Not surprisingly, The New York Times editorial board isn’t impressed with the Senate Intelligence Committee plan, approved this week on a party-line vote, to give Congress more oversight of the Bush administration’s wiretapping program but not to investigate it. Its editorial today calls the decision “breathtakingly cynical,” arguing that “faced with a president who is almost certainly breaking the law, the Senate sets up a panel to watch him do it and calls that control.”
The Times also isn’t impressed with Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts’ work:
“It was no surprise that Mr. Roberts led this retreat. He’s been blocking an investigation into the domestic spying operation for weeks, just as he has been stonewalling a promised investigation into how the White House hyped the intelligence on Iraq.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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Is it breathtakingly cynical.
Yes.
People all around the country are encouraging us Kansans to impeach Roberts, to circulate petitions asking for his resignation, or to do anything we can to get rid of “Old Rubber Stamp.”
He’s a past master of showing how to stall, stymie, and squirm out of actually overseeing Bush’s use, or one should say, MISUSE of intelligence–which is his effing job.
Unfortunately, the rest of the country can hardly overestimate the level of political ignorance and lack of involvment in our fair state . . .
congress, WithThat’s out a capital “C” From Me!
The anti-American criminal institution known as the U.S. Congress is making it very clear that they are in the business of ending the use of the Constitution. Along with their agenda of increasing the wealth and power of the ruling elite at the detriment of the planet and the “rest of the people,” their actions pretty much serve as proof that they are not interested in doing anything good for the people of this nation.
It is not like you have to search the secret files of the Capitol to discover this; just watch C-SPAN. They are openly and relentlessly creating legislation that is in effect overriding and sidelining the U. S. Constitution, not to mention human decency and moral compas.
It their latest effort to destroy the rule of law in our nation the Republican leadership of the U.S. Congress has openly decided to address the abuse of power and multiple violations of the law by George W. Bush and his administration by creating a solution that pretty much says that they can keep breaking the law and abusing their power as long as Congress can have a piece of the action. That’s right, the Republicans in Congress want to let Bushco continue their Stalin/Hitleresque domestic spying program as long as they can watch.
When the Patriot Act was originally passed it contained only one mention of the Constitution and believe it or not they did not even spell it with a capital “c”! Well, from now on when I write my newsletter I am going to give congress similar respect for they are as useless and obsolete to me as the Constitution is to them! Think about it!
Thread hijack alert–Anybody got rainfall totals for East Wichita?
The TV weathercasters dutifully report on rainfall from some middle school in Sublette, but nothing for the 300,000 of us here . . .
OT response:PL,Go to:http://www.crh.noaa.gov/ifps/MapClick.php?CityName=Wichita&state=KS&site=ICT
Enter your zip code. After that creation, go to the bottom of the page and click on “hourly graphs” – rain totals should be there.
Interestingly, this is a governmental service that the Bush administration has been trying to shut down. Josh Marshall says that the Weather Channel, who wants to sell this information that is now free, is behind this.
I sure am glad that Bush is looking out for me.
should be “hourly weather graph” – lower right side box.
Thank you, kind sir. :)
OT warning:
Instead of the hourly graph, look under “Current Conditions” towards the top of the page and under that “3-day history” – there it looks like we got .34 inches of rain. I am not sure if that is for my zip code or if that is what they measured out on their Tyler Road location. I would expect the latter.
Now I don’t claim to be any saint but there are certain friens taht I confiee aspects of my life to that I don’t want to become public record. Now let’s ust sa my friend is involved in something that concerns the Attorney General and a court order is spirited through that allows a wire tap. Guess what? That means they are also wiretapping ME. They tap both sides of the conversation. What did I do to deserve this? Was my name mentioned when the order was secured? NO! But now details of my life are written in a record that can be accessed thorough the Freedom of Information Act. I wonder how Uncle Harold would feel if CNN accessed a story on his last trip to the Gentleman’s club?
If anyone wants to start an Impeach Roberts petition, you’ve got my signature.
If we still have a country that is governed by the rule of law? This is simple, after or when or if ever, the spying is found illegal. Then this committee and it members along with those in the Bush administration should be held accountable to the full extent of the law. Again if we still have a country that is governed by the rule of law?
The hypocrisy of Sen. Pat Roberts and the Bush administration has reached a new level in the NSA spy story. First they say “if you’re not doing anything wrong, then you have no reason to fear being spied on.” Then they block any investigation into the legality of the program. Astounding.
This site should be required reading for all of the loyal so call patriots out there that support Bush/Cheney.
http://tvnewslies.org/html/bush_lies.html
Nobel Peace Prize nominee: Bush re-election may end the human race – I don’t think the Americans have, on the whole, the faintest idea – and I have to say also I don’t think most Australians do either. But it’s not just the threat from nuclear war. It’s the threat of what’s happening to the environment, the global warming which is occurring rapidly now, to ozone depletion, to species extinction, to deforestation – it’s the whole thing,” the Sydney Morning Herald quoted Caldicott as saying.
Retired Diplomats, Military Commanders Fault Bush’s Leadership – The Bush administration does not understand the world it faces and is unable to handle “in either style or substance” the responsibilities of global leadership, an eminent group of 27 retired diplomats and military commanders charged today. – “Never in the two and a quarter centuries of our history has the United States been so isolated among the nations, so broadly feared and distrusted.” – The statement fit onto a single page, but the sharp public criticism of President Bush was striking, coming from a bipartisan group of respected former officials united in anger about U.S. policy. – The new group, which calls itself Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, believes Bush must be replaced for the United States to regain credibility and strengthen valuable foreign alliances.
Livingstone says Bush is ‘greatest threat to life on planet’ – Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, launched a stinging attack on President George Bush – denouncing him as the “greatest threat to life on this planet that we’ve most probably ever seen”. – Mr Livingstone recalled a visit at Easter to California, where he was denounced for an attack he had made on what he called “the most corrupt and racist American administration in over 80 years”. – Well, I think what I said then was quite mild. I actually think that Bush is the greatest threat to life on this planet that we’ve most probably ever seen. The policies he is initiating will doom us to extinction.”
Bush’s Desolate Imperium – Helen Thomas calls him “the worst president ever.” A kinder, gentler Jonathan Chait ranks him “among the worst presidents in US history.” No such restraint from Paul Berman, who brands him “the worst president the US has ever had.” Nobel Laureate George Akerlof rates his government as the “worst ever.” Even Bushie du jour, Christopher Hitchens, calls the man “unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.” Only Fidel Castro, it would appear, has had kind words for our 43rd President. “Hopefully, he is not as stupid as he seems, nor as Mafia-like as his predecessors were.”
Spain’s PM Says Bush Acts Like an Emperor – “The combination of being a Republican, of being an emperor, a Texan and outspoken is really a bad mix,” Aznar said in an interview Wednesday in The Washington Post.
Extinction of homo sapiens not likely. 90% culling of the species, however, IS likely in the coming couple of centuries.
Did anyone ever explain “sovereignty” to this neanderthal? I know I’m asking a silly question, but the mood strikes me.
The Planet does not have the resources to sustain the current population.
Nature will fix that, if we do not.
Dictatorship is the danger
A Reagan-appointed supreme court justice voices her fears over attacks on US democracy
Jonathan rabanhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1729345,00.html
Monday March 13, 2006
Guardian
Linking the words “America” and “dictatorship” is a daily staple of leftwing blogs, which thrive on the idea that Bush administration policies since 9/11 are taking the country ever closer to totalitarian rule.
Liberal fears that democracy is endangered by Republicans in Congress are so widespread, soendemic to the jittery political climate in the US, that they hardly bear repeating. It’ll surprise no one to learn that another voice was added to the chorus last Thursday, warning that recent attacks on the American judiciary were putting the democratic fabric in jeopardy and were the first steps down the treacherous path to dictatorship.
What is surprising – more than that, electrifying – is that the voice belonged to Sandra Day O’Connor, who retired a few weeks ago from the supreme court.O’Connor is a Republican and a Reagan nominee. Regarded asthe “swing vote” on the court, she swung the presidential election to George Bush in 2000.
Equally surprising is that O’Connor’s speech to an audience of lawyers at Georgetown University was attended by just one reporter, the diligent legalcorrespondent for National Public Radio, Nina Totenberg. No transcript or recording of the speech has been made available, so we have only Totenberg’snotes to go on. But – assuming they are accurate – the notes are political dynamite.
O’Connor’s voice was “dripping with sarcasm”, according to Totenberg, as she “took aim at former House GOP [Republican] leader Tom DeLay. She didn’t namehim, but she quoted his attacks on the courts at a meeting of theconservative Christian group Justice Sunday last year when DeLay took out after the courts for rulings on abortions, prayer and the Terri Schiavo case.
“It gets worse, she said, noting that death threats against judges are increasing. It doesn’t help, she said, when a high-profile senator suggests there may be a connection between violence against judges and decisions thatthe senator disagrees with.”
Then she spoke the D-word. “I, said O’Connor, am against judicial reforms driven by nakedly partisan reasoning. Pointing to the experiences ofdeveloping countries and former communist countries where interference with an independent judiciary has allowed dictatorship to flourish, O’Connor said we must be ever-vigilant against those who would strong-arm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies. It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, she said, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.”
Delivered by someone who was, until recently, one of the nine guardians of the US constitution, these are spine-chilling opinions, and you might havethought they’d have been all over the papers the next day. Not so.
I happened to catch Totenberg’s NPR report last Friday, and have been following up references to it. A cable TV talkshow and a handful of blogs have mentioned Totenberg’s piece: otherwise there’s been a disquietingsilence, as if the former justice had laid an unsavoury egg and had best be politely ignored.
Why did O’Connor choose such a closed forum to air her thoughts?
Why was Totenberg the only reporter present? The possibility that America is sliding toward dictatorship or an unprecedented form of corporate oligarchy ought to be a matter of world concern. And if O’Connor believes what she is reported to have said, surely she owes it to the world to make public the prepared text of her remarks, which so far have the dubious character of the scoresof unverifiable leaks that have passed for news in the compulsively secretive world of the Bush administration. It’s unsurprising that, say, Colin Powell chooses to leak rather than speak out, but when a supreme court justice prefers to whisper her fears to a coterie audience, it’s hard toavoid the inference that the whisper itself speaks volumes about the imperilled democracy it purports to describe.
Death threats to judges figured importantly in O’Connor’s speech, with good reason. Last year, an Illinois federal judge found her husband and mother murdered, and a Georgia state judge was shot dead in his courtroom. Withindays, Senator John Cornyn of Texas mused: “I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions,where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in violence.” DeLay, speaking of the judges who had ruled that Schiavo be allowed to die, said: “The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behaviour.”
These are peculiar times, and when Republican politicians appear to endorse the killing of judges who make rulings of which they disapprove, it’s maybeunderstandable that a distinguished judge like Sandra Day O’Connor, expressing views calculated to enrage Republican politicians, might sensiblylook to a small podium with a weak sound system for fear of being heard too clearly by the likes of Cornyn and DeLay.
Sandra O’Connor “retired” to be with her husband.
Given this new information, is it out of bounds to suggest that her “retirement” might be like Colin Powell’s?
Good and credible people in this adinistration are running away from this administration. We might well wonder as to why.
Intelligence Failures
Thursday, March 16, 2006 – Bangor Daily News
The Senate Intelligence Committee stands in the middle of some of the most important work Congress will do this year. It also stands in the way. Not only has it failed to complete its work on investigating how the White House used intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq, it has offered only a weak response to the administration’s warrantless wiretaps. The committee’s seeming lack of direction at precisely the time intelligence is the focus of the war on terrorism and at the heart of the debate over the reach of executive powers is inexcusable.
Committee Chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas defended its work the other day, saying that the second phase of its report on intelligence leading to the Iraq war “has been ongoing since we began the effort shortly after the committee released its unanimous report on the Intelligence Community’s prewar assessments on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.”
The second report was expected in the fall of 2004 and was to examine, among other things, whether statements made by officials were substantiated by the intelligence. It was also to look at the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, a former intelligence unit that reportedly disagreed with conclusions of the CIA.
In the March 4 edition of the National Journal, reporter Murray Waas points to important instances when the president disregarded the intelligence. In one, the president was given a one-page summary of the National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002 that stated the Energy Department and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence believed the much-disputed aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were “intended for conventional weapons.”
But despite that conclusion the president and his cabinet continued to assert the tubes were for gas centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. It isn’t news that the White House was wrong, but it is important that the Senate investigate the facts around the president’s decision to ignore specific intelligence.
Similarly, by January 2003, reports Mr. Waas, a second classified report that included a summary of a National Intelligence Estimate stated that U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously concluded Saddam Hussein would be unlikely to attack the United States unless “ongoing military operations risked the imminent demise of his regime,” the report said. The Bush administration, through numerous speeches, press conferences and interviews, portrayed very different conditions from what its own intelligence was reporting.
The Senate committee’s capitulation on warrantless wiretapping – agreeing to have a subcommittee informed, maybe, of some National Security Agency activity and canceling a possible investigation of the wiretapping – was similarly disappointing. The full committee is supposed to have oversight responsibilities. Simply because the administration denied them that ability is no reason to surrender it in part now. Sen. Olympia Snowe, a member of the committee, said an investigation was still possible, which is better than nothing.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats have shone in the committee’s gridlock. But Congress and the nation need it to lead on difficult issues, and if a new committee membership is needed next year, both parties should consider it.