Archive for December, 2005

New Impeachment Order of Succession

Wednesday, December 21st, 2005

I come back to my earlier conclusion on the matter of how Presidential Succession oughta work in cases of Impeachment, which I’ve altered to align a bit with Richard Nixon’s stated reason for quitting “does not have a large enough base in Congress to be effective” (but really, the case is more along the lines of “Public Loss of Confidence”):

There oughta be a law. A president in his second term who cannot muster an approval rating over 40 percent for a month’s duration shall be removed. He shall be replaced by a member of the same party who has successfully positioned himself apart from the president. (The second part of this law will help clear up a wee bit the Woeful state of the Senate — where a party wraps themselves tightly around their man in the White House, Legislature becoming Parliament, political Independence Lost for fear of how a weakened Party figurehead will tear your political fortunes down. In the current climate… may I suggest Chuck Hagel (Soitenly not goddamned John McCain.) I’ll work out the mechinations of this new rule later.

The basic problem with the current order of succession at the moment is that the first person in line, the vice president, is now more than ever an integral part of the Presidential Administration, and bound down with the same corruption causes that afflict the first president. I wonder how easily it will be from henceforth to elect a vice president into the presidency after the eight long years of the administration. (Then again, Dick Nixon and Al Gore are both saddled with the regret of not simply arguing that they will be a continuation of two popular presidents, both feeling like they needed to distinguish themselves from Dwight Eisenhower or Clinton Penis.) The problem comes into glaring light with the current occupants: Dick Cheney is the most powerful vice president in American history.

At least in the current line of succession we go to the Legislative Body after president and vice president. Okay in a pinch. But face it: we’ve evolved into a bit of a Parliamentary System, and thus… need a parliamentary solution. Margaret Thatcher is thrown overboard because the British public just becomes sick of her. The same is supposed to be about to happen to Tony Blair. But the vote of no confidence is simply met by reshuffling the party head.

Which is why I go with the “Stay Inside the Party” model. Let’s face it: the other party lost the last election, and thus does not deserve to sit in the president. I have suggested a threshold before on how a nation might replace the beleagured second-term president with his loser in the election prior: if the scandal that undid the president had been uncovered before the election, would it have been enough to unseat him? If so, the other guy/gal gets to take his seat. If not, and we are meeted out by the under-40 rule, you go to the “Find someone within the party” rule. The “Member of the Same Party” rule, thus, is a sort of do-over for the governing party. They can reconfigure themselves around their new leader, and bury the old decayed bones of corruption met by the former head. The ship of state is not burrowed under.

The 40-threshold does not apply to the first term, to allow for a president to mete out his learning curve and the public to figure him/her out.

Pieces of Paper Everywhere.

Tuesday, December 20th, 2005

The problem with the Capitol Hill Blue article which found George W Bush saying,

“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face. It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

beyond it being a bit too obvious a scion to Bush-opponents, was its similarity to the most bizarre moment of Bush’s Social Security Reform Tour, where he observes that there are pieces of paper in filing cabinets:

The office here in Parkersburg stores those IOUs. They’re stacked in a filing cabinet. Imagine — the retirement security for future generations is sitting in a filing cabinet.

But somewhere along the line I just have to ponder some things about “Capitol Hill Blue”. Previously we had the story of just how absurdly narrow the “Bush Bubble” was… an early parody of the recent Newsweek “Bush In a Bubble” story that conforms to what I think of the man and his administration. Shortly after the “Capitol Hill Blue” story, the story comes out in the Washington Times (if I’m remembering correctly) that Bush is only associating with five people — Condelleza Rice, Barbara Bush, three other women in his circle that I can’t remember. The story falls in line with the Capitol Hill Blue story. Maybe the rumours are just boomeranging around… I don’t know.

Now stare back at the supposed Bush line that It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!

That appears to be his attitude with regards to his wire-tapping of American citizens in the name of security. How does Bush defend himself? By claiming that he has “Legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force.” He is just making stuff up now. And why not? They’re just pieces of paper — that Constitution, and that Congressional Resolution!

(“Total Information Awareness” is in effect.)

For their part, Capitol Hill Blue has this to say about their reliability.

I don’t buy the “if you piss off both sides, you’re doing your job” line. You can easily skewer this in your mind to claim Independence when there is none. Bill O’Reilly reads his mail — a couple shouting about his right-wing bias, and then a couple clamouring about his left-wing bias (who are those people?), and then, with deep satisfaction in his voice, a letter saying how “Fair and Balanced and unencumbered by any ideology” O’Reilly is. It’s a game you can too easily slant to the direction you want.

Never mind. Assume that Capitol Hill Blues is Garbage, parroting out the worst fears the American populace have about the Administration in Power. There remains truth in what they say… and they do it with more courage than the New York Times, which has been sitting on their “Survelliance” story for over a yearbecause the Bush Administration told them to (stopping the election of John Kerry, I may add). And now Bush is shocked… shocked… SHOCKED… that the New York Times printed such a story. SHOCKED, I tell you.

… because he believes in Original Intent. And originally, a lot of the Founding Fathers had problems with the Constitution… you see?

Bush — Murtha

Monday, December 19th, 2005

It would be possible, in a calmer political climate, to believe that George W. Bush and John Murtha are both partly right about Iraq. It’s a notion worth considering this week, as Iraqis go to the polls for their most meaningful election since Saddam Hussein was chased from his palace.

So sayseth the famous unsigned editorial writer of the Oregonian, in a formula opinion creation I like to call the “Ingratiating Sensible Center”, a formula that works as “a little from column ‘A’; a little from column ‘B'” or “In between the two extremes, lies the truth”.

I may say something different. It may not be a “Skull and Bones trick” (and if you’ve read this blog long enough, you know that my definition of that phrase is “lead to a single opinion through political elites framing the boundaries of the debate), but it may be the case that It would be possible, in a certain mindset, to believe that George W. Bush and John Murtha are both saying the same thing about Iraq. It’s not exactly the manner that Kerry and Bush were saying the same thing about Iraq during the 2004 election, but this seems to be an accidental concurrence with Bush and Murtha.

Consider that Bush Administration keeps hinting of “significant troop withdrawals”, something easily thought of as an mid-term election-year stunt, perhaps trunacated by the supposed “last ditch effort to save the neo-con plan” by Cheney–Wolfowitz–et al. Nevermind that, though. Now Consider that Murtha’s plan is more aptly termed “Cut and Stay” — we’re not leaving the area. So, what? Fortify the bases we’re building in Iraq, stay out of the Iraqi Government (largely chosen by the USA, mind ye)’s way, and … “Onward to Victory!!!”

The Cairo meeting had every Iraqi politician say that US troops should leave, and that Iraqi Insurgents have a right to kill (or some euphemism thereof) Occupation troops. That was enough to get Raed to vote. And if Raed voted, we’ve achieved some sort of milestone with the Iraqi psuedo-Democracy. We’ve appeased the necessary Insurgent-sympathizers.

We can “leave” and “stay”, right? Right?

I tend to skip the Vietnam War with my war analogies, perferring the Korean War. It falls into line of where wars take us a bit more easily: not the best result; not the worst result — and you adjust your future plans accordingly.

Woman of the Year

Monday, December 19th, 2005

I see that Jennifer Aniston is GQ’s “First Woman of the Year”. A curious choice. But, as GQ editor Mark Healy insists it’s not a gimmick and “Sometimes, when you think someone is deserving, then you make room.”

I guess I don’t follow Hollywood close enough to know why she is more deserving than any other actress or female celebrity who doesn’t look awful with a sideways view of her breast. She appears in the tabloids a lot, largely by her own doing? (Publicity Hound, I suppose.) She is going to be in a bunch of movies next year?

The featured article contains several photographs of her shirtless, and scanning it I see a pull-quote showing that she is in favour of World Peace… something along the lines of “At a time when we should be coming together, we’re splitting apart.”

Okay. I will now pick my blog’s “woman of the year”. Maybe there are women more deserving than the choice I picked, and maybe there aren’t. I can’t say for sure.

From Pakistan, I choose Mukhtran Bibi.

Mukhtaran Bibi (c. 1972 – ) is a Pakistani woman from the small and impoverished village of Meerwala, located in the rural tehsil (county) of Jatoi in the Muzaffargarh District of Pakistan. Also known as Mukhtar Mai, Mukhtiar or just Mukhtaran, she was gang-raped on the demands of tribesmen — or by some accounts, on the orders of a panchayat (tribal council) — of a local clan known as the Mastoi. The Mastoi clan reportedly had bitter disputes with Mukhtaran’s clan, the Tatla.

After the conviction of her attackers, Mukhtaran became a symbol for advocates for the health and security of women in her region, attracting both national and international attention to these issues. [If I have to spell it out, traditionally women from these areas after being raped kill themselves out of shame] Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf awarded Mukhtaran a financial settlement of Rs.500,000 (about US$8000) [President Perev Musharraf having to be dragged and prodded by international pressure] which she used to build two local schools, one for girls and another for boys. There were no schools for girls in Mukhtaran’s village before this and she never had the opportunity to get an education. Some Western donors have also come forward with contributions.

Okay, so the editorial dictums of GQ and struat.com/election are different. For the record, I could just as easily have tossed up a hot sem-nude celebrity that I find attractive, and could’ve done so on a whim… and I would have picked someone hotter than Jennifer Freaking Aniston.

I see from Jeff’s latest “Elsewhere” link that Chris Elliott is “Struat.com’s Man of the Year”. The voting tallies show that he beat out Lyndon LaRouche by just 4 third place votes.

Torture

Saturday, December 17th, 2005

“And the Washington Redskins today have now defeated the New York Niggers. Next game in our NFL double header: the San Francisco Spics versus the Atlanta Honkeys.”

Okay. That’s the National Football team as composed of teams named after racial epiteths. The “Washington Redskins” is a perenial sore-spot, regularly derided by Native American groups and laughed off by the rest of us (honkeys like me) as being on par with PETA’s attempt to change the name of the Green Bay Packers to the Green Bay Pickers.

Behind the names lie ugly legacies. Slaughter. Genocide. Terrorism. Torture.

Torture.

We’ve all heard about Alan Dersowitz’s “Ticking Bomb Scenario” and his proposed time-is-of-the-essence-and-we-have-this-procedure-in-place-to-quickly-obtain “Torture Warrant”. Time is of the essence, and you have a person in custody who has information that will save innocent life. Torture is justified to get this information out. Right?

My answer is, “Sure, I guess.” Except I keep stumbling upon this problem with the proponents of Alan Dersowitz’s solution.

On the message board I frequent and sort of administer, there was this bellicose-fueled poster (self labeled “Independent”, who gets “both sides of the story” by listening to “both right wing radio and NPR!”… and he voted for Gore in 2000, but because Bush “will take the fight to the terrorists” will vote for Bush in 2004) who initially sided with the idea that Torture was justified at Abu Gharib. It echoed Rush Limbaugh’s famous “Skull and Bones” defense. He shortly backed down on that idea– I believe after it became clear that the people in abu Gharib were not “The worst of the worst”, and he sidestepped himself to the “few bad apples” storyline of what happened at Abu Gharib.

The next thread we get is the “Say there’s a ticking time bomb and we needed to extract the information. I say, Torture ’em!”

I admit I wasn’t terribly adept in this oh so crucial message board squirmish, and my posting of various news items of descriptions of what happened at abu gharib got a “What’s your point?”. We’re no longer working with what happened at abu gharib, after all, and we all agree that that was bad, but now we’re looking at hypothetical scenarios involving the worst of the worst.

The problem, which I was unable to express at that time, beyond a “when the hell does this even happen??” was that he had just come off defending Abu Gharib, where he for some reason thought the prisoners were the “worst of the worst” and where there really is no “information” that needs to be gotten out with immediacy… and find-tuned it to a more hypothetical, and not on the plate, “worst of the worst”.

He was still defending abu Gharib! And everyone bringing us to the “ticking bomb scenario”, (conditioned by entertaimnet blockbusters the Fox Hit “24”, a show that looks as though it was stoked up and brought into clearer focus after Bush’s meeting with Hollywood executives in the final months of 2001) – torture looks as though they are defending something else entirely, too.

Which brings us back to the “worst of the worst”.

There’s this pro-torture pundit who chimed in with a “Water-board Zarqawi? In a heart-beat!”

To which I can only say, “Well. Sure. I… guess.”

Get back to me after you actually get Zarqawi, okay? In the meantime…

Perception management has every Muhommad on the streets of an Arab country as being, defacto, Zarqawi. I say that with the message board encounter over abu Gharib in mind.

Now you head to the Mathematics of An Iraqi Insurgency, my “inexaustible supply” metrix, with that “Yes! Torture Zarqawi!” … and the multitudes of “#3″s we keep capturing, and… these insurgents are terrorists…

The Washington Redskins have defeated the New York Niggers.

the death of “Morning Sedition”

Saturday, December 17th, 2005

I originally thought that the final two segments of Thursday’s “Morning Sedition” (the now-canceled Air America morning show) program was a joke. A “corporate suit” walks in, and tensions grow between him and Marc Maron (the co-host who is being shoved away along with with the show) as the “Director of Talent Development” (or some such title) placates Marc Maron. Next segment, he stumbles through a routine (“Liberal Marching Orders” perhaps?), and can’t do it, rattled by being walked in like that. He returns, there’s fighting, and what made me think it was a gag: after Marc Maron yelps out something about “What are you going to do? Can me?”, the show goes to the wacky theme for the “Sammy the Stem-Cell” bit.

It seemed kind of similar to a repeated “Best of” moment they aired a few days prior, where the hosts “Called out” for any conservative New York resident who wants to come in and have a fight with one of the show-hosts. And, sure enough, someone does come in, and we have a war of chest-beating bluster. Then, after some things are settled “Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome our guest co-host for the hour, from the WWE [name of pro-wrestler].”

Upon hearing those two segments again… and hearing it discussed on “Majority Report” as an actual incident… it suddenly looks as though “Marc Maron’s melt-down” and on-air fight with the “Director of Talent Development” was, indeed, real, and the playing of the wacky “Sammy the Stem Cell” music was an instant-reaction to fill up the tense fight.

Go figure.

This comment on the top of Marc Maron’s webpage looks like something Rick Emerson might’ve put on his website when his show was cancelled last May:

Popcorn is a good analogy for show business. Every time you make popcorn, there are always those fluffy, white, happy popped pieces that are fun to eat and look at and everybody likes them. But there are also always those burnt, hard kernels at the bottom that don’t pop. You know why they don’t pop? They don’t pop because they have integrity.

A quick note on “Morning Sedition”: the show was horrible when it first aired, so I initially paid no mind to it. In Portland, it was moved to 3:00 am to make way for Thom Hartmann — by which time, it had found itself, I guess partly by ridding itself of Sue Elicot and partly through the seasoning process of the radio nonprofessional Marc Maron.

But it looks like there’s two weeks of “Best Of” programs left for the show. I don’t know if I recommend staying up late or waking up early…

Hey Look! A New LaRouche Posting!!

Friday, December 16th, 2005

Sooner or later (I likely will be able to toss up tidbits, but may lak the gumption for the entire article until the next calendar year), I’ll post what is sort of the master article on Lyndon LaRouche, published in the New York Times on October 7, 1979.  The “tid-bits” I’m sort of promising provide us with some things that echo some experiences found in, of all places, an anonymous PSU student quoted in the Portland State University Vanguard newspaper article from a year and a half ago. The New York Times article is famous in the lore of LaRouche literature as being the “LaRouche is a Bad Man, but We Can’t Tell You Why” hit-piece. (No, I have not spent a heckofalotof time reading his literature, but if you skim around, this sticks out and sticks out well.)

In the meantime, sit back and enjoy an amusing enough example of electoral politics circa 1983, through the eyes of the local New York Times editorial page:

May 2, 1983 “More Than Just A Local School Fight”

New York City’s local school board elections are usually local, important to parents in the district and few others. But tomorrow’s election in the Sixth District, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, holds wider interest. A group calling itself the National Democratic Policy Committee has entered a slate of nine candidates interested in fighting about such local educational issues as “British intelligence and the Israeli Mafia” and the International Money Fund. They hint that city officials are guilty of heinous offenses against law and decency. The election of any members of this group would be a heavy blow to the school district.

The group has no connection with the Democratic Party. It advertises its connection with Lyndon LaRouche. Mr. LaRouche has run for a number of important offices and backed candidates for others. The ostensible program of his organization is to stimulate worldwide economic development through the harnessing of nuclear fusion. His literature, however, devotes far more space to attacks on British bankers, to support for anti-Zionism in a form that is hard to distinguish from anti-Semitism, and to an authoritarian program to counter all conspiracies and perversions.

Residents of District 6 who are either enrolled voters or parents with children in any of the district schools would be wise to select their preferred candidates from among those who are not endorsed by the “National Democratic Policy Committee.” To elect any of its candidates would reward intolerance, and indifference to education.
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May 22, 1983
Well-Schooled Voters

Nine members of the so-called National Democratic Policy Committee, an organization inspired and led by Lyndon LaRouche Jr., entered the New York school board election in District 6, covering Inwood, Washington Heights and upper Harlem. The threat of their candidacies helped bring 14,000 voters to the polls, 6,000 more than three years ago. Not one of the group was elected.

The LaRouche-affiliated candidates complained about inadequacies of the schools and attacked public officials with harsh personal innuendoes. They also warned of the alleged threat of British and Israeli intelligence agents, a standard LaRouche issue. It was impossible to read such broadsides withoug reeling that “anti-British” bias masked ant-Semitism.

Thanks to local organizations, unions and Councilman Stanley Michels, the anti-LaROuche forces were able to rout their opponents. The big turnout, noted also in other districts facing controversy, was in itself encouraging; it may indicate a reversal of the declining interest in school board elections since 1970.
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