"Bow down to her on Sunday Salute her when her birthday comes For Halloween buy her a trumpet And for Christmas give her a drum"
Bob Dylan I salute you on your birthday for four decades of thought-provoking lyrics, four decades of inspiration and a line for every occasion. I salute you for the free tickets you gave me on that long ago autumn evening in La Placita.
On the News Hour tonight, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez gave us a clear example of the kind of double-talk that has this administration scraping the bottom of the approval ratings. Smooth and well practiced in the art of obfuscation, the AG set the mood for the rest of the interview in which he steadfastly refused to give responsive answers. On the heels of the speech in which the president tried to walk the tightrope between the two warring factions of his party (the greedy vs, the knee-jerk nationalists) Mr. Gonzalez's mealy-mouthed utterances illustrate a strategy that assumes that they can go back to successfully fooling a majority of the people most of the time, like in '04.
"Mr. Nacchio made inquiry as to whether a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request." "When he learned that no such authority had been granted, and that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process," Mr. Nacchio concluded that the requests violated federal privacy requirements "and issued instructions to refuse to comply."
The good news is that there is a company left in America that places the privacy of its clients above the authoritarian demands of the police state. I’ve heard some reports that seemed to suggest that the three companies that did divulge the information were paid by the government. Greed disguised as patriotism. Those four words capture the essence of the Bush years.
'Yet nearly two years past a planned deadline, production of the card, known as the Transportation Worker Identification Credential, has yet to begin. Instead, the road to delivering this critical antiterrorism tool has taken a detours to locations, companies and groups often linked to Representative Harold Rogers, a Kentucky Republican who is the powerful chairman of the House subcommittee that controls the Homeland Security budget.'
The bad news is that many Republican members of congress and other "civil servants" have seen this war for the money making bonanza that it is for those in the private sector - the ones who sacrifice nothing in our war to make the world safe for greed and the neoconservative American way.
Millions of Republicans are coming to grips with buyer’s remorse according to a New York Times/CBS News Poll. Letting party loyalty cloud their judgement they have inflicted severe damage to our national image in the eyes of the world. "We should have stayed out of Iraq until we knew more about it," Bernice Davis, a Republican from Lamar, Mo., who said she now disapproved of Mr. Bush's performance, said in a follow-up interview on Tuesday. "The economy is going to pot. Gas prices are escalating. I just voted for Bush because he's a Republican, even though I disapproved of the war. If I could go back, I would not vote for him." It’s too late now, idiot. Consider yourself dope-slapped. At the rate we’re going, it won’t be long before we will have as many deaths on Iraq’s killing floor as we did on 9/11/01. Oh, that’s right! Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. News Flash! David Letterman just said that Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter’s book is titled I Like Bush. But I digress. The poll shows that, increasingly, Americans are finally realizing that the holier-than-thou pontifications and puffed up patriotism of the Republicans were nothing but pasture pastries. “Fifty percent said Democrats came closer than Republicans to sharing their moral values, compared with 37 percent who said Republicans shared their values. A majority said Republican members of Congress were more likely to be financially corrupt than Democratic members of Congress, suggesting that Democrats may be making headway in their efforts to portray Republicans as having created a "culture of corruption" in Washington. “Seventy percent of respondents said the country was heading in the wrong direction, compared with 23 percent who said they approved of the direction in which the country was heading. Those findings are not significantly different from the responses to a CBS News poll last week and suggest that Americans are more pessimistic about the country's direction than at any other time in the 23 years that the Times and CBS News have asked the question.” The annoying thing about all these numbers is that the truth was there to be seen by anyone who bothered to pay attention. The Republican assholes (pardon the redundancy) chose to ignore the facts and follow their leaders; much to our detriment. The red states should be ashamed, they need someone to slap some sense into them.
C-SPAN has been rerunning a tape of a January 23, 2006 press conference at which General Hayden defended the NSA’s unauthorized wiretapping. During the Q&A that followed the general’s presentation, a reporter tried to point out that the warrant-less wiretapping was circumventing the 4th Amendment because, as the general had said, the NSA was using “reasonable certainty” as their standard for wiretapping. When the reporter tried to point out, correctly, that the Fourth Amendment standard was probable cause, the general “corrected” him by insisting that the phrase “probable cause” was not part of the wording in the constitution. The general emphasized his point by saying that if there’s one amendment they are familiar with it’s the Fourth Amendment. A Google search brought me the wording which I’ll paste below… “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.” The scary thing is that nobody was able or willing to correct the false assertion that the high government official made. The questioning reporter tried to insist that the "legal standard" as defined by the Supreme Courtis probable cause but the gravitas of the uniform and the office enabled the General to dismiss the truth.
The recent Patrick Kennedy incident reminds me of a law I proposed a couple decades ago. It's a law that will never pass even though it's sorely needed. Anyone who's paying attention to the abysmally stupid legislation, i.e. prescription drug law to name just one, that has recently come from Washington would not be surprised to learn that the lawmakers had at least one martini too many while passing that law. The uneasy feeling I get is that the very people who are telling us that we should be sober when we drive our cars are often shitfaced drunk when they accept the bribes that buy their votes. It's clear that sobriety is much more important when you're steering the nation. It should be a felony for our representatives in Congress to legislate with a blood alcohol content of more than 0.05%. Communicating with lobbyists should be considered part of legislating for the purposes of this proposed law, since that's how most laws are conceived. This law will never pass because those who want to incarcerate pot heads are unwilling to admit that their intoxicant of choice (alcohol) is much more deadly and disruptive than the hemp plant, a plant that could cure us of our addiction to oil. Hefty hypocrisy taxes should be levied on those who proclaim their support for the war on drugs while imbibing alcoholic beverages.
Before Tom DeLay (R Texas) is convicted and locked up where he belongs we the people should impose a severe hypocrisy tax on the man who piously proclaims that Christianity is the only real religion. “Tom DeLay may look as though he's finished because he is quitting Congress, facing a trial on felony political corruption charges in Texas and being targeted by federal prosecutors in the Jack Abramoff scandal. But that would be dead wrong: DeLay recently told one of his pastors that God wanted him to leave Congress in part because He has bigger plans for DeLay. That pastor, the Rev. Rick Scarborough, introduced DeLay to a Christian conference just last week, saying, ‘This is a man, I believe, God has appointed . . . to represent righteousness in government.’” How do these people define righteousness? What perversion of Christianity embraces a system that encourages the “haves” to neglect the poor in an obsessive effort to join the “have mores?” The moral of the story seems to be that greed and corruption are synonymous with the type of faux “Christianity” that so many millions practice today. Can anyone count how many times Mr. DeLay proclaimed ours to be a nation of laws? The gullible masses will continue to believe anyone who is comfortable using the jargon of the religio-industrial complex. Proving that none are so blind as they who will not see, the faux christian leaders use Biblical verses, usually using the language of the King James version for theatrical effect, to pander to the greed and xenophobia of those who like to believe that our God discriminates against two of the children of Abraham. The belief that the creator of the universe would pick one ethnic group to favor above the rest says a lot about the heart that chooses to believe in such an injustice. Any parent who favors one child over another is a bad parent. Such favoritism is a human invention.
If I had a buck for every time some Republican windbag pontificates that ours is a nation of laws I would be able to fill my gas tank and pay my rent. (We the people should impose a hypocrisy tax on our legislators.) As is usually the case, the laws are selectively enforced, depending on who does the breaking. A case in point was illustrated in a recent NY Times editorial. “President Bush doesn't bother with vetoes; he simply declares his intention not to enforce anything he dislikes. Charlie Savage at The Globe reported recently that Mr. Bush had issued more than 750 "presidential signing statements" declaring he wouldn't do what the laws required. Perhaps the most infamous was the one in which he stated that he did not really feel bound by the Congressional ban on the torture of prisoners. "In this area, as in so many others, Mr. Bush has decided not to take the open, forthright constitutional path. He signed some of the laws in question with great fanfare, then quietly registered his intention to ignore them. He placed his imperial vision of the presidency over the will of America's elected lawmakers. And as usual, the Republican majority in Congress simply looked the other way. “Many of the signing statements reject efforts to curb Mr. Bush's out-of-control sense of his powers in combating terrorism. In March, after frequent pious declarations of his commitment to protecting civil liberties, Mr. Bush issued a signing statement that said he would not obey a new law requiring the Justice Department to report on how the F.B.I. is using the Patriot Act to search homes and secretly seize papers if he decided that such reporting could impair national security or executive branch operations. “In another case, the president said he would not instruct the military to follow a law barring it from storing illegally obtained intelligence about Americans. Now we know, of course, that Mr. Bush had already authorized the National Security Agency, which is run by the Pentagon, to violate the law by eavesdropping on Americans' conversations and reading Americans' e-mail without getting warrants.” Though Mr. Bush would be a major contributor to the hypocrisy tax coffers, he would be seriously challenged by the immigration hard-liners that want to deport the 12 million or so undocumented migrants that are currently doing our dirty work. Not to be outdone by any group are the members of the House Rules Committee that recently introduced a smokescreen called The Lobbying Accountability and Disclosure Act, H.R. 4975. The slick chairman, David Dreier of California, a Ken Doll look alike, skillfully excluded any attempt to meaningfully reform the rules that breed so much corruption in government. With bombast, rudeness and hackneyed rhetorical flourishes, duplicitous Dave foisted a farce that only the gullible believe will make one bit of difference. A nation of laws, indeed!
