From The Progressive
By Elizabeth DiNovella

Since the President is adamant about pursuing his failed policies in Iraq, Congress has the duty to stand up and use its power to stop him. If Congress doesn’t stop this war, it’s not because it doesn’t have the power. It’s because it doesn’t have the will, said Senator Russ Feingold.

In language reminiscent of Fighting Bob La Follette, Feingold on January 30 implored his colleagues to do their constitutional duty. Chairing a Senate Judiciary hearing on Congress’s powers in wartime, Feingold in his opening remarks spared no one.

In the United States of America, the people are sovereign, not the President. It is Congress’ responsibility to challenge an Administration that persists in a war that is misguided and that the country opposes. We cannot simply wring our hands and complain about the Administration’s policy. We cannot just pass resolutions saying ˜your policy is mistaken.’ And we can’t sit idly by and tell ourselves that it’s the President’s job to fix the mess he made. It’s our job to fix the mess, and if we don’t do so we are abdicating our responsibilities.

Only two other Democrats joined Feingold at the hearing, Dick Durbin of Illinois and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. Republican Alren Specter of Pennsylvania, the former chair of the Judiciary Committee, was also in attendance. According to The New York Times, Specter said a clash over Constitutional powers appears to be imminent. Specter also said at the hearing, I would respectfully suggest to the President that he is not the sole decider. . . . The decider is a joint and shared responsibility.

Read more Bush

From Tom Paine
By Paul Waldman

These are heady times for Democrats. They took back both houses of Congress, then immediately passed their 100 Hours Agenda through the House, just as they had promised. On the most important issue of our time–Iraq–their criticisms have been vindicated and the public is overwhelmingly on their side, not to mention the fact that Republicans are deserting President Bush like rats from a sinking ship. As the 2008 presidential campaign begins rolling, the Democratic hopefuls as a group far outshine their Republican counterparts in talent, experience, political smarts and even charisma (think about what a change that is).

So this is precisely the time to be thinking not just about what’s going to happen in this session of Congress or in the upcoming presidential campaign, but in the years and decades to come. This is the time to lay the foundation for enhancing and sustaining a long-term Democratic majority.

In recent years, the most cutting criticism of the Democratic Party has been that it doesn’t know what it stands for. This attack may have been exaggerated by a contemptuous press corps, but it contained some truth: Because Republicans have for so long defined their ideology in the simplest possible terms, by comparison Democrats have looked muddled, scattered and consumed with the dreaded nuance.

So now that they are in the best political position they’ve had in over a decade, Democrats need to start defining for the public–and for themselves–not just where they stand, but why they stand there. In the coming months in this space, I’ll be addressing this question as it relates to a number of different issues, but today’s topic is taxes.

Read more Paying

From CounterPunch
By Jean Bricmont

July 1, 1916, was the opening day of the Battle of the Somme. On that single day, the British suffered more than 50,000 casualties, of which 20,000 died. The battle went on for four months, leading to about a million casualties on all sides, and the war itself continued for another two years.

In the summer of 2006, the Israeli army stopped its attacks on Lebanon after losing about a hundred soldiers. The majority of the U.S. population has turned against the Iraq war after less than 3,000 dead. That indicates a major change in the mentality of the West, and this reluctance to die in large numbers for “God and Country” is a major advance in the history of mankind. From the neoconservative point of view, however, this phenomenon is a sign of decadence; in fact, one of the positive aspects of the present conflict, from their perspective, is that it ought to strengthen the moral fiber of the American people, by making them ready to “die for a cause.”

But, so far, it is not working. More realistic people, the planners at the Pentagon for example, have tried to replace waves of human cannon fodder by massive “strategic” bombing. This works only rarely — in Kosovo and Serbia it did succeed, at least in bringing pro-Western clients to power in both places. But it clearly is not working satisfactorily in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine or Lebanon. The only thing that might succeed, in a very special sense of course, would be nuclear weapons, and the fact that those weapons are the West’s last military hope is truly frightening.

To put this observation in a more global context, Westerners do not always appreciate the fact that the major event of the 20th century was neither the rise and fall of fascism, nor the history of communism, but decolonization. One should remember that, about a century ago, the British could forbid access to a park in Shanghai to “dogs and Chinese.” To put it mildly, such provocations are no longer possible. And, of course, most of Asia and Africa were under European control. Latin America was formally independent, but under American and British tutelage and military interventions were routine.

Read more Clash

From Yahoo News
By Kelley Shannon

Best-selling author and columnist Molly Ivins, the sharp-witted liberal who skewered the political establishment and referred to President Bush as “Shrub,” died Wednesday after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 62.

David Pasztor, managing editor of the Texas Observer, confirmed her death.

The writer, who made a living poking fun at Texas politicians, whether they were in her home base of Austin or the White House, revealed in early 2006 that she was being treated for breast cancer for the third time.

More than 400 newspapers subscribed to her nationally syndicated column, which combined strong liberal views and populist-toned humor. Ivins’ illness did not seem to hurt her ability to deliver biting one-liners.

“I’m sorry to say (cancer) can kill you but it doesn’t make you a better person,” she said in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News in September, the same month cancer claimed her friend former Gov. Ann Richards.

To Ivins, “liberal” wasn’t an insult term. “Even I felt sorry for
Richard Nixon when he left; there’s nothing you can do about being born liberal — fish gotta swim and hearts gotta bleed,” she wrote in a column included in her 1998 collection, “You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You.”

Read More Molly

From Think Progress
By Nico

Ladies and gentlemen: The state of our economy is strong, President Bush told a Wall Street audience today in his second speech this week devoted to shoring up Americans’ disapproval with the economy.

In an interview last night, Bush was asked why only 41 percent of Americans approve of his handling of the economy. ABC News’ Betsy Stark said, Can that be summed up in one word? Can that be summed up as Iraq? Bush responded, I think so, yeah, adding, We’re in a time of war, and war’s unsettling. War’s negative.

Stark asked Bush why 67 percent of Americans believe he doesn’t understand the problems of average people. Bush said, I think it’s ’cause of the war again, and I think people are feeling pretty down about, kind of, things ’cause of the war.

Watch Blame

From AlterNet
By Matt Taibbi

If the right-wing media keeps spreading lies like the one about Barack Obama supposedly going to a madrassa as a child, it’s time to consider hiring the meanest lawyers on the planet to fight these creeps.

“Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage?” — From Hannity.com, long after the “madrassa” story had been debunked

Nearly two years before the next presidential election, we’ve already set the tone: Even the most outrageous media fictions about candidates are apparently going to go unpunished.

At least that was my thought, after watching last week’s unfolding of the Obama-madrassa scandal — the unofficial starting gun for the Great Slime Race, as the 2008 presidential campaign will someday be known. I found the entire affair puzzling. I know for sure that if I made a journalistic “mistake” of that magnitude, I’d be spending the rest of my life picking strawberries in the Siberian tundra. Most print journalists I know would expect the same thing; the legal ramifications alone of intentionally going to print with a story that missed by that much would guarantee that 80 cents out of every dollar you made for the next ten years would go to the victim of your libel. That’s unless you’re Tom Friedman and you can use congenital idiocy as a defense in court.

Read more Liars

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By Jay Bookman

Perhaps drawn by the drama of watching President Bush address a newly Democratic Congress, more than 45 million Americans tuned into the State of the Union speech last week, a number that was up 9 percent from 2006, according to the Nielsen ratings service.

But interestingly enough, while the overall audience for the speech grew substantially, the number of Americans who watched the speech on the Fox News Channel dropped dramatically. Hmmm. Wonder why? Maybe a lot of folks have lost the stomach for the kind of baloney served by the Fox apologists and propagandists.

According to Nielsen, Fox News drew 4.56 million viewers for its State of the Union coverage this year, down almost 2 million viewers from 2006. In fact, this year’s number was easily the lowest number to watch the speech on Fox News since Bush delivered his first State of the Union in 2002.

However, the president’s plummeting popularity isn’t merely bad for business at his favorite propaganda outlet. Republican politicians — those with presidential ambitions, as well as those just hoping to keep their seats in Congress in 2008 — also see their future hitched to that of Bush, and the thought is inspiring a palpable panic, particularly outside the South.

It’s beginning to look more and more like Karl Rove will be proved right — the Bush administration really might inspire a permanent realignment of American politics — although not exactly in the way Rove envisioned.

Read more Deluded

From Information Clearing House
By Paul Craig Roberts

Everyone can see the US buildup of massive air and naval attack forces on Iran’s borders. Fox News, the Bush Regime’s main disinformation agency, is busy preparing its viewers for the US attack by whipping up fear and hysteria over Iran.

President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq is the greatest crime of the 21st century.

Armed with a powerful moral case against Bush, whose lies are responsible for a war that has caused thousands of US casualties and killed vast numbers of Iraqi civilians, Democratic leaders are damning Bush’s war because it did not succeed!

The Bush Regime lied and fabricated evidence that was used to deceive Congress, the American people, and the United Nations. The vice president of the United States and the National Security Advisor created public images of mushroom clouds going up over American cities unless Iraq was invaded and Saddam Hussein’s terrible weapons of mass destruction were destroyed.

At the time that these absurd claims were being made, experts knew that they were false. Today everyone knows that the claims were lies.

The invasion of Iraq under false pretenses comprises solid grounds for impeaching both Bush and Cheney and for turning them over to the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague. Under the Nuremburg standard, to commit unprovoked aggression is a war crime.

Read more Failure

From Common Dreams
By Larry Beinhart

What is Habeas Corpus? Is it some obscure Latin legalism? One of the tricky clauses the ACLU uses to get evildoers out of jail? Does it mean the prosecution has to show a body in a murder case? Or is it the basis of your protection from tyranny?

It is the right to be brought into court.

It is fundamental to - and a sort of shorthand for - the right to be in a legal system, with laws and judges, evidence and a defense.

Hi, there John Doe, says the policeman at the door. We’ve come to take you away.

But I’m Jane Roe, not John Doe, you say, which is true, and you have the body parts that support such a distinction, as well as some paperwork. And why are you taking me away?

Don’t really care who you claim to be, and the charge is none of your business, says the more talkative of the two officers, or soldiers, or whoever is grabbing you.

Wait, let me tell my family and call my lawyer, you say.

Not a chance, says the friendly police person, cuffing you and throwing a bag over your head.

Blouff, blouff, blouff, you cry through the hood.

That’ll teach you to sneer at the president, says the talkative officer, kicking you to make you move. And undermine his War on Terror!

It’s not against the law to sneer, you try to say, but they can’t hear you. And neither will anyone else, because you have no right of Habeas Corpus.

Read more Habeas Corpus

From The Washington Post
By Dan Froomkin

It’s a memorable scene.

The time: September 2003, just as the Department of Justice is launching its investigation of who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent to the media.

The characters: Scooter Libby, the singularly important chief of staff to an enormously powerful vice president, and David S. Addington, the vice president’s preeminent legal brain and architect of the White House’s expansion of executive power.

The place: Libby’s spacious office in the gothic Old Executive Office Building, right next door to the White House.

“I just want to tell you, I didn’t do it,” Libby tells Addington, according to the latter’s testimony yesterday at the former’s federal trial for perjury and obstruction of justice.

And how does Addington respond? No one has ever suggested he is stupid. He did not respond at all.

“I didn’t ask what the ‘it’ was,” Addington testified yesterday.

That was a wise move on Addington’s part.

Read more Leak