Impeach Cheney

With all of Cheney's anti-democratic manuevers (not part of executive branch, torture, warrantless ease dropping etc.), I would be perfectly happy if the Democrats shut down the government just to impeach Cheney. Cheney is not just using the usual political boiler plate aruguments, he is actively undermining the very foundation this nation is founded on. This is serious. If you only write you congressperson once, this is the time to do. We must demand the Vice President stop his anti-constitutional rampages.

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You can watch Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) call for defunding Cheney's office here.

Cheney has done more to curtail our liberties and the Constitution than Al-Quieda could dream of.

You can read Bruce Fein's reasoned analysis for impeaching Cheney:

"Article II enumerates the powers and responsibilities of the president, including the obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. A special presidential oath is prescribed. Section 3 of the 25th Amendment provides a method for the president to yield his office to the vice president, when "he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office." There is no other constitutional provision for transferring presidential powers to the vice president.

Yet without making a written transmittal to Congress, President Bush has ceded vast domains of his powers to Vice President Cheney by mutual understanding that circumvents the 25th Amendment. This constitutional provision assures that the public and Congress know who is exercising the powers of the presidency and who should be held responsible for successes or failures. The Bush-Cheney dispensation blurs political accountability by continually hiding the real decision-maker under presidential skirts. The Washington Post has thoroughly documented the vice president's dominance in a four-part series running this week. It is quite a read.

In the end, President Bush regularly is unable to explain or defend the policies of his own administration, and that is because the heavy intellectual labor has been performed in the office of the vice president. Cheney is impeachable for his overweening power and his sneering contempt of the Constitution and the rule of law."

via Slate.com

Pride Blacked Out

I've lived in San Francisco for over 14 years and have grown both accustomed to and tired of all the pride hullabalou. I am the first to admit to being "over" Pink Saturday and the Pride Parade, but when I read a story like this where a school in New Jersey seized all year books to black out this photo,

I am reminded that I, and, by extenstion, we, cannot become complacent when in comes to being out and proud gays. When there is still such fear and loathing in America, we as proud gays need to come out to family, friends, the world to show we matter and are here to stay. We owe so much to those that came before us and we owe it to proud young men like Andre Jackson to keep ourselves visible, to show the world who we are in all our differnces and all our similiraties. Because we are here and we are not going anywhere, as much as the right wring wants to push out of existance and pretend we don't exist, we must continue to fight for visiblity and equal rights under the law. It is only by becoming more and more visible will America and the world see that we are not the terror that so many what to make us.

Come out, be proud and change the world.

via: Slog

Facing His Waterloo?

Dick Cheney Claims He Is Not Part Of The Executive Branch...!

Run that by me again?

"Vice President Dick Cheney has asserted his office is not a part of the executive branch of the U.S. government, and therefore not bound by a presidential order governing the protection of classified information by government agencies, according to a new letter from Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., to Cheney."

Let's see, there are three co-equal branches of the federal government: Legislative, Judicial and Executive.
Hmm. I don't see anything listed there that shows a "Cheney" Branch.

Now Tricky "Dick" Cheney did comply up to 2003 with the presidential order that governed the protection of classified documents. So what changed? Well, if you remember it was October of 2003 that Scooter Libbey (Cheney's former Chief of Staff) was indicted by the United States for obstruction of justices. What a coincidence that Cheney followed the presidential order governing classified information up until 2003!

Coincidence? Yeah, right.

The depth of corruption and hubris is astonishing.

via ABCNews.com

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As Andrew Sullivan says, "The idea of impeaching him really doesn't seem so outrageous as the months go by, does it?"

Update:
John Arovosis over at Americablog points to what this means:

"What Cheney is doing isn't some esoteric battle over protocol. He's refusing to let the national security watchdogs make sure that his staff isn't being sloppy with classified information. He is quite literally risking our national secrets during a time of war. These rules exist for a reason, the oversight exists for a reason. People are sloppy, and sometimes they're even evil. When you're dealing with classified information, information that can quite literally get someone killed, you need several layers of protection to ensure that the information doesn't slip out, by intent or neglect."

Dick Cheney doesn't care about national security, he only cares about his ego and that is dangerous for The United States.

Rudy G-Man Giuliani Cares More About Raising Money Than Iraq

"Rudolph Giuliani's membership on an elite Iraq study panel came to an abrupt end last spring after he failed to show up for a single official meeting of the group, causing the panel's top Republican to give him a stark choice: either attend the meetings or quit, several sources said.

"He cited 'previous time commitments' in a letter explaining his decision to quit, and a look at his schedule suggests why -- the sessions at times conflicted with Giuliani's lucrative speaking tour that garnered him $11.4 million in 14 months."

Puts into question Rudy's boasting of his tough on terror stance he takes in his campaign.


via Newsday.com

In Case You Missed It, We Are Winning

Massachusetts Gay Marriage to Remain Legal.

One step forward...

The Destruction Of Honor And Morals

Seymour Hersh from the New Yorker has an article about retired Gen. Taguba, the military man that was to investigate the Abu Ghriab prisoner torture scandal. In it, Hersh tells of the systematic approach The Pentagon and The White House covered their asses and blamed low level troops of the abuses when, in fact, the abuse was cleared by higher ups from The Pentagon and The White House.

Here's what General Taguba has to say about the limits put him during his investigation of Abu Ghirab:

"During the next two years, Taguba assiduously avoided the press, telling his relatives not to talk about his work. Friends and family had been inundated with telephone calls and visitors, and, Taguba said, “I didn’t want them to be involved.” Taguba retired in January, 2007, after thirty-four years of active service, and finally agreed to talk to me about his investigation of Abu Ghraib and what he believed were the serious misrepresentations by officials that followed. “From what I knew, troops just don’t take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups,” Taguba told me. His orders were clear, however: he was to investigate only the military police at Abu Ghraib, and not those above them in the chain of command. “These M.P. troops were not that creative,” he said. “Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box.”


Let's take that last sentence, again:
"I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box" Someone is hiding and covering their involvment. Now who could that be?

Hersh goes further to show how this plan from The Pentagon and The White House has, effectively, broken down the chain of cammand in Iraq.

In classic BushCo tactics, it is never BushCo's fault - blame someone else:

A Pentagon consultant on the war on terror also said that the [referring to the Abu Ghirab photos] “basic strategy was ‘prosecute the kids in the photographs but protect the big picture.’ ”

What's the "big picture"? The only conclusion is that "the big picture" refers to higher ups in the Pentagon and, therefore, The White House.

Hersh then goes on to show how The White House and The Pentagon created a kind of secret agency to bypass any formal command structure in order to prosecute however they see fit, the War on Terror.

"In special cases, the task forces could bypass the chain of command and deal directly with Rumsfeld’s office. A former senior intelligence official told me that the White House was also briefed on task-force operations.

What is the consequence of the abuses of detainees and military dicipline?

"Richard Armitage, the former Deputy Secretary of State, told me [Seymour Hersh] that, on his visits to Iraq, he increasingly found that “the commanders would say one thing and the guys in the field would say, ‘I don’t care what he says. I’m going to do what I want.’ We’ve sacrificed the chain of command to the notion of Special Operations and GWOT”—the global war on terrorism. “You’re painting on a canvas so big that it’s hard to comprehend,” Armitage said.

“They always shoot the messenger,” Taguba told me. “To be accused of being overzealous and disloyal—that cuts deep into me. I was being ostracized for doing what I was asked to do.”
Taguba went on, “There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff”—the explicit images—“was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this.” He said that Rumsfeld, his senior aides, and the high-ranking generals and admirals who stood with him as he misrepresented what he knew about Abu Ghraib had failed the nation.
“From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”

The whole article

My rantings about the BushCo criminals goes beyond my dislike of Bush; my dislike of Bush is fed by Bush's own fear and lack of any sense of morals and how his fear and lack of morals is weakening not only our military, but our standing in the larger world. I am not a 'flowers in the sky' liberal (I prefer 'Realist Liberal') that feels as long as we are nice to each other, we'll all get along. No, I am fully aware that there are people out there that would rather see the western world destroyed so a theocratic regime can run things. I feel using the same tactics that terroist use is wrong. We must take the moral high ground when fighting terrorist and not let our baser instincts get the better of us.
The irony, of course, is Bush claims to be a "christian", but he has shown none of the values christians, I'm told, are suposed to beleive in. I'm reminded of what Bush said years ago when Bush was running for his first term as President. The moderator of one of the debates asked who his [Bush] favorite philosopher is. Bush's anwer? Jesus. I find that hard to swallow especially with Bush's zeal for the death penalty while Governor of Texas and his prosecution of the war in Iraq, and therefore, the abuses in Iraq that Jesus is his favorite philosopher.

Gay Bomb, 60 Billion "Dollars", We'll always, it seems, have Paris

Wow. Just wow.
On a list of stupid ideas, this ranks as one of the dumbest:

Pentagon Confirms It Sought To Build A 'Gay Bomb'
The Pentagon serious considered creating a gay bomb so they could turn the enemy into flaming fags so unit cohesion would break down because all these newly minted gays would want to have sex with each other. On the battle field. In the middle of a war. Because, you know, if I were on the battle field in a war, I know I couldn't help but think, while bombs are going off around me, that some hot man on man sex would be great (the proposal said nothing about receiving that elusive toaster).
This little absurdity tells me a couple of things:
1) The Pentagon has no clue about human behaviour.
2) The Pentagon truly thinks the gays are so obsessed with sex that we can't function without it for more than a few minutes at a time. I know that I have to leave a meeting at work a couple of times just to get a blow job because I just can't control them homosexual urges.
3) Someone at The Pentagon has waaaay too much time on his hands. And why does The Pentagon spend so much time thinking about the gays?

G8 Summit posers and that 60 billion dollars supposed to go to the Aprican continent to fight AIDS? Yeah, no so much:

"G8 leaders said they would provide at least $60 billion to fight AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, global diseases that have devastated African countries and their economies.

But the declaration set no specific timetable, saying the money would flow "over the coming years." Neither did it break down individual countries' contributions or spell out how much of the sum had been previously promised."

We all know what it means when our "leaders" makes pledges, it don't mean a thing.

Via: Americablog

For those of you that may feel bad for Paris Hilton, let's not forget she was arrested for drunk driving and then violated her parole. Drunk driving causes nearly 17,000 deaths a year.

Human Tetris

The Japnanese are whack!

It's Been A While

Appologizing for not blogging is as cliched as, well, as apologizing for not blogging. One of the reasons I haven't really posted anything is because I've been a bit busy at work (be careful what you wish for). I usually do most of my blogging from work (shhhh, don't tell), but now that I actually have things to do, I haven't been able to do any blogging. I don't like to blog from home, generally, because the idea of sitting at my laptop while at home when I have been in front of a computer at work all day is, um, not appealing. Well, it is now Saturday morning, zero hour, 8:22 am, and none of my friends are awake at this time (I've already been up for an hour and a half), so I will give a rundown of what BushCo has done to further make the U.S. a laughing stock...

Bush has decided to nominate a man to be Surgeon General. That in and of it self is not news (if anyone else besides Bush was President), but this guy that Bush wants to be Surgeon Genral also has formed a group that will cure the gays! Yes, that's right Bush and his never ending cycle of absolute, complete, incomprehensible stupidy wants the nominate as the Surgeon General of the United States a man that claims he can "cure" one of being gay!
It is absolutely astonishing the depth of Bush's stupidity and ignorance. To say I'm speechless (nearly, anyway), is an understatement. I wouldn't be surprised if this guy isn't even a doctor. This guy's name? Joseph Holsinger

Write your Congressperson:
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via Kos

Congress wants to talk to former Attorney General Ashcroft about the infamous night time hospital run when, then, White House Attorney Gonzales tried to get the bed ridden AG Ashcroft (he just had surgery when this happened - read the whole story, here) to sign off on the (illegal) wire tapping scheme he and the BushCo Criminals conjured up from the sesspool of their "brains". Let's see if he'll talk

via MSNBC

The Republicans supressing votes? Nah. Well, yes, actually. In case you missed Monica Goodling's testimony during the Attorney General scandel, she mentioned "vote caging." What is "voter caging"?

"Vote caging is an illegal trick to suppress minority voters (who tend to vote Democrat) by getting them knocked off the voter rolls if they fail to answer registered mail sent to homes they aren't living at (because they are, say, at college or at war)"

Ahh, yes, the DOJ is not in the business of surpressing votes. Way to go, BushCo Criminals.

via Slate

Don't let Congress stop the Attorney General scandel hearings:
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Just a littel aside, Slate has an interesting article on the BushCo Criminals' confusion between diplomacy and marketing. The article truly reveals how the BushCo Criminals think.

A Senate panel rejects Bush's secret interrogations. I guess some people (not the President) care about the integrity of the U.S..

This is what happens when we are apathetic to what our government does.
Write 'em:
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