Pelosi took impeachment off the table; Bill, Hillary, and the Congressional democrats didn't do that 10 years ago when they gathered on the White House lawn to stand against the GOP witch hunt.
perjury: the one everyone remembers, lying under oath regarding sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky
They can't even prove he lied. And even if he did lie, it has to be relevant to the case at hand to be perjury. Since the judge ruled that what happened between Bill and Monica was irrelevant to the Jones case, it was impossible for Clinton to commit perjury on the subject of Monica.
obstruction of justice: the one everyone seems to forget, regarding Clinton's pressuring of Lewinsky to give false testimony in court and obstruct the investigation
Which was of course even more baseless. In the first place, it was Robert Jordan who was alleged to have talked to Lewinsky, not Clinton. In the second place, just what justice would have been obstructed, exactly? The ability of Republicans to freely engage in a witch hunt and remove a president from office by any means necessary?
You can't even prove Clinton lied in the first place. And even if he did lie, it has to be a relevant lie to be perjury. And since the judge ruled that what happened between Bill and Monica wasn't relevant to the Jones case, it would have been impossible for Clinton to commit perjury on the subject.
Clinton's impeachment wasn't about perjury, it was about Republicans trying to remove him from office by any means necessary.
I weep for America because it's filled with boobs like you. Bush has insisted that he has the right to hold American citizens in jail, indefinitely, without trial, and torture them. That is flat-out fascism.
That being said, I'm not a Bush lover by any means, and I find it fairly interesting that he is being brought up on charges of spying on citizens. Whether or not that is illegal is debatable
It's not remotely debatable. What part of
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
do you not understand?
and again, we're talking about bills that have been passed repeatedly by a bipartisan Congress
Congress never passed any bills to legalize warrantless wiretapping, and even if they did, it wouldn't be Constitutional. And in addition to the 4th Amendment, the Bush administration has also violated the 5th (due process) the 6th (speedy trials) and 8th (cruel and unusual punishment).
To say that Bush and Cheney should not be impeached for their long, long list of crimes marks one as either grossly ignorant or an incompetent tool.
And I am extremely suspect of anyone who claims that Clinton wasn't a liar.
Your suspicions are irrelevant. Unless you read his mind, there is no way you can say Clinton lied about "sexual relations" with Monica Lewinsky.
The right to privacy is implied, but not very clearly defined in the Constitution.
Again, what part of
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated
do you not understand?
It simply is not factual to call the war illegal.
What a surprise, the facts don't meet your storyline. Wars are only legal if it's in self-defense or there's a humanitarian crisis, and the invasion of Iraq fails on both counts.
How many more Americans are going to be killed in Iraq before the next president takes office? How many more phones will be illegally wiretapped? How many more suspects will be tortured? How many more times will federal agencies be used as wings of the RNC, as with the U.S. States Attorney firings and the Don Seigelman prosecution? Bush is still the president, and will continue to trash the Constitution until he leaves office.
Imagine if prosecutors had your attitude when Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman were found dead: "sure we have this mountain of evidence, but sending O.J. to jail wont bring them back. We'll just let him go so he can get back to what's left of his family."
emark, answer me one question: if not for Bush, then what the *fuck* do we have impeachment for, exactly? How do you violate half the Bill of Rights and not get impeached?
Kucinich is perceived as a nutjob by tools and fools such as myself.
That's all there is too it. The David Broder's of the world would throw a fit if Democrats impeached Bush, even though they wanted Bill Clinton to resign for getting a blow job. Democrats need to learn one lesson from Republicans: telling the media they're full of shit will not only not cost you elections, it will gain you respect with voters.
The Iraq occupation is a good example of this; the only Dems to lose seats in Congress were those who voted for the invasion like Tom Dashel and Max Cleland. Democrats were terrified of being viewed as "weak" on national security long after the majority of the public started to oppose the occupation. Ned Lamont helped break that dam by successfully primarying Joe Lieberman while vocally opposing the war. The mass market media, however, is as pro-war today as it was in 2002. The military contractor/analyst scandal has been ignored. The only people invited on-air to about the war were those in favor of the invasion from the beginning - not those who had it right from the start.
Another example: NSA wiretapping. There was the usual blathering from idiot pundits like Joke Line of Time, and the Senate caved as usual. The House, however, held firm...and the sky didn't fall.
Democrats need to learn to stop being afraid of their own shadows and asshat pundits.
Prosecutors didn't indite O.J. Simpson because they didn't like him and wanted to send him to prison for the rest of his life, they indited him because they had two dead bodies in the morgue and a ton of evidence.
What led to Clinton's impeachment wasn't a crime he committed, but a desire among Republicans to remove him from office by any means necessary. Whitewater and Vince Foster were investigated and re-investigated and no dirt was found on the Clintons. So Ken Starr and House Republicans settled for a manufactured perjury charge.
Whereas with Bush and Cheney, we know for a fact that they have broken the law and violated the Constitution countless times. They violated Habeas Corpus, the 4th Amendment (warrantless wiretapping), 5th Amendment (due process), 6th Amendment (speedy trials), 8th Amendment (cruel & unusual punishment) and laws against using federal agencies for partisan gain (attorney firings, Don Siegelman prosecution).
Democrats shouldn't remove Bush and Cheney from office because they don't like them, but because they committed High Crimes and Misdemeanors.
But there is a massive organization in the middle that maybe costs too much but which handles some of the important work necessary to avoid wasting people's time.
It's most egregious when the journal doesn't really do anything, and forces the author to do most of the work. Then charge massive fees all around just so they can put their snobby "Prestige" stamp on it, when in reality the publisher is nothing more than a blood sucking leech. Hopefully we'll get enough politicians in Congress who aren't 100% beholden to corporate interests, and at least mandate open access to research paid for with public dollars.
and our economy has successfully been attacked and destroyed
First went the unions, then went the blue collar manufacturing, and now the white collar jobs are leaving due to outsourcing. And all so the top 1% can have their annual 15% increase in income while having their taxes dramatically reduced under Regan and Bush II, while the rest of us have seen our payroll taxes go up. Smashing, yea capitalism.
Running the last mile is expensive and will always be expensive. They're also called natural monopolies for a reason - do you really think three telecos are going to run wires to hour house when you're only going to use one? Why invest in redundant infrastructure when you can only use a third of it at a time?
We shouldn't have to put up with either shitty access or pound me in the ass prices. It's time for the feds to step in and tell these guys to either upgrade their networks or return all the subsidies they were given and start paying rent on the land that lines run across. And for the Libertarians out there, the lines run across public land, so the telecos can take their regulation and like it.
..."vote with your wallet" with monopolies, eh? Until telecos pay back the subsidies they were given and start paying rent on the land their lines cross, they can take their regulation and like it.
For the most part, outsourcing is the worker's boogeyman, something that is blown out of proportion.
On the contrary, offshoring has been part of the steady erosion of the middle class, and it doesn't receive enough attention. During the post-war boom, it was common to graduate high school and make $20 an hour at a unionized manufacturing job. Good luck doing that today; many struggle to make that much with a college degree.
First went the unions, then went the manufacturing, and now the white collar jobs are leaving, and all so the top 1% can see their annual 15% increase in income. Smashing, yea capitalism.
Outsourcing is also beneficial for anybody who is a consumer.
In the same way right-to-work laws free workers from having to pay a thousand dollars a year in union dues AND making another five dollars an hour with twice as much vacation time. It's a penny wise, pound stupid decision, because the vast majority of all cost reductions are not passed down to the consumer, they just go straight into the executives' pockets.
Problem: other countries have vastly higher residential bandwidth for far lesser costs. Countries with lower population densities. This has very little to do with the cost of technology and a whole lot to do with executive greed.
And they subscribe to eWeek so they can pretend to know what they are talking about. I picked up an issue once and read a 4 page article on the giant databases held by Wal-Mart, NASA etc. Not a word on the technology, not a word on data centers - just repeating "company X has a huge database" over and over.
To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States
There's rational opposition to federal control, and then there's irrational paranoia. Federal power isn't the problem, it's how it's used; take Real ID vs Universal Health Care for example.
Why should the Feds have anything to do with anyone having access to broadband?
Well, if you like bending over and paying $50+ a month for 3 Mbps connections from Qwest and Comcast, go nuts. Me, I'd rather pay $30 a month for a 50 Mpbs duplex connections like some Asians and Europeans.
Regardless get ready for $10.00 a gallon gasoline and rampant inflation over the next four years. And I suspect we will start to see massive famines across the world and possibly in this country. And the endless debate that the other party caused all this.
Too bad we have this thing called a historical record, and we'll know full well which side ignored climate change and dwindling fuel supplies.
Hold on a second. In light of the big picture, I'd rather take a dimwit president over an intelligent one.
Sorry, Dr. Evil. I know you've been frozen in the ice since the 60's....but we already tried your "dimwit president" and it hasn't worked out too well for us.
Nearly every administration since Lincoln has succeeded in expanding the power and revenue of the federal government during their reign. The US federal government of today absolutely dwarfs the US federal government of only 100 years ago, both in revenue and power over the people.
But of course there's nothing inherently wrong with that. It's not a question of "big" government or "no" government, but the right amount of government. Thanks, but I like being able to drink municipal water without checking it for ammonia or mercury first. I like being able to buy ground beef a grocery store and be reasonably confident that a little poisoned rat isn't mixed in.
I'll see your allegations of Chinese influence and raise you facts about Republicans who whore themselves out to special interests. McCain didn't go clean after Keating Five, he just made sure to keep it within the letter if not the spirit of the law.
When O'Connor voted to tell Florida in 2000 it couldn't recount only some of its ballots
Florida law doesn't provide for statewide recounts, only county by county. So it would make sense if you would recount the much maligned punchcard ballots and skip the highly accurate op-scans. But SCOTUS wasn't going to let Gore win under any scenario, even though presidential elections are supposed to be strictly a state matter.
Oh, and if the Supreme Court hadn't stepped in and stopped the recount, Gore would be the lame duck right now. A statewide press recount proved that Gore got more votes Bush, but the biased conservative media merely reported that if the recount followed Gore's initial request he still would have lost, not that Gore got more votes in the state than Bush.
Put that together with Katherine Harris's conflicts of interests and bogus felon lists, and the 2000 election was flat out stolen, much to the detriment of our treasury, tens of thousands of Americans who have either died in Iraq or committed suicide after coming home, and million of Iraqis.
If you look at what's happened to our country over the last 8 years and aren't furious, you're either living in a hole or are a mindless zombie. Which are you?
Slashdot Mirror
Pelosi took impeachment off the table; Bill, Hillary, and the Congressional democrats didn't do that 10 years ago when they gathered on the White House lawn to stand against the GOP witch hunt.
Fixed that for you.
perjury: the one everyone remembers, lying under oath regarding sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky
They can't even prove he lied. And even if he did lie, it has to be relevant to the case at hand to be perjury. Since the judge ruled that what happened between Bill and Monica was irrelevant to the Jones case, it was impossible for Clinton to commit perjury on the subject of Monica.
obstruction of justice: the one everyone seems to forget, regarding Clinton's pressuring of Lewinsky to give false testimony in court and obstruct the investigation
Which was of course even more baseless. In the first place, it was Robert Jordan who was alleged to have talked to Lewinsky, not Clinton. In the second place, just what justice would have been obstructed, exactly? The ability of Republicans to freely engage in a witch hunt and remove a president from office by any means necessary?
Regular people go to jail for that kind of thing.
Regular people don't have prosecutors engaging in endless fishing expeditions with no probable cause. And, given the fact that Clinton was following the judge's definition of "sexual relations" to the letter, she's rather full of shit.
You can't even prove Clinton lied in the first place. And even if he did lie, it has to be a relevant lie to be perjury. And since the judge ruled that what happened between Bill and Monica wasn't relevant to the Jones case, it would have been impossible for Clinton to commit perjury on the subject.
Clinton's impeachment wasn't about perjury, it was about Republicans trying to remove him from office by any means necessary.
I weep for America because it's filled with boobs like you. Bush has insisted that he has the right to hold American citizens in jail, indefinitely, without trial, and torture them. That is flat-out fascism.
It's not remotely debatable. What part ofdo you not understand?
and again, we're talking about bills that have been passed repeatedly by a bipartisan Congress
Congress never passed any bills to legalize warrantless wiretapping, and even if they did, it wouldn't be Constitutional. And in addition to the 4th Amendment, the Bush administration has also violated the 5th (due process) the 6th (speedy trials) and 8th (cruel and unusual punishment).
To say that Bush and Cheney should not be impeached for their long, long list of crimes marks one as either grossly ignorant or an incompetent tool.
And I am extremely suspect of anyone who claims that Clinton wasn't a liar.
Your suspicions are irrelevant. Unless you read his mind, there is no way you can say Clinton lied about "sexual relations" with Monica Lewinsky.
The right to privacy is implied, but not very clearly defined in the Constitution.
Again, what part ofdo you not understand?
It simply is not factual to call the war illegal.
What a surprise, the facts don't meet your storyline. Wars are only legal if it's in self-defense or there's a humanitarian crisis, and the invasion of Iraq fails on both counts.
How many more Americans are going to be killed in Iraq before the next president takes office? How many more phones will be illegally wiretapped? How many more suspects will be tortured? How many more times will federal agencies be used as wings of the RNC, as with the U.S. States Attorney firings and the Don Seigelman prosecution? Bush is still the president, and will continue to trash the Constitution until he leaves office.
Imagine if prosecutors had your attitude when Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman were found dead: "sure we have this mountain of evidence, but sending O.J. to jail wont bring them back. We'll just let him go so he can get back to what's left of his family."
This has no chance of going anywhere.
emark, answer me one question: if not for Bush, then what the *fuck* do we have impeachment for, exactly? How do you violate half the Bill of Rights and not get impeached?
Kucinich is perceived as a nutjob by tools and fools such as myself.
Fixed that for you.
Good thing that was snark, or you'd be as full of shit as the person who modded you "informative" instead of "funny".
That's all there is too it. The David Broder's of the world would throw a fit if Democrats impeached Bush, even though they wanted Bill Clinton to resign for getting a blow job. Democrats need to learn one lesson from Republicans: telling the media they're full of shit will not only not cost you elections, it will gain you respect with voters.
The Iraq occupation is a good example of this; the only Dems to lose seats in Congress were those who voted for the invasion like Tom Dashel and Max Cleland. Democrats were terrified of being viewed as "weak" on national security long after the majority of the public started to oppose the occupation. Ned Lamont helped break that dam by successfully primarying Joe Lieberman while vocally opposing the war. The mass market media, however, is as pro-war today as it was in 2002. The military contractor/analyst scandal has been ignored. The only people invited on-air to about the war were those in favor of the invasion from the beginning - not those who had it right from the start.
Another example: NSA wiretapping. There was the usual blathering from idiot pundits like Joke Line of Time, and the Senate caved as usual. The House, however, held firm...and the sky didn't fall.
Democrats need to learn to stop being afraid of their own shadows and asshat pundits.
Prosecutors didn't indite O.J. Simpson because they didn't like him and wanted to send him to prison for the rest of his life, they indited him because they had two dead bodies in the morgue and a ton of evidence.
What led to Clinton's impeachment wasn't a crime he committed, but a desire among Republicans to remove him from office by any means necessary. Whitewater and Vince Foster were investigated and re-investigated and no dirt was found on the Clintons. So Ken Starr and House Republicans settled for a manufactured perjury charge.
Whereas with Bush and Cheney, we know for a fact that they have broken the law and violated the Constitution countless times. They violated Habeas Corpus, the 4th Amendment (warrantless wiretapping), 5th Amendment (due process), 6th Amendment (speedy trials), 8th Amendment (cruel & unusual punishment) and laws against using federal agencies for partisan gain (attorney firings, Don Siegelman prosecution).
Democrats shouldn't remove Bush and Cheney from office because they don't like them, but because they committed High Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Wasn't there a loophole where you could drop AT&T's contract within 3 days with no penalty and keep the phone, since it's not subsidized?
But there is a massive organization in the middle that maybe costs too much but which handles some of the important work necessary to avoid wasting people's time.
It's most egregious when the journal doesn't really do anything, and forces the author to do most of the work. Then charge massive fees all around just so they can put their snobby "Prestige" stamp on it, when in reality the publisher is nothing more than a blood sucking leech. Hopefully we'll get enough politicians in Congress who aren't 100% beholden to corporate interests, and at least mandate open access to research paid for with public dollars.
and our economy has successfully been attacked and destroyed
First went the unions, then went the blue collar manufacturing, and now the white collar jobs are leaving due to outsourcing. And all so the top 1% can have their annual 15% increase in income while having their taxes dramatically reduced under Regan and Bush II, while the rest of us have seen our payroll taxes go up. Smashing, yea capitalism.
Running the last mile is expensive and will always be expensive. They're also called natural monopolies for a reason - do you really think three telecos are going to run wires to hour house when you're only going to use one? Why invest in redundant infrastructure when you can only use a third of it at a time?
We shouldn't have to put up with either shitty access or pound me in the ass prices. It's time for the feds to step in and tell these guys to either upgrade their networks or return all the subsidies they were given and start paying rent on the land that lines run across. And for the Libertarians out there, the lines run across public land, so the telecos can take their regulation and like it.
..."vote with your wallet" with monopolies, eh? Until telecos pay back the subsidies they were given and start paying rent on the land their lines cross, they can take their regulation and like it.
For the most part, outsourcing is the worker's boogeyman, something that is blown out of proportion.
On the contrary, offshoring has been part of the steady erosion of the middle class, and it doesn't receive enough attention. During the post-war boom, it was common to graduate high school and make $20 an hour at a unionized manufacturing job. Good luck doing that today; many struggle to make that much with a college degree.
First went the unions, then went the manufacturing, and now the white collar jobs are leaving, and all so the top 1% can see their annual 15% increase in income. Smashing, yea capitalism.
Outsourcing is also beneficial for anybody who is a consumer.
In the same way right-to-work laws free workers from having to pay a thousand dollars a year in union dues AND making another five dollars an hour with twice as much vacation time. It's a penny wise, pound stupid decision, because the vast majority of all cost reductions are not passed down to the consumer, they just go straight into the executives' pockets.
Problem: other countries have vastly higher residential bandwidth for far lesser costs. Countries with lower population densities. This has very little to do with the cost of technology and a whole lot to do with executive greed.
At my work, we call these people "managers."
And they subscribe to eWeek so they can pretend to know what they are talking about. I picked up an issue once and read a 4 page article on the giant databases held by Wal-Mart, NASA etc. Not a word on the technology, not a word on data centers - just repeating "company X has a huge database" over and over.
Why should the Feds have anything to do with anyone having access to broadband?
Well, if you like bending over and paying $50+ a month for 3 Mbps connections from Qwest and Comcast, go nuts. Me, I'd rather pay $30 a month for a 50 Mpbs duplex connections like some Asians and Europeans.
Regardless get ready for $10.00 a gallon gasoline and rampant inflation over the next four years. And I suspect we will start to see massive famines across the world and possibly in this country. And the endless debate that the other party caused all this.
Too bad we have this thing called a historical record, and we'll know full well which side ignored climate change and dwindling fuel supplies.
Hold on a second. In light of the big picture, I'd rather take a dimwit president over an intelligent one.
Sorry, Dr. Evil. I know you've been frozen in the ice since the 60's....but we already tried your "dimwit president" and it hasn't worked out too well for us.
Nearly every administration since Lincoln has succeeded in expanding the power and revenue of the federal government during their reign. The US federal government of today absolutely dwarfs the US federal government of only 100 years ago, both in revenue and power over the people.
But of course there's nothing inherently wrong with that. It's not a question of "big" government or "no" government, but the right amount of government. Thanks, but I like being able to drink municipal water without checking it for ammonia or mercury first. I like being able to buy ground beef a grocery store and be reasonably confident that a little poisoned rat isn't mixed in.
I'll see your allegations of Chinese influence and raise you facts about Republicans who whore themselves out to special interests. McCain didn't go clean after Keating Five, he just made sure to keep it within the letter if not the spirit of the law.
When O'Connor voted to tell Florida in 2000 it couldn't recount only some of its ballots
Florida law doesn't provide for statewide recounts, only county by county. So it would make sense if you would recount the much maligned punchcard ballots and skip the highly accurate op-scans. But SCOTUS wasn't going to let Gore win under any scenario, even though presidential elections are supposed to be strictly a state matter.
Oh, and if the Supreme Court hadn't stepped in and stopped the recount, Gore would be the lame duck right now. A statewide press recount proved that Gore got more votes Bush, but the biased conservative media merely reported that if the recount followed Gore's initial request he still would have lost, not that Gore got more votes in the state than Bush.
Put that together with Katherine Harris's conflicts of interests and bogus felon lists, and the 2000 election was flat out stolen, much to the detriment of our treasury, tens of thousands of Americans who have either died in Iraq or committed suicide after coming home, and million of Iraqis.
If you look at what's happened to our country over the last 8 years and aren't furious, you're either living in a hole or are a mindless zombie. Which are you?