Tom Tando (no Cred) is Resigning

We in Colorado's sixth congressional district have a golden opportunity before us, the chance to be represented by a more than one trick pony. Tom (no cred) Tancredo has announced that, regardless of the outcome of his Presidential campaign, he will step down.

Now Colorado's Sixth has never been held by a Democrat, not surprising, since it was only created after the 2000 census gave us another seat. The demographics of the district, particularly western Arapahoe county, have changed, giving us a chance to pick up the seat.

I certainly hope so. It would be nice to be represented in Washington for a change. Our Congressional delegation consists of Tancredo and Senators Wayne the Torturer and DINO Ken Salazarasaurus. Not much of Nosy's interests being furthered in the Beltway Vacuum these days. Picking up the seat would give us some well-needed representation in Washington and I understand we have a candidate. Since I can't find him on Google and verify that he's announced, I won't give out his name.

What happened to the CD6 Blog? The Progressive one? At any rate, there's some hope - our State rep converted from the Dark Side and we have a shot at Tando's (no cred, remember) seat. Life is good in CD6.

Democrats Cave on Torture

Can I please have a third party? One with some whatever dangling parts are required to stand up to a 24% President? It's no wonder young people are turning to radical alternatives like Ron Paul. In my youth they did too in Ross Perot.

I ask this question of our leadership: Do we condone torture? Even more fundamental, do we condone those who condone it? I realize Mukasey didn't say he endorsed waterboarding, he only refused to answer the question. Seems pretty suspicious to me, refusing to say that simulating drowning a person (a mock execution, by the way) is illegal.

But it doesn't matter. Our party caved in to a President with a 24% approval rating. I am willing to bet our DINO Ken Salazar doesn't join a filibuster, if one is even mounted. Our new party slogan: We're not as evil as the other guys?

(Obscenity removed)

Feinstein and Schumer Cave on Mukasey

So I guess torture, specifically waterboarding, is okay with some Democrats.

Shit.

TABOR - A Work of Fiendish Genius

Know your enemy, Sun Tzu tells us, and know yourself and you will always prevail. Knowing the evil genius behind the Taxpayers' Bill of Rights (TABOR) is essential to knowing the enemy we fight and our response is essential in defeating them.

The goal of the Right is to shrink government, normally defined as the amount of taxes they pay, no matter what the collateral damage. In conceiving TABOR, they found a way to shrink government on automatic. During good times, growth of government would be limited by the amendment but then, here's where the genius is expressed, when things turned bad, government would shrink and the decrease could never be recovered. Government would shrink automatically, State agencies would fight over funding and the original authors of the law would be forgotten. Enshrined in the State constitution, the law could not be bypassed without a vote. Higher education, transportation, education in general, services, all would shrink by default and on auto-pilot.

The marketing of TABOR speaks to the gut: Government is wasteful. By repeating that meme, the Right was able to make a case for TABOR despite dire predictions as to what it would do to State and local governments. Let's limit government's growth, they said, in such a way they can't simply vote themselves more money. But the first economic downturn guts government, the other side argues. They're just rationalizing, the Right replies, trust us, they're crooked. In the end, the Right won and TABOR became law.

Almost on cue, the economy tanked. State funding for transportation, higher education, services tanked with it so that our roads require billions of dollars in repair, our scholarship funds are non-existent and we're closing drivers' license offices to save money. Everything went as the "crooked" politicians had predicted and will continue to go as long as TABOR is on the books. We were smart enough in the last election to pass Referendum C to allow us to keep the refund checks we'd grown used to for State funding but that law will expire and TABOR will resume its relentless, automatized gutting of our State government.

We continue to fall for the Right's gut message. Politicians are corrupt, they say, resulting in Amendment 41 despite predictions of its effect in the Blue Book. Now children of State employees are ineligible for scholarships because of 41. They continue to flank us by using the gut argument. Politicians waste your money. Politicians are corrupt. Simple sentences, repeated until they're bored into the collective conscience and so self-evident that no cerebral argument can over come them. Those are our enemies and they will try again. Our only defense is the offense, speak to the gut. But being Progressives, it's incumbent on us to speak to the gut from the heart.

Delusional

If there has ever been an excuse for invoking the 25th Amendment and removing our Leader from office, it's his unwavering support of Alberto Gonzales. Gonzales's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee included "I don't know" more times than I can count and painted a picture of a person unable to fulfill his job. Yet Bush continues his "unwavering support", both of Gonzales and of Wolfowitz.

The man is obviously delusional. I've argued against impeachment or other removal from office of Bush before, mostly on political grounds (he's the best advertisement for Democrats I can imagine, among others). His unwavering support of these two men in spite of reams of evidence that they're either incompetent or evil supports his immediate removal from the office. He's obviously unable to continue his work for reason of insanity.

Tragic Events at Newt Gingrich University

Newt Gingrich made the infinitely dumbassed statement that if the students at Virginia Tech had been armed, they would have gotten the attacker before he got what, two, three of them? I suppose two or three college students are worth less than a historical misinterpretation of a single sentence (the second amendment) but let's fast-forward a few years to Newt Gingrich University on a beautiful day in April.

First a bit of background on NGU. It was established to train young Conservatives in ideology. There are no science classes, no history classes, no civics. Students study what they need to become lawyers, political hacks and charismatic church ministers, nothing else is important. When students arrive, the handbook requires them to bring a laptop computer, a handgun (the 9mm Glock is recommended due to its stability), a bible and a copy of the Bill of Rights for ritual trampling at convocations. An hour a week on the firing range is required and that is where our shooter learned to change clips in his Glock in two seconds.

According to School Doctrine and the Student Handbook, in case of a school shooting, students are expected to defend themselves. So when our shooter comes into the student union and starts firing into a prayer meeting, the students do what comes natural.

They freeze. These are future lawyers and politicians, not people of action. Little people get themselves killed defending others, they are the elite (school motto: Education for the Elite, Work for the Others). Finally, one of them realizes he's armed and pulls his Glock. The problem just compounded itself, as we soon will see. Our shooter is a college student, looks like a college student, dresses like a college student. Our other students look exactly the same. The net result of our first hero's standing and pulling his weapon is that there are now two nearly identical people shooting. So when the rest of the student body comes unfrozen, the result is a free-for-all, a melee, a circular firing squad, a slaughter.

Further complication: The school, castigated by armchair police tactical specialists in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, immediately broadcast over cell phones, e-mail, loudspeaker and carrier pigeon there is a shooter lose on campus. Any loud bang now instigates gunfights campus wide as jumpy college students with weapons but with no tactical training panic and start shooting one another.

The end result, hundreds are dead. The university president the next day announces sadly that it was obvious that the students were under-armed and that next year's freshman class will be required to bring assault rifles, the Glocks just weren't deadly enough. And, in keeping with school tradition, the students take out their copy of the Bill of Rights, carefully tape over the Second Amendment, and proceed to trample the documents into the bloody mud....

Second Amendment - Where's the Dumb Line

When the Second Amendment, the one so often abused by the Right, was penned, the most fearsome weapon fired less than one shot per minute. A musket was good for one shot and, if you didn't hit the person you were firing at, they could take it from you and beat you to death with your own weapon before you could reload. There was a good reason, though, for authorizing the citizenry to bear arms: America was broke. By allowing the citizenry to keep arms for hunting and defense - Kentucky was the western frontier in those days, the nation had an armed pool of recruits for the inevitable next war.

Fast forward to April of 2007. Weaponry has come a long way - one man armed with a modern assault rifle could hold off hundreds of War of 1812 regulars. Or kill 33 people including himself on a college campus. The weapon's manufacturer and the seller to the young man who had been committed to a mental institution without his consent are protected by laws based on the same Second Amendment. The Right would hold, again proving that we disappoint ourselves when we expect intellectual honesty from them, that the young man was perfectly within his right to buy the assault weapon.

Imagine the brouhaha if someone wanted to buy a combat-ready surplus MIG from the Soviet Union. I'm sure those very authorities would defend the right because the Second Amendment doesn't specify which arms we are entitled to bear, the very defense used for assault rifles, yes? They'd be all over the guy. He'd never be allowed to fly it, it would be taken from him by the very people who just defended the right of a disturbed young man to buy deadly weapons. What about nuclear weapons? Are they defended by the Second Amendment? A strict constructionist reading would lead to the conclusion that I, a citizen, given my unrestricted right to bear arms, could buy a nuclear weapon from whomever and keep it in my basement.

Ridiculous? Okay, where's the dumb line, then? I'd place it at the point where someone who'd been arrested for stalking, who'd been involuntarily committed to a mental institution, who was referred to campus counseling for the content of his essays. Perhaps you'd place it at nuclear weapons. That is the unrestricted right to bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment and the Founding Fathers whose idea of a weapon of mass destruction was a musket volley, one per minute.

Tortured Logic

The week's political events have led me to an intellectual impasse due to logic tortured worse than Gonzales would have enemies of the state. For all the tortured, circuitous paths the debate on the Iraq war has taken this week, there are two things I don't understand:

1. Why does the party who sent our troops into an unfounded, unnecessary war with inadequate armor, who keeps them in the indefinite war without any hope of an end or without any definition of what victory even looks like, who overstretches their resources, both man and material, who looks aside as their hospitals and homes decay to the point where they lie in their own pus and feces, and who manipulate soldiers' applications for benefits to avoid paying deserved benefits claim to support our troops?

2. Why does the same party claim that the other, the party who has exposed the lies leading up to the war, who has voted additional money into the supplemental appropriations bill to bring care for the wounded soldiers, who want to bring the troops sent to an unfounded, unnecessary war home isn't supporting them?

I suppose prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere isn't all the GOPers torture.

Cheney Diagonsed with Deep Vein Thrombosis

Shame they didn't take him to Walter Reed for treatment.

Accountability Triumphs

Compare Bush's steppin' and fetchin' (like their pants were on fire and their asses was catchin' - with nods and respect to the Charlie Daniels Band) to get to the Southeast in the wake of this week's tornadoes and his lackluster response at the destruction of New Orleans. What's the difference between then and now?

Oversight. Bush is quite frankly scared shitless of his own incompetence in the wake of last year's election. Oversight led to the firing of the head of Walter Reed and then, when the Secretary of the Army hired the incompetent who led the hospital into its current situation, the Secretary got sacked, too. Oversight, led by the Democratic party, is leading to restrictions on the Shrub's unrestrained attempts to form a monarchy of the Executive branch. Oversight and the Power of the Purse will stop the United States' downward slide into tyranny and it's Democrats doing it.

In fact, as Ann Coulter's attempt to bring John Edwards down using the word "faggot" indicates, the entire Right is running scared. The Democrats are showing them how to rule and all they have left are baseless insults. And Bush running to a disaster to show what a good leader he is. Without Democrats in power, he still would have been reading "My Pet Goat" and looking stupid for the cameras.

Completely Off Topic, Adobe Tech Support....

....sucks. Actually I'm not qualified to make that observation because they've made it impossible to contact them. The situation is as follows: A long time ago I bought a product from Syntrillium Software, Cool Edit 2000. In the interim, my computer took a digger (with help from me), causing me to completely re-install Windows XP. Since Outlook Express is an integral part of WinXP, the reinstall wiped out my saved mails and since the registration info was one, it's now electrosmog.

After resuscitating my 'puter, I wanted to re-install Cool Edit and naturally, since it's probably reached Uranus by now, I can't find the registration info. I search on Syntrillium Software and find they've been subsumed by the Adobe giant. Now the fun begins. You can't call Adobe - the number doesn't work. If you work for a living, you can't chat with Adobe since they shut down at 5:00 (isn't it always 5:00 somewhere?). You can't e-mail them because their "contact me" option leads to an endless round of faqs and self-help screens and when you finally get a link that says create a case, you can't.

All this tells me is never buy anything from Adobe. Granted they have some good stuff but if their idea of customer service is to make it impossible to obtain, Adobe is not a company to do business with. Photoshop is nice, but leave it in favor of someone who will support you when you inevitably have a problem that can't be solved with a FAQ.

They Fired the General in Charge of Walter Reed....

And replaced him with an able GOPer administrator known for letting soldiers lie in their own urine. As for this veteran, I'd go back on active duty just to participate in the firing squad for the traitors we so calmly refer to as the Bush Administration. Remember, Bush is a Republican, Republicans are Bush. Keep driving home the equivalence and Bush becomes our best advertising.

A Little Political Humor

Bill Clinton is placed against the wall, and just before the order to shoot him is given, he yells, "Earthquake!" The firing squad falls into a panic and Bill jumps over the wall and escapes in the confusion.

John Kerry is the second one placed against the wall. The squad is reassembled and John ponders what his old pal Bill has done. Before the order to shoot is given, John yells, "Tornado!" Again the squad falls apart and Kerry slips over the wall thus making his escape.

The last person, George W. Bush, is placed against the wall. He is thinking, "I see the pattern here, just scream out a disaster and hop over the wall." As the firing squad is reassembled and the rifles raised in his direction, he smirks his famous smirk and yells, "Fire!"

A Timeline of Bush Lies

Here's something neat from Mother Jones:

Bush's Timeline of Lies

You need popups enabled and it takes a few seconds to download. Lots of fun!

By the Numbers: Iraq = Vietnam

A lot of comparisons have been made between the Iraq war and the Vietnam war. One of the defenses of the Iraq war are the casualty numbers. After all, we lost 58,000 men in Vietnam but so far have only had 3,200 casualties in Iraq. So Iraq isn't as deadly, right?

Problem is the numbers the Pentagon itself put out that the ratio of killed to wounded is 16:1. That means we have had 51,200 wounded in Iraq (the Pentagon reports only in the mid-twenty thousand range but why should we expect consistency out of a Bush-controlled Government body). The Pentagon attributes the ratio, immensely higher than Vietnam at 1:2.8, to better body armor and better medical battlefield medical techniques and I'll give them that. So, if we were still using Vietnam-era technology, the number of casualties would be 51,200/2.8, or around 18,300. Given we've been at war about five years, the number of casualties per year would be 3,657.

Now Vietnam lasted 16 years and had 58,000 casualties. That places the Vietnam count per year at 3,625 per year. Statistically that's no difference. So there, by the numbers, Iraq roughly equals Vietnam. Not a grand distinction.

Bush Compares Himself to Washington - Where do I Hurl?

Where can I hurl?

Today the Deciderator actually had the gall to compare himself to George Washington, a man who had to be practically shanghaied into running for President and who maintained that Executive powers should be governed by restraint:

"I feel right at home here. After all, this is the home of the first George W. I thank President Washington for welcoming us today. He doesn't look a day over 275 years old," Bush said to laughter. (AP)

Furthering Bush's madness in comparing himself to the first President:

"And as we work to advance the cause of freedom around the world, we remember that the father of our country believed that the freedoms we secured in our revolution were not meant for Americans alone."

That, as people, including American citizens, are languishing in jails from South Carolina to Guantanamo, denied basic American rights by edict of the man who would compare himself to Washington? As I remember, Washington treated British POWs well and released them at the end of the war in contrast to the British treatment of American POWs. There is no comparison between the heroics and wisdom of Washington and the incompetence and arrogance of the latter-day "George W."

But "W" leaves an opening for us. For the next eighteen months we should never pass up a chance to equate Republicans with Bush, to contrast the deeds of the latter-day "W" with the first. The GOPers are their own worst press right now and as Sun Tzu wrote: "Keep him under a strain and wear him down."

The Long Implosion

In nucular (sic) weapons, the longer the implosion, the greater the explosion. The GOPers have been imploding since the American people rejected their ideology last fall and watching McCain campaign, the explosion just might be beginning.

It looks like John the former Straight Talker needs a little while to get his stump speech in order. Right now, he's spinning like a weather vane, pointing in every possible direction to see which way the wind is blowing. His position on gay rights flip-flops faster than bits in an Intel chip, he's now taking out his war frustrations on Donald Rumsfeld (not that Rummy needs any help in the screw-up department), his position on Roe v. Wade is diametrically opposite to his position as candidate McCain in 2000, in short, he's triangulating to the GOPer base.

That's exactly where we want him. McCain is living in the Conservative past, unaware that a new era of politics was ushered in by the 2006 election. His positions were almost universally rejected - even South Dakota rejected their draconian anti-abortion law. For the former Straight Talker to flip-flop this many times makes him vulnerable. He's always been a far-right politician, his lies in an attempt to win the 2000 nomination are now biting him where he's most vulnerable.

In his flip-flops.

"Keep him under a strain and wear him down" Sun Tzu.

Welcome to the Post Conservative Era

The election of 2006 marked the end of the era of the conservative. Reading an article in Der Spiegel (via Watching America, a website I highly recommend for all progressive thinkers) led me to believe that we are entering the Post-Conservative era of American politics. The writers point out that the Conservative Right were correct about two main issues, free markets and communism.

Now, with Ronald Reagan dead and Margaret Thatcher senile, the conservative movement is now led by the likes of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. While I believe Reagan actually did have the U. S.'s interests at heart, I believe the latter day conservatives, the Neocons, have little in common with the last Republican I'll ever vote for. We have seen deregulation become air support for corporate consolidation, free-market capitalism become plutocracy, small government become something more akin to a Soviet-era apparat. The Right has abandoned fiscal responsibility. All that's left of the movement is its inertia and, as we saw in 2006, that is running down.

What will follow, I have no idea. I don't think we'll return to the Liberalism of the '60's and I hope we don't mimic the apathy of the '70's. What I hope will emerge is a Democratic leadership motivated by the needs of the people and sensitive to the needs of business. Perhaps our new post-Conservative leadership will take action on global warming, restore the balance between haves and have-nots but one thing is certain, the Right will not die immediately. Conservatism might be on life support but a patient on life support can endure a long time.

I'm reminded of those who, forty years after the victories of the civil rights movement, are still racist. For a long, long time there will be pockets of Reagan conservatives out there preaching the old gospel and attacking those of us who have found another way. The Religious Right will not go away overnight, either, although their betrayals by political leaders may keep them out of politics for a while. We will have to deal with cries of "death tax" and "war on terror" and "soft on defense" and "entitlements" for a long time to come but election 2006 shows one thing: We've turned the corner. The Reagan Conservatives are a dying movement.

Ritter Betrays Labor

After insinutating he would sign the measure repealing the requirement for a second vote to unionize a shop, Governor Bill Ritter betrayed his supporters and vetoed the bill.

While perhaps not as aggregious as Ken Salazar's vote to shred the Constitution and deny habeas corpus to American citizens, this vote would indicate that we got another GOPer-lite in Democratic clothing in Mr. Ritter. I don't think a lot of the shopkeepers, Chamber of Commerce members, CEOs and sweatshop operators who work non-union labor for peanuts and who pressured him to veto the law voted for him in the first place. I don't think they will vote for him even after his blatant betrayal of his political base, either.

I do think organized labor will be hard-pressed to support him. This dumb decision, this pandering to the Right, may cost us the Governor's mansion after we finally won it back. Dumb move, Bill.

Dinosaur Flatulence and the GOP

Sometimes they write themselves. Any opportunity to use dinosaur, flatulence and the GOP in one sentence should never be avoided. How about this one: The flatulent sound of GOP dinosaurs debating global warming provides evidence of their ignorance and their unwillingness to be cured of that state.

I am referring in particular to Dana Rohrbacher (R, Calif) and his comments concerning the cause of a global warming incident 55 million years ago. One must credit the representative with believing that 55 million years ago is a plausible date; however, his paleontology leaves a bit to be desired. He credits the warm up and mass extinctions of the time to dinosaur flatulence. The only problem with his dinosaur fart of a statement is that the dinosaurs had been extinct for around ten million years by the start of the event.

Of course, the ignorant gentleman from California was simply trying to discredit global warming to the benefit of his elitest supporters. Nancy Pelosi, on the other hand, is willing to face the truth - the only way we're going to prevent a similar disaster of our own creation is to use less carbon. Rohrbacher apparently disagrees, proof that certain species of dinosaur will never die.

Paycheck Lenders - Proof of the State of the Bush Economy

Today I heard an article on paycheck lenders on NPR. These are legal loan sharks who charge up to 500% interest for people to take out loans against their next paycheck. If the lendee is not able to pay off their loan with their next paycheck, unlikely since their pay is so insufficient that they had been driven to the paycheck lender in the first place, the fees kick in and the lendee is never out of debt.

While there have always been pawn shops and organizations willing to lend against future earnings - some even will lend against a tax return - these groups have grown to the point where they have a powerful lobby in Washington. It is left as an exercise to the student to determine which side of the aisle they lobby hardest. I don't remember seeing these shops in great numbers during our last Presidency, only since the Bush economy has benefitted only the top one or two percent of Americans in terms of wealth have I began to see more and more of these shops around.

The growth of paycheck lenders illustrates one thing: Our economy is not benefitting the lower and middle classes of the economic scale. Investments are growing rapidly, as are corporate profits. Wages have declined under Bush, as has health coverage and the proposed budget would cut benefits for the lower end of the scale more. Bush has proposed 1.6 trillion dollars in tax cuts, primarily for the rich, while cutting Medicare and Medicaid benefits by $100 billion. It is this irresponsibility that leads to paycheck lenders becoming more common and the less fortunate becoming even less fortunate. It's Republican values - defend the elite electorate and dupe the others, just as they have done with the Religious Right, just as they have with the Lee Greenwood patriots, just as they have with anyone who isn't a member of their elite supporters.

Bush's Economy - Another Surprise Visit

The economy is good, if you're a stockholder, if you're a CEO, it's the best it's ever been. Republicans have all but eliminated your taxes and are trying to shift the rest of them to the backs of those of us who aren't benefitting from the economic recovery - wage earners and middle class families.

Class warfare? Damned right it is. The Republican elitists want you to believe what's good for the corporation is good for America and in some respects, they're right. The welcome the Elitist in Chief, President Bush, received on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange today should give some indication of the results of his policies. Stocks are trading at all time highs, meanwhile your health care costs continue to rise, people continue to lose coverage and by the way, in real dollars, you're making much less than during the past Presidency.

Bush's remarks indicate how out of touch he is. All the changes he outlined in his remarks were to the benefit of employers, not employees. Tell me how many people feeding a family can even afford the tuition to go back to school, much less the time. Meanwhile, Republicans want to link further tax cuts for business to an increase in the minimum wage. During the debate on the minimum wage, the good Senators from the right have made as much as a minimum wage earner earns in four months. That's elitist.

The Meme and the Minimum Wage

Today the Senate voted to end debate on the measure to increase the minimum wage to $7.25 over the next two years ending a week of debate in which Senator Ted Kennedy pointed out that every Congressman made as much money as a minimum wage earner will earn in four months. And naturally, the GOPers found a way to get their elite constituents a piece of the pie by saddling the bill with tax breaks for business.

Here's the GOPer meme: "Raising the minimum wage will cost some jobs," Al Hubbard, the director of the president's National Economic Council told reporters aboard Air Force One Tuesday. "We think it's important to counter that with tax breaks that will replace those jobs."

It never has in the past and if the economy is as strong as Tony Snow and George Bush keep saying, can't it absorb the cost? And it's worth pointing out that the pay increases for lawmakers alone over the past couple years outstrip anything a minimum wage earner makes in a year. Democrats have a chance to strip out the GOPer business welfare provisions from the bill in conference committee and I hope they do. And I hope we rub every GOPer nose who votes against raising wages for America's working poor in their own doo-doo for the next eternity. Our new meme can then be that the Republicans hate the poor.

The Deferred Tax Increase

Amid the usual Bushit of the State of the Union speech, one nugget reeked particularly like GOPer. The masterpiece of Bush's current "blame it on the next guy" strategy was the proposal to tax the fortunate few of us who have health care plans costing us AND OUR EMPLOYERS together more than $7,500 per year. And I have the reddest of fishwrappers, the Houston Chronicle, to thank for pointing this out to me.

Here's how it works. Say your employer pays three-fourths of your health care and you pay $100 per month, or $1,200 per year. You're safe - the total cost of your health care is $4,800 per year. Now when health care, unrestrained and unregulated by GOPer philosophy, doubles in cost again in five years, the next President's term, you'd be paying $9,600 together, meaning that now you are paying taxes on $2,100 in additional income. So either you are now paying taxes on your health care, a de facto tax increase hidden as a measure that, just five years ago, looked like a tax-the-rich scheme is now taxing you.

Sound like the Alternative Minimum Tax to anyone?

There's no guarantee that the taxes collected would go to universalize health care, either, only the guarantee that, under Bush's plan, your taxes go up when, inevitably, the routine cost of health insurance goes through the artificial ceiling that will never be raised.

That, friends, is a back-door tax increase that does nothing, kind of like the Republican President who proposed it.

How GOPers Support the Working Poor

The following Senators, all GOPers, voted against cloture on the Senate measure to increase the minimum wage to $7.25 per hour:

NAYs ---43 Alexander (R-TN) Allard (R-CO) Bennett (R-UT) Bond (R-MO) Bunning (R-KY) Burr (R-NC) Chambliss (R-GA) Coburn (R-OK) Cochran (R-MS) Corker (R-TN) Cornyn (R-TX) Craig (R-ID) Crapo (R-ID) DeMint (R-SC) Dole (R-NC) Domenici (R-NM) Ensign (R-NV) Enzi (R-WY) Graham (R-SC) Grassley (R-IA) Gregg (R-NH) Hagel (R-NE) Hatch (R-UT) Hutchison (R-TX) Inhofe (R-OK) Isakson (R-GA) Kyl (R-AZ) Lott (R-MS) Lugar (R-IN) Martinez (R-FL) McCain (R-AZ) McConnell (R-KY) Murkowski (R-AK) Roberts (R-KS) Sessions (R-AL) Shelby (R-AL) Smith (R-OR) Stevens (R-AK) Sununu (R-NH) Thomas (R-WY) Thune (R-SD) Vitter (R-LA) Voinovich (R-OH)

We the people (remember us) of Colorado voted to enshrine a fair minimum wage into our State constitution in the Great Republican Rejection of 2006. Note Allard, our not-too-soon to be retiring Senator and lover of torture, voted against the will of Colorado. Otherwise the usual suspects are in the list including Man of the People, John Blowin' in the Wind McCain.

These guys have truly lost touch. Try living anywhere in this country on $7.25 per hour. My bet is they'll say they're in favor of increasing the minimum wage, but only if we can decrease Paris Hilton's tax load on her inheritance (Bill Gates referred to the Inheritance Tax as the Opportunity Reallocation Tax, a much more descriptive label of the social function of the tax). So if you want the person waiting your table or cleaning your latrine to get a pay raise, you have to give the Hilton heiresses millions.

Supporting the poor, one millionaire at a time. Today's GOP.

If Illegal Immigrants were Cows....

Today I got one of those stupid e-mails stating implying that the Department of Agriculture, since it can find one cow with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease) from all the millions in the country, they should be allowed to search for the millions of illegal immigrants.

I had seen this BS so often I was fed up. I hit reply-all and replied, if you're willing to assume the civil rights of a cow, you'd be traceable, too. Problem is, the ones you want to find won't take that set of civil rights. You wear an ear tag from birth, you can be bought and sold at will, you can be bred or castrated at will, milked, slaughtered, moved, silenced, all the wonderful rights and privileges we afford our bovine companions (and the GOPers would like you to have). Meanwhile, those you'd find have all the freedoms you have today because they know one thing:

If every American were as easy to find as a cow with BSE, the bad guys would still be invisible in modern society.

So cut the bull.

A Great Argument for Curtailing War Funds

One of the best arguments I've heard in a long time for curtailing funds for Bush's war in Iraq came today during a debate over stem cell research. I believe it was Senator Lugar who was bloviating against funding the research, stating he was not only voting his own belief, he was voting the belief of millions of Americans. He felt it was patently unfair to ask millions of American taxpayers to fund research that violated their fundamental belief....

Okay, Senator. This war violates my fundamental beliefs, as well as those of millions of other Americans. I find it unfair that you want us to pay for it.

Think that little gem will have any effect on our GOPer friends? They're willing to cut off funds to support the Fundies, how about to support the millions of pacifists? I highly doubt it. Were we to raise the argument on the Senate floor that millions of Americans oppose the war; therefore, we shouldn't fund it, the GOPers would call the argument specious.

Shouldn't the same apply to their objections to stem cell research? Just asking....

Allard on What's Important

We have two Republican Senators from Colorado. Ken Salazar is a GOPer-lite who voted for Bush's torture and deny habeas corpus law, a gutless Republican wannabe who wouldn't stand up for the principles our country stands for. The other Colorado Senator, Wayne Allard, is a true-red old school GOPer whose idea of the most important thing facing this country is the immortalization of Ronald Reagan.

Come on, Wayne! El Paso County has already named I-25 the Ronald Reagan Expressway, what more does the ur-neocon need? The only differentiation between him and the dividers that followed is that Reagan was eloquent and I speak as a Reagan-Republican who later saw the light. Allard, one of the Great Dividers, now wants "bipartisanship" from the Democrats. I believe he should be given exactly the same "bipartisan" treatment his party gave the Democrats for the last twelve years - none. He believes the spirit of "bipartisanship" will move his meaningless tribute while his GOPer buddies wouldn't budge on it in the last congress. I hope our Democratic majority will move on more meaningful legislation and let Allard's go where Allard himself should - right down the political toilet.

Meanwhile, Republican-lite Salizar says In the next two years, "the politics of division, of the past, are politics we will be able to transcend." With his record of voting for torture, for drumhead tribunals and for denial of habeas corpus and suspected support of spying on American citizens without a warrant, I'm sure our GOPer-wannabe will be one of the first to reach across the aisle. I hope Congress can pull it together and find some statesmanship, God knows we need it to solve some of the problems we face but rather than forwarding a GOPer-lite agenda, I'd rather have the GOPers and GOPer-lites treated exactly the way the GOPers treated us for twelve years - ignore them.

A Republican Tax Cut

I'm sure somewhere someone promised a tax cut. Somewhere someone underestimated the amount required to do a job only Government can do and instead of finding a bathtub to drown Government in, the GOPers in charge of Arapahoe County chose a storm sewer. Maybe it was a gift to developers, maybe an undercollection of property taxes but for some reason, I got a card in the mail informing me I was about to be assessed for stormwater management.

Apparently it's for $76 million in stormwater improvements - read necessary drains to support the cancerous development in our area - and for unfunded Federal mandates. Okay, so we didn't fund the mandate at the Federal level, doubtless to make one of Bush's hoodin rob tax cuts (rob from the poor, give to the rich) square with the outlay. So that's been passed down to, ultimately, the county level. Instead of making the developers (and future homeowners) pay for the needed upgrades, they're passing it on to me.

The definition of impervious surface is an interesting one, too. My roof is an impervious surface although all storm water runs off into my yard, into my soil to nourish my grass. Yet that will be included in the assessment. The agency assessing the fee performed the analysis to determine how much of my property is "impervious". My patio never drains anywhere except into my yard. I'm sure that's in my assessment.

Long story short, this is the result of GOPer tax cuts - the bill gets passed down. The party who claims to support individual initiative is now passing the costs of development on to me, living in an area that's been developed for fifteen years. Government, reduced to a size capable of being drowned in a storm drain, is no longer capable of meeting its bills with the taxes it takes in; therefore, the cost gets passed from developers and McMansion owners to, well, me.

By the way, I don't own the sidewalk. Bill Arapahoe County for that one.

Bad Idea in Colorado

Thanks to Jump to the Left for tagging my blog. Sorry, Jump, I can't respond right now. For all who haven't heard, we're having a blizzard here in Denver. New powder and I'm stranded about a hundred twenty miles east of where the action is. Consolation is that while this kind of storm dumps a lot of snow on us, the resorts west of the Divide don't get it.

Speaking of not getting it, there's a move afoot to modify Colorado's anti-monopoly law. Basically, it prevents people from selling a commodity such as gasoline or prescription drugs below cost to drive competition out of business. When I heard there was a move afoot to modify the law to allow Safeway to sell gas below cost to drive Mom-and-Pop gas stations out of business, my GOPer alarm went off. Sure enough, it's our august Secretary of State, a GOPer, behind it. Surprisingly, though, he's managed to convince a Democratic Senator from Aurora the change is a good idea.

It isn't. Like "deregulation", this law allows GOPer contributors - big businesses with deep pockets - to take a temporary loss to eliminate a competitor. As with "deregulated" industries such as telecommunications, once the small competitors are eliminated, the big guy can charge what they want. The supporters of this law disengenuously argue that if a person sells gas at $1.00 per gallon - a huge loss, competitors will do the same then when the survivor goes to $4.00 per gallon, the competition will undercut them. Problem is, no competitors will be left to undercut them, exactly what the big operators are wanting to happen. This is true with pharmacies as well. Wal-mart drives the corner drug store out of business then sells at whatever price they want or even better, refuses to sell contraceptives based on "principles."

Allowing big business to buy out their competition by taking a loss on their products is not a "competitive" measure as sold by its sponsors, it's anticompetitive. I wonder who bought the sponsors.

This bad idea should disappear from the legislative radar as soon as possible.

Amendment 40 - Judged and Found Lacking

This is another of those amendments that seem better than they are. What could be better for the state than mixing up the Judicial branch every few years, throwing the experienced old farts off the bench in favor of some young firebrand? What could be wrong with being able to get rid of an ineffective judge every few years without all the trouble of impeachment? What would be wrong with the People holding the judges accountable more often?

Two words: Judicial impartiality. Elected judges are beholden to political parties and to campaigning, things I really don't want arbiters of the law doing, particularly in today's ideologically-charged environment. We have a more than adequate system of initially screening judges. The Governor can't just pick someone, a commission has to approve the nominees then after two years the judge has to stand election for retention. They are required to retire at age 72.

This amendment builds in a "loading" of the court every ten years, as the Governor then can appoint a supermajority. There goes that judicial impartiality - the judges are then beholden to the Governor and his ideology. It also eliminates experience, something this lefty approves of. Judges tend to move to the left as they mature on the bench, a nice little trend considering the current makeup of the U. S. Supreme Court. And finally, every two years we have the choice to retain or dismiss a judge or justice. Should we exercise this choice, good. Should we keep a bad judge, it's the people's fault.

Amendment 40 is another bad idea. Vote against it and vote against bad justices, let's not limit ourselves to re-selecting them constantly.

Amendment 39 - School Improvement Republican Style

On the surface, Amendment 39 sounds like a great idea aside from its blatant attempt to write what should be statutory into the Constitution. According to Amendment 39, 65% of all public education funds would be spent on "specific items", code for in the classroom. There is a similar measure called Referendum J that would mandate a similar percentage but would not be constitutional nor would it be the absolute mandate for school districts Amendment 39 is.

If Amendment 39 is such a great idea, why does every teacher I know, including my partner, oppose it? Quite frankly because it would mandate how school spending is spent regardless of the situation with in the district. Amendment 39 includes only the following items in its 65% solution:

Teachers, Classroom Aides and Tutors
Libraries and Librarians
Books and Instructional Material
Classroom Computers
Field Trips, Athletics, Arts and Music

Glad to see they're not going to limit the football team.

This list omits a few key players such as principals, support staff (includes school nurses, food service, guidance counselors and bus drivers), support services such as student testing, college placement, health and medical services, food services and transportation. Also included are the school boards, building construction and maintenance and central administrative functions.

In short, we're supposed to support the schools on 35% of the school budget. The problem is not the need to save in administrative areas, it's the areas that will need to be cut to meet the standard. For example, if a district isn't spending the required amount in the classroom, food service could be cut. That's school breakfasts and lunches. My partner will tell you quickly, you can't teach a hungry child. Transportation, likewise. You can't teach them if you can't get them to school.

This is an ill conceived measure designed to fool people into thinking they're doing something good for schools. It completely denies the fact that administrative costs may be necessary, as may be services such as hot lunches and medical care. It will impact exactly those who need education most, the poor in rich districts and everyone in less rich ones. This one is a definite no but if you do have to vote yes on this, vote yes on Referendum J as well. Better yet, vote no on both and keep schools under local control.

Here a very good link to a draft description of Liberal Values:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com...liberal-values_b_31218.html

I'd challenge a Conservative to come up with something similar.

Amendment 38 - The Ballot Initiative Goes Amok

Again I mention my love-hate relationship with the ballot initiative in Colorado. I love it for its citizen democracy concept - we citizens can actually pass a law. I hate it for the special interests who try to use it to get out their base, to discourage others' bases and to pass crap laws that would never survive the public scrutiny of our elected leaders, idiots that they often are.

Amendment 38 would, on the surface, increase access to the ballot initiative process and make it uniform across the state. Not bad on the surface but its expansion of an already amok process is unpalatable. It also limits the use of exemptions - legislative measures to protect laws from change by ballot initiative - to a hard number, ignoring the fact that there is not a good hard number to assign. It'll stretch ballots, already long with spurious measures, and cost us an election every year. There are positives - it encourages changing statutory law instead of the Constitution but those positives don't offset the negatives of a bill that would allow citizen-democracy to run amok and develop into what Aristotle called the worst form of government, mob rule.

Amendment 38 would best be consigned to the dustbin of bad ideas. Vote against it.

Salazar's Mea Culpa

Today Ken Salazar offered a lame excuse for voting to shred the Constitution and grant Bush powers normally reserved for the likes of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh and his old buddy Castro. Here goes:

http://salazar.senate.gov/news/releases/061006mil.htm

He knew, he said, that it was a bad bill but it was the best we could get at the time to move along detainee trials. Under the circumstances dictated by the law, Ken, what's the point? Just declare them guilty and be done with it. And by the way, do the same with the American citizens that can now disappear from the street into places like Guantanamo. Get the tribunal to declare them enemy combattants under criteria defined by the President or the Secretary of Defense and you're done with it.

Colorado does not need Democrats of Salazar's stripe, either Ken or John. John can be job hunting in two years, Ken in four. Let's work for that.

God bless Amerika!

More Amerikan Justice

A follow up, this from NPR:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6211231

Is this what America is about?

Amerika, 2007

President Bush's law providing cover for torture also would seem to provide cover for instances like this one:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061006/ap_on_re_us/guantanamo_alleged_abuse

Bush's Amerikan Gulag Authorization Act of 2006 not only provides legal cover for those beating helpless prisoners - the Marines in the story linked above are good examples - it provides for the "disappearing" of Americans. There's a provision of the law that allows Americans taken as enemy combattants to petition for habeas corpus but the hook, the part that gives Bush powers generally reserved for the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh is that once taken, he can convene one of his drumhead "tribunals" have you declared an enemy combattant and then, your right to petition for your freedom is gone.

Then in come the Marines, no longer afraid that smashing you repeatedly into the bars of your cell is a war crime. Not only are they covered, you are never going to see American soil or breathe freely again.

Even more frightening, Bush and Rumsfeld won for themselve the right to set "other criteria" defining you as an enemy combattant. Writing this blog opposing Bush's policies could be construed as providing "material support" to the enemy or Bush or Rummy could just make up new criteria. Then it's off to the Gulag for your Humble Author. Then in come the CIA interrogators.

Torture is not a technique for extracting information. It's a technique for extracting confessions and intimidating opponents. And it's legal now.

And in come the Marines.

God bless Amerika.

An aside from Colorado matters, did anyone notice that Condi had to sneak into Iraq again today? Of course, somewhere in that cavern called a mind she still believes we believe it was a "surprise" visit. In reality, the security situation there is so bad that our officials, Prez included, can't announce their arrivals for fear of shoulder-fired missiles.

Stayin' the course: 22 Americans dead there this week. We aren't even bothering to count the Iraqis. God bless Amerika!

Ballot Initiatives, Love 'Em or Hate 'Em

I got my blue book today although it's printed on unbleached brown paper. That thing is HUGE! It's a good half-inch thick, compressed. It's my intention to go through the initiatives over the next few days from a progressive point of view but first I'd like to talk about the ballot initiative process itself.

I both love and hate the process. It embodies all that is both good and bad about our democracy - citizens can effectively say to their lawmakers "this is what we want" on an issue. On the other hand, special interests can also use the initiative for their own purposes, not always aboveboard as we'll see when we get into the actual initiatives. The grossest abuse of the initiative process is to amend the Constitution, already a monster of a document, to enshrine measures that should have been law in an almost repeal-proof form. Bad law can also be passed through populist sentiment, TABOR is an example of a law that appeared good on the surface but had unintended consequences during the recent economic downturn and required a ballot initiative to fix.

At its best, the ballot initiative is a way to get reluctant lawmakers off the pot. At its worst, it's a populist nightmare. Am I glad we have the ballot initiative? You bet. I'm just glad that few of them tend to pass. And that Coloradans, by and large, are a whole lot brighter than our lawmakers believe we are.

God bless Amerika!

GOPer Implosion Continues

Isn't the election in five weeks? Shouldn't the GOPers (Greedy Old Perverts) be on attack message now, impugning the patriotism of Tammy Duckworth, who lost her legs in Bush's Iraq? Shouldn't Rove be orchestrating Soft on Terror, Stay the Courses, all the talking points that have passed for Presidential leadership the last six years?

Thanks to Mark Foley, it isn't the case. The GOPers are in serious defensive mode thanks to the revelation that Mr. Foley, R, FL, has been sending inappropriate IMs to sixteen year old pages and quite probably has had assignations (read gay sex) with some of them. That we don't yet know. Hastert is flopping around like a dying Snakehead, I fired him, I didn't fire him, I knew nothing about it, it was just overly friendly, every hour a new story. Reynolds and Shimkus are both wounded for not taking action or for being overly supportive of Foley and those who got donations from him are dumping the money as quickly as they can.

Frist, too, contributed to the meltdown. Yesterday he suggested the Taliban should have a place in the Afghan government. Weren't these the guys who supported and sheltered Osama? Weren't they the ones we fought to liberate the country and then, after our distraction in Iraq, allowed to become resurgent? Aren't they the folks killing our allies over there? No matter, Frist thinks they have a place at the table. GOPers don't support Chavez, legally elected by a greater majority than Bush ever enjoyed, or Hamas, they're inconvenient examples of failures of democracy yet Frist can ask the Taliban to be part of the government.

And Bush, engineer of the train wreck that is America in 2006 will be in Colorado tomorrow to raise money for the flailing Bob Beauprez. It must be bad for Bob, he will even be seen with the Shrub. At last count, Ritter was leading by 17%. I'd bet being seen with Bush will drop Beauprez to 20% behind. I just wish there were some way to tie Tancredo to the GOPer sex scandal. We seriously need some new representation out here in Colorado HD6.

Meanwhile, Maf54, Foley's screen name, still lurks on the Internet. NPR reports that the Bush EPA buried a report that said their soot standards will cost 4,000 American lives per year in the name of economic progress and furthering the Rapture. Somewhere in Clear Creek County, bark beetles have killed another tree. God bless Amerika.

Ah, the Greedy Old Perverts

The Mark Foley story, outside of the mainstream media, of course, has been quite amusing in a sick way. Let's see, Hastert is already throwing the "threaten the leaker" card around instead of going after the perpetrators and their enablers (including himself, if truth be known). Foley is still out there on the streets, presumably having learned that IMs aren't secure. The GOP is asking if they can use Foley's money, of all things, for other House races. Talk about giving the other side a line: "Candidate x uses money raised by registered sex offender and child predator Mark Foley..." And finally, there's a bit of an exoneration for Clinton: At least Lewinsky was of the opposite gender, of age of consent and as far as we know wasn't coerced.

The interesting thing is how it will play with some of my more conservative friends with kids. One has said on ocassion that he'd kill anyone who got close to one of his boys. Will he still vote GOP? Or will his values allow him to see through the plot, the the leadership of his party enabled and covered for Foley? They even kept his contact with the pages alive, providing him a steady stream of victims. Will he abandon the Greedy Old Perverts or will he rationalize it.

I'd bet the latter. He's a good guy but he has the same delusions as most of the fanatical GOPers I know, the ones who give our current gang of incompetents their 35% approval rating.

God bless Amerika.

The Salazars' Betrayal

The Salazar Brothers, Ken and John, betrayed Colorado last week with their vote to turn the United States into a law of torturers and gulags. The interrogation techniques their "yes" vote on the Republicans' effort at absolute power for the executive made legal the United States's use of the same interrogation techniques the Vietcong used so effectively on our airmen and that the Khmer Rouge used to great impact on their population. Further, the vague language of the bill allows Bush and Rumsfeld to make "enemy combattants" out of effectively anyone they please. So the scenario is now we take anyone we want off the street and if we never want to let them go, we declare them enemy combatants and never give them a trial. If we do, we waterboard a confession out of them - perfectly legal since the act allows coerced testimony - or find someone to present "hearsay" evidence against them. Then we put them in a prison overseas, away from the prying eyes of American journalists and the citizenry, just as the Nazis put their most notorious death camps outside of Germany.

The betrayal goes even further than passing the worst possible measure for America. It demeans our national values. No one who isn't willing to torture the nine year old daughter of a suspected terrorist to extract "information", most likely useless, from the terrorist should support someone else doing it. It gives Bush and his CIA torture squad a free pass for illegal actions under the War Crimes act and the Geneva Conventions and it makes us the enemy I served to defeat - the Soviet Union.

"The bill I voted for today was the best bill we could reasonably expect in this highly charged political environment," said Ken Salazar on his web site in his mea culpa for voting for the measure. "Due to the many controversial and far-reaching implications of this bill, I believe it would be appropriate to force Congressional review of this bill in five years. I have concerns with this bill, but on balance it meets my personal view of what America needs to get the job done."

Will Congress review the bill in five years? Are we assuming a Democratic takeover of power and a less power-mad president (remember the legal maneuverings they took to keep Jose Padilla in prison for four years without being accused of anything)? Was a bill that allows torture, that eliminates habeas corpus for those held as enemy combatants and that gives criminals a free pass the best we can come up with? And finally, does the Senator not imagine that Republicans will use the twelve Democratic votes for the measure as a proof of "bipartisanship?"

In short, Ken and John Salazar have betrayed the people of Colorado, the nation and our Democratic party that got them elected despite the Republican headwind of two years ago. If I had wanted to vote for a Repubican-lite, I'd have voted for their opponents.

Both deserve to be ex-lawmakers in the next Democratic primary.

The Most Important Issue in America

Quick, what's the most important issue facing Washington right now. Is it the War in Iraq, the war against radical jihadists? The deficit? Health care? Poverty?

To Marilyn Musgrave, it's gay marriage.

Misplaced priorities, anyone?

I keep remembering that kiss Bush gave her on the head. That brain wasting disease Bush seems to suffer from must be contagious.

Global Warming - A Visual

Today I went up to Summit County to ride my bicycle. As always, I'm astonished and depressed at the damage the bark beetle is doing to the forest there. Just a rough visual, one in four trees are dead and I'm certain numerous others are infested. It seems there's no stopping the pest. The town of Dillon was taking draconian action, clearing their forest of infected trees yet it is most likely too little, too late as the beetle has finally spread east of the Continental Divide.

The bark beetle is a poster child for global warming. In the past there were bark beetles in our forests but the winter got cold enough to kill off most of the grubs. Now that's no longer the case. Last winter it was warm enough our snowpack began to melt in March. Combined with the close spacing of our trees due to excessive fire fighting, the beetle can march eastward almost as fast as the Japanese beetle is marching westward.

This comes amid rumors that Bush is about to convert to the anti-global-warming camp. The timing is suspicious as is the conversion - Bush is desperately trying to avoid two years of congressional subpoenas so is willing to grasp at any straws. I compare this to his Christian conversion. Bush is nominally a born-again Christian yet he lies, cheats, tortures and falsely imprisons. For five years he has fought any restrictions on greenhouse gas emission, citing the famous cigarette-maker pseudo-scientific obfuscational phrase, "It's not completely clear that...." For years Bush and the Republicans have used this phrase in lieu of coming up with any sound scientific alternative to global warming, indeed, that's the purpose of the phrase, to stall. It's an attempt to fillibuster science.

So don't get me wrong, I'm not implying that Bush can't have a change of heart. I just suspect very strongly that his "conversion" is politically motivated and about as sincere as his so-called devotion to Christianity.

The 65% Solution

On the surface, it sounds like a great idea. Write into law through the ballot initiative that 65% of all education funding must be spent in the classroom. Great, you say. Mandate that we can't be wasting money on lavish administrator salaries and grounds and all that fluff. Now ask yourself, why would GOPers, conservative sponsors of the measure intent on raising private education up as the model of an efficient educational system, want to add money to the public schools?

They don't. What they want to do is shuffle money. Rest assured, this bill will raise no new funds for education in Colorado. Instead it would move money from transportation and school lunches out of those programs and into the classroom. Great, you say but here's the word of my teacher girlfriend: Try teaching a hungry student. And how, without transportation, are some of these kids to get to school in the first place?

The flaws in the initiative have prompted pro-education groups to add another initiative to keep the money to go to 65% classroom funding from coming from programs that will hurt students. Hopefully the Blue Book will spell this out and hopefully voters will read it and understand the implications of the GOPer 65% solution to lame public education even farther. I remain skeptical; however, I can hope for the best.

Please, if you must vote for the 65% solution, vote for the amendment requiring the money come from other sources than transportation and food assistance. You can't teach a hungry child and you can't teach one that isn't there. The GOPers' compassion would require teachers attempt to do both.

His Lips are Moving

Look here... A Washington Post story about the CIA closing the Bin Laden unit.

Then here.... Here Bush says "You know, there is a kind of an urban myth here in Washington about how this administration hasn't stayed focused on Osama bin Laden. Forget it. It's convenient throw-away lines, you know, when people say that."

Once again, Bush's actions don't square with his rhetoric. I tend to believe the actions. The hunt for Bin Laden will not progress as long as Bush needs him to support fear-mongering. This is the sick symbiosis we've created between our increasingly out-of-touch government and the terrorists they claim to fight.

Democracy on the March

I love it when the Shrub gets angry! It means he's not getting his way which also means Democracy probably has prevailed. No, George, you don't get to try the detainees using evidence they can't see. No, George, you can't use coerced (read obtained by torture) evidence and you can't use hearsay.

His jaw clenches. You can see the muscles clenching. Well, King George says, if you won't get me what I want, I'll just not try them! I'll keep them forever! Constitution be damned, they're terrists! We need to try the guilty bastards so we can shoot them!

No, George, it doesn't work that way. Even captured on the battlefield, the fundamental principle of American justice is innocent until proven guilty. Some of these guys are there for wearing a Casio watch. Some are there because they were caught near the battlefield in green clothes. Some are there because someone with a grudge sold them for the bounty. Some, if they weren't terrorists before they came to your little shop of horrors, are now.

And I just love it when he's at a loss for words. There's no comparison, he says, between the extremists and the U. S. He's right. Our body count is much higher, something in the 50,000-100,000 range. They're not worth counting to the Shrub.

A Sea Change in the Colored-Red State

We're on our way to renaming the state Coloazul.

Screw "purple state." We're going for blue.

Imagine...

Today the GOPer Senate laid a smackdown on GWBush - no way will we approve your drumhead tribunals that deny the accused the right to see all the evidence against him, that accept "coerced" (read "alternative interrogation techniques" or "torture") evidence or even hearsay before declaring summarily that the poor guilty bastard is indeed guilty. Firing squad tomorrow at dawn. No, they said, asserting for the first time in five years Congress's place as a co-equal branch of the Federal government. Imagine if it had been that way all along.

No Patriot Act and its incredible internal espionage provisions. There would have been action taken to break down the walls around the intelligence community, walls that should remain in place if for no other reason than to provide checks and balances and to prevent groupthink on a national scale, but civil liberties would have remained in place. Guantanamo and the CIA's black prisons and their incredible harm to the U. S.'s reputation in the world would have been shut down before it could have become operational. The rich would be paying for the war in Afghanistan, a war we should have fought to win, with their fair share of taxes.

We would not be in Iraq.

Abu Ghraib would never have happened.

The President would be on the Hill explaining why he considered it necessary to break the law and end-run Congress with his illegal wiretapping operation.

It would be different. The world I imagine is no fairyland, no eutopia but a far cry from the budding dystopia of the Bush administration. It will be nice to, once again, assert our rights and change the balance of power from one-party dystopia to the messiness of a semblance of balance of power. I am looking forward to November 8th, the start of the U. S.'s rebirth as a just nation and a good citizen of the world.

Tancredo Wraps Himself in the (Confederate) Flag

Tommy the Xenophobe shows his true Confederate colors:

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/news/item.jsp?aid=79

We knew he was a xenophobe and a white supremacist. Now he's openly attending Confederate rallies. What next, Hakenkreutze on his campaign posters? A shaved head? Seriously, I don't think Tom's extreme position represents Colorado's Sixth Congressional District and I certainly don't think we want him as a Presidential candidate. I can see him standing alongside Jefferson Davis but not sitting in the Oval Office spewing his bile.

It's time to end his political career. Vote for Bill Winter for HD6. We'd be much better represented than by a man who willingly wraps himself in the Confederate flag.

Casualties of 9/11

I honor the 3000 who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon five years ago. In addition to them, there are a number of other casualties of that attack, the greatest of which is the country I was ready to defend. Many of Republican Washington's policies are no longer defensible. This is the saddest casualty of the attack.

We lost foremost truth. Our government has systematically lied to us about a number of results of the attack, most notably the war in Iraq. Even though the Republican Senate has reported that there was no connection between Iraq and the attacks of five years ago, Cheney continues to assert there somehow is.

We lost our honor. We have become a country of torturers, something I would never have considered years ago. The Russians were the bad guys, they did things like waterboarding and "unconventional interrogation techniques." We were the good guys. No more can we make that claim.

We lost our civil liberties. This is the saddest of casualties and the greatest of victories for our enemies. We've become like them in that we will torture, we will kidnap, for what were the CIA's secret prisons other than organized, government-sanctioned kidnapping. We will imprison without the hope of trial and when the judiciary is engaged, the Government will play shell games to keep the prisoner from being tried, accused, counseled. We will summarily sentence the condemned without giving them the right to see the evidence against them and to confront their accusers all in the name of secrecy. No more can we claim the honor of shining beacon of freedom.

We've lost our moral compass. Espionage without oversight is considered by Republican Washington to be quite all right as long as it's not happening to them. Republican Washington wages a war based on lies but does not send their own nor do they pay taxes to support the war. Corporate profits are at an all-time high measured against the GNP while wages are at an all-time low against the same yardstick. We will not raise the minimum wage unless we cut $1.4 million from 8000 of America's wealthiests' taxes.

We've lost our leadership in the world. Republicans send a bully to the U. N. in the guise of a diplomat. We've traded our traditional allies for third-world partners of convenience who will support our twisted policies.

The greatest casualty of 9/11? America. I give up, the terrorists won.

Fascism, the Truth

It seems that everyone besides Republicans today are fascists. There are islamofacists, there are those who support fascism and the islamofascists (Cheney and Rumsfeld tell us that, anyway). Let's take a look at fascism's poster child of the last century, Nazi Germany.

First, fascism was great for business, at least at the start. One of Hitler's early successes was getting the trains running on time. Business, the rich and Germany's remaining nobles made out well under the mustachioed one. Meanwhile, the peasants didn't. They were regarded as fodder for the army, which we'll get to next.

Once he'd consolidated his power, Hitler began to use extreme nationalism under the guise of patriotism to keep up his support. Anyone who disagreed was first derided then actually persecuted, either executed or thrown into prisons on weak or no charges, denied due process and access to lawyers. He also generated an enemy in the Jewish immigrants, some of whom had been in Germany long enough to develop their own language - yiddish - based loosely on German. The Jews, it was self-evident, were destroying Germany. They were less than humans, parasites on the German economy and as such, deserved their treatment - extermination of six million of them in the ovens of industrialized slaughter.

War was another of Hitler's devices - see the quote from Reichsmarshall Goering at the top of this blog. By keeping the country at war with some imagined enemy or to attain some needed resource (lebensraum), Hitler kept nationalistic fervor alive despite killing eventually millions of his own people. Business and the rich at least financed Hitler's wars by donation of treasures and by serving.

Internal espionage was also an industry under Hitler. The Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolezi, or secret state police) brutally persecuted anyone dissenting with Hitler or working against the regime. They used any form of espionage and required no oversight, instead they just acted, often against even Germany's laws. And there was no defense against them, legal or otherwise.

In short, those calling their enemies fascists seem to have more in common with fascism than those they accuse. Our leaders support the rich at the expense of all others, wage war for resources and to whip up nationalistic fervor, invent enemies and use those real ones for propaganda, violate national law in an effort to spy on and control their own citizens, neglect the fiscal health of the country and ignore the rights of citizens, all in the name of security.

Which, by the way, was Hitler's reason for everything he did.

Bush's Economic Effectiveness - Two Great Stats

I heard two great statistics on NPR this evening that pretty much sum up the effectiveness of Repug handling of the economy. First the number of cars "torched" in Colorado to get out from under loans or to generate cash has risen from 7 in 2000 to 83 in 2005. Second, the number of homeless in Co. has gone from about 3,ooo to about 15,000 in the same period.

Real wages, meanwhile, have fallen by two percent in the same period. Sounds like not much until you realize that during the entire period, productivity and corporate profits have risen, profitability to its highest percentage of GDP since the 1960's.

Like what's going on? Continue to vote Repug, the party of stay the course.

Want change?

Doesn't Understand the Nature of the World

Bush claims his opponents, particularly the Federal judge who ruled his warrantless wiretapping program unconstitutional, "do not understand the nature of the world in which we live." I would submit it is the Chimperor who is not quite aware of the nature of the world or the restrictions on the office he holds.

I just returned from a trip to Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, my hometown. I was met by an astonishing poverty, something I never noticed while I lived due to what Jared Diamond calls "creeping normalcy." I observed this trip quite plainly how many people were living at or below poverty levels, some above the minimum wage but below what the Democrats would raise it to. Yes, these were people living on less than $12,000 per year. Many were involved in the work of being poor, some of these family members willing to talk with me about it. If you've never known poverty personally, it's hard, uncertain work. Many in this situation turn to drugs - I have family members in jail for making meth to give their children Christmas presents. Yet the Shrub and his Republican allies would tie an increase in the minimum wage to a tax cut for the richest 1% of Americans. An increase to $14,000 per year won't pull anyone up out of poverty but it might have kept a cousin of mine out of jail.

It's this reality, the reality of my own situation of losing buying power faster than my salary increases, of urban and rural poverty, of hopelessness that the Shrub and the Republicans don't understand. They're not willing to listen when anyone talks with them about it, the poor don't have advocates with deep enough pockets to buy an audience with a Republican Representative, let alone a Senator or the President. The Judge who ruled the Shrub's wiretapping unconstitutional had a far greater grasp of the nature of the world.

Bush can't concern himself with his job, much less the plight of others.

Tomorrow's Primary

Tomorrow I'll be having dinner with a visiting cousin from Kentucky. There are no contested Democratic races in Colo. 40, Colo House District 6 and it's still two years before we can vote Allard the Torturer out. So I'll be going to a nice restaurant with visiting relatives.

In the loca race between Peggy Lamm and Ed Perlmutter, no decision. It's been a negative campaign, they all seem to be now. Down in House District 5, six wingnuts are duking it out to represent James Dobson and the upper 2% of El Paso County (Colorado Springs). No matter who wins, wingnut or Bush clone, that district is so solidly repugnant, I mean, Repugnica... No, Republican, that the poor Democrat has little chance except in the staunchly liberal district in and around Colorado College. In this year, I may be surprised.

Best news is an NPR poll I heard a few days back. In the 50 competitive house races, the Democrat is currently leading in all of them. By six percent. Talk about taking back control, that's a 35 seat majority if it plays out. It ain't over for a while and we still have a lot of work. Better still, it looks like Lieberman will be running as an Independent Repugnican with a chance to win in a three-way race. Controlling the Senate is a longer shot but one worth dreaming about. Imagine the hearings we could have (he rubs his hands in maniacal glee....).

So tomorrow, in Colorado as elsewhere, may the best Democrat win.

How Misdirection Works

This afternoon, I was surprised at first to read that half of all Americans believe that Iraq had chemical weapons when we invaded them (I refuse to use the over-used and inaccurate "weapons of mass destruction" when general officers have stated they'd rather be hit with a chemical round than a "conventional" high-explosive round because when a chemical round goes off, you have a chance). Are we as a people that thick, I thought, then I remembered some reports touted by such reliable outlets as Fox News that we'd found the mother lode, WMDs in Iraq.

Never mind that they were degraded shells, fifteen years old found in ones and twos in locations where they could have easily been overlooked and that the contents were about as dangerous as the Drano under your sink, Rick Santorem trumpeted the news. We were being deceived by the Pentagon (under whose control?), he bloviated, a cry readily taken up by Faux News and Radio Wingnut. We had justification (finally) for the invasion!

Some of it may just be true believers trying to find a reason to believe that the Values President, the darling of the Christian Right didn't just flat-out lie to us. Most of it is the fact that we get a lot of our news from suspect sources. The end result is Jefferson's dream of an informed public, despite our inundation with media at all times, just isn't happening. Fox asking "ARE SADDAM HUSSEIN'S WMDS NOW IN HEZBOLLAH'S HANDS" does little to dispel the misinformation, in fact, it only favors Fox's partisan cause.

We are uninformed. How else could the Bush Team not only be elected, but re-elected. I don't see things changing any time soon, unfortunately for our democracy and for our national policy.

Republican Primary in Wingnut Central

Colorado Springs is the epicenter of wingnutism in Colorado. Home to Cheyenne Mountain and James Dobson, the 5th Congressional District, Colorado College excepted, is a Republican wonderland, full of knee-jerk, unthinking Conservatives like Duncan Bremer who believes the way to peace in the Middle East is to convert all the Moslems to evangelical Christianity. I'd like to invite Mr. Bremer to take his campaign for the Republican nominee to Baghdad where he can start proselytizing to his heart's content, preferably outside the Green Zone.

Which brings us to Brantley Rayburn, who is concerned that Iraqi kids grow up chanting that they want to die for Allah. Uh, I believe the word for dying for one's God is martyrdom, something the Evangelicals have honored since there were Evangelicals. Rayburn believes Iraq is the key to rooting out terrorism in the Middle East. Personally, I believe Israel and our knee-jerk support of it is a more likely key to the problem but Mr Rayburn conveniently ignores the fact that we, the United States of America under Republican party rule made Iraq into a haven for terrorists, we're near to making it into a failed state and the primary war there is sectarian, kind of like when the Southern Baptists and the Missionary Baptists square off over immersion vs. sprinkling.

Jeff Crank has an interesting take on the war's failures, attempting to blame them on Congress, who authorized the war, rather than the President, who prosecuted it so ineptly. He's a Hefley and a Bush clone, stay the course and all, yada, yada. Doug Lamborn and John Anderson echo the party line, further emphasizing the intellectual bankrupcy of the Republicans. Neither of these people are willing to face the great, white elephant in the middle of the debate: We're losing both in Iraq and Afghanistan, the entire premise of the Iraq debacle was a lie and Bush was liar in chief.

Lionel Riviera wants to beef up the special forces, emphasizing the failed Neocon thinking that we can impose democracy at gunpoint and that American force can dominate the world. One need only look at how poorly supplied and funded Hezbollah is holding off nuclear power Israel to see how ineffective force is in an age when any kid with a shoulder-launched rocket can take down the mightiest of warplanes.

In short, unless Colorado Springs wakes up and realizes that the Republicans truely have lost their minds and the right to rule this country, one of these Wingnuts are going to become the Representative from Colorado's Fifth District. I'm not anticipating a Democratic win, the best that can be said of this race is that we won't lose a seat.

Non-News as News

This is not news: GOP Chair Says Democrats Weak on Terror

Ken Mehlman, Chairman of the RNC, saying Democrats are weak on terror is like a weather man talking about weather. I read the above article and noticed nothing in it that wasn't a misrepresentation or an attempt to reinforce Wingnut memes. An example of misrepresentation: "Will we elect leaders who recognize we're at war and want to use every tool to win it, or politicians who would surrender important tools we need to win?" I haven't heard of a single Democratic lawmaker who wants to surrender any tool, we simply want it supervised at least by the kangaroo court known as FISE. Mehlman claims that the Democratic party wants to keep the NSA from eavesdropping on terrorists - utter bullshit. All we want is to do it legally and by the way, to keep them from fishing expeditions involving, well, you.

This dollop of Rovian bullshit had no place in the news for the most part because it isn't news. It's nothing the Wingnuts haven't been saying for months and repetition will neither make it the truth nor will it make it newsworthy; they only hope to reinforce the meme. What Mehlman's pathetic attempt to predict disaster is the desperation in the Republican party. They see their absolute hold on government, wasted in bad policy and disastrous decisions, ending and they're scared as hell.

Imagine a Democratic Congress with Bush on the stand, under oath, explaining his policies? It scares the hell out of them. And that, friends, is also not news.

Denver's Republican Dream of Health Care

I have a rose named Denver's Dream. It's an orange blooming miniature, quite prolific. It has nothing to do with this blog entry. While the White House is attempting to grab dictatorial powers of infinite incarceration without access to the courts, while Bush vacations while the Middle East burns, while the Senate Republicans are loading up the minimum wage bill with tax cuts for Paris Hilton and sweetheart deals to restauranteurs, while Delay is forced to run in gerrymandered Texas as the courts contemplate yet another redistricting, while FDA staffers reveal that the decision to block over-the-counter sales of Plan B, a move that could stop more abortions than a Wingnut Supreme Court, was made in advance of even seeing the scientific evidence in its favor and the while Right continues to want to ban abortion rather than following their constituents' wishes for a balanced approach, Denver approaches the Republicans' dream of the American Health Care System, emergency room care for all.

According to Dr. Vince Markovchick, Denver Health’s director of emergency medicine in an interview on Denver's KCFR's "Colorado Matters," the emergency room has become the medical first stop for those without health care, a number that has ballooned to 47 million under the Republicans' compassionate conservative rule. As a result, at Denver Health, a safety net hospital, patients are waiting up to 48 hours to be moved from the ER to an inpatient bed. Dr. Markovchick attributes this directly to the medical insurance crisis in the country: Un- and Underinsured patients can't pay, they use the "safety net" hospitals as their primary care, the hospitals run in the red and are closed, compounding the problem. Many of the patients could have been treated earlier for chronic problems such as diabetes or hypertension, problem is, they can't afford it. Not only would the early treatment be cheaper, it would improve the patients' quality of life.

Think the Compassionate Conservatives are going to do anything about it? They've stood by as companies cut or eliminated medical benefits and done nothing. They stand by and let emergency rooms where it costs $450 if the doctor says good evening become primary care facilities and treat catastrophic conditions when a simple, low-cost intervention earlier might have prevented the problem. No, they'll continue to believe the problem will be solved by giving money to the richest 2% of Americans while allowing 47 million of us to go uninsured and to have to rely on emergency rooms for our medical care.

It's the Republican dream: Two percent of the population have access to 98% of our medical services. Meanwhile, some uninsured person has been suffering at Denver Health for the last two days waiting for a hospital room and, according to Dr. Markovchick, Denver isn't nearly as bad off as most cities. So if the interests of the top 2% of income earners in this country are yours, vote Republican.

The 2% Majority

If anything proves that Republicans have only the interests of the top two percent of income earners, the minimum wage bill now in the Senate should leave no doubt. First, they want to tie an increase in income for minimum wage earners of about $2,700 per year to an increase in earnings of an average of $1.4 million for the top two percent, those who would benefit from the estate tax reductions. Not content simply to allow an increase in wages for six million Americans, they now want to keep the wages of those who earn income from tips in states where they're paid the minimum wage the same. That means a waitress at a Nevada casino, paid minimum wage by state law and her tips by letting fat Republicans with money to waste pay her for service will get no pay raise. The raise in minimum wages will have to be offset by her tips, resulting in a pay cut of $3 per hour in seven states who demand minimum wage for service personnel.

It's a plan only a Republican could hatch. To use an overused word these days, this is evil. And of course, it's backed by the National Restaurant Association. We raise the minimum wage, then require the employers of those people to offset the pay raise with the employees' tips. Sweet deal! We "raise" the minimum wage, then cut the raise. It's like Rick Perry's Texas Repugnicans giving teachers a $2000 per year raise for one year only. Republicans call it a raise. I call it election year bribery, much like Frist's renowned $200 energy offset.

I wonder how many of those "restauranteurs", probably owners of restaurants on the Strip in Vegas, will be double-dipping with the estate tax cut? In any case, unless you're a part of the Republicans' two-percent majority, voting Republican is voting against your own self-interest.

Welkome to Amerika

As promised, tonight I'll comment on the more despicable Repugnican ploy, their attempt to convert the Guantanamo kangaroo courts into the norm for America. In the bill Bush submitted to have Congress authorize the tribunals was a provision that would allow the President to hold anyone suspected of terrorism, anyone including American citizens, on U. S. soil indefinitely without notification or access to a lawyer. Might as well name them gulags in my book.

Now, I'm sure all the Shrub and his most honorable legal staff, you know, the guys who played a shell game for years with Jose Padilla rather than grant him his civil rights, had only the country's best interest in mind. I'm sure they were just trying to close Guantanamo and provide for holding the detainees on American soil under the same legal status they held at Guantanamo and that the fact that their provision would grant the Administration the right to hold anyone based on a diktat was purely an oversight. Right.

This must be our line in the sand against the budding dictatorship of the Bush Administration. They aren't competent enough to lead, so now they attempt to rule. We must not allow that. Write your Representatives (unless, like me, you live in the Colorado 6th and have Tommy the Xenophobe Tancredo for a Representative) and Senators (Waste paper on Allard the Torturer but know it's a waste and vote accordingly) and oppose this unconstitutional attempt at absolute power.

Because that's all it is. By the time the Supreme Court overturns it - wait, it's stacked with Bushies. Disregard that. This bill must never become law.

Paris Hilton and the Minimum Wage

Haven't posted in a while. Been busy, don't ask.

It was the Repugnican tactic of adding a tax break for Paris Hilton and her ilk to a bill to raise the minimum wage that shocked me back to the keyboard. If ever there was a more dastardly amendment to a good bill, I'll write about it tomorrow but for now, I'll settle for this one. Briefly, Repugnicans added an amendment to the bill to raise the minimum wage that will give Paris Hilton and 8,199 (approx) of her rich buddies an average of about 1.4 million each out of Federal tax receipts. That works out to about $11.5 billion. In exchange, the 6.6 million people in this country working forty hour weeks for $10,700 per year, the minimum wage, get $1,200 per year for a total of $7.9 billion. That's the rich guys by $3.6 billion.

They've avoided voting against giving themselves a raise for the past nine years for about $36,000 per year in raises. And they can't vote to give the working poor a raise without shifting to you and me the tax burden (what a burden!) of the rich?

Amazing how Republicans keep convincing perfectly sane Americans to vote against their own self-interest.

July 4th, 2006

I didn't fly a flag today. Me, a military veteran, made the decision based on the fact that I'd have to fly it upside down. They're fighting for the symbol while trampling all over what it symbolizes and that distresses me. It should distress us all.

While North Korea launched four SCUD missile variants into the Sea of Japan, the MSM was babbling about someone eating 53 and a half hot dogs. I wouldn't care to be that guy's toilet in the morning and I don't care to hear about him now. Iraq, rightly so, wants some of our troops tried for war crimes. Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.... The MSM is still publishing Wingnut rants to defy the First Amendment to the Constitution vis-a-vis freedom of the press. We're still holding people in Guantanamo without access to a lawyer, without the right to confront their accusers and without even being charged with a crime. All that said, here's my Liberal scream for the day:

I could care less about the flag of the United States of America.

Some years ago I was sworn in as an Air Force officer. I swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. There wasn't and isn't in any oath of office sworn in the United States a reference to the flag. The Flag is a dish rag and in most cases not a particularly absorbent one. Without the Constitution, it's a meaningless piece of brightly colored cloth, something to bleed its colors on your laundry. There is no reason to defend the Flag, it guarantees no rights, it doesn't establish a system of checks and balances on power, it does nothing. The Constitution establishes our government, it outlines the basic freedoms we have, the responsibilities and limits of the three branches of Government, it is the basis for the great American experiment. The flag just kind of hangs there and flaps.

Given a choice what to defend from desecration, I'd pick the Constitution any day.

Happy Fourth, everyone.

Osama Unit Shut Down

Remember the guy who killed nearly 3,000 Americans? The one Bush said we'd get dead or alive? Bush shut down the CIA unit charged with getting him some time last year and didn't bother to tell you about it.

I heard a long story on NPR about it this morning but they never mentioned the one reason Bin Laden hasn't been captured: It isn't in the interests of the Bush Administration. Sure, if they really know where he is, he'll be trotted out some time in mid-to late October to try to win some points for the bad guys but as long as he's out there, the Bushies have a poster child for their interminable War on Tactic. Were Bin Laden captured, there could be an outcry for us to declare victory in the War on Terror (TM) and strip the Shrub of his greenery, sorry, "wartime President" status. He might then even have to start obeying laws and respecting minor things such as the Constitution and treaty.

Tomorrow is Independence Day. I'm tempted to fly my flag upside down, showing the distress of a lover of our country. I respect the flag, as does every military man. I revere the Constitution. Without the Constitution, the flag is a dishcloth, a bad rug, lining for a pet bed, it's a meaningless piece of cloth. Without statesmen to support the Constitution, it becomes a useless piece of paper, to quote a certain very unstatesmanlike political leader (it's parchment, Mr. Bush, not paper). Without an informed citizenry to elect statesmen rather than cheap politicians (current President, Congress, Supreme Court and most of state and local government of both parties being members of the latter), all we get is cheap political posturing about non-issues such as gay marriage, flag burning, vague threats against the First Amendment and other meaningless drivel designed to inflame the base rather than solve problems. Without an effective press, citizens can't be informed, instead will know everything there is to know about insignificant entertainment and little about our Government.

It's instructive to realize that Civics is not a required subject in most school districts.

So my Fourth of July wish for the United States is for a press that realizes its job is to inform, not to pander to the Administration or to hide facts from us because they may be inconvenient to some. I hope the Press wakes up and realizes its job is objectivity, not balance, and leaves balance to slanted infotainment broadcasters such as Fox News. I pray for more articles such as the New York Times's revelation of the Government's unwarranted "follow the money" spying and I pray they publish them sooner rather than later. I pray for what Jefferson prayed for, the press. And I pray for more stories about the Osama unit's closing, just a bit more punctually, please.

McConnell and McCain, Two Fries Short of a Happy Meal

I was wondering what to write about, I mean, it's been a quiet day. I can't even attribute our sudden inch of rain, the first real precip since January in Denver, to global warming. Then I read of an interview with the two Big Mac's, McConnell and McCain, on the Supreme Court's ruling on Guantanamo.

Republicans are having a hard time with the ruling, I mean, it was such a slam dunk. These were bad people, running around Afghanistan wearing olive green clothing and cheap Casio watches, sold to the U. S. for a few dollars as terrorists or Taliban. They shouldn't have human rights now, should they? That "We Hold these Truths to be Self-Evident" thing, well, that belongs in the "quaint old parchment" bin with the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, two documents pulled from the Republican dustbin and returned to the position of prominence they should hold in our land. They're having trouble with two parts of the ruling:

1. The United States is a country of law with a Constitution that is above all law and office holders. It's what separates us from Saudi Arabia and other pleasant, quaint monarchies and it applies to everyone. Also, treaties carry a weight higher than the Constitution itself and we are signatories to the Geneva Conventions. McConnell frets that enforcing article three of the Conventions could expose American servicemen to war crimes accusations. Well, based on some of the atrocities I've seen reported from Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo, they probably deserve it. They also can't hide behind the argument that they were under orders because first, none of the big fish are being implicated and second, "I'm following orders" doesn't absolve soldiers of liability for crimes. Following an illegal order is no defense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I had to live with that. Today's soldiers do, too.

2. The ruling exposes the illegality of a number of Bush power grabs from Guantanamo to warrantless wiretapping. It also shows the Republican Congress to be complicit yes-men in allowing the extension of Executive power. Bush and Cheney have wanted from the start of their administration to grab power, to "restore the power of the Executive". In so doing, they've completely ignored laws, used 750 signing statements to say I don't have to follow the law and have avoided run-ins with their Republican majority by rubber stamping whatever Congress sends them.

In general, Republicans have pretty much indicated they don't support the Constitution. From First Amendment cases through Habeas Corpus to ignoring basic American values, they've pretty much indicated they'd prefer a Republican Taliban Monarchy to our messy, checks-and-balances-laden form of constitutional democracy. McCain, too, shows his true colors in this discussion. He's not a centrist, he's a true Conservative and as such, does not deserve to rule this great country.

Is Allard Confused?

Yes but in this case, the Torturer (one of less than ten Senators who believe the Constitution of the United States, the newly-reaffirmed Geneva Conventions and the values of our country allow torture as indicated by their votes on the McCain anti-torture bill) is more confused than normally indicated by his lock-step approach to the Shrub's anti-American agenda. He wants hearings on immigration held here in Colorado because of our proximity to the border.

Last I looked, we had about seven hundred miles of New Mexico between us and the border.

Allard's motives are simply political. Immigration is a red-meat issue to Conservative Republicans (read Christian Taliban, the populace of Colorado Springs). We're having an election for Governor this year and with the last polling, Democrat Bill Ritter was leading Republican Bob Beauprez by ten points in this so-called red state. They want to bring the National issue here to whip the base into a feeding frenzy and get out the vote against the Democratic usuprers (we took back both State houses last election and now seem in good position to take the Governor's mansion as well). Ken Salazar, one of the few Democratic bright spots in 2004's election, calls it a delaying tactic to keep from having to vote in the Congress. I call it a blessing in disguise.

I love reframing the Republicans' untenable positions. Here they want to keep a rational bill designed both to shore up our borders and to offer a way to citizenship for those already here at our invitation to pick our crops and clean our toilets from a vote in favor of a bill that will criminalize twelve million people. Which I also enjoy because it will alienate the Latino vote, one that was beginning to drift to the Right. Maybe unlike many of us Americans, the Latino vote will continue to vote their own self-interest, read Democratic.

How much longer before we can get rid of Allard the Torturer, too?