Monday I promised that if I could find Eliot Spitzer’s speech that I described on Monday that I would post it. The page on C-Span that describes the event is here.

Here it the link to the video.

Spitzer starts speaking about one hour and fifty minutes into the program, so skip through the other speakers to get to see one of our next Presidents speaking to ordinary people.

..and remember Spitzer’s famous words said about the Republicans:

No party has done so much for so few who need so little.

Perhaps someone a little more adept than me with video editing can cut out the rest and post a shortened version. I haven’t had time to view all the speakers, so there may be more good stuff from some of the others who spoke, particularly Russ Feingold.

It’s nice to go back on this blog and look at how much Jerry Doolittle got right, even before the war in Iraq started. You will be amazed at how right Jerry was about so much. For instance, this entry, posted by Jerry seems to have been more than prescient. If you haven’t already done so, go back and examine our archives from 2002 and 2003. I can’t take any credit for any of it, because most of the very best stuff was posted long before I got here.

Now, this is something:

Congress is poised to meet fewer days this year than the notorious 1948 legislative body dubbed by President Truman as the “Do-Nothing Congress.”

The average number of days lawmakers spend in session has dwindled over the decades, but legislators are on track to be in Washington fewer than 130 days in 2006.

“The ‘do-nothing’ nickname worked for Harry Truman, and Democrats are reviving it again this year,” said Richard Semiatin …

It’s not like we don’t have problems they could be coping with: war in Iraq, the implosion of our prestige overseas, health care, the prescription drug fiasco, global warming … where are our leaders when we need them?

Let’s get controversial again.

For a while now I’ve been mouthing off to Mrs. Batard about the theory of “Peak Oil”. The theory of “Peak Oil” seemed to me to be the best propaganda that the oil industry could create to jack up prices. Until just now, I had never punched my personal theory into Google to see if others agree with me. WOW! I’m amazed. It looks to me like there are conspiracy theories run amok about my simple thought. Well, here’s just one link to a story that kind of halfway talks about my theory and then goes far beyond it. Beware of treading in this minefield. Conspiracy theories run amok. Maybe mine too, but I doubt it. Running up the price of a commodity (and running it back down to “knock out” competitors at the right time) has always been the hallmark of capitalism. Peak Oil fits the bill very nicely. Alright, I know I’m done for. Blast away.

They make the profits on creating artificial scarcity.

“Peak oil” is pure military-industrial-complex propaganda.

Publicly available CFR and Club of Rome strategy manuals from 30 years ago say that a global government needs to control the world population through neo-feudalism by creating artificial scarcity. Now that the social architects have de-industrialized the United States, they are going to blame our economic disintegration on lack of energy supplies.

Globalization is all about consolidation. Now that the world economy has become so centralized through the Globalists operations, they are going to continue to consolidate and blame it on the West’s “evil” overconsumption of fossil fuels, while at the same time blocking the development and integration of renewable clean technologies.

In other words, Peak oil is a scam to create artificial scarcity and drive prices up. Meanwhile, alternative fuel technologies which have been around for decades are intentionally suppressed.

I once read that Woody Guthrie hated the friend of HUAC, Burl Ives, and for good reason. Woody also couldn’t stand a song that Ives sang and was famous for, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”. Woody somehow thought it was a song used by old perps to entice young boys away from home. [Wikipedia says it’s so, but I’m not convinced.]

Well, I’ll forgive Woody for his indiscretions and bigotry, par for the course for the times. I’m sure Woody would be more enlightened today. However, I do revel in the fact that Tom Delay is leaving Sugar Land. Yes, Delay is doing the perp walk, leaving the town of Sugar Land, which surely must be where the “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” lies.

DeLay, who will turn 59 on Saturday, did not say precisely when he would step down, but under Texas law he must either die, be convicted of a felony, or move out of his district to be removed from the November ballot. DeLay told Time magazine that he is likely to change his official residence from Sugar Land, Tex., to Alexandria by the end of May. He said he informed President Bush of his decision yesterday afternoon.

Pelosi calls Attorney General Gonzales a liar for saying that the president had the authority to hide the wiretaps from the special international surveillance court.

I probably should wait until the story shows up, but I can’t resist. The Washington Post just announced in their headlines (no story yet) that:

Delay to Resign From Congress: Texas Republican and former House majority leader announces his retirement rather than face a re-election fight that appears increasingly unwinnable.

That stuff always worked for me too!

OK, it’s up. Hopefully it’s just the beginning.

George Bush likes to compare himself to Winston Churchill. Eliot Spitzer is appearing on C-Span as I speak and he just made a startling but true statement:

No party has ever done so much for so few who need so little.

Spitzer is an incredibly good speaker. I’d not heard him speak before. Unlike Al Gore, who sounds strained and not quite genuine when he speaks to this southern bred country boy, Spitzer hits the notes just right. I have nothing against Gore; he just can’t speak to southern country boys and sound genuine. Spitzer can. Spitzer also has the goods. I hope he makes us a good President one day.

If the podcast or a video shows up on C-Span, I’ll post it.

For some time now, it’s largely been the unions and a few small business owners who have been fighting Wal-Mart. I wonder if this means the real fight has not even started yet. I do hope they do a better job than with their eyeglass centers. Wal-Mart doesn’t offer a good deal there.

When Wal-Mart announced recently that it would open medical clinics in supercenters across the country, the news coverage went something like this: Get ready for a battle of the titans. America’s most admired, most vilified, most shopped-at retailer is finally taking on the $2-trillion-a-year U.S. health-care market, a hulking giant just begging to be whipped into shape by Wal-Mart’s vaunted efficiency and everyday low pricing. It's Ali vs. Foreman, Mothra meets Godzilla, right?

Not exactly. Stop by the Wal-Mart (Research) in a place like Owasso, Okla., five miles northeast of Tulsa, and you do see signs of something interesting going on. Between the Smart Styles hair salon and the Kids Fun Center is the new RediClinic, three freshly painted, stark-white rooms staffed by nurse practitioners licensed to prescribe drugs.

A smiling receptionist hands out fliers touting a flat $45 fee for “Get Well” visits. That price includes all the tests necessary to diagnose and prescribe for everyday ailments like colds, flu, strep throat and pink eye. If you’re uninsured, as roughly half the clinic’s customers are, it’s a big saving over the $95 or so that a regular doctor's visit would cost in this part of the country, and a huge savings over the $400 a hospital emergency room might charge.

Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

— George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”.

Thanks to Avedon at The Sideshow for pointing to an important editorial by Howard Zinn. The only thing I might add to what Mr. Zinn says is “Yes, Virginia, democracies do start wars, or at least their politicians do”!

If we don’t know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. I am not speaking of the history we learned in school, a history subservient to our political leaders, from the much-admired Founding Fathers to the Presidents of recent years. I mean a history which is honest about the past. If we don’t know that history, then any President can stand up to the battery of microphones, declare that we must go to war, and we will have no basis for challenging him. He will say that the nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at stake, and that we must therefore send ships and planes to destroy our new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him.

…Read on

I say it again: can a man with purple lips become president? (Though, in his favor, the effect is far less pronounced in photographs than it is in person. Drown lately, Senator?)

Now I’m really looking forward to reading Kevin Phillips’s new book, American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, a title that veritably rolls off the tongue.

Phillips, you’ll recall, has some credibility with the right due to his past contributions to Republicanism. His 1967 book The Emerging Republican Majority was a must read for early movement conservatives. In recent years he’s become a strong critic of the direction that movement has taken.

In his Washington Post article, “How the GOP Became God’s Own Party”, Phillips displays a bit of the zeal of a convert, but he makes some solid points.

The United States has organized much of its military posture since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks around the protection of oil fields, pipelines and sea lanes. But U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East has another dimension. In addition to its concerns with oil and terrorism, the White House is courting end-times theologians and electorates for whom the Holy Lands are a battleground of Christian destiny. Both pursuits — oil and biblical expectations — require a dissimulation in Washington that undercuts the U.S. tradition of commitment to the role of an informed electorate.

The political corollary — fascinating but appalling — is the recent transformation of the Republican presidential coalition. Since the election of 2000 and especially that of 2004, three pillars have become central: the oil-national security complex, with its pervasive interests; the religious right, with its doctrinal imperatives and massive electorate; and the debt-driven financial sector, which extends far beyond the old symbolism of Wall Street.

President Bush has promoted these alignments, interest groups and their underpinning values. His family, over multiple generations, has been linked to a politics that conjoined finance, national security and oil. In recent decades, the Bushes have added close ties to evangelical and fundamentalist power brokers of many persuasions.

You gotta admit, he calls ’em as he sees ’em.

The American heartland, from Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico to Ohio and the Appalachian coal states, has become (along with the onetime Confederacy) an electoral hydrocarbon coalition. It cherishes sport-utility vehicles and easy carbon dioxide emissions policy, and applauds preemptive U.S. airstrikes on uncooperative, terrorist-coddling Persian Gulf countries fortuitously blessed with huge reserves of oil.

Of the 99 requests at the SF library for a copy of his book, I’m number 58. The web site says they have seven copies, with two more on the way. So it will probably take two to four months for the book to reach me, at which point it won’t be the hot topic any more. I expect to blog about it anyway; for one thing, I’ll already know what lots of other people said, so maybe some new synthesis will present itself.

Anyone else interested in reading the book? If so, we could synchronize our reading of chapters and post a running conversation here at BA.

Nixon was castigated out of office for what? (I’m not an apologist for the war, but look what we’ve got now).

Perhaps this:

A negative income tax, proposed by Milton Friedman, came close to implementation in the United States under Richard Nixon. Also, the U.S. does have the GMI-inspired Earned income tax credit. The citizen's dividend is a similar concept, but the payment made to individuals is based upon the revenues that the government can collect from leasing and selling natural resources (such a dividend in fact exists in the state of Alaska).

Where did this obscure fact come from? Well, actually, Mrs. Batard told me, but the whole scheme is outlined in an entry in Wikipedia:

A guaranteed minimum income is a proposed system of income redistribution that would give each citizen a certain sum of money independent of whether they work or not. It is sometimes known as a “Basic income Guarantee (BIG)”, “universal basic income”, “citizen’s income scheme”, or just a basic income (the term “guaranteed annual income” is often used in the United States), but these systems also often include a method of paying for the income as well.

…Read on

Major new analysis by Teixeira of the Democrats’ chances to stop or at least stanch Bush’s nation-weakening in the elections this fall.

Bottom line: the climate is favorable, and the Democrats have an opportunity to return the country to strength, as long as they have the sense and self-confidence to put forth a forceful agenda responsive to the clear anti-Bush majorities on specific big issues, such as opposition to the war and fixing the health care insurance system.

Booman Tribune reminds us once again that democracy might just be a pipe dream:

Yet, the e-voting machines are just part of the digital problem facing U.S. voters. Diebold’s election software packages include what many activists describe as “one stop shopping” for election fraud. Most of the e-voting machine companies also sell software that creates digital electronic voter registration databases. In the Cleveland area, an estimated 7000 voters were knocked off the voter registration rolls when Cuyahoga County Board of Elections adopted the Diebold registration system. The e-voting machine companies can control everything electronically, from voter registration to election day vote recording to final vote tabulation and recounting.

…Read on

There’s plenty out there to fuel paranoia, but this story should set off some neurons in the brains of true American patriots:

In a scene that could have been inspired by the movie “Minority Report,” one North Carolina county is using a UAV equipped with low-light and infrared cameras to keep watch on its citizens. The aircraft has been dispatched to monitor gatherings of motorcycle riders at the Gaston County fairgrounds from just a few hundred feet in the air — close enough to identify faces....

Twenty-four hundred American boys and girls dead, tens of thousands more wounded, all in the name of spreading democracy and freedom. Elections in Iraq almost four months ago, but still no government named. So what do we do?

U.S. officials sent a message this week to Iraq’s senior religious cleric asking that he help end the impasse over forming a new Iraqi government and strongly implying that the prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jafaari, should withdraw his candidacy for re-election, according to American officials.

We’re forced to ask an America-hating cleric (Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani) to make the bad, bad Iraqis name a government. But, it’s not a theocracy our kids died for, and it’s not a civil war that’s going on, and it all was realio, trulio, worth it-oh.

Ogden Nash

Editor and Publisher confirms it. Zero points for the mainstream media and a three pointer for the blogosphere.

How far will critics of media coverage of the Iraq war go to prove reporters are wrongly focusing on the negative?

One answer came this week, in a shocking if amusing episode featuring one Howard Kaloogian, a leading Republican running for the seat in Congress recently vacated by indicted Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham.

He posted on the official Web site for his campaign a picture taken in “downtown Baghdad,” he said, during his visit to the city, which supposedly indicated that the media was wrong about the level of violence in the city. “We took this photo of downtown Baghdad while we were in Iraq,” he wrote. “Iraq (including Baghdad) is much more calm and stable than what many people believe it to be. But, each day the news media finds any violence occurring in the country and screams and shouts about it — in part because many journalists are opposed to the U.S. effort to fight terrorism.”

But the blogosphere quickly smelled a rat. The photo featured people who didn’t seem dressed quite right for Iraq, and signs and billboards that looked off, too. In the now-familiar pattern, the ace detective work leaped from obscure blogs to the well-known (Talking Points Memo, Eschaton, Attytood, (and more), and back again, as eagle-eyed experts proposed alternative locales, with Turkey a likely suspect.

In less than a day, it was over. “Jem6X” at the popular DailyKos blog confirmed the street scene was in Istanbul, not Baghdad.

It might be also noted that Wikipedia has already been updated to alert us to the honesty of the Republican hopeful responsible for this sordid tale. Wikipedia also offers this nice screenshot of the offending page given to us by Mr. Kaloogian, who is surely soon to be relegated to the dustbin of history.

Molly Ivins does it again:

The Pentagon has once again investigated itself! And — have a seat, get the smelling salts, hold all hats — the Pentagon has once again concluded the Pentagon did absolutely nothing wrong and will continue to do so.

In this particularly fascinating case, the Pentagon investigated its own habit of paying people to make up lies about how well the war in Iraq is going, and then paying other people to put those lies in the Iraqi media, thus fooling the Iraqis into thinking everything in their country is tickety-boo. Well, if we can’t fool them, whom can we fool?

The case revolves around a contract worth several million dollars given by the U.S. military command in Baghdad to the Lincoln Group, a public relations outfit started by two young entrepreneurs, one British, one American, in 2003 in Iraq. Articles were written by American military personnel from the American point of view about the war, to wit, it’s going well. Lincoln Group in turn paid Iraqi journalists, some “on retainer,” to print the articles without revealing the source.

Amusingly enough, through other programs, the U.S. government is also spending money trying to teach Iraqis about the importance of a free press in a democracy. According to the Pentagon’s investigation of itself, none of the Lincoln Group’s actions violate military policies because the Pentagon is just trying to counter the vast amount of anti-American propaganda carried in Middle Eastern papers.

This website is not totally devoted to the comings, goings, and hairdos of Condoleezza Rice — for instance, we have some Cruella mixed in — but it comes close enough to satisfy.

Motto: “I keep track of Condoleezza’s hairdo so you don’t have to.”

It is amazing and a little bit wonderful that the biggest corporate law firms in the country have come out solidly against the Bush Administration’s plan (being argued in the Supreme Court today, BTW) to weaken our country and strengthen bin Laden and his sympathizers by denying court review to detainees at Gitmo:

Many of the nation’s top law firms have signed briefs against the government and in support of Salim Hamdan, the detainee who allegedly served as chauffeur to Osama bin Laden and who is being detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

More than three dozen briefs have been filed on Hamdan’s side, largely arguing that the military tribunals established by the White House to try the detainees are illegal. By contrast, only a handful of briefs have been filed on the other side, backing the administration’s expansive view of executive authority.…

The covers also carry the names of the big-ticket New York, Washington, D.C., and other national law firms that are bringing their muscle to bear, from Cravath, Swaine & Moore to Covington & Burling to Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld to Jones Day.

“The blue-chip firms are all in this case, and it’s the senior partners who are involved very often,” said David Remes, the Covington partner who coordinated the amicus curiae effort for Hamdan.…

“This is not noblesse oblige by the big firms. It is an extraordinary no-confidence vote by the establishment bar in what the administration is trying to do here.”

[Professor Burt Neuborne of NYU Law School] said the only recent parallel was the effort 50 years ago by New York firms to help desegregate public schools.…

Neuborne too points to a long tradition of major law firms representing the unpopular.

“Wendell Willkie was representing communists and aliens in World War II,” he said, referring to the one-time presidential candidate and partner in the New York firm now known as Willkie Farr & Gallagher.

But Neuborne sees the Guantanamo effort as different, and more widespread.

“The centrist establishment bar has rallied to this as a defining issue,” he said. “The government has gone too far.”

Now, I opened by saying all this was remarkable, and it is fair to say so. And, those white-shoe attorneys deserve our thanks for adding hard-to-ignore muscle to the battle to fight those forces, led by W (a/k/a, “the Weakener-in-Chief”) and his co-weakeners in all branches of government, whose hard-to-understand but plain-to-see intent is to weaken our great nation by all means possible, in this case by attacking and circumventing the legal system. But that is the glass half-full take.

The glass half-empty take is, “Corporate lawyers? You’ve got to be kidding me. How horrible that our nation has come to such a pass that we must rely on Cravath Swaine & Moore to defend our nation from its internal enemies in the Capitol and the Department of Justice and the White House.”

Tom Delay wants his license to carry a concealed weapon back. (Image via.)

Pachacutec at Firedoglake writes, admirably and compellingly:

A sizable portion of Americans are like me: they supported the invasion and now know they fucked up. They may not understand why they fucked up, but if Democratic leaders are to have any credibility with the majority public, they need to do their own version of what I just did. More honesty equals more credibility equals greater turnout equals greater gains in 2006. Even if you lack the sense to do the right thing for moral reasons, the public is ahead of you: do it based on calculation. It’s what you do best (and much of why you fucked up in the first place).

Not so admirably, I point out that Bad Attitudes and millions of others didn’t fuck up. The link is to an entry on March 20, 2003, four days before Bush began his Long War by bombing Baghdad. My photographer son Mike took pictures of the huge demonstration at the Washington Monument (one of many around the country). They are here.

Let us reflect on the scriptures:

Mark 12:41–44. 41: And he sat down over against the treasury, and beheld how the multitude cast money into the treasury: and many that were rich cast in much. 42: And there came a poor widow, and she cast in two mites, which make a farthing. 43: And he called unto him his disciples, and said unto them, Verily I say unto you, This poor widow cast in more than all they that are casting into the treasury: 44: for they all did cast in of their superfluity; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living.

What better example of the poor widow and Christian piety than Katherine Harris, who reminds us via this article in the Orlando Sentinel of her steadfast faith in the Lord:

Harris makes reference to a poor, pious widow in a biblical parable, saying she, like the widow, was “willing to take this widow’s mite … and put everything on the line.”

While Avedon at The Sideshow showcases the latest Bra of the Week, we here at Bad Attitudes work harder to find something more useful — something you can put in your wallet and that’s free. We hope you get to enjoy using it.

You’ll thank me, I know, for sharing this. It’s a video of a kingsnake regurgitating a corn snake longer than itself. Enjoy!

Via Laura Turner at Liberalism without Cynicism, this revolting news from Liberated Iraq.

Hey, there, cat lovers! Check this out.

Hey, I know a lot of you guys out there have been following the paper-ballot story closely. Did you notice this:

Diebold, the electronic voting machine maker, suffered another sharp setback recently, when Maryland’s House of Delegates voted 137-to-0 to drop its machines and switch to paper ballots.…

Maryland was one of the first states to embrace Diebold. But Maryland voters and elected officials have grown increasingly disenchanted as evidence has mounted that the machines cannot be trusted.…

Many states have passed laws requiring paper records for electronic voting. What is happening in Maryland is important, because not a single member of the House stood behind the once popular Diebold machines. It is just the latest indication that common sense is starting to prevail in the battle over electronic voting.

A good development, to be sure.

Well, I’m surprised. The Washington Post interviews Noam Chomsky.

From the New York Times this morning: Note that it is also somewhat ambiguous and, I guess, unintentionally ironic.

"U.S. troops are trying to train Iraqi forces to battle the Sunni-led insurgency without resorting to abductions, torture and murder."

More shoot-the-messenger from the incompetent cry-babies running the country:

Cheney said his comments that Iraqis would welcome Americans as “liberators” and the Iraqi insurgency was “in its last throes” were “basically accurate and reflect reality.” The problem, he said, was that news reporting has created a negative impression “because what’s newsworthy is the car bomb in Baghdad. It’s not all the work that went on that day in 15 other provinces in terms of making progress toward rebuilding Iraq.”

I remember when the strong, muscular G.O.P types would laugh at Hollywood and Los Angeles, calling it “La-La Land.” Don’t bust a gut, funny, hunh? Get it? Because they are all goofy and ineffective liberals out there on the Left Coast, call it “La-La Land.” Shirley MacLaine, ha-ha!

Now, the rulers astride Washington, D.C. just can’t stop whining and crying and blaming everybody but themselves. Blame the press, not getting the message out, blah-blah and wa-wa.

That’s why we should start calling Washington, D.C., the Cry-Baby Capital Of The World, “Wa-Wa Land.”

Spiiderweb has been a godsend to this blog (alright, blast me for my use of the deity if you will, but nevertheless, Spiiderweb has a fascinating blog).

In one of his latest posts he starts out with a picture of Harry S and then morphs over to Molly Ivins [Bill Doolittle, please take note of Molly’s article] and then hits us with the following (below), just after he calls “bullshit” on Molly Ivins. On top of that, he’s a prolific blogger.

…Read on

Our sweet Mabel has been getting edgy. It seems that she caught a glimpse of Martha Bridegam’s cat Edgie and she is quite concerned that she might not be considered the meanest cat on the blogs anymore. Not to worry. Mabel proved herself this week after our hiatus, displaying once again her resolve to protect our non existent garden. Mabel says “eat your heart out Edgie, cats in the suburbs have the upper paw” over those in the city. On the other hand, we don’t know what to do about this. We haven’t taught her to read yet.

The Smoking Gun brings us an interesting travel document in which Dick Cheney gives directions to the Five Star Hotels about his preferences. We might note that sparkling water is only required if Mrs. Cheney is present. We can only assume Dick is still sticking with the hard stuff, probably a requirement for those who are so intellectually challenged such that Fox News is the only channel worth watching.

With all due respect to Bill Doolittle’s previous post, I offer up the following, mainly because I caught glimpse of, and then took a picture of, what for me was an unexpected encounter with the grave of Osceola while touring the South this past week. The grave of Osceola is located at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island, SC (Edgar Allen Poe fans take note), and I have been itching for an opportunity to post it.

Although Andrew Jackson is sometimes fondly remembered for the first of the Seminole Wars, let us not forget the Second Seminole War, of which has been written:

The greatest lesson of the Second Seminole War shows how a government can lose public support for a war that has simply lasted for too long. As the Army became more deeply involved in the conflict, as the government sent more troops into the theater, and as the public saw more money appropriated for the war, people began to lose their interest. Jesup’s capture of Osceola, and the treachery he used to get him, turned public sentiment against the Army. The use of blood hounds only created more hostility in the halls of Congress. It did not matter to the American people that some of Jesup’s deceptive practices helped him achieve success militarily. The public viewed his actions so negatively that he had undermined the political goals of the government.

[Thanks to Martha Bridegam for her comments in the previous post, which reminded me (I’m a poor history scholar) that Osceola (misspelled on the grave) had a connection to Andrew Jackson.]

…Read on

Bob Herbert of NYT (behind the scum-sucking pay wall) finally gives some MSM play to an academic study, noted on this blog when it came out months ago, regarding the real cost of the Iraq war — now measurable in the trillions. Herbert says:

Now comes a study by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University, and a colleague, Linda Bilmes of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, that estimates the “true costs” of the war at more than $1 trillion, and possibly more than $2 trillion.…

In an interview, Mr. Stiglitz said that about $560 billion, which is a little more than half of the study’s conservative estimate of the cost of the war, would have been enough to “fix” Social Security for the next 75 years. If one were thinking in terms of promoting democracy in the Middle East, he said, the money being spent on the war would have been enough to finance a “mega-mega-mega-Marshall Plan,” which would have been “so much more” effective than the invasion of Iraq.

I am opposed to the censure of President George W. Bush for two reasons. First, it implies that he is unworthy of impeachment. Second, he will be mentioned in the same breath as Andrew Jackson, the only President to be censured.

Jackson was one tough son of a bitch. At the age of 13 Jackson “refused to clean the boots of a British officer, (and) the irate redcoat slashed at him, giving him scars on his left hand and head, as well as an intense hatred for the British.” He went on to become a war hero and champion of the common man. His body was covered with scars. He tried to do away with the Electoral College so the people, not the rural states or the Supreme Court, could directly elect their president.

Nobody ever accused him of being a nice person, and he had no patience for fools. In contrast because Bush is a fool himself, he’s unable to fire them. Doing so would indict George W. Bush himself.

Nothing less than impeachment and removal from office is proper for Bush. It will not happen because impeachment is a political action, as was the censure of Jackson.

I decry the power of the Church and its use of that power, in America in particular! Throughout the world, as all know, the churches are so organized as to have the wealth, size and formation of a great corporation, a government, or an army. And in America, the wealthy individuals who rule in corporate affairs appear to be attracted to the church by reason of its hold not only on the mind but the actions of its adherents. Politically, socially and otherwise, they count on its power and influence as of use to them. And not without reason, since especially among the ignorant and poor, its revealed wisdom counsels resignation and orders faith in a totally inscrutable hereafter. In short, it makes for ignorance and submission in the working class, And what more could a corporation-minded government or financial group, looking toward complete control of everything for a few, desire?

…Read on