The death of the U.S. soldier came as the United States marked Memorial Day. It brought to 2,467 the number of U.S. military members who have died since the war started in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
The NSA has secretly been collecting billions of phone call records with the aid of Verizon, AT&T and Bell South.This man has taken advantage of the lives of thousands of people to push a program that is illegal, immoral and goes against centuries of what
If you allow this man to say he has inherent powers as president during this time of war (which is actually an occupation, "authorized use of aggressive force") then there is no limit to what he can do.
H
e is already allowed to hold people without trying them and wiretap your phone without a warrant for making a call outside of the
Nixon left office because he broke the law. He broke into records unlawfully. Are we going to allow this president to do the same thing just because people don't have to physically open files to get the information they want? They have access to YOUR information.
On top of that, how far has this gone? All of these programs in the NSA are private. The NSA itself was private from the 50's till 1975 when it was forced into regulation under FISA in 1978. We found out Bush ordered the NSA to go behind FISA's back and wiretap
I'm repeating the article, just read it.
Yes, straw man voting has started for the Republican party. Straw man voting for the straw man party. But what does it really matter? They are the same party they've always been. So some of them didn't support the Dubai Ports World deal, so what. The only reason they didn't go along with King bush is because the public didn't go along with it. They are all trying to save face for the '06 and '08 elections.
bush couldn't give a damn because he's already gotten everything he wants. He can go party with the UAE and get more millions with his shady business partners after his dead duck presidency is finished. The Republican Party on the other hand will be around a bit longer than bush will. They need to get away from the imploding President bush.
Unfortunately Frist can't distance himself from bush. People thought this cat slicer might have been bush's Vice President if not for the fact that Cheney has been shooting people in the face and sucking their soul to keep his heart beating. So Frist made his one move in teaming with Schumer and he thinks that sucking up will be enough to pull his party out of the dumps. It's too late though.
We have already seen these "through the looking glass" party antics. It's a party that helps the rich 1% and leaves the poor drowning. It attacks countries that have nothing to do with 9/11 while their executive's administration let's facilitators of the attacks do business with us. It's a party that equates women's choice with pro-death. Frist, bush. bush, Frist. It's all the same. Romney and McCain are all the same.
Ever since George Bush got into office I was against him. Let me correct that. Ever since I learned he was running for president I was against him. I remember being in the politics chat in Yahoo telling people George Bush's state had the 2nd highest number of state sanctioned capital punishments in the world followed by CHINA. Back then I didn't add these fancy links that back up what I say.
Back then the president was arrogant enough to say "I'm confident, that every person that has been put to death in Texas under my watch has been guilty of the crime charged, and has had full access to the courts." Even when gross inadequacies in the trials of those convicted were shown to the man he replied "We've adequately answered innocence or guilt". (Answers like these would foreshadow his attitude in the future when he believed he had done everything adequately before wiretapping U.S. citizens, torturing prisoners in Abu Graib and attacking a country under false assumptions.) Yes, this president deals with inadequacies in the same way an absent-minded teenager deals with a minimum wage job.
But most of America doesn't appear to care about the murders occurring in the industrial prison complex. Americans manage to shrug off the the possibility of innocence and continue supporting the death penalty. So at the time I thought I could use shock value.
George Bush has never really been an "environment man". He truly does look out for the interests of large companies (or the friends that own them). For at least a decade during Bush's reign as governor of Texas there were babies being born without brains in the Rio Grande Valley. Along the U.S. Mexican border the rate of babies born with anencephaly can be anywhere from 2 to 8 times the nation-wide rate each year and tends to be higher than rates in many third world countries. The $3-$4 million dollars spent on researching this phenomena makes you wonder how much the businesses Bush supported in Texas are getting. Just as the Bush administration argues global warming doesn't exist he argued the increase in businesses (businesses that were largely not held accountable for the toxic waste they exported) would help environmental conditions. You increase industrial activity and population and pollution decreases. Go figure.
So no one listened to that. Then I remember personally talking to someone from Florida. (I didn't know it would be the problem it turned out to be at the time. I thought it would be close at the time I was talking about it but I didn't think they'd be subtracting votes and acting like the state was theirs from the get-go) This person from Florida personally told me their vote would not count. This person was not a convicted felon, didn't err in registering and probably could have made it to the booth (all three things that disenfranchised thousands of voters). This was a democrat who just said "I'm not voting", a youth. I'm a youth too and it pains me to speak to another who doesn't care. No, I can't say it truly pains me. It angers me that I can't be empathetic with their position. If not for ethical reasons I'd bust someone upside the head when they tell me they're not voting when they are able.
So I had my dose of pre-election fire. I remember printing out "Vote Gore" several times on sheets of paper and placing those pieces of paper across the country during a road trip. Fun times. Alas, Gore did not win. My first time being more than superficially involved with the upcoming election turned out to be a bust. I actually couldn't believe it. My family had been watching the television until we saw Gore win Florida. Then we went to the voting booth (this was in California). After we came back home (which didn't take more than 15 minute) Gore had some how lost control of the state. Talk about surreal.
"We have to address the fact that the president has broken the law." -- Senator Russ Feingold
In a letter to the Senate Judiciary committee yesterday, Attorney General Gonzales provided a "clarification" of his previous testimony in which he admitted that, from the very beginning, the President as King theory upon which this administration operates has guided the President's actions. He confirmed that the President has been acting as though the Constitution allows him to break the law.
In his letter, Gonzales revisited earlier testimony, during which he said the administration immediately viewed a congressional vote in September 2001 to authorize the use of military force against al-Qaeda as justification for the NSA surveillance program. Bush secretly began the program in October 2001, Gonzales's letter said.On Feb. 6, Gonzales testified that the Justice Department considered the use-of-force vote as a legal green light for the wiretapping "before the program actually commenced."
But in yesterday's letter, he wrote, "these statements may give the misimpression that the Department's legal analysis has been static over time."
Fein said the letter seems to suggest that the Justice Department actually embraced the use-of-force argument some time later, prompting Gonzales to write that the legal justification "has evolved over time."
One government source who has been briefed on the issue confirmed yesterday that the administration believed from the beginning that the president had the constitutional authority to order the eavesdropping, and only more recently added the force resolution argument as a legal justification. [emphasis mine]
Let me repeat. The administration believed from the beginning that the president had the constitutional authority to violate FISA. The administration believed from the beginning that it was above the law and because they believed the President was above the law, the President BROKE the law. All of these "evolving" legal justifications for the illegal warrantless wiretapping of American citizens have been nothing more than diversions, window-dressing to make us think that the administration FELT like it had to provide justification for it's illegal actions. Whether he intended it or not, Gonzales just admitted that, from the very beginning, the President has operated as King.
Before the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees even consider revising FISA, they need to address the fact that the President of the United States is an admitted criminal.
-Taken from DailyKosSen. Charles E. Schumer, an outspoken liberal Democrat from New York, two weeks ago began publicly denouncing a deal to let a Middle Eastern firm take over terminal operations at six U.S. seaports. From the other end of the political spectrum, even more outspoken conservative radio host Michael Savage was doing the same -- and recruiting Republican lawmakers to his cause.
It was on Feb. 13 that the Dubai Ports World deal -- after simmering unnoticed for months in the federal bureaucracy and the transportation trade press -- started to boil, as a result of Savage's blustery on-air alarms and an event by Schumer at the New York harbor with families who lost loved ones on Sept. 11, 2001.It was not until Feb. 16 that Bush was informed by aides of the controversy -- and that his own administration had approved the port deal a month earlier. It was not until five days after that, on Feb. 21, that Bush spoke up in support of the port deal. By then, dozens of prominent lawmakers in both parties had joined Savage and Schumer in questioning the president's commitment to national security.
You can read the whole article here. It is analyzing the port deal and how bush reacted slowly and some might say inappropriately when the uprising began.
So he was tardy in responding to us getting attacked on 9/11, he was tardy on Katrina and he was tardy with our security in the port deal. He used to own the Texas Rangers right? Has he ever heard of three strikes?
Then again maybe we should let him go with two since he was nowhere near tardy when he said "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. He might be a good 10 or 15 years early for all we know.
I wanted to get a transcript of the "State of the Black Union 2006: Economic Empowerment" so I could get the words of Minister Farrakhan. I see I will have to purchase the DVD from C-Span :p I searched for a news article that might give you a glimpse into the words of Farrakhan but I could only find watered down, misdirecting, out-of-context versions of the event here, here and here.
These versions of the event aside, Farrakhan's words are of major importance. I'm going to make an attempt to paraphrase it, We have attempted to work "inside the box" with this country. We have played by the rules of this country. We have also been burned by this country while playing by the rules.
Harry Belafonte was at this event and the honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan recalled a moment Belafonte had with Reverend Martin Luther King, a few weeks before his assassination, in which Mr. Belafonte had asked why King looked so "melancholy". King answered that he feared he was integrating his people into a burning house.
His fear was not unjustified. This house has been burning for 400 years. We can tell it is still burning because, as Barbara Jordan had said, we want "an
An oppressed people have never been freed by their oppressors. The oppressed can only free themselves by reforming the system that oppresses them, or by destroying that system. We have already tried to reform the system and the system has failed us. The only choice we have is to remove this president, remove this government and replace it with something that works.
It's more than that though.
It's a call to justice.
It's a call for movement
It's an enlightenment of what the leadership in this country is thinking
and doing
It's a call to tell others about what's going on
It's a call to uproot a tyrant
Then there is more than I can think of at the moment that I am sure others got out of it. Like Smiley said. You didn't get that even if you think you got it. It might be days, weeks and even months until some people understand what's was said.
Now this is just a little bit of easy reading for a friend of mine (you know who you are). The question came up, and I paraphrase, Why would we attack
The pipeline through
Halliburton dips it’s hands in
So that’s just a taste. This day's for you LD
Washington - The Dubai firm that won Bush administration backing to run six U.S. ports has at least two ties to the White House.
One is Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose agency heads the federal panel that signed off on the $6.8 billion sale of an English company to government-owned Dubai Ports World - giving it control of Manhattan's cruise ship terminal and Newark's container port.
Snow was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, the year after Snow left for President Bush's cabinet.
The other connection is David Sanborn, who runs DP World's European and Latin American operations and was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration.
Why does a president need extraordinary wartime powers when we are not in wartime? If this is a war why have we not made a declaration? Why have we gotten "Authorized use of force" instead of war? This is not palatable. We are not fighting a threat. If
I don't have the energy. I don't know what common sense is anymore.
If terrorists are such a threat to our country why are we still eating butter? Why are 30,000 people being laid off at Ford instead of being kicked into high gear in order to build more military supplies? Why are people walking around without being taxed feeling like there is nothing going wrong? Can't you just taste something is wrong. Why am I able to type this down without any worries? Where is the draft? I don't even see people riding around with flags any more. Is it possible that 9/11 was a fluke?
Maybe we aren't destined to not be attacked ever. Maybe, just maybe, 1775, 1812, 1865, 1917, 1941...maybe the Cold War and
It is completely understandable that 9/11 occurred. I'm not going to belittle any of the people's lives or anything but get over it. You can do everything you can possibly do outside of putting tags on ever citizen and non citizen in the U.S. (and I mean tagging their brain so you can press a button and off us) and there is still the possibility of getting hit. Put that on top of our mentality to put others down in order to stay ahead and you will always have an enemy.
Impeach bush. he broke the law.
This is the "Authorized use of force on
Gonzales is one weak puppet.
