Representative Linda Sanchez says she wants to see Karl Rove in jail. A second segment follows with law professor Jonathan Turley. There does appear to be some confusion as to whether or not the White House has claimed executive privilege on behalf of Rove as both Sanchez and Turley state. Marcy Wheeler, on the other hand, makes a compelling case that executive privilege has not been claimed by the White House over at Empty Wheel.
Press TV:We hear that Michael Mukasey is going to become the latest of the President's Attorney-Generals to be subpoenaed, this time over his conversations with Bush and Cheney - does this show that Congress is serious about calling the executive to account?
Gore Vidal: No, Congress has never been more cowardly, nor more corrupt. All Bush has do is to make sure certain amounts of money go in the direction of certain important congressmen and that's end of any serious investigation. After all, one of the bravest members of Congress is Denis Kucinich who brought the article of impeachment in to the well of the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives must then try the president, and then after that it goes to the Senate for judgment. However, none of these things will happen because there's nobody there except for Mr. Kucinich who has the courage to take on a sitting president who is kind of a Mafioso.
Press TV: How can it just be one person among so many hundreds of Congressmen who wants the impeachment of George W. Bush in these circumstances?
Gore Vidal: Well it's because we no longer have a country. We don't have a republic any more. During the last 7 or 8 years of the Bush regime, they've got rid of the Bill of Rights, they've got rid of habeas corpus. They have got rid of one of the nicest gifts that England ever left us when they went away and we ceased to be colonies - the Magna Carta - from the 12th century. All of our law and due process of law is based on that. And the Bush people got rid of it. The president and little Mr. Gonzales who for a few minutes was his Attorney General. They managed to get rid of all of the constitutional links that made us literally a republic.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) presented 35 Articles of Impeachment on the House floor tonight. They are a must read for all Americans. But until a transcript is up check out Articles 28 and 29 which are near and dear to my heart:
Article 28: Tampering with Free and Fair Elections (7:20)
Article 29: Violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Part 1, 8:54)
Article 29: Violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Part 2, 9:39)
Yesterday I interviewed Byron DeLear who is running for Congress in Missouri's 2nd District. The current holder of the seat is the ultra-conservative war supporter and Bush crony, Todd Akin (R-MO), who last year infamously argued to keep sending reinforcements to Iraq by invoking Davy Crockett at the Alamo.
I found the intellectual DeLear, who supports the withdrawal of our troops from Iraq and the impeachment of Bush and Cheney, extremely knowledgeable on a wide range of issues including election integrity. DeLear even goes so far as to call for the 28th Amendment to the US Constitution to secure the vote:
“I talk about the necessity for the 28th Amendment to the US Constitution to be securing the most sacrosanct institution of our Republic which is the vote – the cornerstone of our democracy. And how is it that we can allow corporations to own the source code that instructs voting machines how to count the vote? How is it that in our supposedly popular and public owned electoral system can we have privatization occurring where the basic functions of our elections are in secret and are not available to the scrutiny of the American people?
So I think the 28th Amendment to the Constitution should be securing the vote, providing for independent verification of ballot results and I think we should explore the idea of perhaps standardizing the American voting experience. Because when you have 13,000 different methods of counting the vote littered across the landscape of our Republic – that essentially violates the essence of equal protection under the law. And I don’t think it’s fair that you can have African Americans waiting six hours in the rain in Ohio and then other people in other parts of the country just walk in and get their votes cast and there is no problem whatsoever.
So we got to end this kind of unequal, unfair playing field that is occurring in regards to counting our votes and getting our voice heard.”
You can find out more about DeLear and contribute to his campaign at his website - DeLear for Congress.
UPDATE: DeLear also spoke at length on Sunday with Gore Vidal. Below are some of the highlights from DeLear that had me thinking he should be running for President instead of Congress:
Rep. Wexler is a great Congressman who speaks truth to power. But in this video he evidences exactly why he will fail in his mission to impeach Bush and Cheney. How is it that the White House has a tv arm (Fox “News”), a radio arm (conservative talk radio), a push for the Iraq war arm (NY Times) and has editorial boards across the country in its pocket (see The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times and The Washington Post for starters), but Rep. Wexler can't find himself a tripod, a microphone or a news outlet for his important message.
This Op-Ed by George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley in the L.A. Times is not to be missed:
The recent decisions of Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey to block any prosecution of Bush administration officials for contempt and to block any criminal investigation of torture led to a chorus of criticism. Many view the decisions as raw examples of political manipulation of the legal process and overt cronyism. I must confess that I was one of those crying foul until I suddenly realized that there was something profound, even beautiful, in Mukasey's action.
In his twisting of legal principles, the attorney general has succeeded in creating a perfect paradox. Under Mukasey's Paradox, lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president -- and a president cannot commit a crime when he acts under advice of lawyers.
Such a perfect paradox is no easy task. Most attempts fall apart because of some element of logical consistency. The closest example to Mukasey's Paradox is the Grandfather Paradox: If you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he meets your grandmother, you would not be conceived and therefore you could not go back to kill your grandfather. That one can play real tricks with your head.
Mukasey's Paradox appears designed to play tricks with Congress. Its origins date back to Mukasey's confirmation hearings, when he first denied knowing what waterboarding was and then (when it was defined for him) refused to recognize it as torture. In fact, it is not only a crime under U.S. law, it is a well-defined war crime under international law.
It's officially time to replace the American mantra of “innocent until proven guilty” with “guilty once proven innocent”. According to Democracy Now, two more men remain in prison despite being found innocent of terrorist related crimes by a jury of their peers. Esteemed GWU law professor Jonathan Turley makes clear what is going on with one of the prisoners mentioned in the video clip:
“The mistreatment of Dr. Al-Arian remains an international symbol of how the Bush Administration has discarded fundamental principles of fairness in a blind pursuit of retribution against this political activist.”
I have previously posted repeatedly about former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman who also remains behind bars as a political prisoner in America:
ALERT: Set your TIVO/VCR to record “60 Minutes” this Sunday (opposite the Academy Awards)!
The MSM is finally taking up the egregious case of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman who is literally an American political prisoner thanks in no small part to Karl Rove.
For much more on this shocking case check out Scott Horton's great work at Harper's and the Don Siegelman website.
Glenn Greenwald at Salon may be the best and most important political “blogger” on the internet today. Among other things he has been admirably leading the fight against the absurd and utterly shameful (not to mention anti-American) idea of granting retroactive immunity for past law breaking to the telecom industry in the currently being debated FISA bill.
Most of the telcos including AT&T and Verizon have been breaking the law -- since before 9/11 -- by helping the Bush administration spy on Americans. The one exception was Qwest which, rather coincidentally, subsequently lost major government contracts and had its CEO investigated for three years by the SEC and FBI before he was finally charged with insider trading.
While the immunity debate is ongoing and the outlook for the rule of law is not good, the fact that there has been any debate at all is largely because of bloggers like Greenwald and the good folks at fire dog lake who inspired the masses into taking action. To this point Greenwald writes words that every American should heed:
There is never any shortage of super-sophisticated cynics to come along and say how none of this matters, how it's so pitifully naive to think that any difference can ever be made, how the System is so Corrupted and the Deck So Stacked Against Us that everything is doomed and defeat is the inevitable option. And there is an element of truth to the premises of that defeatist mindset. The principal reason blogs exist, after all, is precisely because all other institutions intended to provide some adversarial check on what our government does -- the establishment media, the “opposition party,” the Congress -- typically do the opposite: they serve as enablers of it rather than checks on it. That's all true enough.
But what incidents such as this one conclusively demonstrate is that it is always possible, if enough citizen intensity is mustered and the right strategy is formulated, for citizens to disrupt and defeat the best-laid plans of our corrupt political establishment. There's a comfort and temptation in denying that truth. Those who insist that defeat is inevitable and All is Lost are relieved of the burdensome task of trying. But defeat occurs because the right strategy isn't found, not because it is inevitable.
So to borrow the catch phrase from the great progressive video site, Brave New Films: “psssst...Do Something!”
Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) called for the firing of John Tanner - the head of the Voting Rights section of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department - because of the prejudicial comments he made at the National Latino Congreso that I captured on video and posted at The BRAD BLOG. In the video Tanner acknowledges that Photo ID laws do disenfranchise elderly voters but do not disproportionately impact minority voters because they “don’t become elderly the way white people do; they die first.”
Well, he should certainly be fired, obviously. Obviously, someone who has such prejudices has no business heading the Voting Rights section or any other branch of the government and certainly not being on the Federal Voting Commission, which is supposed to enforce our election laws and our voting rights laws.
Now, Mr. Tanner, as head of the Voting Rights section, perverted the Justice Department -- or he and a few others perverted the Justice Department from seeking to protect people's civil rights and the right to vote to seeking deliberately, I believe -- and I think a number of reports have shown this -- to use the Justice Department to disenfranchise people likely to vote Democratic, specifically minorities and more elderly people. You know, here he’s admitting that procedures that he sought to put into place would discriminate against elderly people in voting, would cause valid elderly voters not to be able to vote. That’s against the law, and it obviously also should be against the policy of the United States government. But we know that the Bush administration has been using these voter ID cards, the fear of -- so far never demonstrated -- voter fraud, to put into place all sorts of new restrictions, voter ID cards, purge lists and so forth, which we know have the effect of disproportionately disenfranchising legal elderly and minority but likely-to-vote-Democratic voters.
Commit OBVIOUS war crimes and no one flinches. Kill more than a million innocents and few raise an eyebrow. Wear a button that reads “I LOVE THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ” and get your ass kicked before you get arrested. Here's the story:
WASHINGTON - September 10 - Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr., president of the Hip Hop Caucus, was attacked by six capitol police today, when he was stopped from entering the Cannon Caucus Room on Capitol Hill, where General Petreaus gave testimony today to a joint hearing for the House Arms Services Committee and Foreign Relations Committee on the war in Iraq.
After waiting in line throughout the morning for the hearing that was scheduled to start at 12:30pm, Rev. Yearwood was stopped from entering the room, while others behind him were allowed to enter. He told the officers blocking his ability to enter the room, that he was waiting in line with everyone else and had the right to enter as well. When they threatened him with arrest he responded with “I will not be arrested today.” According to witnesses, six capitol police, without warning, “football tackled” him. He was carried off in a wheel chair by DC Fire and Emergency to George Washington Hospital.
Rev. Yearwood said as he was being released from the hospital to be taken to central booking, “The officers decided I was not going to get in Gen. Petreaus' hearing when they saw my button, which says 'I LOVE THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ.'”
Capitol Police are not saying what the charges are, but an inside source has said that the charge is assaulting a police officer. Rev. Yearwood is scheduled to be transferred to Central Processing to be arraigned tomorrow morning.
The incident was recorded by an observer and is available on YouTube WhyNotNews http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiradc...
For further information contact: Liz Havstad at liz@hiphopcaucus.org or 510-206-6749.
One more way Bush is destroying the Constitution from Yale law and political science professor Bruce Ackerman:
President George W. Bush's campaign to stay the course in Iraq is taking a new and constitutionally dangerous turn. When Senator John Warner recently called for a troop withdrawal by Christmas, the White House did not mount its usual counterattack. It allowed a surprising champion to take its place. Major General Rick Lynch, a field commander in Iraq, summoned reporters to condemn Mr Warner's proposal as “a giant step backwards”.
It was Maj Gen Lynch who was making the giant step into forbidden territory. He had no business engaging in a public debate with a US senator. His remarks represent an assault on the principle of civilian control - the most blatant so far during the Iraq war.
Nobody remarked on the breach. But this only makes it more troubling and should serve as prologue for the next large event in civilian-military relations: the president's effort to manipulate General David Petraeus's report to Congress.
Once again, nobody is noticing the threat to civilian control. Mr Bush has pushed Gen Petraeus into the foreground to shore up his badly damaged credibility. But in doing so, he has made himself a hostage. He needs the general more than the general needs him. Despite the president's grandiose pretensions as commander-in-chief, the future of the Iraq war is up to Gen Petraeus.
A Stanford law professor on the Jose Padilla case in the Washington Post:
As court filings indicate, Padilla was allegedly subjected to sleep deprivation, stress positions and extreme temperatures. Worse, he was held without human contact, without a clock or even natural light -- with no way to know how quickly or slowly time was passing. When he was removed from his cell to visit a dentist, goggles and earmuffs were placed on him. Psychologists have long reported that extreme sensory deprivation is one of the quickest ways to drive people mad -- and make them willing to confess to anything.
The case challenging the constitutionality of Padilla's detention was in the federal courts for several years. It reached the Supreme Court in 2004, at which point the government finally allowed him to speak to a lawyer. But the high court did not review the merits; instead, it ruled on a technicality that the case should have been brought in South Carolina, not New York. Litigation continued and nearly reached the Supreme Court again in late 2005. By then, the administration had begun soft-pedaling the “dirty bomb” story, which it described as “loose talk” rather than an imminent plot. It put forward a new theory: Padilla was planning to blow up apartment buildings with natural gas. The government also argued that he could be detained as an “enemy combatant” because, it alleged, he had been in Afghanistan during the U.S. bombing campaign in late 2001.
Two business days before the government's brief was due in the Supreme Court, the administration switched tactics again. Fearful that the court would rule that a U.S. citizen arrested in the United States could not constitutionally be detained forever without criminal trial, the government announced that Padilla would be tried in a federal court in Miami. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit noted, the government's actions made it appear that it was trying to evade Supreme Court review.
The charges brought in Miami contained none of the allegations about the dirty-bomb plot, the apartment buildings or even Padilla's presence in Afghanistan in late 2001. Instead, the government alleged that Padilla had conspired in the 1990s to provide support to overseas jihadists in Bosnia and Chechnya. Commentators called even this weaker case notably thin, but Padilla was found guilty.
Third alleged offense is the charm I guess. Every American should be asking themselves, “Are you ready hey are you ready for this?”
There are plenty of ways that you can hurt a man
And bring him to the ground
You can beat him
You can cheat him
You can treat him bad and leave him
When he's down yeah
But I'm ready yes I'm ready for you
I'm standing on my own two feet
Out of the doorway the bullets rip
Repeating to the sound of the beat
Another one bites the dust
Another one bites the dust
And another one gone and another one gone
Another one bites the dust yeah
Hey I'm gonna get you too
Another one bites the dust
Shoot out
