> Nadeau: 12.05

Saturday, December 31, 2005

Too late to wake up?

Reporters and columnists in the bigger media have in the last 48 hours blurted out one story after another commentary telling us how shocked, shocked they are at the extent to which Bush & Cronies so much of the present executive have seized total power and signal.

The now growing signals that Bush is sending out that he has no intention of letting go of any of the powers he has grabbed seem to scare the main media the most.
Perhaps it was the process of composing the year-end wrap-ups their editors asked for that got them thinking. Finally.

That fine Village Voice is not one of the later-comers to this terrible realization. He’s been writing waring pieces about the disappearing democracy all along, but his recent summary of the sorry situation we’ve sunk to is so right on the money that it behooves us to quote a few opening ‘graphs of his most recent story.
Washington - The 9-11 attacks provided the rationale for what amounts to a Bush family coup against the Constitution.

From the outset, President George Bush used 9-11 to reorganize and increase the federal government's reach far beyond any existing law to delve into the lives of innocent, ordinary people. The new powers allowed the government to arrest them at will and to subject them to endless incarceration without judicial review. Some people were sent abroad to be tortured for crimes they had nothing to do with. Who knows how many people have been tortured in American jails? When government employees within the intelligence community sought to protest, the government fired them and made sure they could never get another job in their areas of expertise.

This extraordinary program of spying on Americans, much of which was carried out in fishing expeditions under the Patriot Act, has the makings of a consistent and long-range policy to wreck constitutional government.

It is little wonder both left and right have come together to fight Bush and may yet jettison the Patriot Act. Revelations of the domestic spy operation, with its secret wiretaps, ought to supply sufficient evidence to impeach Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and launch criminal prosecutions of the top federal officials involved in carrying out the program. After all, these people are directly engaged in overthrowing constitutional government.

Village Voice/Truthout
Son revisits sins of the father on America
December 30, 2005

Most worrisome about all this is: Can we, the citizenry, ever recover what we had that was good, or is it too late?

The year 2006, as I’ve written elsewehere, may provide the answer. Like it, or not.

posted by Tom Nadeau at 10:48 PM 0 comments

Bobbies can detain
anyone for anything

A new British law going into effect Jan. 1, 2006 is described this way:
Officers will have to satisfy themselves of "a person's involvement or suspected involvement or attempted involvement in the commission of a criminal offence" and that there are "reasonable grounds for believing that the person's arrest is necessary".

Telegraph/UK
Now you can be arrested for any offence
Filed December 29, 2005

In other words, at seems, a London bobby may now arrest and detain anyone who appears to be thinking about attempting to overstay a parking meter somewhere.

That is to say, a cop can now arrest anyone he doesn't happen to like the looks of.

And their expanded new laws are considered relatively lax compared to those promulgated, known and unknown, in the US after 9/11.

posted by Tom Nadeau at 5:10 PM 0 comments

Reply to a friend's good wishes
for a year of living dangerously

Yes, Bob, amd Happy New Year! to you and to those you hold near and dear.

Myself, I'd settle for anything close to a medium good year and anything short of 365 days on life support -- unless, of course, the government was picking up the tab and then I might reconsider.

Others besides you have noted the oxymoronishness of the government itself having the FBI/NSA investigate the NSA/FBI investigating the government itself.

It's a perfect political palindrome guaranteed never to reach any conclusion but that there was nothing to investigate to begin with.

NOWRONGDOINGGNIODGNORWGON

And they say GWB is stupid.

As it so happens I was already writing something on this topic.

Mentions, even demands for impeachment have drifted out of the blogosphere and into the edgworld of the lefty press. Nationally syndicated Molly Ivins called for Bush's impeachment in a recent column. And so has John Dean, who knows a thing or two about impeachments and the legal thresholds applying thereto.

Similar to Bush's palindrome, there's the political conumdrum I've been mulling.

Some things Bush is doing are illegal and worthy of impeachment and removal from offic

But there is no reason to think Bush will leave office on his own accord or heed any call to step down. There is also little evidence that Congress will act on its own to compel him to go. And forget the police-military complex acting to protect any sidein the dispute but the president's.

So, it could concievably come to pass that the only element of society that might act to preserve the nation as it was constitutionally designed to operate and to remove Bush from office would be the citizenry, or some part of it -- modern Tom Paines and Patrick Henrys with Blackberry's and gasmasks.

The street term for that option, I believe, is revolution, or, if it's not too noisy, coup d'etat. And, of course, those two options are illegal.

So, the political palindrome I'm mulling for 2006 is this: how wrong must the president's illegal acts be before illegal acts by the people to remove him from office are no longer wrong?

posted by Tom Nadeau at 3:10 PM 0 comments

Friday, December 30, 2005

But I still miss MB

Scientific studies have shown that mad love doesn't last much longer than that intense summer infatuation.
IT WON'T LAST -- Falling madly in love significantly changes our body chemistry - but not for long. Researchers from Italy studied a group of people who had fallen in mad, passionate love in the past six months, comparing them with people in longer-term relationships and with single people. The group consumed with passion had more of a stimulating protein called nerve growth factor in their blood. The more intense the feelings of infatuation, the more nerve growth factor there was. But when these same lovers were tested a year later, the levels had dropped back down to normal. Someone should warn Brad and Angelina: their year is up.

New York Times
While you were sleeping
December 30, 2005

posted by Tom Nadeau at 10:09 PM 0 comments

Thursday, December 29, 2005

Shouting on-air about it for 2-plus years

by Tom Nadeau

LToBS readers, both of you, surely remember that we have been predicting for the last two years that there will probably be no national election in 2008 election. Either it will be canceled outright, or cleverly7 postponed forever for some pretended “national security” reason.

Now, some commentators on the left edge f the mainstream are beginning to voice the same concern. Geov Parrish is one. He writes:
In the waning days of 2005, a number of Beltway developments have pointed to 2006 as a pivotal year in the future -- if there is to be any -- of American democracy.

The most far-reaching of these has been the Bush administration's aggressive advocacy of its once-secret program of NSA spying on American citizens. No lawyer outside a small clique of Bush appointees has seriously defended the NSA program, already renewed 30 times by Bush, as legal. Indeed, the only way that it can possibly not be construed as a blatant, ongoing violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (note the key word: Foreign) is if the President has the authority, as Commander-in-Chief, to suspend or override any law. And this is precisely the claim George Bush is making.


Combine this with the fact that Bush and his cabal have also claimed that their so-called "War on Terror" -- the Dubya-launched war Bush is referring to when he calls himself a "wartime president" -- is one they expect, and presumably intend, to last for up to 100 years. In other words, what Bush is claiming is that for the next several generations, the rule of law and the Constitution need not apply. Bush is thus claiming the right as "wartime president" to do anything he likes. Anything. Hey, why not disband Congress? (There'd probably be a lot of public support for that one.) Why not suspend the 2008 election?

This is deeply alarming.
He goes to say that the public, that is to say, the voters, should act quickly to save the Republic.

Even as he calls the voters to quarters, Parrish mentions it may, er, be too late.
“And more and more Americans are wondering whether the voting machines are rigged,” he writes.

Dan and I have been – not “wondering,” but grabbing anyone’s lapels who might listen and saying, screaming and shouting, “Honest elections (if there were any) are over.”
We’ve been doing this since 2000, which was two elections ago.

If ever there was a barn door that needed closing then, not now, this was it.
It’s going to take more – much more – than a big turnout of League of Women voters to savethe democracy from this constitutional crisis.

posted by Tom Nadeau at 12:19 AM 0 comments