McCain Votes Against Banning Waterboarding, but Claims it is “Illegal”

BY FRANK J. RANELLI


Senator John McCain, the erstwhile prisoner of war, whose previous vehement opposition to torture stemmed from years of torment at the hands of the North Vietnamese, has voted against banning waterboarding while claiming it is illegal.

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As reported in the New York Times today, the Senate passed a measure by a vote of 51-45 to ban waterboarding and other “harsh interrogation methods.” The legislation had already cleared the House in December that would “limit all American interrogators to techniques permitted in the Army Field Manual on Interrogation.”

President Bush, threatening to veto the bill, drew harsh criticism from Democrats Charles Schumer and Senate Leader Harry Reid. In a salvo to prod Bush into signing the bill, Schumer exclaimed, “If the president vetoes intelligence authorization, he will be voting in favor of waterboarding.” While Reid proclaimed, “We are taking an important step toward restoring our moral leadership in the world. It is now up to the president to show his own moral leadership and sign this bill into law.”

However, self-proclaimed maverick and presumptive Republican nominee for President, John McCain, took a mercurial stance. McCain who was a prisoner of war during Vietnam for five years, and who was tortured while in captivity, voted against the banning of waterboarding.

McCain, claiming his support and vote for the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which gives the President the ability to approve harsh interrogations methods not in the Army Field Manual, provides proof his record is consistent with his views and voting record on torture.

Nonetheless, McCain seemed to contradict himself, telling one reporter, “Waterboarding is illegal and should be banned” and “the agency (the C.I.A.) must adhere to existing federal law and international treaties.”

The “Straight Talk Express” may be posing tough on terror, in an effort to shore up a shaky relationship with hard-line conservatives, but obvious prevarications, such as this, will do little to convince likely voters McCain is anything but an opportunistic politician who claims, when asked about potential political motives, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

Independent Study Finds Bush "Unequivocally" Lied U.S. into War with Iraq

BY FRANK J. RANELLI


In perhaps the most complete and damning evidence yet that President Bush deceived a nation into a baseless war, a nonprofit collaboration of two independent organizations has concluded that President Bush used at least 532 misleading and deceptively false statements to justify military action against Iraq.

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A nonprofit collaboration of two independent, non-governmental organizations has concluded that President Bush used at least 532 misleading and deceptively false statements to justify military action against Iraq. In all, the Bush administration as a whole used a mind-numbing 935 false statements to goad America into war with Iraq. Calling their findings "an orchestrated deception on the path to war," the partnership report may very well be the first fully comprehensive investigation that incontrovertibly proves the Bush administration lied this nation into an unfounded war.

The Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism determined, through a collective study and breakdown of Bush administration speeches, press briefings and interviews, that Bush and other top officials "led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information."

According to the report, Bush alone lied more than 259 times, including 232 false statements "about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq" and "28 about Iraq's links to al-Qaida." Quoting Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism, "It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida." Furthermore, the shared study noted, "the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

Among the seven top officials cited, Colin Powell was the most egregious in the dispersal of dissembling and mendacious language regarding the requisite call for war against Iraq. Powell is attributed to having made 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in a two-year period beginning on September 11, 2001 and through the commencement of military action in Iraq on March 18, 2003.

As a microcosm example of at least 935 lies cataloged by the exhaustive study, Vice President Dick Cheney declared on August 26, 2002 that "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." Bush's patently false proclamation, made on May 29, 2003, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction," has now been completed discredited. Of course, no weapons of mass destruction were ever found and George Bush, on NBC's Meet the Press in 2004 conceded, "No weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq."

In a never-ending stream of fuzzy rationales to justify war, beginning as early as November of 2001, the Bush administration began making disingenuous statements attempting to tie Saddam to the attackers of 9/11. Quoting Bush, "They're both risks, they're both dangerous. The difference, of course, is that Al Qaeda likes to hijack governments. Saddam Hussein is a dictator of a government. Al Qaeda hides, Saddam doesn't, but the danger is, is that they work in concert." However, in stark contrast, the 9/11 Commission Report was unable to establish any "evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with Al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States."

The comprehensive study also touches on and illuminates the vast failures of the mainstream media; mainly their failure to offer critical scrutiny, while chiefly operating as Bush's surrogate and disseminator in the misleading rhetoric of the dire need to take the country to war. During that critical, seminal juncture in the run up to the war, the media "creating an almost impenetrable din" that forced out nearly all dissenting views, the report revealed.

In what may be the first true, categorical "War Report Card" that separates fact from fiction, fine tunes mass distortion into utter clarity, the Center for Public Integrity makes a compelling case that "Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq."

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To learn more and read the full report, visit on the web:

Center For Public Integrity: http://www.publicintegrity.org/default.aspx

Bush administration was either incompetent or is guilty of malfeasance

Frank J. Ranelli


George Bush has been likely caught in another lie, another cover up, and another scandal. One that may debunk his entire justifications for violating FISA, or worse yet, show that the 9/11 attacks were not prevented due to gross incompetence!

Bush simply can't have it both ways.

Impeachment, not immunity, or blank war checks,without aggressive congressional checks and balances, is more warranted than ever now. As first reported on Daily Kos, and summarized by Bob Fertik on Democrats.com, the Bush administration has been pursuing dragnet data mining operations well in advance of September 11, 2001. Of course, once again, Bush has been mendacious and totally erroneous about when the illegal warrantless wiretapping began and for what purpose.

Quoting Mr. Fertik,

“This week Joseph Nacchio, the former CEO of Qwest, revealed the Bush Administration started muscling telephone companies to wiretap American citizens without a warrant on Feb. 27, 2001. When Qwest refused, they were cut out of government contracts and Nacchio was prosecuted for insider trading.

So we now know Bush began violating FISA and the 4th Amendment just 1 month after stealing the White House. And since the 9/11 attack was 7 months later, Bush has lied about 9/11 being the justification for warrantless wiretapping for the past two years.”

Therefore, Bush either lied about the program’s intended purpose or the program failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks! At this point, Joseph Nacchio’s revelation strongly suggests that the Bush administration was either grossly incompetent on September 11, 2001, which negates any and all claims that the warrantless wiretapping has, or continues to, prevent any terrorists attacks at all. Otherwise, it has been involved in a Watergate-like abuse of power for nefarious reasons over the past six-plus years.

Impeachment, not future elections, is the only way to halt this runaway exploitation of claimed plenary power by President Bush.

The Fading of America: Failing our children, funding a president's war

By FRANK J. RANELLI


George W. Bush, just days after heretically eulogizing Monday as "Child Health Day", turned around silently and glibly vetoed a bill to aid millions of children through subsidized healthcare. The insincerity is more than real; it is now potentially lethal to millions of vulnerable children.

Part V of the "American Democracy in Crisis" series.


Is anyone else feeling the intense hypocrisy, the thick, cold heartlessness of denying the cries of powerless and defenseless children? George W. Bush, just days after heretically eulogizing Monday, October 1, 2007, as "Child Health Day", turned around quietly and glibly vetoed a bill to aid millions of low-income children through subsidized healthcare. No cameras or media were present for this brutal act of callous cruelty that was carried out like a stealthy thief under the cover of night. The insincerity is more than real; it is now potentially lethal to millions of vulnerable children and their struggling families.

The nauseating duplicity does not sufficiently affix what has been perpetrated by Bush in vetoing this bill. The outright gall to offer empty, rank rhetoric and then fiendishly denying healthcare for millions of low-income children falls beyond deceit and lands on the edge of treachery.

This "President in perfidy" is a lifeless sociopath who posses the audacity to veto a bill -- one in support of expanding an essential program to aid millions of children -- yet will look Congress dead in the eye and demand $190 billion more to fund endless aggression, death, mayhem and global hegemony. All of this madness is at the cost of the American taxpayer's wallet to fund continually senseless war, and the cost of so many children losing their healthcare is the loss of our collective conscience to demand morally what is principled and right.

Reciting dismal polls, writing scathing articles, acts of civil disobedience, demonstrations for redresses, outrage, disgust, contempt, disdain, and letters to Congress are simply no longer enough. America, as a unified whole, must set forth and take swift action to end the reign of a tyrannical presidency gone dreadfully awry.

When we as a nation presumably allow war and degenerate crimes against humanity to be prioritized and sanctioned over the health or our posterity, then we as a nation have not only lost our footing, but have slipped beneath the very foundation of what this nation once emblemized. No longer are we the nation that claims to ask the world, "Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free." We have become the nation of the "coalition of cowards" and the "coterie of complicit" that finds rejecting over 4 million children access to healthcare as "politics as usual." All it takes, as it has been said, for evil to take root, is for good and decent men and woman to stand by and do nothing. Right now, at this very moment, we are doing just that -- nothing.

We are a nation of 303 million people now. Yet, somehow, we have allowed 536 diminutive-minded, self-centered, grotesquely egotistic individuals to commandeer our values, our principles, and now our nerve to stand and fight for the wellbeing of helpless kids. We huddle in angst; we sigh in antipathy, and then quietly permit 535 subversive members of our very own Congress -- and one demonic, inhumane megalomaniacal maniac -- to brush our booming voices aside with the single, sickening sweep of a pen.

Saying, "enough!" is simply no longer enough. Massive malfeasance must be fought with radical new measures to combat and strike at the heart of the malignancy that has inflicted the entire body of our democracy now. If we as a nation are to exist beyond the ephemeral moment in time, then the time has arisen to take a stand, and to stand against the Bush doctrine and its merciless machinery of cold-blooded coronation of a tyrant!

At the behest of all that is sane, reasoned, and vital to fight for the survival of our sovereign nation and its future, we must demand, be forever resolute, and ensure that George W. Bush is forced to resign immediately. Forget the idea of impeachment. Anything short of George Bush immediately resigning will codify into law and write his reprehensible deeds into the historical annuls of precedence for all future Presidents to prey upon.

If we are to survive as a nation, and to resemble again anything close to that which the founders of this country envisioned, then we must accept America is in grave peril. And this time the casualties are not only unwitting soldiers unjustly caught in a deadly game of Risk, but that which we cherish and have fought for the most for over 200 years in existence. Children, above all, are the hopes, dreams, and future of our nation. If we cannot muster a modicum of decency, without bitter, partisan divisiveness, then hope will certainly fade for countless children, as it will fade for America, too.

Pelosi's Gavel Proves to Wield Little Power to End Conflict in Iraq

Amid disingenuous half-truths, an obvious penchant to submit to Bush’s resolve to indefinitely stay in Iraq, and now cobbled together excuses instead of results, Nancy Pelosi has shown little true grit to exercise Congress’ ability to end the bloodbath in Iraq.

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Yesterday, Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, condemned Bush’s failed occupation in Iraq as “a path to 10 more years of war in Iraq.” Claiming, “The American people long ago rejected the President’s plan to stay in Iraq,” Pelosi additionally called General Petraeus’ report “endless war” and a “status quo” sales pitch for a permanent footprint in Iraq.

The newly dubbed “Bush-Petraeus plan” is neither innovative or a new strategy to wind down an unfounded and once wholly avoidable war of aggression. This continued shell game to run out the clock on Bush’s tragic presidency only brings troop levels in Iraq back down to the pre-surge level of 130,000 troops by April of next year. The proverbial goal post has once again been moved another six months down the battlefield.

After 54 months of hostilities, No WMD’s, nine shifting rationales to stay in Iraq, and a tragic story of hubris and obstinacy, Bush has escorted our country in a vicious, and now complete, deadly circle. We have arrived empty-handed at where we began, with an ill-advised pre-emptive war, based on flimsy and manipulated intelligence, minus nearly 3,800 American soldiers and half a trillion dollars futilely spent.

Sobering facts in hand, Americans in near unanimity, voted for Democrats in 2006 to take the reigns of power in Congress and end Bush’s misbegotten adventure in the Middle East. Since then, using only paper tiger arguments and toothless legislation, the Democratically-led Congress has accomplished little more than symbolic gestures in an attempt to please a vastly emergent anti-war base that handed them an historic election victory just ten months ago.

Equally content to merely watch the sand in Bush’s hourglass run out, Pelosi has turned to a dangerous political game of “blame Bush” and hollow rhetoric. The Speaker’s website, The Gavel, crafts spurious allegations that it is Bush’s veto pen, and a lack of a super-majority in the Senate, that is the reason Congress is unable to fulfill their election promise to America. This is the penultimate, intolerable excuse for being unable to deliver a mandate to President Bush to cease hostilities in Iraq.

However, the definitive, insufferable failure on Speaker Pelosi’s part is her statement that the Bush-Petraeus plan is “an insult to the intelligence of the American people.” To the contrary, Bush has bullied, lied, and been outright indifferent to the demands of the American people. It is Pelosi’s dissembling, amid a tempest of empty vitriol indicting Bush for Congress’ failures, which is the damning insult to our intelligence.

Nancy Pelosi’s invective to America’s wisdom began when she took impeachment “off the table” and ended when she commenced funding Bush’s illegitimate war. America is no longer only insulted by Pelosi’s inactions, but increasingly angry and restive.

In truth, it is not Bush’s veto pen or the lack of votes in Congress causing a deadly, failed foreign policy to drag on into its fifth year. It is Speaker Pelosi’s acquiescence and incompetence that is the centerpiece of culpability and the reason why we are still expending blood and dollars in Iraq.

As Speaker of the House, Pelosi ultimately determines what legislation is, or is not, brought to the floor in the House. As such, she has no constitutional directive that demands she allocate any further funding for Iraq. No legislation is requisite. No vote is necessary. All that is bluntly needed is for Pelosi to say “no” to Bush, and “You have the money to bring the troops home.”

Sadly, Nancy Pelosi, America’s first female Speaker of the House, has chosen the path of least resistance. She has failed to heed the clarion call of America to put a stop to virtually five years of circular madness. In the end, it is Pelosi’s continual capitulation to political pressure and propaganda from a deeply unpopular President, which will render the gravest consequences of all to America for years to come.

A Real Call-up to Duty?

Every wish the Bush twins or the Romney boys could get drafted? Do you want to see the rest of the warmongering crowd, military service dodgers who brought you the debacle in Iraq forced to enlist (or at least their children or families)? Do you feel like the “burden of a ruinous war” should be shared by all?

Lucky for the bellicose and combative among us who crave infinte war, cheer it on, and advocate Global American Militarism, there is hope.

Yes, those who desire war the most may actually get their chance to participate on the front lines and in the hot sands of the Iraq quagmire.

In the video below, General David Petraeus states Iraq will be “a nine or ten year endeavor.” While Bush’s new War Czar, General Douglas Lute, on August 10, 2007, intimates at the return of a draft to promote and promulgate more, endless war.

Will the raucous and vociferously hawkish among us finally “step in line” or will calls for conscription send them running for college deferments and medical waivers?



Watch it!

A Message for the ‘Dirty 41’ who voted FOR the Bush changes to FISA

BY FRANK J RANELLI

America is headed on a fast track of elective tyranny, fostered by a cowering and once-again trembling legislative branch. The seemingly uninterrupted, expansive powers that Congress continually acquiesces to President Bush have downgraded Congress to being merely a Ceremonial Branch of our government.

James Madison, acutely aware of the dangers of any form of authoritarianism stated, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judicial in the same hands, whether of one a few or many, or whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Remember, the very despotic powers that you, as a member of Congress continue to grant freely to President Bush, may someday in turn be used to usurp your very own liberties or rights to live in a free and sovereign society.

History has taught us, as recently as the Bush Administration’s egregious behavior, disdain for Congress and the rule of law, that once power is wholly consolidated, those who aided in the establishment of a totalitarian government by achieving unconstrained authority may themselves become enemies of, or victims of, the very police-like state they helped create.

Please, think about what you are doing to all of us, including yourself and you family next time you decide to mistakenly vote to give President Bush more unconstitutional and despotic powers!

A Prescient Thought to Ponder, Especially for Republicans

By Frank J. Ranelli


A Bush proclivity for secrecy, a reputation for arrogance and power grabs, and openly flouting the rule of law has one conservative Republican asking, “Do we candidly desire reaping what we have sown over the past six-plus years?”

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A short article entitled, More Bush-Congress court fights likely, is an interesting and contemplative piece highlighting the aggressiveness and smugness – including outright hubris – of the Bush Administration’s transgression of, and secretive standards by, a belligerent and confrontational President, that far exceeds Nixon’s pugnacious approach, has operated under since January 20, 2001.


Contained within this brief but telling essay, by Associated Press writer Charles Babington, is a keen and perceptive quote from Bruce Fein, the former associate deputy attorney general throughout the Reagan administration.


"The Bush administration is close to reducing Congress to wallpaper, when it comes to oversight, if Congress does not respond" more forcefully, he said. Republicans, he added, may come to regret the precedents that Bush is asserting. "I tell my Republican friends that Hillary Clinton will be the president some day," Fein said. "They just don't get it."


Fein, a strong conservative and constitutional lawyer, also recently spoke to Bill Moyers on PBS about Bush’s power grabs and over-reaching, calling for his (Bush’s) impeachment, critically reminded Moyers and us all why the Founders fittingly feared an unchecked executive by stating, “Men are not angels. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition to avert abuses or tyranny. The Constitution embraced a separation of powers to keep the legislative, executive, and judicial branches in equilibrium.” That “equilibrium”, or symmetry and balance, has been vilely attacked and to a great extent neutralized under the Bush Administration. Abuse indeed, has been bountiful.


Of course, Fein is reminding the Republicans, and their supporters, of the old axiom that quips, “Be careful of what you wish for; for someday you may actual receive it”. Moreover, by abdicating and bequeathing many of Congress’ co-equal capacities under the Constitution to Bush, that this continued genuflecting to an egocentric, deeply unpopular President may likely be returned in kind, in the very near future. And the Republicans may find the fruits of their disgracefully obsequious labor to be a very fetid orchard crop of ill-advised deference once an exchange of power ensues.


Power only has as much clout and muscle, by that which it is given by those who bow or consent to it. In addition, power, no matter how seemingly omniscient and enduring is only immortal for an exceedingly limited time. No matter how consolidated, power habitually and frequently changes hands. When it does, the invertebrates that acquiesced and yielded to a flawed fallacy of permanent supremacy – and helped bring it about – always tend to have a rude and unpleasant revelation.


Recipients of power through overturn then tend to use the very monopoly of authority that the previous preponderance of blind ambition errantly and extemporaneously built, by relegating the erstwhile primacy to the minority, and therefore the retributive target of, the new pre-eminence. History is replete with examples of terrible and devastating consequences of such precarious power plays and shifts for omnipotence rule.


What Bruce Fein is suggesting, in fact pleading for, is for Congress to act as a whole and synchronous body of our Government, in the interest of our Nation, and not continue this sycophantic behavior to a supercilious Executive bent on an imperial presidency. To prolong doing so begets the very question Fein posited in his very quote above for all Republicans (and perhaps the rest of us) to deliberate, “Do you genuinely desire the near unmitigated and proto-despotic powers Bush has defacto claimed in the hands of President Hillary Clinton?”

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich Eviscerates Bush, Calls War on Terror “Phony”

BY FRANK J. RANELLI
Friday, August 03, 2007

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The contentious and conservative, erstwhile Speaker of the House bemoans how Bush has helped America become a country that is “no longer serious”, harshly criticizes the Bush administration's handling of terrorist groups, calling the war on terror “phony”, and claims hyper-partisanship is a “stupid way to run a country”.


In an extraordinary and stinging repudiation of Bush’s phantom war – the so-called “War on Terror” – former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, justifiably pronounced Bush’s apparent and failing exercise of nation building in Iraq as a “phony” war.

Quoting Gingrich, who was attending and speaking at the National Conservative Student Conference in Herndon, Virginia on Thursday, “the Bush administration is waging a ‘phony war’ on terrorism”, and “there is no evidence that we are winning this war”.

Gingrich, the architect of the Republican Revolution in 1994, which swept Republicans into Congressional power for thirteen years, before the historic, mid-term election of 2006 thrust Democrats back into control, is no ally of the left. However, Gingrich, due do his deep conservative roots, makes his admonishment of Bush’s failing foreign policy and flawed, mock war especially cutting and acerbic.

Signifying just how out of touch Bush’s energy policies are with Americans, and especially his own political party, the former Speaker declared, the U.S. needs a “national energy strategy aimed at weaning the country from its reliance on imported oil and some of the regimes that petro-dollars support”.

In his strongest chastising and chiding of the Bush years, Gingrich, referred to the autocracy years from 2001-2007, when the Republicans controlled both branches of Congress and the White House, as a time where “I don't think you can look and say that was a great success”.

Further illuminating on Bush’s crippling and abortive war of futility in Iraq, Gingrich lamented on how America “took on Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany” and “beat all three in less than four [years]”, yet somberly, Gingrich staidly pointed out that “we're about to enter the seventh year of this ‘phony war’...and we're losing”.

Whilst Newt Gingrich is an antithetical ideologue of a progressive America, who once shut down the government for 28 days during the Clinton years, he has managed a small, token gift to the left; he has properly proffered the best analogy for what Bush’s seven-year ‘war on terror’ is: “Phony”.

Democracy Interrupted

By FRANK J. RANELLI




Why we as a nation, have been titrated, which is the gradual increasing of dosage, pressure, and propaganda, till the desired effect – an inured and compliant society – have willingly bequeathed away our autonomy of self-government, embraced the genesis of tyranny, and begin our seemingly inexorable march towards dictatorship.


Part IV of the "American Democracy in Crisis" series.

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If the past is prologue, then the present may be prescient. Each day, many of us awaken to a queasy feeling of unrest, knowing that the rule of law is under assault. The Constitution is in jeopardy and our unassailable rights to an egalitarian society are quickly being abolished. Television, newspapers, blogs, and a litany of books are reminiscent in our collective conscience that America has been browbeaten into trading peace for war, liberties for securities, sovereignty for safety, and blood for oil.

Our reputation on the world’s stage is indelibly stained by pernicious acts of imperialism, hegemony, blind patriotism, and outright incompetence by Washington’s power brokers and their agents of avarice. Yet, beyond dystopian polls and sparse demonstrations, Americans seem unwilling to accept and are extraordinarily unaware, that tyranny is taking root here in America.

We have ran the gamut of – and sadly sanctioned – some of the most unconceivable and heinous measures in American history. The Military Commissions Act, The Patriot Act, The Domestic Wiretapping Program, ignored the Geneva Conventions, revoked habeas corpus and engaged in torture. We removed our selves from the world’s courts, attacked and now occupy a country that never posed a grave or imminent danger to our own nation and then failed to adequately care for the pointlessly wounded soldiers, evident by the Walter Reed Hospital debacle.

The Justice Department enacted by law and created in1870, to make certain fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans was carried out under the law, has been purely politicized. It has been altered and grotesquely mutated into a blanket of immunity for loyalty and allegiance to an autocratic president that has throttled our nation to the point of snuffing out all legitimacy of our national system of jurisprudence.

Alberto Gonzales, the empty suite at the head of the Department of Justice, appointed by President Bush and confirmed by the United States Senate in 2005, not only repeated lies with impunity, but also obediently abdicates his sworn duty. He obsequiously yielded to Bush’s wild assertions of executive privilege and steadfastly refused to pursue Congress’ mandated contempt citations for Harriet Miers and Josh Bolton. Justice, by these lawless actions, is not being served, but is abruptly being handed its hat.

The commutation of I. Scooter Libby, an obstructionist of the law and felon, reminds us that justice is no longer in service in the interest of integrity and impartiality. Justice is now enslaved to the bidding of the Bush Administration and serves only to provide shelter and safe haven for loyal soldiers within a rogue, Mafioso-style executive branch.

Pre-emptive war planning operatives, such as John Yoo, David Addington, Paul Wolfowitz, the infamous “Torture Memo”, the radical “Unitary Executive Theory”, unconstitutional signing statements, the shocking Abu Ghraib torture pictures, The Project for a New America Century’s outlandish, 1998 white paper entitled, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, all signify we are on an inexorable march towards dictatorship.

It should now be brutally apparent and undoubtedly understood by all that the Bush Administration is not merely above the law; it is the law. Our seven-year autocracy has now morphed into full despotism. Bush and his actors of austerity, beyond all doubt, are desperados who are unrestrained and unfettered, severing all ties with restraint and decency, decorum and sound judgment. The nascent Nixon enterprising years of imperialism and lawlessness are feeble by contrast.

We have rhetoric from armchair members of Congress who assert, “This administration has weakened America in a way that is frightful[1]”, and then refuse to breathe life into the comatose corpse of a once proud and functioning democracy by taking impeachment, the people’s remedy for the infringement of our independence, “off the table.” Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the rest of the Democrats are quite content to allow Bush to self-destruct, in full view of the nation, while the U.S wreaks havoc in the Middle-East, in order to create what they falsely believe will be a landslide election weighted heavily for the Democrats by Bush's massive blunders and political collapse.

Thirty plus years after Nixon's failed coup d'état, George W. Bush has taken the idea of a tyrannical, presidential despot, at the helm of the Executive Branch, to dizzying heights and abject lows in America in the 21st century. Bush has now fully entrenched himself – in a twisted, extravagant, bravado-ridden version of Richard Nixon – by stonewalling every action Congress takes, as a totalitarian ruler, more bellicose and bombastic than his previous six years of pompous swagger and reckless governing.

The juxtaposition of these two loggerheads – an ineffectual Congress and an imperial President – leads to the will of the people being usurped, subjugated, and silenced. The People no longer have a voice in this government, for it is no longer our government as much as it is no longer a democracy. What America has become is an autocracy operated by lobbyists, mega-corporations, the military-industrial complex, and the whores in Washington that these power brokers, in a very fascist way, have bought politicians’ loyalty, acquiescence, and obedience. Contrary to the revisionist history so may of us are indoctrinated with, and unswervingly clutch to without reason or true examination of the facts, is our nation is run by an oligarchy.

Our will as a nation is not being done for a very simple reason. We, as a nation, have been titrated – the gradual increasing of dosages, pressure, and propaganda – till the desired effect, an inured and complicit society, have willingly bequeathed away our autonomy of self-government. We have bestowed our birthright to despotic rulers who do not find fear in – or seek shelter from – the near unanimous disapproval of the people they suppress and subdue[2]. They seek not the consent of the people for they seek only allegiance and adherence to their own reprehensible, egocentric, and depraved pursuits for power, money, and authoritarian control. Never in America's past has an assault on the truth and freedom been waged so viciously nor have the American people been so reprehensibly divided and utterly deceived by men we never truly elected in the first place.

What is prescient about the present is the deafening silence in which we fail to speak out, take action, or demand accountability. George Bush and Dick Cheney are the epitome of, the embodiment of, the exact personification of, what the founders feared in an autocratic oppressor, the rise of a despot to the presidency, and how that despot would come to exist. The framers of the Constitution gave us all the tools we need, without the shedding of blood, to ensure the rights and freedoms of the people remained intact and attempts at tyranny or oppression were rejected and ultimately beaten back.

We have to begin to change the framing of peoples’ mind first, and then explain the actions that need to be taken. No matter what or how somber the facts are, if the framing, the paradigm within which people operate is not changed, then no transformation will take place.

The only proper instrument for accountability and transformation – when a president becomes despotic in his actions – is impeachment, trial, and removal for failure to respect and honor the Constitution and faithfully execute the laws of the land. Impeachment is a just and necessary remedy and we must immediately diverge away from the idea that it takes away from other work Congress should and can be doing. When you have a president who openly flouts and disobeys the law, intentionally attempts to erase the separation of powers of our tripartite government and assume dictatorial powers, no legitimate work, which will stand as the rule of law for all men, can be realized.

Here is the straightforward reason why impeachment is a mandate to return to a working democracy: No matter what legislation Congress passes, Bush will veto it, ignore it, or add a dubious “signing statement”, making unilateral claims he may disregard it or claim the bill is "unconstitutional", plainly bypassing the judicial process of the Supreme Court, as well. As many historians have appropriately point out, not even King George III of England had or assumed these kinds of authoritarian powers.

The fabric of democracy is feeling the strain and we must unburden our country, through impeachment, from a despotic president and a dangerous vice-president who uses fear and subjugation to rule by and not the rule of law to govern our nation by. There can and must be far more significant consequences for all of these abuses of power and executive anarchy, or the actions of Bush and Cheney will simply become historical precedence for future abuses by future presidents, whether a republican or a democrat.


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[1] Senator Russ Feingold (D) of Wisconsin, on Meet the Press, July 22, 2007
[2] 71% of Americans Disapprove of the Way Bush is Handling His Job; July 23, 2007, American Research Group

Censuring Bush Is Not Enough!

An open letter to Senator Russell D. Feingold, of Wisconsin, highlightling the ineptitude of censuring the president and why impeachment is the proper instrument for accountability.


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Tuesday, July 24, 2007


The Honorable Russell D. Feingold
United States Senate
506 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510-4904
DC Phone: 202-224-5323
DC Fax: 202-224-2725


Dear Senator Feingold,


With all due respect and support for restoring the rule of law, if these transgressions (listed below) are not impeachable, what usurpations do rise to the level of a High Crime? Is impeachment optional in the face of such blatant and incontrovertible evidence, or does not the Constitution stipulate Congress must act?

Bush/Cheney Offenses:

- The assertion that Iraq was linked to al-Qaeda;
- The claim that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction that threatened the U.S.;
- The knowingly false declaration in the 2003 State of the Union Address that Saddam Hussein tried to purchase yellow-cake uranium from Niger;
- Insufficient war planning;
- The failure to protect troops and preserve the military;
- Fiscal mismanagement of the war.
- The implementation of the illegal, domestic wiretapping program and for misleading the American people regarding the legality of the warrantless program;
- The use of military commissions;
- Redefining torture;
- The politicization of the U.S. Attorney scandal;
- The refusal to comply with congressional subpoenas.

The only proper instrument for accountability -- when a president becomes despotic in his actions -- is impeachment, trial, and removal for failure to respect and honor the Constitution and faithfully execute the laws of the land.

Impeachment is a just and necessary remedy and I disagree that it takes away from other work Congress should and can be doing. When you have a president who openly flouts and disobeys the law, intentionally attempts to erase the separation of powers of our tripartite government and assume dictatorial powers, no work, as has been the case so far, except for the minimum wage bill, will be accomplished!

Here's the simple reason why: No matter what legislation Congress passes, Bush will veto it, ignore it, or add a dubious “signing statement”, making unilateral claims he may ignore it or claim the bill is "unconstitutional", plainly bypassing the judicial process of the Supreme Court, as well. As many historians have appropriately point out, not even King George III of England had or assumed these kinds of tyrannical powers.

I fully understand that impeachment starts in the House of Representatives, but it is also your solemn duty, as much as it there's, to ensure the Constitution is respected and the laws of the land rule our country, not an imperial president who ignores them or invalidates them.

Censuring Bush and Cheney is a start, but there must be far more significant consequences for these abuses of power, or the actions of Bush and Cheney will simply become historical precedence for future abuses by future presidents, Republican or Democratic.

The fabric of democracy is feeling the strain and we must unburden our country from a despotic president and a dangerous vice-president who uses fear and subjugation to rule by and not the rule of law to govern our nation.



Frank J. Ranelli

STEP INTO THE MORASS

An open letter to Senator George Voinovich, of Ohio, highlightling the gravity our troops face in Iraq and what he MUST do to help end it.

::::::::

Thursday, July 19, 2007


The Honorable George Voinovich
United States Senate
524 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510-3503
Phone: 202-224-3353
Fax: 202-228-1382


Dear Senator Voinovich:


ABC News recently ran a four-minute video clip entitled, Exclusive Look at Soldiers on the Front Line, illuminating the enormity and misery in Iraq. Here is what one soldier, Specialist Michael Vassell, had to say:

"I challenge anybody in Congress to do my rotation... Because we have people up there in Congress with the brain of a two-year-old who don't know what they're doing...I challenge the president to ride along with me for 15 months."

This rare, candid, and somber video confirms, in lurid and stark details, of the daily horrors and despair that U.S. soldiers and Iraqis face together, while President Bush prosecutes his ceaseless 'War on Terror" in Iraq.

The casualties in this video include, six U.S. soldiers burned to death in an up-ended Humvee from an IED, an old woman's wits; whose tears and shrieks of terror echo eerily in your mind long after the video stops, and finally a taxi cab driver erroneously shot to death by over-vigilant, weary and nervous American troops – from an extended 15-month tour – who was circling a neighborhood looking for an address to pick up a customer.

Senator, your recent vote on the Levin-Reed Amendment perpetuates this endless cycle of dread and death, senselessness and insanity - by failure to enact the will of 70 percent of Americans and end Bush's misbegotten exploit in the Iraq.

Please, watch the video (link provided below) and stop supporting President Bush's failed foreign policy and start truly supporting the troops – by bringing them home – and help sustain the resolve of the American public, which you were elected to serve and represent, by ending this ruinous and unjustified war now.


Respectfully,
-Frank J. Ranelli

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Video Link: http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=3383873

Soldier Challenges Bush & Congress to Step into the Morass

Watch it!

Specialist Michael Vassell:

“I challenge anybody in Congress to do my rotation... Because we have people up there in Congress with the brain of a two-year-old who don’t know what they’re doing...I challenge the president to ride along with me for 15 months."

Click on the link below and watch the ABC video of an,

"Exclusive Look at Soldiers on the Front Line"

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=3383873

This rare, candid and somber video confirms, in lurid and stark details, of the daily horrors and despair that soldiers and Iraqis face together, while Bush prosecutes his 'War on Terror" in Iraq.

The casualties in this video include, six U.S. soldiers burned to death in an up-ended Humvee from an IED, an old woman's wits; whose tears and shrieks of terror echo eerily in your mind long after the video stops, and finally a taxi driver erroneously shot to death by over-vigilant, weary and nervous American troops -- from an extended 15-month tour -- who was circling a neighborhood looking for an address to pick up a customer.

Six U.S. soldiers, an old woman and a cab driver: fighting "them" there, so we don't have to fight them here....

Think about it, America.

Impeachment matters

Barbara Boxer on the Ed Schultz Show yesterday:

"I've always said that you need to keep it on the table, and you need to look at these things, because now people are dying because of this administration. That's the truth. And they won't change course. They are ignoring the Congress. They keep signing these signing statements which mean that he's decided not to enforce the law. This is as close as we've ever come to a dictatorship. When you have a situation where Congress is stepped on, that means the American people are stepped on. So I don't think you can take anything off the table. Because in fact the Constitution doesn't permit us to take these things off the table." -- United States Senator, Barbara Boxer

54% of Americans want Dick Cheney Impeached! Learn why!

WATCH IT!




IMPEACH CHENEY! Support H. RES. 333!



ARTICLE I

In his conduct while Vice President of the United States, Richard B. Cheney, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of Vice President of the United States ...purposely manipulated the intelligence process to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States by fabricating a threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify the use of the United States Armed Forces against the nation of Iraq.

ARTICLE II

In his conduct while Vice President of the United States, Richard B. Cheney, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of Vice President of the United States...purposely manipulated the intelligence process to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States about an alleged relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda in order to justify the use of the United States Armed Forces against the nation of Iraq .


Learn how you can get involved and make a difference at:




Read the full text of H. RES. 333 at:

Impeaching Richard B. Cheney, Vice President of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors

Congratulations Democrats, you've just purchased yourself a war!

By Frank J. Ranelli

Bush blusters, Congress folds and the war plays on…

Democratically-controlled House and Senate leaders have confirmed their capitulation and acquiescence to Bush’s autocratic demands and have agreed to fund more, unregulated warfare in Iraq for another six months. The media, eager to please the executive at large, launched a full fledge ‘declaration of surrender’ campaign, indicting democrats with headlines such as Democrats Concede on Iraq and Democrats Retreat in Funding Showdown. The excuse put forth by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, for an abysmal show of cowardice and abdication of Congressional and Constitutional responsibility, was, “we don’t have the votes.”

“Ah shucks, Nancy, you tried! Golly gee Harry, we know, Bush is scary!” Better luck next time, when America votes you back into the minority in 2008. You weren’t quite ready for the “big leagues” were you? The Whitehouse already believes, just as they do of former President Jimmy Carter, that the Democrats are “increasingly irrelevant.”

We know it is hard facing-down a wayward Neanderthal, a maniacal megalomaniac, a law-breaking lunatic juxtaposed with a public approval rating of 28%. Being the majority is arduous work and you haven’t had any practice over the last 13 or so years. However, there is a benefit to this gutless recoil; you’ve just purchased yourself a war!

Yes, congratulations Democrats, enjoy your newly purchased war of aggression. It’s only four years-old and lots of subsidy is now available for refurbishment, revamp and renovation. She is a real ‘fixer-upper’, but hey, causalities on the American side have been “light” and taxpayers have already absorbed most of the costs associated with the “working out the bugs” process. A new coat of paint, a few extra brigades, a fresh printing of “support the troops” pretzel magnets and your are good to go!

In addition, with Bush’s promise of sustaining your minimum wage increase bill, the preceding despondent dregs at the lowest end of the wage scale can now patriotically participate in your new ‘combat acquisition’ by infusing more cash into Bush’s upside-down economy. Think of the potential promise Democrats now offer to all those that previously were unable to finance appropriately the hostilities formerly known as “Bush’s war”.

Honestly, it does not take an exemplary acumen to see why Americans over the last 25 years keep voting largely Republican – the 2006 election not withstanding – and opting for Republican presidents. Americans, as a whole, do not necessary agree with or even like the Republican Party and its intransigent ideologies of preserving the status quo. They do, however, like team players, winners and driven tenacity when times get tough. The Republican Party – in full view of every amoral, depraved, nefarious and unconscionable act they have committed – does one thing and does it well; they stick together and tend their flock. Something the current Democratic leaders have patently failed to do.

“Resolute” and “unified” are not currently part of the lexicon or landscape of the crop of democrats in Congress today. “Fractured” and “failing” are more suitable metaphors befitting an ostensibly co-equal branch of government that kowtows to a petulant president. Bush may have lost all credibility with the American people long ago, but Congress has now lost its guile; and therefore, the alliance of the American populace.

American Beauty: Specious Lies and Ample Wars for Gain

FRANK J RANELLI

A mere century after the anthem-like sonnet “America the Beautiful” was published for the very first time, America’s grand splendor and life-giving liberty is now lethally littered with signs of a destiny relegated to ruination.

On July 4, 1895, Katharine Lee Bates’ now historic poem turned song, America the Beautiful, was published in the weekly journal, the Congregationalist. Spacious skies, amber waves of grain, fruited plains, and purple mountain majesties etched-out a picturesque and endorphin-invoking scenic and tranquil narrative of the vast marvels to imbibe in the land she crowned, “thy good with brotherhood.” Ms. Bates, a Wellesley College professor, aptly described much of the natural splendor splashed across our land “from sea to shining sea”, but idealistically and innocently failed to forecast how greed and imperialism would turn America into a “sinister sister” and ignore Bates’ call for “liberty in law.”

Barely a century after Bates would climb Pikes Peak in Colorado and pen her now immortalized words; “America the beautiful” has lost much of her luster. Spacious skies are now obscured by enormous, sky-scraping edifices that cast immense, gloomy, and looming shadows over much of today’s landscape. Amber waves of grain are nearly gone and replaced by the sprawls of an ever-encroaching suburbia crusading forth with an insatiable craving for more materialism. The fruited plains eternally damaged by the ravages of anthropogenic induced global warming – irrefutably caused by the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels – have begun to wither, bear less produce or simple have gone barren.

Yet, this dismal and unsettling damage to our land and skies –that has occurred in the past century since America the Beautiful was composed – fails to annul an even more ominous peril most Americans unwittingly face – the fall of our republic. Our “liberty and law”, that once governed a great and free nation, has been maliciously molested, oppressed, and shackled by an “ill-selected” executive run amuck. Incarcerated by a provincial-minded, bellicose, and fool-hearty man, America is nearing dictatorship and the end of an egalitarian society. Endless war, death, bloodshed, and repression – without a shred of rationale or reason beyond grandiose perversions of power – have locked America in an entropic spiral of disorderly decay towards dystopia.

Courageously, yet perhaps naively, some Americans fought back in vain this past fall to alter the maniacal mayhem of a madman and his minions whose collective aim is to douse out the light of liberty and sabotage our rule of law. Now, disheartened and feeling betrayed by the new, Democratic-lead Congress, many citizens now sense helplessness to stop the eminent deterioration of our country by the malignancy that resides in and about the Whitehouse. Sadly, many have resigned themselves to subjugation and the acceptance of the demise of a truly democratic government of the people.

Sure, we will still go on having staged elections, just as Rome did for many years after the Republic of Rome fell. When Roman senators, such as Cicero, prattled on and continued to debate meaningless and unenforceable laws or agendas under the recently solidified Roman dictatorship of the time. All of it was purely symbolic to lend to the prevarication and impropriety of a still functioning government instead of the grim, bona fide reign of totalitarian law by Caesar. Not until 476 A.D., when Emperor Augustus was at last deposed – the throne left permanently vacant – did Roman tyranny finally end.

Current contemporary discourse suggests that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will triangulate their way to a Democratic victory in 2008, promising the phoenix-like resurrection of America from the scorched ashes left behind by the Bush Administration. Then, upon taking their oath of office, only will they continue the selling of America out the backdoor to the Chinese, the industrial/military complex, and the proto-fascist corporate giants of our time. The mock appearance of reform will be embellished by a few bones for real Americans to crunch on. Perhaps they will offer some form of thinly veiled "universal health care" or a promise to remove combat troops from war-torn Iraq. Only to leave Blackwater, Halliburton, and their horde of hundreds of thousands of privatized mercenaries to carry on the nefarious deeds of the profits of mechanized war and commercial, hegemonic globalization.

In the midst of our democracy being sweep into the abyss of autocracy, is the breakdown of our entire planet’s ecosystem. This atmospheric collapse, complements of American-driven unfettered capitalism, feverishly fuels global warming and the swell of an all-out climate crisis. The world, but Americans in particular, are simply too lazy and complacent – amid all of our modern amenities – to take genuine action to arrest the harmful effects of dumping billions of tons of carbon into the environment each year. Our fatalistic arrogance and ignorance – conceivably even self-righteousness on this issue – are both supremely mind-numbing and immensely nauseating.

Oblivious, Americans still hastily hustle about their self-entwined business as the flora and the fauna fade, freedom withers and turns to fascism, and democracy deviates into despotism for dollars. God may have “shed his grace on thee” in 1895, but we, by proxy of our own foibles and follies in the 21st Century, have discard decency and discretion and traded “purple mountain majesties” for a mountain of carnage and disarray. America perchance, is no longer so beautiful afterall.