From The Chicago Sun-Times
By Jesses Jackson

Nothing is more costly or dangerous than a failed presidency. The powers of the office are without rival. The scope of responsibility spans the globe. When a presidency fails, we all pay the price — no matter what our politics.

As George Bush serves up his State of the Union address, his presidency is in virtual collapse. None of this will be apparent on the TV screen. The address will be “interrupted” with numerous standing ovations. The pundits will be respectful. The Democratic response will seem muted. As Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton understood, a president never looks better than on these ceremonial nights.

But beneath the bunting and the applause, this president is in trouble. His war of choice in Iraq has gone bad. Our military is near “snapping,” according to a report commissioned by the Pentagon. Iraq has become a training ground for international terrorists. The elections have produced a Shiite plurality, led by religious parties that have formed a mutual defense pact with Iran. The Iranian president has called for the destruction of Israel, and the Iraqi leaders that our soldiers are dying to defend stand by his side.

The reconstruction of Iraq is a joke, with literally billions wasted or stolen, while citizens still have no stable source of electricity. We can’t leave because a civil war, already started on the ground, will flare up. We can’t stay because our presence simply feeds the terror and destabilization. Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz now projects the actual cost of the Iraq war at $1 trillion.

Read more Failures

From Mother Jones
By Bradford Plumer

The Secret Service will have a much easier time breaking up protests and arresting protestors if the latest version of the Patriot Act passes, according to Fox News:

A new provision tucked into the Patriot Act bill now before Congress would allow authorities to haul demonstrators at any “special event of national significance” away to jail on felony charges if they are caught breaching a security perimeter.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sponsored the measure, which would extend the authority of the Secret Service to allow agents to arrest people who willingly or knowingly enter a restricted area at an event, even if the president or other official normally protected by the Secret Service isn’t in attendance at the time.

Just to be clear, the Secret Service already has the power to haul demonstrators away on felony charges if they breach a “security perimeter” while the president or other VIPs are around. But now, apparently, that power’s being extended to occasions when no one important is in the area. From the looks of things, the Secret Service could name just about anything they wanted a “special event of national significance” and lock up anyone who crashes. Why? What possible security purpose does this serve, besides clamping down on dissent?

From Yahoo News
By Steve Gutterman

President Vladimir Putin had sharp words for his critics and stark reminders of Russia’s nuclear might at an annual news conference Tuesday in which he sought to burnish his image as a competent leader at the helm of a great and fast-growing country.

Playing to a crowd of about 1,000 journalists in a nearly 3 1/2-hour session, Putin gave an upbeat assessment of his six years in office and a defiant warning against foreign meddling in Russia’s affairs.

At least three times during the marathon news conference — most of it televised live nationwide — Putin voiced pride in the economic achievements during his two terms, reeling off indicators that improved last year and favorably comparing the situation to the state Russia was in when he came to power on the last day of 1999.

High oil prices have helped Russia’s economy rebound significantly from the economic collapse of 1998, and Putin said gross domestic product grew by 6.3 percent in 2005, with real incomes also rising.

He found cause for celebration in Chechnya, ravaged by two wars in the past 12 years, saying one of the greatest political achievements in 2005 was bringing the republic into the “constitutional fold” with November parliamentary elections that completed a campaign to restore local government structures.

Read more Meddling

From CNET News
By Declan McCullagh

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in San Francisco’s federal district court, charges that AT&T has opened its telecommunications facilities up to the NSA and continues to “to assist the government in its secret surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the suit, says AT&T’s alleged cooperation violates free speech and privacy rights found in the U.S. Constitution and also contravenes federal wiretapping law, which prohibits electronic surveillance “except as authorized by statute.”

Kevin Bankston, an EFF staff attorney, said he anticipates that the Bush administration will intervene in the case on behalf of AT&T. “We are definitely going to have a fight with the government and AT&T,” he said.

AT&T said Tuesday that it needed to review the complaint before it could respond. But AT&T spokesman Dave Pacholczyk told CNET News.com last week in response to a query about NSA cooperation: “We don’t comment on matters of national security.”

Read more Spy Program

From The Village Voice
Why the White House Won’t Release Its Katrina Papers

By James Ridgeway

The reason for the government not turning over documents and making available top officials to testify about the Hurricane Katrina debacle before Congress is not just that the documents and testimony would reveal incompetence in evacuating the stranded, bringing in relief supplies, and cleaning up the mess. No, the paper trail is bound to demonstrate in detail that the federal government knew a good 48 hours before the storm hit what was bound to happen, but did virtually nothing to protect lives and property.

There is no secret about any of this. The Washington Post last week said it had obtained a copy of a 41-page report on the hurricane distributed by the Department of Homeland Security before the storm hit. According to the Post, an e-mail containing this report reached the White House Situation Room at 1:47 a.m. on August 29, hours before the full force of the storm raked the Gulf Coast.

Read More Barricading

From Think Progress

ThinkProgress launched last year on February 2 with real-time rapid response to the State of the Union address.

Tonight, we’ll mark our first full year online with another State of the Union extravaganza. Here’s the schedule — hope you’ll tune in:

1) 8 PM ET — Live Pre-SOTU Video Webcast: We’re teaming up with Air America’s Majority Report for a live panel at the Center for American Progress previewing President Bush’s speech. Watch the video webcast live on ThinkProgress.

Read more Think Progress

From Information Clearing House
By James Bovard

A recent denunciation of U.S. government foreign policy offers insights into a paradox of the war of terrorism. On January 24, 2006, the East Timor Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation denounced the U.S. government for backing the 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor. In the following decades, a quarter million East Timorese residents died as a result of this incursion. The commission declared that U.S. political and military support were fundamental to the Indonesian invasion and occupation.

The Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor were among the most barbaric actions of the late 20th century. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with Indonesian President Suharto in Jakarta the day before the invasion and gave U.S. approval. The primary concern of U.S. officials seemed to be to get back to Washington before the bloodbath began. Kissinger told Suharto, We understand your problem and the need to move quickly but I am only saying that it would be better if it were done after we returned. Kissinger, doing his best imitation of Lady Macbeth, urged Suharto, It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly.

Indonesia used U.S. military weapons to bombard East Timor and to crush resistance. The Indonesian military finally left East Timor in 1999, inflicting one more orgy of burning and killing on the island in the final days before its exit.

More people died as a result of the U.S.-backed invasion of East Timor than were killed by international terrorists in the subsequent 30 years. According to the U.S. State Department, between 1980 and 2005 fewer than 25,000 people were killed in international terrorist incidents around the globe.

Read more Terrorism

From CounterPunch
By Dave Lindorff

The pathetic failure of Democrats in the Senate to stick together and block the appointment of Sam Alito to the Supreme Court — a man committed to the idea of a president with unchecked, dictatatorial powers, and who favors corporations and the state over the individual — shows that it won’t just do to have Democrats take over Congress in November.

The Democrats who are still in Congress — especially the leadership, but even the rank-and-file members — are so spineless and habituated to caving in to Republican threats that they don’t even know how to stand on principle.

This means it won’t be enough to simply pick up 16 new Democratic seats in the House and six in the Senate in November. Those new seats will have to be filled by people who do stand for something. And the fake Democrats like Max Baucus (D-Montana), Kent Conrad (D-N. Dakota), Joe Lieberman (D-Connecticut) and Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) — there were 19 Democrats who voted for cloture, ending the chance of a filibuster, and one, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) who abstained — need to be challenged in primaries by real progressives, and punished for their betrayal of the Constitution and the hopes of those who sent them to Washington.

Impeachment of the criminal and power-mad President Bush will not even be possible as long as these frauds continue to dominate the Democratic Party. Only a grass-roots revolt among progressives during the primaries in support of candidates like Cindy Sheehan, who has announced plans to challenge Feinstein, will produce the kind of political shift that could turn around the country’s slide into authoritarianism.

Read more Debacle

From The Center For Public Integrity
By Sandy Bergo

A Justice Department memo written in 2003 may call into question the legal rationale the Bush administration has offered to justify electronic surveillance of Americans without court review.

Some critics of the ongoing National Security Agency (NSA) wiretapping program believe the 2003 memo undermines the position President Bush is taking today. The memo describes legislation drafted by Justice Department staff to expand surveillance powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Critics say it is hard to understand why Justice Department attorneys felt this change was needed, if, as the administration now claims, it had even broader authority and could avoid judicial review. In recent days, the administration has said the inherent constitutional powers of the president and the congressional authorization of military force against al Qaeda gave President Bush the authority he needed to circumvent the court.

The memo and proposed Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, dubbed “Patriot II,” were first obtained and posted on the Center for Public Integrity website in February 2003.

Read more Spying

From The Progressive
Editorial

There comes a time when the nakedness of the emperor can no longer be denied. Such a time is now.

George Bush’s policy of eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without a warrant proves he has placed himself above the law. Add this to the long list of other impeachable offenses–lying the country into war, torturing prisoners, exporting detainees for torture, paying columnists to propagandize the American public–that George W. Bush has committed, and put it at the top.

The President swears an oath of office that he will uphold the Constitution and faithfully execute the laws of the land. But he has been brazenly flouting the law that prohibits domestic spying without a warrant.

When The New York Times revealed on December 16 (after sitting on the story for a year and then omitting details at the request of Administration officials!) that Bush ordered the National Security Agency to monitor the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years, I expected Bush to deny it or to say he was going to review the policy. Instead, he has been vehemently defending that policy, citing both his authority under the Constitution as commander in chief and Congress’s authorization to go after Al Qaeda.

Read more King George