice guy" Albright
Carl Levin
Ted Fscking Kennedy
Al Gore and a HOST of others...
It begs the question why Kusinich is picking on Dick only?
Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime
- Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23. 2003
"I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force -- if necessary -- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security."
- Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct. 9, 2002
"One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line."
- President Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998
"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program."
- President Bill Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998
"We must stop Saddam from ever again jeopardizing the stability and security of his neighbors with weapons of mass destruction."
- Madeline Albright, Feb 1, 1998
"He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983."
- Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18, 1998
"[W]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs."
Letter to President Clinton.
- (D) Senators Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, others, Oct. 9, 1998
"Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process."
- Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998
"Hussein has
- Madeline Albright, Clinton Secretary of State, Nov. 10, 1999
"We begin with the common belief that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations and is building weapons of mass destruction and th! e means of delivering them."
- Sen. Carl Levin (D, MI), Sept. 19, 2002
"We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country."
- Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002
"Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power."
- Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002
"We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."
- Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, MA), Sept. 27, 2002
"The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam H
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Well, 6.2 billion if you discount the US itself.
Just trying to fight the concept that the Earth only has x billion people in it. While perhaps you were not implying x=5, enough people don't realize that x > 6.5 that it never hurts to throw that number out every now and again.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Why are Libertarians insane? Because they willfully disregard any evidence that their simplistic theories will not and do not work in the real world. The free market is not magic and infallible. It is a complex system of feedback loops that does not posses any sort of true homeostasis and therefore needs external management in order to maintain its state of freedom.
Not all Libertarians are as "bug-fuck insane" as you're making them out to be; there is a clear line between Libertarianism and economic anarchism -- Libertarians generally advocate a form of government which creates as level a playing field as possible, and then lets individual actors do the rest; this is generally summed up by saying that it is OK for government to create a framework where individuals can make decisions on their own, but not to act redistributively. Although this would not allow for conventional anti-trust regulation in the conventional sense, their stance is -- and I think they have a very good point here -- much of the danger of monopolies and trusts isn't inherent in the monopoly itself, but in the accrual of power in a single organization which is then used to influence government and suppress competition; if you removed all the corporate welfare and protective legislation that large corporations have bought themselves, they would tend to be lumbering behemoths and, excepting some special cases which tend towards natural monopolies, generally aren't as competitive as they appear to be today.
There is a lot of debate within Libertarian organizations as to how those special cases should be treated, and setting aside orthodoxy, I think the vast majority of self-identified Libertarians would support some form of minimalist interventionism in order to counterbalance the distortive effects that some monopolies have had on the government, while the laws and welfare that they have purchased are repealed or dismantled.
In short, I think you're getting dangerously close to creating a straw man when you attempt to pigeonhole Libertarians so narrowly; like it or not, they're the closest thing that the United States has to a third political party, and their views are not nearly as simplistic as you seem to think they are.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Cheney is easily one of the most evil fascists of the last 100 years. Profiteering enormously from this war, and milking the USA out of its resources have transcended into a sick sport of his.
If I were to guess, this sick bastard probably has middle-class Americans lay down in front of him everywhere he goes so he doesn't get his $3000 shoes dirty.
Impeachment is not enough for this guy, we need a real punishment. For starters, how about taking away ALL of his money, and forcing his to live like the rest of us Americans?
I am open source, and Linux baby!
True in a way, but they unfortunately go so far as to disregard the need for checks and balances in massive inequalities of private power. Libertarians are simply under the delusion that a perfect free-market system is "fair" and allows anyone with enough gumption to rise to the top and ignores the inherent interest of those with financial clout in tilting the system to be as biased in favor of their offspring as possible. Basically, Libertarians only care about your freedom from government and your freedom from violence. Freedom from other forms of coercion, freedom from deception, freedom from having the costs of others pushed off on you, etc., and equality of opportunity don't really matter that much to Libertarians. It's all just about "what the market will bear."
That said, I think the government would be far better if it were split between Libertarians and Democrats than between Republicans and either of the other two. Our government might still be torn over economic issues, and the economic divide might still be widening, but we wouldn't have to worry about the abuses of executive power that we've seen in the past few years.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Gee, six months ago wasn't the tune, "Don't blame us, blame the UN, the UK, and Clinton-era intel?" to save their own seats for the elections? Now they want to turn around and blame their own government?
So I suppose it boils down to:
1) Claim that they got hoodwinked by the UN/UK/Jews/Whomever and not support this crap
2) Try to claim that "It's all Cheney's Fault" and really hope no-one says "GEE WHY DIDN'T YOU CATCH THIS?"
My guess is #1 is going to win. It's always easier to pass the buck to someone elses government.
listened to Morning Edition and All Things Considered non-stop for days
Get a fucking life. You hate Cheney, but you let news of his fate devour your life. What an idiot. Oh noes! NPR done let you down! Call the cops!
Who cares?
Does anyone seriously think that this is anything but a partisan political stunt?
What relevance does this have for the Slashdot audience?
AC
nm
I don't get the point of this. Yes if they were to go after Bush, Cheney is next line. Fine, cut off other heads of the hydra, blah blah. But when this administration is only going to be around for another year, and it's quite obvious that absolutely little is going to be done due to the relationship between the current Congress and the White House, what exactly is the point other than to send the White House yet another message that the Congress isn't happy, and to do even more strutting about?
I'm not surprised any of the mainstream press is not carrying this.
Insert Sig Here
You're absolutely right. However, the question is does this perjury rise to the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors"? Perjury is a very serious crime, but I'm not sure that in this case it meets that criteria. The perjury issue would still be worth pursuing if there was a reason to suspect it covered up larger crimes, but in Clinton's case that didn't seem to be true.
I voted for Dole in '96 because of the corruption I saw in the Clinton administration. That corruption now seems quite minor by comparison to the current administration. (On a side note: if Dole has won in '96, we wouldn't have had Bush in office in 2000.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The problem isn't that the general public isn't supporting it.
The problem is that nobody takes Kucinich seriously, even within his own party. He's maybe not quite as ridiculous as Ralph Nader or Jesse Jackson on the list of "hopeless ideologues who continually run for President," but he's definitely on that list. Hell, he gets regularly ridiculed by Jon Stewart, who is practically the mainstream Democratic party's mouthpiece on national television. He is, in general, a loose cannon, and I doubt that earns him many friends on either side of the aisle. (Well, some Republicans might secretly like him just because of his entertainment value, and because he creates things they can point at and use to condemn Democrats in general with; e.g. his proposals to ban handguns make for great NRA campaign fodder.)
None of the real players in Congress are going to touch this, because they don't want to be associated with him. He's practically famous for introducing feel-good bills with no cosponsors, that get him a little media attention and then get tossed in the circular file in committee.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
with the success of the right wing campaign to reclassify righ as center and center as left.... there are no candidates representing the actual left, which make up the majority of the population, hence low voter turnout.
maybe instead of allowing news pundits in the ivory tower to scare them off their populist positions, candidates for the left should plough forward and see what kind of interest they can develop in the 250+ million people who didn't vote in the last few elections because the only candidates to choose from were a corporate schill and a corporate schill who happens to be christian.
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The U.S. Public needs to start by arresting and jailing those who pushed the policy, sold the lies and sent the U.S. into a wasteful and pointless, (and for some, a highly profitable) war. This would include Bush, Cheney, Rice, and the secret service folks who helped fabricate the falsehoods.
Then the next step would be to arrest everybody who didn't have the spine to stop the war machine if they knew better.
The next appropriate step would be to fire everybody else who should have stood up and asked more questions rather than gone along with the charade.
And finally, honest people need to get into politics. And screening tests be implemented to look for psychopaths at all points along the way.
Is all of that going to happen? Probably not. If we can imprison Cheney for a thousand years, it'll be a good start. And it would set a nice precedent. I'd like to see Bush removed from office and put down.
-FL
First off this is just glory grabbing by Kucinich, it won't go through because to impeach a president doesn't just require a president to do something wrong, it's to do something so wrong that a mark can be made upon the presidents of the past and future. Same for the vice president. Nixon did something at that level, Clinton did too. (the perjury, not the sex let's not try to confuse that issue again)
But even so this isn't news for Slashdot, this is partisan politics at it's best, and it has little if anything to do with anything. We arn't voting on it. So why is slashdot writting about it? This is Slashdot, the place I come to read news that matters to me, if I or any of us really cared about this we'd likely have an RSS feed or another news source to our political sources which would be mentioning this.
Let's get Slashdot back to being news about technology and nerdy stuff, rather then turning it into a Technology based version of CNN.
Let's look at the articles objectively (if that's even possible). Did Cheney commit any crimes, according to Kucinich? Note that lying in a political speech is not a crime (nearly every politician in the country would be behind bars if it were). Neither is lying to Congress, unless it's under oath, and we know how fervently the Bush Administration opposes testifying under oath. It's also not a crime to break a solemn promise, like the oath of office an elected official takes. These may be reasons not to reelect somebody (except that America did), but they're not crimes.
Article I: Cheney lied about Iraqi WMDs. Reprehensible, yes. Cynical and morally bankrupt, yes. Criminal, unfortunately not.
Article II: Cheney lied about a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. But again, not a crime under any law.
Article III: Cheney's been rattling his saber at Iran. It may be foreign policy by sledgehammer rather than Xacto knife, but there's no law against this either.
So although I would really, really like to see Cheney removed from office, Kucinich's articles of impeachment don't contain any actual crimes for which he could be tried. Not that that's stopped impeachment proceedings before, but there was a better case against Clinton, because he actually testified under oath. We have some truly reprehensible people leading our country, and they should be stopped before they get us into even more trouble, but unfortunately this isn't going to do it.
The green party strongly supports IRV and has been able to promote it is some jurisdictions (e.g. http://www.newamerica.net/blogs/2007/02/takoma_par ks_new_vote_system_makes_debut).
n al_Apportionment_Amendment. So, if you don't live in NJ, MD, NC, SC, NH, NY, RI, PA, VA, VT or KY
get your state legislature to ratify.s -selling-solar.html
To end gerrymandering, all that is needed is for 27 more states to ratify the Congressional Apportionment Amendment:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressio
--
Switch to solar http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
As wary as Madison was of parties, he failed to understand two fundamental things.
First, parties are inevitable. From an economic standpoint, they represent a pooling of resources that is more efficient for campaigning than individual candidates all going it alone. From a social standpoint, they are the result of likeminded individuals coming together for the same goals -- political bent in many ways is tied strongly enough to personality types and the background of your upbringing that it was inevitable that politicians would find that some of them had a LOT more in common than they differed on and choose to team up. From an mass manipulation standpoint, parties would provide a common set of assumptions to bring in less informed voters. You may not know what candidate X's standpoint on Issue Y might be, but you probably know what their parties stance is on Issues A-Z.
Second, Madison and the others missed the nature of future parties. The Constitution was written under the assumption that regional blocks would form and that factions would largely revolve around regional issues that were prevalent in the day -- slavery vs. abolition, agriculture vs. shipping, etc. etc. The general assumption seems to be that there would always be many candidates in a race. They failed to see that the electoral system would condense down to a winner-take-all system in almost every state and mathematically make the viability of anything other than two parties inevitable. While Madison speaks of the tyranny of the majority, I don't think he was really expecting for there to be only two parties at the time.
Anyway, for all the reasons in the first paragraph, you can't get rid of parties. Parties are a natural outgrowth of the existence of common political philosophies and the desire of people to pool their resources with others to achieve their goals in a world where each individual is relatively powerless. The only thing we really can (and should) do is to change the system so that it doesn't favor the dominance of only two parties. Breaking the collations of the main two parties into a more fine-grained choice would allow the will of the people to be expressed better, but you cannot expect for us to go back to the system of each candidate fund-raising and introducing themselves to the voters individually and from-scratch any more than you can expect us to go back to a barter-based economy.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Stuff that barely matters.
the US House votes to impeach and the process fails in the US Senate? Given the nature of the charges and the substantial documention that is presented, will future individuals be able to use this 'aquittal' as a way to say "Hey if VP Cheney wasn't guilty and I didn't do anything more than him, then I can't be guilty"
Better yet, how about some of the current enemy combatants using this is a typical courtroom of proof of what does and does not constitute treason against the US and that they did no worse than him?
Also, Kucinic (sp?) has already said that you need to remove the VP first since lord knows we don't want him as Prez after Bush is impeached.
I looked on CNN, Euronews, the BBC website, and the dutch Journaal.
There is absolutely no mention at all of this impeachment procedure, which according to the website started 2 days ago.
I don't understand, can anyone explain why this is so under-represented in the mainstream media? (I'm not an USian BTW).
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
I don't see the impeachable offense here.
Basically, the charges amount to lying to get Congress to support his preferred policy, and saber rattling against Iran.
As bad as I think these are, they are not treason. Even if Cheney is forced to admit that he lied, he has a simple defense: he did it in the interests of the United States.
Proving they are a high crime is going to be very, very tough. Drawing the line between preposterous interpretations of facts and lies is very, very hard. The best evidence may be that the trucks you claim are mobile biological warfare labs are actually artillery balloon trucks, but if there is any wiggle room at all, the best they can nail you on is being obstinately stupid in ignoring the most plausible explanation. You'd have to do something stupid like stage the photograph. Or maybe if you found a photograph lying around labeled "artillery balloon truck" and said "Hey, let's tell everybody that these are mobile biological weapons labs! The suckers won't know the difference." Otherwise if you find a photo labeled "Suspected as mobile lab, but probably a balloon truck," you can choose to believe the worst, so long as you are careful deflect any questions about alternative explanations with vague, preferably meaningless answers when under oath.
If there is any wiggle room at all, then it will do as "reasonable doubt". Does anybody doubt that Attorney General Gonzales lied in his recent testimony where he claimed he couldn't remember anything he had done in the last few months? Is there any chance he'll be brought up on perjury unless he's nailed at least a dozen other ways?
Politicians don't get indicted for lying. They have to take something which can be shown beyond any doubt to have known to be a fact, and say something that cannot by any possible stretch of the imagination be interpreted as consistent with that fact. When Clinton said "I did not have sex with that woman," he was lying. However he had first made the people deposing him give a uncomfortably precise definition of "sex", which lucky for him could be construed by an inhumanly literal half-wit as excluding his shenanigans. So technically, while it is clear he lied in the sense of "deceived", he did not tell a lie as in "something you can convict a politician for saying."
The thing that is most likely to yield winnable impeachment against anybody is the US Attorney firings. If this can be shown to be part of an attempt to obstruct prosecutions of political friends, then they've got them.
The next thing would be deliberate violations of the Hatch act, and attempts to cover them up. Cover ups are a good way to nail people for obstruction, if they leave any trail of evidence at all.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
about Dennis Kucinich, but he's right on a *lot* of things, he's got great big balls of solid brass, and a hotter wife than most of you misfits could ever dream of.
not that he'll win, but really, would you rather have hillary?
Politics are fine, but this is news for nerds - not cnn.
/. submitters for postings that have nothing to do with technology.
Why post this flaimbait crap here?
It's too early in the morning to already be pissed of at
See here.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Until someone made the argument you just made (might have been you), and I was forced to admit he was right. I wish the voting populace was smart enough to handle Condorcet, but they're not. You have to go to vote with the populace you have, not the populace you want.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
To impeach Harry Reid and try him for treason.
Just think if Harry had been alive and in office during the Battle of the Bulge, he would have pulled us out of Europe, screaming the war has been lost. We could all be speaking German instead of English, I mean really "Have a good night said the knight." is so dam confusing and dum, I mean damn confusing and dumb. And the French language with its primitive throat grunting sounds would be extent. And we wouldn't have all those Jews running around, and the Negroes would be put in their place. I bet Hitler would have known how to deal with the Arabs, they are after all a Semitic race like the Jews. We would all be one big happy National Socialist Society... Unless of course you are not Aryan in the true since of the Third Reich.
Still I am thankful that people like Harry Reid and Joseph Lieberman and Dick Chane are in office, and it means that this country is still free. People are free to stay stupid things or make statements that are counter to "The Administration" without worrying about the Storm Troopers breaking in the front door at 2:00 AM. Burn a US flag on Main Street, yep go ahead you can do that still. Some retired Vet my thrash your ass but at least the police won't haul you away and place you in a reeducation camp in Idaho. College students can hold rallies in the campus quadrangle protesting "The War On Terror" Bad name terror is a weapon for fighting a war much like a ship or B-52. Better name perhaps would have been Islamofacism, but that would have been Islamophobic.
If you only want to bring out evidence, would it not be more expedient to ask the Senate Ethics Committee to consider expelling the President of the Senate for unbecomming conduct? That's what I did, but Senator Boxer does not read her email if it is not from California. The house has work to do so I'd think handling this in a Senate committee would be time better spent.
Did you not read the comment you quoted? 'Cause I think you missed the point...like, by miles. That's just not where that train of thought was going.
You go and pluck the chickens - I'll heat the tar!
Now, on to expose his secret masters...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Don't forget the most serious charge:
He uses more that one square of toilet paper per day!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I can't imagine Federal taxes getting any lower than they already are. Even if we were to pull out of Iraq and reduce the military budget by half we would then need to spend more money on port and airport security as well as the social security program. Medicaid is also going to need a lot more money if it is going to function when all of the baby boomers retire. Otherwise we'll be right back where we were back before social security existed with the poor getting little if any health care while the rich prosper. Or we'll just run the national deficit up to the point that America's credit is ruined for a very long time (which would almost certainly lead to a worldwide recession).
I see a lot of people complaining about a third party not getting a vote.. blah blah blah.
I agree with it, but if you cant count on the populace to elect a third party then you need to put your money where your mouth is and organize a mass relocation of intelligent people on the order of the formation of silicon valley.
In this case we have the perfect centralized location to coordinate people.. (over a million registered users and likely 10 times that many readers).
slashdotters claim to be intlligent, resourceful, more "rational" than the masses.. well it's time to put your resources where your mouth is!
organize an effort to concentrate slashdot membership/readership in one location. Make it a midwestern state where the population measures in the hundreds of thousands.
This is not far fetched. I've been confronted by numerous posters who claim to own businesses, many of them web based or otherwise independent of physical location.
It's very simple.. move the businesses to some place like montana, hire other slashdotters, who if they are as intelligent as they claim, will make a competent workforce.
Overwealm a state with slashdot's population, elect a member of the "slashdot" party into congress, launch a tv network, publicise publicise publicise, and use the leverage of virtually controlling an entire state to get the word out to the rest of america.
Make a party that sets progressive goals, then achieves them by combining the "idealism" of the left with the "realism" of the right. (what our current government is supposed to do instead of just "mirror imaging" one another.
heck.. i'm making this a journal entry...
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
. . . puts a smile on my face.
Thank you kdawson for promoting this to the front page.
Ha ha!
I hope they hang that mother fucker!
What is it with William Kristol? He turns up everywhere, when he's obviously a delusional bozo (or likes to play one). He keeps getting interviewed like he actually knows or understands anything, while he just sits there and argues that black is white.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Libertarians generally advocate a form of government which creates as level a playing field as possible, and then lets individual actors do the rest; this is generally summed up by saying that it is OK for government to create a framework where individuals can make decisions on their own, but not to act redistributively.
Well, the problem is that without acting redistributively, you simply can't create as level a playing field as possible. Take the inheritence tax, for example. Without the inheritence tax, you get economic dynasties where the child of a wealthy and powerful individual not only starts off with an advantage in education and political connections (that you can't really erase) but also with an entire foundation of wealth that an otherwise equally talented individual would not start with. In essence, the race is already lost. I've always been of the opinion that wealth should be earned, but a lack of inheritence tax allows for the existence of an upper class that has no need for work when they can simply let their money work for them by entrusting it to investment advisors. Most if not all Libertarians consider the Inheritence Tax to be an abomination, though it is widely considered outside of the American Right to be a necessary foundation for the creation of equality.
I think the vast majority of self-identified Libertarians would support some form of minimalist interventionism in order to counterbalance the distortive effects that some monopolies have had on the government, while the laws and welfare that they have purchased are repealed or dismantled.
The problem is that most Libertarians don't seem to believe that there's a problem with a monopoly having a distortive effect on the market or on consumers as long as they don't get the government to do them any special favors. I, too, would like to see less corporate influence on government, but until corporations are prohibited from or (by force of law) gain no profit from donating to the campaigns of politicians, you'll never see and end to special favors for industry. I find it very rare (i.e. I've never met) a Libertarian who does not consider the ability of the wealthy and powerful to spend their money as freely as they want on political donations to be a matter of their free speech rights, nor have I met a Libertarian who thinks that the idea of corporate personhood and the existence of the same free speech rights for corporations should both be abolished.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
What age are you? About 15 by the sound of things. Go back to your skateboard, or bong, or whatever it is that "having a life" means to you. Why are you reading this story if you think caring about how the country is run is lame?
In your example you seem to forget that this is ranked choice voting. Suppose there are three candidates and as you suggest two are similar in their positions. Suppose that there is first choice voting that is split about three ways and one of the two similar candidates is eliminated. The second choice votes are then distributed among the remaining two candidates. It is much more likely that those second choices will be for the other similar candidate rather than for the disparate candidate. This is the advantage of IRV, it produces a majority result and eliminates plurality results that lead to charges of spoiling. Charges of spoiling are silly since parties and candidates don't own votes so this is not a good reason to go for IRV unless your the sort who likes to make those kind of charges. The largest strength of IRV is that it decerns what voters actually want better in multicandidate elections without having a potentially different electorate in sequential runoff schemes.
Oh please.
There's a HUGE difference between page 8 with snide editorial remarks, and front page with cheering sections. Every link you gave demonstrates that the media is armed not just a volume control, but also the ability to raise or lower the perceived validity of a story.
So, yes, when this happens to be the across-the-board policy of every major news agency in the country, it does lead one to think that there is evidence at the very least of a massive bias. I know personally a number of journalists, (both in print and on in television), and they tell me in no uncertain terms that news which does not fit the corporate and Israeli agenda does not get fair play, if any play at all.
This is what is meant when people say that, "The Media is not running this story."
If this was about Clinton's penis being sucked, then every magazine cover would be electric with the news and every day time talk show would be running a discussion segment on it. But instead we're talking about a mass murderer who sold lies in order to start an illegal war and the media clearly has no interest in asking the appropriate questions or in seeing the criminals brought to justice. Do you see the difference?
If you don't want to call this a, 'conspiracy', then perhaps the word, 'corruption' or the term 'base ignorance' would be more appealing to you.
-FL
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Nah, this is just the media showing that they know what a blowhard Kuchinich is. No one seems to remember what a crackpot his 2004 Presidential campaign was... I do. And I remember how soundly blown out of the water he was when he tried to do this very same thing then. :) It's just to grab attention. And the media knows it won't work.
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
You're being idealistic. A government that elects its representatives by plurality vote will always degenerate into a two-party system. People would rather vote for a lesser evil than "throw their vote away".
Three words: Free State Project
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Considering that numbers are absolutes and "left vs. right" are relative positions like "hot vs. cold," I'd say that your rebuttal is ridiculous.
I'm guessing by the angry, defensive tenor of your post at something that either purports to portray a more liberal point of view as the norm or at something which might somehow be construed to be critical of America and by the confusion between absolute and relative truths that you count yourself as a conservative, right?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
To me, as a finn, it seems more like you have two middle parties. There are differences in nuances and rhetoric, that is all.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
Where exactly did you study the political process? Street protests are used by groups that are in the minority to bring awareness and supporters to their cause. A lack of street protests means a suppression of the minority. The abortion issue will cause street protests forever, no matter which side wins, because the other side will always be pissed. Right now the pro-life people are in a pretty sharp minority (only 30-40% of our population), notice how much they protest?
Your attempt at false equivocation is completely dishonest. The Democrats have used a strategy of containment since Clinton was elected in 1992. It worked, there were no WMD to be found. Attempting to equivocate the fraudulent rush to war with a reasoned effort to contain a known danger is bs. Are you seriously going to argue that the interests of the United States have been served by the actions of this administration? And what freedoms or other traditions are Conservatives conserving if it is ok for the government to use my tax dollars to lie to me? How are the claims of the Bush administration not fraudulent? They were the ones advocating for war, they were the ones making the claims that a change in the course of action must be taken. Ineffective defense against fraud might lose you an election, but it is not grounds for impeachment, commission of said fraud is. The Democrats gave up their responsibility to criticize unsound evidence, but in the light of the fact that they were the minority party and could not win in either the House or the Senate their political expediency and deferment to a extremely popular president during an election season is reasonable. However, the Democrats sin was accepting the evidence as presented by the administration. Since then, they have repeatedly (except for Hillary) stated that they should not have trusted the Administration's claims and that doing so was a mistake. Again, all of the quotes you have about Iraq possessing WMD from 02/03 are based on information promoted by the White House that had no integrity. Quotes before then are based on a strategy of containment, not invasion.
Show me the evidence from an actual intelligence agency that says Saddam had weapons in 2002 or 2003, hell anytime after 1998. Other than the rockets that exceeded the allowed range (which were destroyed before the war by inspectors and had no WMD warheads), Iraq possessed no capabilities to threaten the US or it's neighbors. The Democratic strategy of containment was working until Bush decided it wasn't good enough for his delusions. It's the same thing in N Korea, the !Clinton policy of the Bush Administration has managed in 2007 to get the same agreement Clinton got in 1995, but now Pyongyang has a couple more warheads it can sell to real terrorists. How did Bush's actions advance the interest of the United States? Why did we invade Iraq? To what purpose are our soldiers and treasure being spent?
I'd really like someone to show me a person with actual intelligence credentials that believes invading Iraq was a good idea. Defectors provided by "heroes in error" over at the INC don't count, they have been exposed as frauds. Plagiarized thesis don't count either. Show me the CIA approved intelligence, show me the mid-level analysts who actually believed Saddam was capable of building nukes, would in a million years team up with Al Qaeda or provide them with WMD or would be stupid enough to attack the US with the amount of US military power already pointed at him.
I want something that didn't come out of the the White House Iraq Group, the INC, the Office of Special Plans @ the Pentagon and that wasn't a delusion with no evidence (Atta in Prague). I seriously challenge you to come up with something.
What Bush and Cheney said:
DICK CHENEY: (Speech to the VFW 8/26/02) Many of us are convinced that Saddam Hussein will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.
DICK CHENEY: (Speech to the VFW 8/26/02) But we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.
DICK CHENEY (MEET THE PRESS NBC 9/8/02): It's now public that in fact he has been seeking to acquire and we have been able to intercept to prevent him from acquiring through this particular channel the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge and the centrifuge is required to take low grade uranium and enhance it into highly enriched uranium which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb."
PRESIDENT BUSH (Discussion with Congressional Lea
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
With a few modifications in the wording of this synopsis, we could be describing a majority of our elected officials. I wonder if we should be holding all of our governmental officials to the same light for other misleadings, intentional or not, in other aspects of the government operations. If so, we may be impeaching a majority of our government. I am not saying that Vice President Cheny was right in his actions, only that most of our officials behave in the same manner as long as it suites their career. We should be holding our representatives responsible for all actions they perform, whether it be something minor, or major. I believe that our elected officials need to re-examine their actions and decisions. They have been voted in to be servants to the voting populace, not to further a career, pet project, business endeavor, or pocket book. Sometimes it appears that, once voted in, they either project their own agenda, or follow their peers in order to maintain their political stature. We need representatives who will look after what is good for the populace, not a political party.
I would like to say to our representatives this:
support the impeachment as long as you yourself have not modified the data, mislead your constituents, withheld information, or paraphrased information in order to change its relation to the facts at hand.
Impeachment at this time should be the last thing on your mind. You should be spending our time and resources helping our citizens, including the military citizens.
Consider John Edwards's bit about eliminating poverty. Of course, Socialist Worker doesn't like him, but they wouldn't, now would they.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
STV for multi-seat elections is ideal for a proportional representation system. Condercet doesn't satisfy the criterion of proportional representation of the populace in multi-seat elections.
A agree, though, Condercet methods work better than IRV for single-seat positions (such as we have in executive positions), but for houses, proportional representation is the best way to counterbalance the tyranny of a centrist and non-controversial minority against edge minorities that increase the political dialogue.
On a related note, was Hitler a moderate simply because he was at war with both the capitalist democracies of the West and the communist dictatorship of the East?
Short answer: No, who your external enemies and friend are do not necessarily reflect the economic stance of your own country.
Long answer: Hitler was an economic moderate because National Socialism was a semi-rightist totalitarian system that shared control of the country between government officials and industry leaders. The economy was semi-planned, but much of the planning was done by government recognized monopolies and cartels instead of by the government itself. In addition, property was assumed in general to belong to the citizen instead of to the state. That last distinction is very important between leftist and rightist totalitarian economies and is one of the few places where they don't blur together much.
As for defining them by allies, note that the Nazis and the Communists were initially allies until they turned on each other, and a sizeable portion of the wealthy and of the intelligentsia of America in the late 30s were more sympathetic to Germany than to England. Hilter wrote quite glowingly of Americans in his writing, praising them and considering them as potential fearsome rivals. The clash of powers was more pragmatic than ideological until the war got started and the propoganda started up. History largely writes it as a war against an evil power that massacred Jews, but it got started more out of a fear of the balance of power.
I mean, what kind of nation are we that is allied with both Norway and Saudi Arabia?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I take it they're reserving HR 666 for George Bush?
Dennis Kucinich's impeachment resolution is like John Edward's wife's cancer announcement, both designed to bolster support.
Kucinich is such a marginal figure that even his democratic colleagues are distancing themselves from his antics:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artiCan someone explain why he only went after the Vice President and didnt include Bush?
I dont read
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Unfortunately I have to disagree that gerrymandering is fundamental. How elections are funded is more crucial, IMHO. As long as our "representatives" are working only for corporations and rich people (often equivalent), we'll never get rid of harmful practices such as gerrymandering, parties, and wacko presidents concerned more with enlarging the military industrial complex and oil cartels than the welfare of the country's citizens. Arizona, Main, and North Carolina have already enacted publicly funded election programs. Also, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) have introduced the Fair Elections Now Act that does something similar for some federal elections. This is the most realistic attempt yet that I've seen at reclaiming control of the government.
Please support H Res 333, the articles of impeachment of Vice President R. Cheney submitted by Congressman D. Kucinich, in the most vigorous terms possible. The invasion of Iraq was an international crime, and I do not need to describe to you the colossal human, economic, and social costs that have already accrued, and that will increase in the future with the inevitable multi-faceted blowback that will result.
Please make this your top priority and do everything in your power to recruit your colleagues in its support, and to ensure the successful impeachment of Mr Cheney.
Thank you very much!
John Jackson: I say your 2 cent titanium tax goes too far!
Jack Johnson: And I say YOUR 2 cent titanium tax doesn't go too far enough!
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
That would be relevant if Iran was an Arab nation, but it's not. Your own link points out that Iraqi (Arab) forces did poorly against Iranian (Persian) troops in the Iran-Iraq war. They don't speak Arabic, and they're ethnically distinct. I don't know what effect this has on military supremacy, but it ticks me off when people mix up Arab/Arabic with Persian/Farsi.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Nancy Pelosi.
:P
Period.
Oh, and Dennis Kuchinich. They are merely playing the same old same old game our parents beat the shit out of us for playing with them, only they are doing it on a national scale - Divide and Conquer. Um, never forget the districts they represent are the most liberal in our country, as are their constituents. Nancy Pelosi does nothing but serve her own interests, and has done a damn good job demonstrating it. Not that the media discusses it.
And for what? To capitulate to the enemy and sell the American people out to the illegals that infiltrate our country at an ever increasing rate? Don't make me laugh. Some of us actually care about the future.
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
All of the quotes from before 2001 are irrelevent. Inspectors were not allowed in Iraq from 1998 to 2001, so it was feasible to speculate that Saddam had WMD at the time. In 2001 inspectors were allowed back in and no evidence of WMD was found. I'm not a Democrat or a Republican, but I do think it's important to keep quotes in context.
Impeaching the Veep is kind of silly anyway. Except for whatever W chooses to delegate to him, he has no official duties, except to preside over the Senate. What's the charge, that he banged the gavel too hard?
Now, about those examples I asked for...?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Partly we overthrew Mossadegh to stall off the Soviets. Partly we did it because British Petroleum persuaded Winston Churchill to call his old pal Ike and ask for help.
But whatever the reasons we did it, we earned the enmity of the Iranian people by doing so. We can look back now and say "we did it because we had to", and maybe that's true. But if we were really honest with ourselves, we would also add "... even though it was completely against our values and was of very dubious morality."
A really courageous President would face this forthrightly. He would record an address to the Iranian people stating plainly that overthrowing their democratically-elected leader was contrary to our values but that we did in in pursuit of a larger struggle against the Soviets; that we realize that US actions hurt the Iranian people, and that while we felt it was necessary at the time we are regretful of the harm it caused them. Further, we wish to put the past injuries the two nations have done one another behind us, to normalize relations, and perhaps one day to beome friends.
Alas, doing this now - after Iraq became a debacle - may look like a sign of weakness, rather than of magnanimous strength. It should have been done while Khatami was President of Iran, for he would have welcomed such a move and it would have considerably strengthened the influence of Iran's moderates; perhaps winning us an ally in the region.
But we blew our chance. I doubt we'll get another so good.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
You do realize the government hurts they poor don't you? The biggest example of this is the federal reserve system and the entrenched inflation policies. With the current policy, it becomes a bad proposition for anyone to simply save money in the bank as its value is less every year. Since the lower income brackets typically do not have money to invest, their primary option has been to save money instead.
This is in effect a stealth RECURRING tax on money that you and I have already paid taxes on.
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
You have them. :) Look at their records. Plain and simple enough. Oh, but wait... I forget, you're blinded by your own bias!
:)
I'm not trying to get into a pissing match... I'm a girl, I'll win. (we pee more) Simply saying, step outside your blinder box and look at different perspectives, not the ones you're being spoonfed by the leftists running the media outlets of this country, as proven by the Al Sharpton shakedown of the media.
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
Gerrymandering will still be quite possible (and would still happen), but it's true the effects of gerrymandering would be mitigated somewhat. Of course, we would need a bigger Congressional building...
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
it's a distraction to keep all those red blooded American's from realizing that the work visa program both parties are pushing is about to drop 20 million+ disparate workers into our economy.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'm sorry but if you think the left runs the media then all you have to do is turn the channel to FOX(in your case just leave it where it's at). Or any other station for that matter. If you for one second think Fox is left, try listening to democracynow.org, or if you really want to twitch listen to counterspin on fair.org. That is real news, done by real reporters who have to think for themselves(outside the box-void of blinders). If the mass media was run from the left, the cheney impeachment would be followed up with, oh I don't know, maybe video clips showing exact proof of lying, like what can be found on utube. But, no, all we had was 30 second soundbites void of any reporting at all.
Remember Webb Hubbell? He was something like the #2 man in the DoJ under Clinton.
:-P
t ebook.htmlc ial/clinton/stories/hubbell050198.htm
Well, he made a deal with Ken Starr that he was going to cooperate with Starr. But then he got a bunch of "consulting" jobs that paid him something like $1 million. Guess who got old Webb those jobs? Vernon Jordan. Guess where one of those jobs was? Revlon.
Guess who got Monica Lewinski a job at Revlon when she was asked to testify? Vernon Jordan.
Hmm, no pattern of obstruction of justice, now is there?
No, of course not...
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/04/06/time/no
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/spe
Sorry to toss facts into the way of your apology.
All you dolts who think Bush is bad seem to have forgotten all the crap Clinton pulled. Hundreds of private FBI files on prominent Republicans, payoffs to senior DoJ officials like Hubbell.
Can you imaging how loud the moonbats would be barking if the second-in-charge in Bush's DoJ were to get almost $1 million from Republican supporters and suddenly shut up in the current flap over firing a few political appointees?
Well, Webb Hubbell didn't shut up over the firing of a few political appointees, he shut up in a when he got paid a million bucks in a probe where the Clintons raked in millions in what looks like a crooked land deal.
But noooo, Bush is worse.
I'll bite.
Look, it's not World War II. It's also not the American Revolution, and it's not the Star Wars Trilogy. The mess we find ourselves in in Iraq is more like France's involvement in Algeria, or in Indochina, or our own involvement there. It's not an honorable thing, it's not an admirable thing, and it's one of the worst foreign policy decisions ever, right up there with Operation Ajax and the Kirkpatrick Doctrine. We're not fighting Hitler or Sauron, George Bush isn't Winston Churchill or Aragorn or Feric Jaggar, or whatever your preferred fantasy trope is. This was a stupid mess, and it cannot be made better. Our options are (a) leave, and watch the region descend into utter chaos and barbarism, (b) keep doing what we're doing until the Republicans are safely out of office and the disaster can be blamed on the Democrats, then watch the region descend into utter chaos and barbarism, and (c) roll through Iraq like the Ottoman Turks, the Roman Legions, the Golden Horde, the Germans or any other empire-builder of yore, and exact disproportionate revenge on random civilians for any act of defiance, causing them to fear us more than they fear the insurgents. (I provide option (c) only for completeness; if you find it appealing, please seek help.)
Occupying a large country and pretending that we're not invaders is a stupid idea. It was a stupid idea before it was executed, and it's a stupid idea now. No good will come of it, no matter how much better you feel when you blame the person who points out that it was a stupid idea.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Every time taxes are raised, revenues go up, too.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Just send him to Germany, let them lock him away for being a NAZI.
Making assumptions will get you nowhere. I do not watch Fox. I do not watch CNN. I do not watch NBC. I do not watch CBS. I do my own research and think for myself and research my own conclusions, and expressly AVOID soundbites that are so taken out of context. Unlike most American children, I *was* taught to think critically. Unlike the social morass that is the education system today. Again... product of the socialist left.
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters? ??? ?????
So you do not watch any of the media, but you are sure they are lefties. There might have been a problem with your critical thinking class.
Bill Clinton's blowjob didn't get anyone killed while Cheney's lies got thousands of people killed. Murder or accomplice to murder is a crime. Lying to get the country into war is high treason. High treason deserves the death penalty.
A blowjob just deserves a smile if both people agree to it.
When a man or woman lies about a blowjob it is to protect his or her own privacy and not to screw the American people.
Not really. This hasn't made the big news sites - because it isn't big news, it's a marginal congresscritter grandstanding for his own self aggrandizement. This happens on a daily basis - and almost never makes the big news sites unless its a very slow news day and nobodie's kitten was caught on video being rescued by the local fire department.
:/ Really.
I've addressed this before but it bears repeating. The thing that bothers me about the Bush claim of religion is that he's so incompetent at it. Bush (supposedly) comes from a Christian point of view. The entire history chronicled in the Christian holy text repeatedly stresses that nothing in the middle east is easy, nothing is simple, and conflict will always be present. Any Christian with even the most basic grasp of the history of the religion understands that jumping into the middle of *anything* in the middle east is going to be trouble and that starting a war over there is, well, pretty much the definition of insanity. If Saddam Hussein had publicly boasted of being personally responsible for 9/11, a real Christian would still have hesitated mightily before committing troops to that part of the world. And this guy jumps in based on...what?...conjecture and wishful thinking? No Christian with a brain would do that or anything close to it.
When Bush claims to be a Christian, I shudder. I resent the association; it insults me.
Great idea ! Then all you would have to do is get all the Slashdotters to agree on a topic and you could change the world...
oh wait.... nevermind...
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
It's getting no coverage in mainstream media - because it's a non event. Marginal fringe Congresscritters grandstand for their consituency on a routine basis, and it only makes the news on a particularly slow news day.
NPR understands the difference between actual news, a tempest in a teapot.
Hear, hear! It was also plainly and obviously stupid before it was done, but too late now.
I do take issue with the current conventional wisdom that "the region descend into utter chaos and barbarism" if we leave. That claim represents a shallow view of history. Much more likely is that the Shiites will unabashedly exterminate any remnant of Al Qaeda in Iraq, arguably a desirable outcome, and viciously repress the Sunnis, arguably a recipe for prolonged conflict. The Saudis and other Gulf states will support both the Sunnis and Al Qaeda, as they apparently have been doing for quite a while. Iran will support the Shiites by supporting instability within Saudi Arabia and the other authoritarian Gulf states, which these days is probably not a difficult thing to do. These forces will test each other and back down if the heat gets too high, and trust me, it will. The region will cool off to a simmering conflict among the local players, and the usual supects there and here in the US will take advantage of the situation to cry out impending doom to ensure high oil prices, as they have been doing all along.
Suckers the world over will believe the bullshit, and spend their lives in fear of chaos and imminent massive terrorist attacks, which will rarely occur. The US energy and "defense" industries, the Saudis, and the Gulf states will continue to be controlled by wealthy oil-industry players who will enjoy an even greater windfall than they already have, and will use part of that wealth to 1) ensure that the windfall continues by supporting the conflict and public sense of emergency, 2) viciously repress anyone or anything that threatens them, and 3) support terrorists attacks in the region and occasionally in the west, so that "world public opinion" stays in line.
I define a political centrist as a person who believes in small government, fiscal convervatism[1] and is socially liberal[2].
YMMV. HTH. HAND.
[1] Few taxes used to support only the Constitutionally defined role of the Federal government (enforce rights, legal/judicial issues, etc.) and promotion/provision of those 'common good' services and goods that aren't efficiently provided by the market (managing public airwaves, national defense, etc.). We can argue about that last bit.
[2] Feel free to do whatever you want, as long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of anyone else who is (or isn't) doing whatever they want.
Day X: Impeachment hearings are held
Day Y: A move to impeach is passed
Day Z: Bush orders armored units and Marines back from Iraq for a "parade" in Washington DC around the White House.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
When the stories of the successes and threats towards our soldiers and people are deliberately left unreported - yeah, that's the domination of the liberals in our country. Pray tell, just what successes have you heard reported on mass American media in the last 2 years?
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
I'm just pointing out the fallacy of the argument that lowering taxes will raise revenues. Most (if not all) economists will argue that the point of diminishing returns (with respect to revenue only) is at a tax rate much higher than the current tax rate. If raising revenue is your only concern, then you should be fighting for higher taxes. However, I'm not in favor of raising revenue.
No, I am, like most people, in favor of lowering taxes, but I refuse to support faulty arguments as a means of doing so.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
But noooo, Bush is worse.
Clinton's perjury and obstruction of justice may be legally worse than Bush's conduct as president, but I don't recall those blowjobs costing the lives of 3,000 American soldiers and hundreds of billions of dollars with little to show for it.
ok, how about the reports of those we bombed. I haven't seen the latest Iraq death count on the main stream media. The latest news is 400,000 Iraq's have died since the invasion. I only see a death count when it's america's that die. That is not the cost of war, the cost felt on both sides but we only hear our plight. Oh, and if you haven't noticed, the mission was accomplished 4 years ago, so covering any other success story would be old news, big taboo in the news industry. But didn't you say you don't watch any of these networks, that might be why you don't hear about all the "success" we've made. Or it could be, let me just out on a limb, that we aren't making successes. But your probably right, it's those damn lefties and their iron grip on the media. I wish we could just go back to the old days of prepared easy questions for the president and canned news stories....oh wait, we still do that don't we, yippeee!
In the old days, like 20 years ago, we depended on MSM printing on dead trees to find out what the impeachment was about, and had to wade through pages of stuff to get to the meat. Today there's no excuse for anyone with net access NOT to access the impeachment resolution, and search it for what-ever is of interest.
This is an improvement that would have thrilled at least some of the Founders of our great nation.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
LOL. Yeah... ok. What reality do you live in again? The successes are reported, in BBC Media, in Der Spiegel. In the Air Force Times. By my friends and loved ones stationed on the ground in Iraq. But no... we can't have troops talking to the media. We are making *far* more successes than you know... and if the Democrats would quit all their blunderbussing, we might actually be ABLE to start leaving in 2008 due to the successes we have gained, but no. The insurgents are feeding on the animosity and diversions, which is why we must continue to stand our course and be there for the people who have suffered far more at the hands of their own brethren than by any number of US or Allied munitions.
But then, you'd have to listen to something other than George Soros owned media outlets (each one you recommended) to get that... you might actually have to buy dinner for someone in uniform that bled for your right to stick your head in the proverbial sand and be spoonfed whatever you wish to believe. But again... he's proud and happy to have done so. (not that it matters, but my husband served 2 tours in Iraq, my best friend is a medic attached to a Marine division, and oh, my two new neighbors just got out from their third tour - you don't need to tell me what is really going on... I KNOW.)
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
A centrist is like agreeing that 2+2=5 because one side says its 4 and the other says its 6.
I've dealt with centrists simply by taking the extreme position knowing their vote would be for what I wanted, usually my supporters wouldn't go as far as I do so I'd win majority. Child's play.
The democrats are often cowardly trying to be centrist which is why they lose the big fights that require spine and succeed in winning tiny fights that do not matter Sadly, when they take a centrist position the real centrists then move right of center. Even worse is when the democrats are out smarted by the republicans purposely over shooting their targets, which has been done so much its a normal part of their playbook.
The political diversity in the USA is weak and the representational diversity is almost non-existent. Despotism is far off but its possible it will really suck for a century before consensus forms that despotism has taken over. Despotism is the end point for all governments (see ben franklin.)
Expand your political mind:
http://www.politicalcompass.oro/
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Surely, you're familiar with the plural form of "you".
This editor Kdawson is a worse troll than Katz.
All this post is is a political flamebait invitation.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,138621,00.html
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
Impeachment is not a political tool as much as a constitutional check and balance that the legistlative body of the government has on other branches of government.
The issue is not whether it is winnable as much as whether High Crimes and Misdemeanders have been perpetrated on the American people.
I think it clear and the 50 odd investigations ongoing in Congress indicate that there are things the Republican controlled Congress should have been providing oversight and checks and balances. Not to mention the press not investigating the "evidence" for the war in Iraq.
I have heard a theory that the impeachment of Clinton which was politically motivated (look at all the failed attempts by Ken Starr to find something prior to the the final impeachment which was for lying to Congress) with the idea that then when they got in office and allegedly lied, detained, spied, tortured, kidnapped, fired,... for political and corporate purposes at the cost of Billions if not trillions of dollars, 3000 of out citizens lives, 10's of thousands wounded, many more Iraq's dead and wounded, and our constutional guaretees erroded and civil liberties trampled on. Well I think that even though there may not be enough votes today for impeachment of Channey that after more and more comes to light, it may be hard for even the Republican lawmakers to not take a stand against that sort of alleged malfeasance.
I certainly support the process of the investigations to substantiate the facts involved. If the facts support the charges (impeachment) then that should happen.
We need to change our way of life.
The NYT is reporting that Cheney's Spokeswoman says he "is focused on the serious issues facing our nation." in repsonse to the news. Presumably he is just too busy to be impeached. Nixon should have used that one instead of protesting his innocence. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/24/us/24brfs-IMPEAC HMENTE_BRF.html
What's this article doing on Slashdot?
If I wanted to read meaningless political discussions, I'd go read KOS.
Why don't you care?
I'm going to assume "you" meant 'all of you' and respond accordingly. We care - when we know something's wrong. I think that in the long run, the greatest disservice done the people during the Dubya years will not be done by the administration, but by the "journalists" covering the administration. When Jon Stewart and Bill Maher are the only real journalists left, brother, somebody's feeding somebody a lot of shit. The Patriot Act isn't the lasting legacy of this administration - Bill O'Reilly and his ilk are. Sadly, that's where most of us get our news from now.
I notice that in all of this ad hominem, you never ever once give an example of someone reporting US successes in Iraq that the US media skipped, nor do you give even one example of what Nancy Pilosi is doing to destroy America.
Also, I can't imagine how you could believe that you are killed at critical thinking and also believe that "Flaming liberals are clearly trying to destroy our country".
I can see how you could be a critical thinker and believe that "flaming liberals *are* destroying our country" (I disagree, but I can see it). Trying requires intent, and I can't see how anyone rational could think Nancy Pilosi and Dennis Kucinich seek to destroy the country.
In short, your posts don't provide any supporting evidence and are not well thought out.
Hey, how many libertarians does it take to stop a panzer division?
o rlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/columnists/orl-ope d-reese15041501.column
None -- the free market will take care of it!
No man is an island, no man is self-made. Though I disagree with many of his opinions, Charley Reese is right when he talks about why he isn't a libertarian. It's why I cannot be one as well.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010416233157/http://
One. Is. Too. Damn. Many.
Spoken like a true repugnican. It always starts out with something like "you need to look outside the box, take your blinders off", but then when someone asks you to do the same it's always, "I know what's really going on". You assume I don't have blood in the game, my brother and sister both served, you want to know their advice to me about joining the military, DON'T. My neighbor serves, he was held for an extra tour. You want to know what he thinks about this war! Let's just say having the military not talking to the camera's is probably a good thing for the administration. I have no problem dining with soldiers, but you cannot say they died for my freedom or bled for me. They went to war, to go to war. Iraq was in no military position attack us, it was hardly holding itself together. Your mind is made, don't even try to tell others to open there eyes.
MOST libertarians I meet are actually embarrassed republicans who either "changed" or even refuse to admit they openly professed to being republicans a few years ago.
Microsoft had no presence in D.C. until they were under threat of anti trust action.
Microsoft was screwing the market for years without hardly any government support of that monopoly's unfair, unethical "competition." I'm sure there is plenty of proof around the world of overly deregulated markets doing lots of harm.
The ONLY way to stop this corruption of government is to have economic anarchism, so then the motives don't exist. EXCEPT then other areas that government protects (like stopping slaves labor) become the big problems in the market so then improper influence in government will be still sought. Government will always be having to fight off corruption (which is largely economic in nature) and will not always be victorious against it.
The accrual of power is a MAJOR problem in humans. This is a long long long standing problem with no real solutions as of yet. The solution has to encompass all areas not just government structure; which today should be obvious as corporations have become the dominant institutions of our time.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I gave Miss Kelly the appropriate link to my blog where I have all of the links to both successes and failures in Iraq. She didn't bother going, and neither did you.
As for 'intent' - aiding and abetting the enemy in a time of war sure as hell is sedition at the very least in my book, and both Pelosi and Kucinich are guilty of that by their own admission - negotiating with known terrorists against the advice of the commander in chief... puh-lease.
Sorry, I do think they are both flaming liberals, as proven by their records found at both the Washington Post and Thomas.gov. I thought people could look that up on their own... but no, I have to hold hands - something I'm not inclined to do to big adults like yourselves.
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
The Civil War (and again, I was raised 2 miles from where the damn thing started) was an act of immoral rebellion against a legitimate authority.... South Carolina agreed and ratified the Constitution, there was no justification for secession or the violence that followed, they committed immoral rebellion.
I do not believe that their rebellion was illegal. The federal government was legally over-stepping their bounds, as provided by the Bill of Rights added to the Constitution which South Carolina signed. Amendment X: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Furthermore, I firmly believe that this country's founders, the people who wrote the Constitution, built the new government with the hopes that it would succeed, but also with the hope that a corrupt government would be overthrown by the people.
If South Carolina wasn't following both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution, I've yet to see a state that has come any closer!
Don't cry "Oust Bush," cry "Restore Freedom!" Don't support a candidate who isn't doing anything to unravel Bush's web.
A brief glance at the synopsis is enough to see that it is clearly slanted to the left. Especially on page 3. Looks like about 3 degrees.
Bottom-of-page quote: If the thunder don't get you, then the lightning will.
To anyone reading, I would like to know if there are any organizations, regardless of political inclination, that are working toward these changes in our elections (better voting and congressional districting techniques)? I would like to know so I (we) can support them. The thing about all these concepts and reforms is that it seems that they're never going to happen if they're left to the politicians themselves to do. Since single-handedly trying to bring about these changes myself obviously wouldn't go very far, what organizations out there are trying to get this going? Thanks in advance.
You're a nice girl Kelly, but you're truly blinded such that you can't see. And yes, my mind is made by the blood of my husband's wounds from the first and second go-round's in Iraq. And if you think Iraq wasn't preparing to ally with Al-Qaeda, then you truly can't see the forest for the trees. Where were your brother & sister stationed in Iraq, and at what points in the war? It could make all the difference in their stories. I had Marines on the ground in Tal-Afar that took it back from Al-Qaeda. The same Marines that my friend T saved lives and limbs in. I had Marines on the ground in Fallujah that took it back from the insurgency, twice. Don't tell me that we haven't done good there and gained ground there, the peace shows the difference.
Do you truly not understand why we fight???? Perhaps you should read this from an Arab-German journalist in today's Der Speigel. Yankees, Don't Go HOME! Do you not understand that the civilians in Iraq need us there far more than we want to be there??? I mean - if you had family serving on the ground there, then they should be able to tell you how much we are needed. Who else is going to stop the mass murders of the Shiites and Sunnis by their opposing factions? LOL - not Saudi Arabia.
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
Noam Chomsky is almost too correct when he writes about these issues.
You veto our withdraw time frame and we will impeach the VP
if you don't veto it we will withdraw the impeachment
Sounds like our government at it's finest
Now, what the He11 does it have to do with new for nerds?
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
First of all:
The Civil War, when we decided that the Federal moral responsibility to abolish slavery outweighed the rights of states to institutionalize the ownership of people of a different race.
You're being inaccurate here. The Civil War was not about abolishing slavery. It was about an economic divide between the northern industrialist and the southern agrarians. The south revolted and the revolt was put down. You're not wrong in that this dealt a firm blow to federalism, but lets not say it was because of morals.
[Ego]out
What is the point of doing this? This will never pass, only stir up some controversy. These kind of actions never help our current situation, only cause more problems.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
This is not really a joking matter. Most people in the U.S. have no idea how corrupt the U.S. government is. If you knew, you wouldn't joke.
We need to help each other educate ourselves about the corruption. Here is my summary of U.S. government corruption. Where's yours?
I figured I snagged a troll but really. The only way you would know if we had or hadn't hit your blog would be to look at the logs and whaaaawhaaawhaa nobody visited you. You couldn't even troll a hit to your site. I'm just going to go sit in the back of the bus where I'm supposed to. Oh, and since we are assigning gender, you totally must be the guy in the relationship right?
Centrists don't waffle; that's a myth of extremists who use alternating perspectives on the actions of centrists to get people unhappy about them, and therefore more willing to go with the extremists. The problem with those same extremists is that it's their way or the highway - they're not willing to take compromises and see where it goes. The solution to a conflict is therefore never quitting the field, but escalating; and we see where that gets us.
[Ego]out
LOLOLOLOLOL. Uh no. I actually know I got visitors because of comments left. How lovely. And, well, if you had - you might change your opinion. But no... I ain't a troll. LOL. I've far too much of a life for that. And no, dear... I'm most assuredly a female. Hence, the husband reference?? But, I suppose with a name like Kelly - as is your ID - I suppose it could be gender-ambiguous. I forgot, 98% of the participants here are boys. Funny that. And believe me, I get nothing out of my blog, except to know that I'm distributing antithesis to the crap that spewed by people like Dennis Kucinich. :D
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
The reason gerrymandering is an issue, though, is because it entrenches the politics on the top level by reducing the value of the vote. What I think people keep missing is that the reason for, say, Federalism is much the same reason that we have three separate branches of government; it spreads out the power. If the states don't agree with the nation, they withhold power. If the people disagree with their leaders, they vote them out. If the Executive branch does something illegal, the Legislative impeaches them. But in recent years we've put a lot more faith in the three branches to balance each other, without worrying overmuch about those three branches being balanced against the power of the people. When corporations, PACs and other high-money, high-influence organizations can sway that end of things more than the common people, we're in big trouble. We're in big trouble.
[Ego]out
All of a sudden this has become a conversation about staying or going. Looks like you have some issues. You have all these marines apparently working under you, at least that's how it sounds from here. You must have a great view from that patriotic cloud you float on. Lets just try to stay on topic, impeachment for lying about reasons to go to war. Remember...
Unfortunately, the most frightening trend in the past seven years is the continuing public perception that we Americans are simply powerless to stop the abuses.
Consider -- Americans have known for years that Bush lied us into a war, yet that knowledge has made little difference in altering the course of the current occupation in Iraq. Right now, today, the evidence is clear that Bush and company broke the law by eavesdropping on Americans' telephone calls, yet the consequences were a lot of useless talk in the press and a handful of public hearings that ultimately went nowhere. Bush, it seems, is like teflon when it comes to facing the music for his actions. He is the one president who just can't be held accountable for anything, no matter how bad it may be.
Unlawful detentions, condoning torture, the PATROIT Act -- the list goes on and on. Yet the list of consequences for these acts is disturbingly short, if not completely non-existent. Sometimes, it all makes me feel like I'm living in a third-world dictatorship. Sometimes, I wonder what would happen if Bush sodomized children in the Oval Office, then broadcast the act on national television. I have to think that, given the current political climate, there would be a lot of talk about how the children were 'bad apples' and that the president's powers in wartime allowed him to do whatever he felt was needed in the name of 'national security'. Certainly, no one would seriously consider impeaching the guy. God knows Bush has been effectively sodomizing the public for years now with virtual impunity -- is there anything this man couldn't do and get away with it?
Yes, and though the execution sucked, thank you RUMSFELD, we still had reason, and were right to go. And Cheney committed no impeachable offense. NONE. Especially since CLINTON was saying the same damn things right up until the Bush Administration took office! (as has been documented by at least 3 other posters on this article)
No, I support our military, no matter the cost. Period. That isn't about being patriotic, it is in my blood and bones. And that includes all those who have served past and present. I'm sorry that you can't see that when the Commander in Chief makes orders.. they are bound to follow. Bush hasn't given one iota about his legacy - only that of the future of American citizens. And maybe because I've been exposed to the hate and murderous ways of those who kill for not believing the way they do - but I know that if we don't stop it now, it will consume my children. As it consumed so many other innocents in cities around the world.
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
Oh, Kucinich, you whacky dog. What will you think up next?
Seriously. Who let him off his meds?
Term limits are built in...they are called elections. Don't like the bum? Vote against him.
What we really need is voting reform. There are more than two positions on any given topic. We need to open up the debate to more points of view, and make it easier for these "third parties" to have an impact. How often have you heard it said (or said it yourself) that you're voting for the "lesser of two evils"? Why do we persist in voting for something we disagree with? That should indicate the system itself is fundamentally broken. Still, the fault is our own for not doing something about it.
Term limits are arbitrary, and would work against the honest hard-working decent office-holders too. Not that there are many of those, but hey! Implementing term limits is nothing but a band-aid on a broken system that needs to be fixed.
The way I see it, you waste your vote if you don't vote third party. I, for one, don't want more of the same ol', same ol' "politics as usual". I bet you don't, either.
Constitutionally Correct
Its not Cheney he should go after (Darth Sid), but Carl Rove (Senator Palpatine). Poor Bush is just a victim (Anakin).
FINALLY!!!!!
It doesn't matter whether Pelosi or Clinton or Reid or anyone else has already spoken out in support of impeachment. It's a process, and they just don't have the balls to do what needs to be done. They'll come around when people start contacting their senators and representatives and demand that they sponsor this bill.
This is absolutely the right thing to do, and a great time to do it. The Bush administration has more than earned a public trial to determine if they are indeed criminals, as so many American citizens feel more and more these days.
Cheney is the obvious logical first step.
If you disagree on whether Cheney has earned himself an impeachment, that's one thing - but keep in mind the country's most recent impeachment proceedings, and how serious of an accusation it took to trigger those - a cover-up over a consensual sexual relationship.
How does that compare to the loss of the hundreds of thousands of lives in Iraq, the permanent loss of civil rights, and our new status as a country that disappears people, tortures them, with the wholehearted consent and endorsement of our president and vice president?
This kind of sick aggression, in the name of a country supposedly supportive of peace, cannot go unanswered for. What kind of example would be set for future presidents?
Congress is getting the background laid with the investigation into Gonzales, and Rove, and now Rice.. Reid is testing the waters by escalating his verbal attacks on Cheney every day - The circle is closing. You may think I'm dreaming, but I'd take bets that we'll see at least part of this administration taken down before their term is out.
Reid and the rest of the dems will need escalating tactics anyway, once bush and friends piss them off sufficiently, which they are well on their way to doing. Getting impeachment articles off the ground would be a good next step before the next negotiating round over the Iraq funding bill, once the first is veto'ed.
As to whether the rest of congress _currently_ and _publicly_ supports impeachment -- how is that AT ALL relevant to whether a citizen like you or me should contact their representative, and tell them how their constituents feel about it?
It's our duty to tell them, and it's their duty to do it. But in that order.
I can't believe how little support there is for such a good man, loudly supporting things (such as world peace), that everyone pretends they support while dismissing him without a second thought. And then they vote for some asshole who starts war after war after war while deeply invested in defense companies.
Going on and on about how others don't support Kucinich as a "reason" not to support him yourself, is just an excuse not to think for yourself, and THAT is the biggest problem in politics. Go on and on about how YOU feel if you want to be a helpful part of democracy.
Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kennedy, to be precise. Kelo was a complete travesty, and it's just the tip of the iceberg with these five. The judicial branch needs to be reined in.
Constitutionally Correct
Yes! American behavior makes a lot more sense if you watch American news. It wasn't until Katrina that anyone in the US dared mention anything bad about the President.
Its an Urban Archipelago.
[...]It's time to state something that we've felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion--New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on. And we live on islands in red states too--a fact obscured by that state-by-state map. Denver and Boulder are our islands in Colorado; Austin is our island in Texas; Las Vegas is our island in Nevada; Miami and Fort Lauderdale are our islands in Florida. Citizens of the Urban Archipelago reject heartland "values" like xenophobia, sexism, racism, and homophobia, as well as the more intolerant strains of Christianity that have taken root in this country. And we are the real Americans. They--rural, red-state voters, the denizens of the exurbs--are not real Americans. They are rubes, fools, and hate-mongers. Red Virginia prohibits any contract between same-sex couples. Compassionate? Texas allows the death penalty to be applied to teenaged criminals and has historically executed the mentally retarded. (When the Supreme Court ruled executions of the mentally retarded unconstitutional in 2002, Texas officials, including Governor Rick Perry, responded by claiming that the state had no mentally retarded inmates on death row--a claim the state was able to make because it does not test inmates for mental retardation.) Dumb? The Sierra Club has reported that Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Tennessee squander over half of their federal transportation money on building new roads rather than public transit...
Of course, this will probably get quashed by the more mainstream leadership of the House, but we can always hope.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Just think if Harry had been alive and in office during the Battle of the Bulge, he would have pulled us out of Europe, screaming the war has been lost.
Make sure you always start your rants by comparing the current situation in Iraq with WWII circa Bulge, so anyone listening to you will know right off the bat that you have no freaking clue what you are talking about. As if the last major counter-offensive against our successfull invasion of Europe is comparable to the consistent, non-stop, and continuing attacks by insurgents and terrorists in Iraq. They've been saying the insurgents were on their last legs and "desperate" for over three years now.
Well, wait, actually there is a vague resemblence, just probably not the one you want.
The Bulge was a last-ditch effort by Germany to push back the advancing Ally line, the idea being that by attacking a lightly fortified point in the line and breaking through the German army could split the Allies and outflank them, spoiling the advance and possibly even surrounding the Allies. The German army, exhausted and drained from fighting on the Eastern Front, was not able to push through before the Allies brought reinforcements. They created a brief bulge in the line, but then it was gone. Tactically, this was a minor achievement, and strategically it was meaningless.
The Surge is a last-ditch effort by the Bush Administration to push back the insurgents, the idea being that by placing a large amounts of troops down in select areas they can create pockets of safety in which to create a functioning society and government. The U.S. Army, exhausted from repeated tours and limited in manpower due to a lack of recruits, is not able to secure more than a few small pockets around Baghdad. They have created pockets of relative safety, but they will vanish as soon as the extra troops move to protect some other area, and meanwhile even more devastating suicide bombs have been going off in the unprotected areas, and even inside the only thing resembling a stable and safe area, the Green Zone. Tactically, the Surge is creating some minor success, but strategically it is meaningless.
This is of course not a great comparison (Vietnam or Algeria make for better), there are thousands of differences, but if you haven't figured it out, we're the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. You sound like a German commander insisting that they weren't losing, and that the Bulge would fix everything even though it was plain it would be insufficient, and then jumping on someone as being a traitor for pointing out the obvious truth. Or like a Japanese general insisting that you were going to win even though the Allies had just fire bombed Tokyo and you couldn't retaliate because your entire navy was gone, who then beheads an underling for pointing out that victory was basically impossible. Like you, the Japanese at the time though that belief in victory was sufficient no matter what facts they had to ignore.
Even while we were building these extra safe zones for John McCain to walk around in, a bomb went off inside the Parliament building in the middle of the Green Zone. We can't retaliate, because it isn't clear we have any idea who did it (could have been any of dozens of groups) or even how (though assuming they got help from someone in the Iraqi security forces which are known to be deeply infiltrated by insurgents seems pretty safe). How many more car bombs are going to have to go off before you realize that the strategy we are using simply will not work? When the Green Zone becomes as dangerous as the rest of Baghdad then at least the commanders staying there will have no choice but to admit the truth. We'll end up coming home, whatever happens in Iraq afterwards will happen, and people like you will spend the next 30 years talking about how if we'd just believed in victory, it would have happened, we only lost because we stopped believing. No. We will only stop bleeding when we stop believing in an imaginary "vic
The enemies of Democracy are
Why should a call to impeach Cheney for crimes everybody knows he committed be paid attention to?
The current political scenario in the United States is quite remarkable. The constitution is being dismantled, the U.S. is operating secret prisons all over the globe and stands accused of committing regular torture. The legal system is being rigged, and the current war in Iraq affects everybody. It is safe to say that nearly everybody has been affected negatively by the war in Iraq. That the war was stared illegally and that the men responsible for it have not yet been held responsible is a Big Deal. As such, an actual call to impeachment, (the first for this administration), is a Big Deal. Any rational human being should be interested in this kind of development. Anybody who tries to ignore it or side-line it or diminish the fact that the country is being run by criminals, is not behaving in a rational manner.
Right. All the other political sites out there will ignore it if it's of any value to discuss.
While other political sites may certainly discuss this kind of news, the people who frequent those sites hold starting viewpoints and belief structures and social values which do not necessarily correspond with mine. I am fascinated to know how geeks feel and think about this stuff as opposed to regular folks. I don't find regular folks as interesting or engaging. Geeks have a unique experience in life, often having had to live in the cracks of society and they hold interest in science and fantasty/sci-fi. That's a headspace I love and it's one which provides a huge spectrum of unique language and social mathematics which you cannot find elsewhere. Basically I'd like to discuss the things I care about with the people I feel closest to. I don't want to wander down the hall to hang out with the jocks to discuss relationships. I'd rather stay in the geek hall and talk with the people I understand.
Did you actually bother to read my post? It would seem not - as I was quite clear on why I believed this item should not be here.
Yes, I did read your post, but words and intentions are not always closely related. And from your post this time around, (which I also read), it would appear that my initial impression has a fairly high likelihood of having been correct.
-FL
Bad idea. The state highways would slow down to a crawl if we Slashdotted it. :^P
--
Toro
If you meant illegal, a supreme court ruling is against it, so you can't just have a small majority, you need a giant majority to amend the constitution (or slowly replace the supreme court by overtaking both executive and legislative offices).
I suggest you learn something about your government before proclaiming to know an answer.
God bless the W let freedom ring!
Socialists sure love to purge their opponents after they win elections, don't they?
Sometimes at night I imagine the darkness is filled with horrible things with too many teeth, like Julia Roberts.
step outside your blinder box and look at different perspectives, not the ones you're being spoonfed by the leftists running the media outlets of this country,
Good lord you are deeply stupid.
GE owns NBC. They made billions in new weapons sales by *selling* the Iraq war.
It's pretty similar across the board of the major media organizations.
When somebody whines about "leftists running the media" it's safe to disregard what they have to say since they are so entirely delusional and out of touch with reality.
So, you've demonstrated conclusively that you don't have a clue what you're talking about and that you are an ignorant fool.
Sorry to be so blunt, but you insisted on proving it to be true.
Kucinich is committing a gross misinterpretation of the Laws of the United States and the U.S. Constitution with the wording of this resolution. While there are certainly actions of Cheney which are impeachment-worthy, Kucinich's resolution is a political diatribe with only the barest shreds of substance. Saying that Cheney's actions against Iran are a high crime and misdemeanor is the topper. Although Cheney's comments may not have been helpful, Kucinich is unrealistic in assuming that our relations with Iran would be positive in the absence of those comments.
Really, this is just a ploy to try to gain enough attention to make his bid for the presidency in 2008 less unrealistic.
As for 'intent' - aiding and abetting the enemy in a time of war sure as hell is sedition at the very least in my book,
That would make *you* guilty of sedition as you are defending the worst enemies out nation has ever had in the face of all facts and basic reality.
Sorry, but when you're the one defending criminals, terrorists, and traitors, then you ave given up the right to play the patriotism card. You aren't one and you are actively aiding our enemies.
Give your nonsense a rest.
We're really deeply sick of hearing the same moronic lies repeated ad nauseum.
As I (and many other /. readers) don't actually live in the US, I'm afraid I'll have to pass, myself.
Though we have no shortage of our own problems, I like living in Canada, and of course I'm not much help to you given that I can't vote in your elections.
Best of luck, though - if you get your SlashTopia built, hot damn, I'd love to visit!
Remember the foreign tourist trade in your planning... lots of fellow nerds live outside the USA.
Do you truly not understand why we fight????
Absolutely.
We fight because war profiteers make a lot of money off of war and so they decided we should get involved in another one.
Are you truly so stupid that you haven't figured that one out by now?!?
Please don't spout any drivel about "defending America/liberty/freedom" or any of that other stupid crap idiots drool on about because they're too dumb to pay attention.
Do you not understand that the civilians in Iraq need us there far more than we want to be there???
Do you not understand that our utter failure to plan for this well understood and easily predicted situation demonstrates our incompetence in dealing with it?
Of course not. That would involve honestly assessing our entire basis for starting that idiotic war based solely on lies and realizing how badly your vaunted reasoning skills have failed you, failed your country and failed every one of the hundreds of thousands poor dumb suckers who have been murdered by Bush with your active support.
No, I support our military, no matter the cost. Period.
If there were a single scrap of truth to that, then you'd actually be doing something to support them instead of stabbing them in the back which is what you are doing.
You owe it to the people you claim to love to deal honestly with reality.
You have failed completely at that.
All those dead soldiers? They'd still be alive if you and those like you would pull your heads out of your asses and honestly deal with reality.
No, you'd rather see good men die due to your cowardice and deep lack of honesty.
From wikipedia:
This is such a HUGE waste of time, money, and effort. If there is any substance to this, Cheney will be out of office long before they can come to any conclusion.
People have to move on. Sure we dont agree with the war, but how is this going to do anyone any good but make the Bush-haters feel smug. Gore lost the 2000 election. Let it go.
Neither the Republicans - or the Democrats - are capable of running this country, efficiently and cost effectively. Staying with these two parties is like staying with Windows 98 or MS DOS.
When taxes have been raised, revenues have also gone up. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I was providing a thought experiment to illustrate why it is ludicrous to theorize that wealth is a "zero-sum" game. Zero sum means that for every "dollar" won, a dollar must be lost, and for every dollar lost, a dollar must be won. If you don't mean zero sum, don't say zero sum, that's all I'm saying. I don't dispute your assertion that material objects come from material sources and that costs associated with these sources are often overlooked, but I do dispute the idea that the "value added" by the laborer cannot be greater than the "cost" of the labor itself. I.e., sometimes the value of an object (perhaps a piece of art) is greater than the cost of the materials and labor that went into creating it. I do not claim, however, that infinite wealth is possible. I do believe that information also has value, and can often be attained at a high value/cost ratio, although "value" is obviously subjective.
I assume you agree now that your original claim ("Wealth *is* zero sum.") was wrong, right?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
They know they need to do something to appease their "base". Since they don't have the votes to get anything passed unilaterally and they refuse to act bilaterally because their supporters will have their heads for "selling out" to those hated Republicans, they are grasping at whatever straws they can. The minority power of the Democrats last year finally made the Republicans suffer a breakdown as a party and costs them their majority. Now they are applying the same tactics they learned from the Democrats and the Democrats are doing the exact same things wrong. It's crazy that so few politicians are smart enough to avoid the mistakes to their adversaries and are condemned to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. Do they force every elected official to get a lobotomy before they are sworn in? I'm all for term limits for every elected official. There's something about DC that makes everyone lose touch with the people they were supposed to represent, and getting them out of that city is the only way to slap them back to reality. It's not that this is confined to one party, even the people who I vote for and like initially turn into money-raising, power-crazed idiots after a few years in DC.
Stardom is about living vicariously through someone. They don't get that money because they're worth it, they get it because without it, they aren't worth it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I saw LooseChange 2nd Edition, and I saw Farenheit 9/11. I'm not particularly pro or anti American but I'd like to know which parts of Loose Change are not credible.
I'd like to know what parts of Loose Change are, well falsified, for dramatic (or other) effect.
Hummm... European support would have helped and might have led to success? Seems to me that seeking their support might have been a wise move then. I think they were asking that the arms inspectors finish their work. When the Secretary of State called the Iraq Arms Delcaration a pack of lies before it had even been delivered, they may have felt a little uncomfortable since they have dealt before with a nation that struts around making false allegations on no evidence to cause a war.
In any case, some European nations did provide help. It is amazing that Blair is still in power, most are not. Yet, it seems a little ungrateful of you to dismiss this assistance. This war has been completely poisonous for the US. Hope, optimism and virtue are things of the future so sullied have they been that they are denied to the present.
http://clevelandoh.areaconnect.com/crime1.htm
This is true. Unfortunately, because he's such a nutjob about some other things, and because he manages to alienate people in the more conservative part of the Democratic party -- not to even mention the Republicans -- so thoroughly, they're going to be ignored.
You could say the same things about Ralph Nader, too. (Actually I think Nader is a much nicer guy all around than Kucinich, but that might just be because I've met the man in person.) He has a lot of great ideas but the few wacky ones push him into nod-and-smile territory.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You missed the point.
The point was: There have been extremely destructive incidents, such as the shooting of President Reagan, and every time someone from the Bush family was there.
Now just take any other family of which you know. Could you find several otherwise disconnected incidents in which a member of that family was there?
There was no claim that Bush family members did any of those terrible things. The interesting fact is that Bush family members were present.
Social Darwinism
You can't handle the truth.
1. Have him get suspended jail term, but his community work should be that he gets a spade and gets dropped in Iraq outside of the green zone. Let him do the rebuilding.
2. Extraordinary rendition, would serve him too.
3. 5-year sentence in Gitmo.
4. 2 months in Abu Graib.
5. Any combination above, and youtube clips of his "adventures"
Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
You misunderstand the development of theory.
I watched the World Trade Center towers fall on television, as it happened. At the time, I thought to myself, hey wait a minute, something is wrong. "Something is wrong" is a very weak theory.
Later people began considering the fact that very strongly built buildings feel into a heap of powder and very small pieces. They began making theories. Many of those theories led nowhere.
The people who made the movie "Loose Change" helped enormously by presenting a lot of facts, and by presenting theories on which others could improve, or could disprove.
My writing a summary of the U.S. government corruption was just a part time unpaid effort, by someone who loves the U.S., but has little interest in politics. At the time, Loose Change was the best we had.
If the World Trade Center towers were demolished by explosive charges, it is now believed credibly that all of those charges would have had to have been released at the same time. That's not impossible.
Anyhow, if tall buildings have a failure mode in which they can collapse into powder, I would never work in one. Such a collapse has never happened before or since, howoever.
You made another mistake. If someone makes many statements, and one of them is wrong, that doesn't mean every statement is wrong.
And another. The intent of the summary of corruption was not to establish that I have credibility. I only gathered information. What is important is if the information has credibility.
In any case, I'm not the only one who believes that U.S. government has become corrupt in an unprecendented way. More than 30% of U.S. citizens believe that, maybe much more than 30%.
As I said, I hope you will write your own summary, particularly since you didn't like mine.
Every time the idea of impeaching Bush has come around, my thought has always been that if Bush is removed, Cheney would take over as President. That doesn't sound like a positive outcome to me; the thought of President Cheney makes chills run down my spine. Of course, if they take Cheney out first it'd be different...
Well its not surprising to see the media (although you think NPR of networks would run it) would not run the story.
The media has been 'controlled' for decades in most western countries.
Maybe you should thank Cheney and Co.
USA invaded IRAQ to keep the fiat US dollar from tanking.
By keeping oil priced in USD, they can effectively print as much money as they like.
As soon as IRAN started selling oil in euros, I thought, hello, lets see what fear stories we can fabricate about IRAN now.
Unfortunately, I think the long term consequence for the USA is not great. fascism anyone?
Its almost like I'm seeing the USA destroyed by your political & capitalist machinery.
Very sad for such a great country...
46137
My 10-year old nephew decided to choose Switzerland as the topic of his school assignment. Asking me: Who is the leader of Switzerland ? caused much thought. The Federal Council comprises 7, and they may belong to parties, but it is mandated that no party may dominate by majority. The presidency revolves yearly, and all sorts get a shot, because it carries little, if any, real power. The "states" maintain some legal power (they have their own "elected councils", as does the federation and the little communes/gemeinde "communities". All 3 levels of government receive funding independently, setting their tax rates more-or-less independently. They even have their own police forces. The people can institute referenda on ANY issue they choose, and if sufficient numbers vote (several times a year at each of the 3 levels, AND on paper), the authorities almost always follow the vote outcome (although not quite always).
So what was my answer ? The people are "the leaders", and it's probably the only country in the world with a well-functioning participatory democracy worthy of the name "democracy". The Swiss aren't perfect by any means, but they're damned stable and very civil in general. And it's easier being they're only about 7 million on a small parcel of land, with about 400 years of accumulated cooperation and fine-tuning and 4 indigenous native officially-recognised languages (6 in practice, including English and the almost-never-written Schwytzer-tüütsch collection of dialects spoken by the majority).
Could the USA do that ? Not a snowball's chance in hell - USAsians' collective inferiority complexes and fear-based lives (remember the proportions that are "evangelical", a cult based on fear and exclusion if there ever was one) preempt rational, realistic, cooperative government. Genocide of the natives, almost non-stop war against someone since they were founded. Shame. The poeple are usually polite, but the form of government is fucking us ALL over.
Then why do they lie, why do they continue to sell lies, and why don't they tell the truth about how good our troops really are doing on the ground? Because Steve Capus is a money-grubbing idiot who really doesn't care about anything other than the bottom line ratings - as proven by his stunts in the last three weeks. Sorry, don't buy it... and I was proven 100% correct during the Democratic debate last night. You're welcome to your opinion, though, seeing how you don't know anything about which you base that opinion on. :)
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
Primarily, on basic logic: Arguing ad hominem against Kucinich doesn't address the factual basis for anything he asserted. A person can be "marginal", biased, or possessive of any character or intellectual flaw and still by circumstance alone present truthful arguments.
Prove his arguments wrong, or get out of the debate.
Secondly, it's really ironic that you want your audience to "consider the source" while presenting as evidence an article crafted by Dana Milbank. Consider the source indeed...
First things first. T. Jefferson should be impeached posthumouslyfor going after the barbary pirates.
I'm truly amazed at the orwellian society we now live in - or was that the huxely society of brave new world where 17,000 repetitions make one truth.
the clinton policy of personal destruction has been presented by the dems and amplified by the media ever since bush won the election. Bush was naive enough to think that dems in DC were like dems in TX and could be reasoned with and worked with in cooperation to better the situations of the country. Not being a true conservative with rightwing principles, this was easy for bush to try to do. However, the response of the powerhungry, greedy and corrupt dems bent on getting their power back by any means and at any cost to the country and to the world was even more an unexpected shock than the sadam strategy of not putting up a fight to drag the US into an extended war which has proven to be a losing proposition for the US because of a vocal minority in the US.
The snails pace rush to war permitted evacuation of wmds and sequestering of weapons over the ensuing year. It's hard to say whether sadam would have ever guessed that the bird mimic of 'polly wanna cracker' would ever be duplicated in humans with the 'there weren't any weapons of mass destruction in iraq' or whether it was part of his propaganda plan. I doubt we'll ever know.
As for now, the dems are back trying to duplicate the magic of watergate where the atty general was taken out, the vp was taken out and then the president was gone after, having little support in his own party from a bunch of squish nothing political hacks infesting the senate.
I have spent over 100 hours looking at the official explanations and the objections raised by the skeptics. My impressions are
- the conspiracy implied by the skeptics is incredible: I refuse to believe it just based on the weakness of the official reports;
- the explanations in the official reports are clearly flawed;
- a proper investigation was not done: indeed, there appear to have been attempts to prevent a proper investigation which is mighty odd under the circumstances;
- very, very few people have read the official reports critically, which may account for the limited criticism of their contents.
I would dearly like someone to explain why WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7 collapsed; and why no proper investigation was allowed. I would like an explanation that does not imply that sections of the US establishment conspired to demolish downtown New York for financial and political gain.Then why do they lie, why do they continue to sell lies, and why don't they tell the truth about how good our troops really are doing on the ground?
A: They're really not doing all that well regardless of the lies you like to tell yourself. It's a civil war which was caused by the power vacuum we left because we didn't put any thought into dealing with the situation we chose to create.
B: They lie because that's what they do. They will push the corporate agenda regardless of reality.
Because Steve Capus is a money-grubbing idiot who really doesn't care about anything other than the bottom line ratings - as proven by his stunts in the last three weeks.
That describes every major media outlet, so you've really added nothing with that.
Sorry, don't buy it..
Of course you don't. You've chosen to believe the nonsense that you do based on "religious" beliefs, not reason or facts, so you will never be able to deal with reality honestly as long as you refuse to deal with the fact that you were wrong from the start, and the scam that you chose to be fooled by was transparent from the start.
You're welcome to your opinion, though, seeing how you don't know anything about which you base that opinion on.
You're the sick weirdo who is defending the scumbag who actively chose to have your husband who you claim to love shot up for the personal profit of a few friends, so it's quite obvious that you have neither facts nor sanity on your side.
Seriously, you claim to love a husband who you claim got shot up in Iraq and instead of standing up for him or the rest of the troops you're standing up for the monster who created the situation and caused all the death and destruction.
That is really deeply sick, twisted, and monstrous.
And you are a monster for lying in such a gruesome fashion. And you know precisely NOTHING about my personal life. FWIW, he was injured flying an F-18 during the FIRST Gulf War in 1991. Not that you care, because you are an egotistical jackass who likes to make assumptions about what he does not know about. So go screw yourself in your delusions - and may you be the first on the firing line of failure.
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
We need more protests. Where are the people protesting the reduction of Habeus Corpus that allows a citizen to be imprisioned w/o trial indefinately on the whim of the President? What about the no-paper-trail spying? What about the use of torture? All these acts were used to demean the USSR when I grew up in the 80s. Only godless commies wouldn't let you get a trial...only evil soviets spy on their citizens...
The generation that taught me to hate these afore mention 'tools' of government is the now piss-pants-scared generation willing to give it all up in order to feel secure.
So yeah...more protests would be good. We can arm everyone and then see how an 'armed society is a polite society'.
Blar.
Reference to Orwell, check. Assertion that it's all Clinton's fault, check. (Though I'm going to deduct half a point for failing to mention the Clenis.) Complaints about a lack of civility on the left, check. Insistence that Bush isn't a Real Conservative, check.
Does it make sense to you that an isolationist nation would, on the eve of invasion, give away its weapons? Of course it doesn't make sense, but you believe it because, well, you need to. Just like you believe that Bush isn't really a conservative--not because of his policies, which were the toast of the conservative intelligentsia until they started to bear bitter fruit--but simply because they've turned into utter failures, and conservatism, in your view, cannot fail, it can only be failed, and is thus an unfalsifiable doctrine, an article of faith. Just as it's easier to believe that magical fairies and elves spirited away those WMDs, not because it's particularly likely or plausible, but because if they didn't, well, best not to think about that.
"Powerhungry, greedy and corrupt" describes the administration quite handily. The promulgation of the ludicrous "unitary executive" doctrine, no-bid windfalls to politically connected contractors and the rampant cronyism in the initial post-invasion phase of the Iraq occupation illustrate this quite nicely, but of course, you're blind to this, and because you've sold yourself so thoroughly on the idea that your guys (well, the guys whose water you carry) wield the mystical Truncheon of Stag Held and are engaged in bloody (political) warfare with the Dominators of Zind... well, the other guys must be a batch of Orcs, and there's a ready-made narrative for you to pick up and spew back out. Good show, there.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
You recall correctly, he was one of 66 nays in the House. And only Feingold had the balls to vote against the USAPATRIOT Act in the Senate.
a triot
http://www.google.com/search?q=russ+feingold+usap
(Captcha was succinct -- neat.)
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
And you are a monster for lying in such a gruesome fashion.
Except, unlike you, I haven't lied about a thing. I'm most certainly not lying to try qand drum up support for a mass murderer and traitor which is what you are doing.
And you know precisely NOTHING about my personal life. FWIW, he was injured flying an F-18 during the FIRST Gulf War in 1991.
OK, you're still supporting a monster who has murdered hundreds of thousands of people for his own personal profit.
So go screw yourself in your delusions - and may you be the first on the firing line of failure.
Whatever, you cowardly, treasonous, lying sack of shit.
http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html
http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html
http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html [theadvocates.org]
Wow... You are truly out of touch with life. Seek medical help. Seriously.