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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.
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
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.
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.
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 urge all Slashdot readers to write their respective Congressional Representatives and voice their opinions. I have just done so.
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]
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."
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").
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.
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").
Uh, look at the dates on some of those quotes. Quite a few of them were from before Bush took office.
And George W. Bush was never the head of the CIA, that was his father.
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").
Amusing. First of all I'd like you to entertain us with how all this relates to the price of bacon in Timbuktu. And secondly I can't help but laughing at you neo-con-artists, who's entire "defense" seems to boil down to "Clinton said", or "Clinton did". How about taking fucking responsibility for your own insane actions, rather than trying some ridicolous "he did it too" defense that doesn't even work in kindergarten?
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
That's what they thought with Nixon and Agnew. They got Agnew first, then Nixon. More of the same? How I yearn for term limits for EVERY elected politician!
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!
I must disagree.
A lack of street protests can mean either one of two things: a very successful system where all issues that would result in street protests are solved within the legal process before they become a real issue or a very repressive society where organizing such protests is a Very Bad Idea.
It's usually very easy to distinguish between both.
It's also very easy to transition from the good one to the bad one.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Of the protests I've seen on the news for the past couple of years, it seems like their purpose is to fullfil some kind of hippie fantasy of the protestors. Politically, they have been pretty much meaningless.
Perhaps you didn't read my post, that is impossible. There is no way an issue like abortion can be "solved". A large minority of our society will not be happy unless it's completely illegal, a small majority of our country will not be satisfied unless it's legal in most situations. There is no way that this (or many similar issues like it), will ever be "solved". The situation you describe would mean a legal system that can solve unsolvable problems, an impossibility, an absurdism.
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
This editor Kdawson is a worse troll than Katz.
All this post is is a political flamebait invitation.
Sometimes in the depths of a sickening tragedy, joking about it is all you can do to stay sane when you've done everything else you can. I really like your document. I have been wanting to write something similar for a long time.
Umm. That's not a centrist. You've given almost the dictionary definition of a libertarian. Try the age-old political quiz.
A centrist beleives that government should control people and restrict their rights, just not completely. They believe that government should be big enough to do many unnecessary things, but it should strike a "balance" between liberty and socialism.
If you have a graph, where the x-axis is increasing personal freedom and the y-axis is increasing economic freedom, the libertarian is the furthest from the origin. A centrist would want a moderate amount of economic freedom and a moderate amount of personal freedom (for example, perhaps they have an agenda of being pro-life and anti-drugs, and want the government to control interest rates and feed the poor).
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
a) the elected official is often not the staffer's employer...
Any elected official that allows policy descions to be made in their office by a civil servant should be impeached. We're good for a lot of things, but we shouldn't be doing a legislator's work for them. "Aides" should be just like the heads of gov't offices -- appointed by an elected official and serving at his pleasure.