A new enemy?

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a strongly worded dissent from Thursday's ruling and took the unusual step of reading part of it from the bench — something he had never done before in his 15 years. He said the court's decision would "sorely hamper the president's ability to confront and defeat a new and deadly enemy."

Supreme Court blocks Bush, Gitmo war trials By GINA HOLLAND, Associated Press Writer

But there is nothing new about Terrorism

"Modern Terrorism: The beginnings of modern terrorism may go back to the mid 19th century when a Italian revolutionary, Carlo Pisacane theorized that terrorism could deliver a message to an audience and draw attention to and support for a cause. Examples of early modern terrorism are the Klu Klux Klan, which formed to try to dissuade reconstructionists after the Civil War, and the Young Bosnians, which had Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914, leading directly to the outbreak of World War One. It wasn't, however, until the 1960's that terrorism as we know it today came into prominence. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), and other terrorist groups used attacks against civilian populations in an attempt to effect change for religious or ideological reasons. The most infamous incident of that time period occurred during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, when a Palestine terrorist organization held eleven Israeli athletes hostage, who were then killed along with the terrorists during a rescue attempt."
A Concise History of Terrorism

What are we fighting for?

The Republican talking point seems to be that Bush, as Commander in Chief, is free to fight the War on Terror any way he sees fit.

But what are we fighting for?

Is it solely to save Americans from another attack? Is that all? Are we willing to kill the patient (America) to cure the disease (Al Qaida)?

"The troops here and across the world are fighting a global war on terror. The war reached our shores on September the 11th, 2001. The terrorists who attacked us -- and the terrorists we face -- murder in the name of a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom, rejects tolerance, and despises all dissent. Their aim is to remake the Middle East in their own grim image of tyranny and oppression -- by toppling governments, by driving us out of the region, and by exporting terror."
- Bush in a recent National Address http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/06/20050628-7.html

Bush, given his blatant disregard for our form of government and our Bill of Rights... is guilty of the very thing he says the terrorists are guilty of. The attack against the Free Press is only one of the most recent demonstrations of that fact.

Do we have checks and balances anymore?

Senator considers suit over Bush law challenge

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | June 28, 2006

read the article

Some things I took away from this article:

• Most Republicans in the Senate seem loath to enforce what our founding fathers envisioned as a system of checks and balances that would prevent tyranny.



• If well qualified lawyers can disagree on what the law means, the law is too ambiguous. We should fix that. Any lawyer imparting partisan politics as expert opinion should be disbarred.



• Reinforced opinion that Bush really wants to be a dictator, and appears to be succeeding.

Bush and the Law update

Thanks to
http://atrios.blogspot.com/

Must reads:
Bush’s signing statements: Constitutional crisis or empty rhetoric?


And if this isn't trying to destroy our system of government I don't know what is... here are a couple... but they are all horrifying.

"March 9: Justice Department officials must give reports to Congress by certain dates on how the FBI is using the USA Patriot Act to search homes and secretly seize papers.

Bush's signing statement: The president can order Justice Department officials to withhold any information from Congress if he decides it could impair national security or executive branch operations.

Dec. 30, 2005: US interrogators cannot torture prisoners or otherwise subject them to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.

Bush's signing statement: The president, as commander in chief, can waive the torture ban if he decides that harsh interrogation techniques will assist in preventing terrorist attacks."

There's more... read it all:
Examples of the president's signing statements

Americans think Dems have no clear plan for Iraq

"Asked if Bush and his government had a clear plan for handling the situation in Iraq, more respondents said no than yes: 67-31 percent respectively in the Today/Gallup poll, 64-35 percent in the Post/ABC survey.

Democrats, however, fared just as poorly. Sixty-eight percent said the Democrats had no clear plan for handling Iraq, while 25 percent believe they do. The Post/ABC survey put it at 71 to 24 percent." more

Why do you think people believe Dems don't have a clear plan? Because the GOP keeps telling them the Dems have no plan?
Or are Americans so stupid that two plans with modest differences presented to and rejected by the Senate is the same as "no clear plan"?

Or is it that the two plans presented by Kerry/Feingold and Levin/Reed (calling for different time tables) were not 100% supported by the Democratic membership of the senate? Is it that the public wants the Democratic party to be sheeple like the Bush supporters?
Read a decent Fox article here

I really want to know why Americans think the Dems have no clear plan.

Bush and the Law

Bush evidently believes laws are for other people... and do not apply to him.

This has been going on for the entire Bush presidency. Do you think broadcast media will pay attention?
How many Americans understand what is going on? How could they unless they really work at getting the news?

"WASHINGTON — A bill becomes the rule of the land when Congress passes it and the president signs it into law, right?

Not necessarily, according to the White House. A law is not binding when a president issues a separate statement saying he reserves the right to revise, interpret or disregard it on national security and constitutional grounds." more

"For the first five years of Bush's presidency, his legal claims attracted little attention in Congress or the media. Then, twice in recent months, Bush drew scrutiny after challenging new laws: a torture ban and a requirement that he give detailed reports to Congress about how he is using the Patriot Act." more

Only a lawyer could fully understand the signing statement below. Hardly conducive to transparent government.
Basically states (among other things) that "enemy combatants" detained on foreign soil have no due process rights.
President's Statement on Signing of H.R. 2863

"The first president to issue a signing statement was James Monroe.[2] Until the 1980s, with some exceptions, signing statements were generally triumphal, rhetorical, or political proclamations and went mostly unannounced. Until Ronald Reagan became President, only 75 statements had been issued. Reagan and his successors George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton made 247 signing statements between them. As of 2006, George W. Bush, the current President, has issued over 750 signing statements. [3]" more

Update on the 500 WMDs found non-story

Fox called Santorum on it.
Video

But it's like closing the barn door after the horses are out.

FoxNews - prime example of pseudo journalism

FoxNews has so little respect for the consumers of their products they'll feed them noxious waste products.
Fox news is to journalism what the old west medicine show is to Mayo Clinic.

Of course they couldn't do it without the help of people like Santorum. He is a person entrusted to govern in the name of we the people. Instead he choses to deceive and manipulate... providing the impetus of the story.

"Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Santorum said: "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist.""
Report: Hundreds of WMDs Found in Iraq


Neither are trying to inform us. Both are trying to manipulate us. How many readers are going to process the meaning of "pre-Gulf War" to alert them that the headline is a lie? My hope is all. I am an optimist.

Is it possible that there are some FoxNews listeners who could be "saved" given the truth?

Know Hope

EVANS AND SMITH GET IT RIGHT!

Can we wake up the MSM to their responsibility? Stay tuned.

Dems have no plan

We hear this all the time.

I think this perceptions is because the Democrats have too many plans. Democratic congress people are a diverse lot. Democrats are tolerant of people formulating their own opinions based on their experience, including those in office.

Democrats will never goose step to a single drum as the GOP does.

And that is a good thing.

The GOP is to McDonald's as the Democrats are to a Family owned restaurant

This study not covered in MSM

But it is relevant to those of us who vote based on real issues.

Jonathan Chait: Your silence is deafening, conservatives

"A FEW WEEKS ago, I wrote a column about a paper that decimated the conservative worldview. The study, by William Niskanen of the Cato Institute, found that the conservative "starve the beast" strategy does not work. Indeed, since 1981, he found that tax cuts tend to produce more spending, while tax hikes produce less."

LA Times Article here


And here is Mr Niskanen's report

Thanks George.

Must read

Media Matters- by Jamison Foser
Weekly Part 4: where do we go from here?

While the focus of the above article is on concerns of "progressives", it should also be a concern for conservatives. The issue is whether the Fourth Estate is doing its job. Accusations of bias are flying all around us. Some folks have stopped believing the press altogether.

Has the Fourth Estate lost it's credibility?

MSM priorities

Evidently the sham debate about Iraq pullout time table is big news. The fact that the vote ran counter to American's wishes is interesting though. Majority wants Iraq pullout date set

Stories of abuses of detainees committed under the Bush leadership has been spotty.
You'd think these incidents were isolated spikes in an otherwise acceptable conduct of a war.
But in the background these investigations have been going on for years in relative secrecy... and even promises to share findings with the American people go unfulfilled... unless prodded by FOIA.
Pentagon details U.S. abuse of detainees

While not putting undue emphasis on these abuses is the right thing to do... it is also incumbent on AP, Reuters etc. to not put undue emphasis on obvious political manipulations such as the so called debate held in the House Friday the 16th of June 2006.

Let's see how long the "abuse" story remains highlighted v.s. the sham debate story.

The MSM can inform, or it can manipulate. Currently I think it is a tool for the Government... instead of a tool for the People.

Liberal issues

The MSM seems to treat all environmental concerns as liberal concerns.
Don't conservatives love their kids? I think they do. So how can they justify labeling environmental laws as liberal? Liberal is now a term present day conservatives (PDC) have hijacked to mean anything they don't like.
Can they be so blind that they can think "My kids will be safe because (fill in the blank (eg Global warming)) is a liberal concept"?

My take is that the PDC is so intent on supporting business they forget that they and their families are also vulnerable to the damage we are doing to the ecosystem. Being rich won't save them. Or us.

Main Stream Media ignores "free press" expulsion from Gitmo

What's up with that?
Ok, so they had some spin to excuse them. I don't buy it. Do you?
Raw Story Article

The truth is out there. Can we get there from here?

Quote of the day

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
--Aldous Leonard Huxley 

What would Thomas Jefferson think of our press today?

"The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers... [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper." --Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785. (*) ME 5:181, Papers 8:632

What has become of investigative journalism? We seem besieged by infotainers masquerading as journalists and political pundits.

We need a serious number of news junkies like me to sift through the thousands of stories posted via the internet every day and elect a few as worthy of the term journalism. Anybody with me?