A Heart Where There Is None Or Just A Ploy To Get Rudy In Office?

Yes, MSNBC reports that Grand Emperor of the Evil Empire Bush's Vice President Dick Cheney has an irregular heartbeat.

Just one question: what proof is there he has a heart?

Ask the people of Iraq, of Afghanistan, our soldiers, to name but a few. I suspect they have no such evidence.

But beware: there has been speculation even among some on the right for more than a year that Cheney would conveniently disappear with at least a year to go to Bushdom to introduce a Rudy Giuliani, for example, in the Veep seat.

"Out of The Mouths of Blabbering Boobs & Bushies"

With so much bad news - from the economy to the declaration that we're having our deadliest years E-V-E-R in both Iraq and Afghanistan to a host of other awfuls, the Bushies have made a few really TELLING declarations in the past week that are worthy of note.

First, there was Bush's insistence that anything Pakistan leader Pervez Musharraf wanted to do to for his country was A-OK with Bush. But that's not quite the NEWS. Bush, when asked if it was appropriate for Musharraf to claim the presidency when he came to power through a military coupe with Musharraf heading the military at the time, Bush comes out with:

Can a leader run both the military AND be president of his country at the same time? Of course not!

Uh.... Houston to the president: YOU ostensibly run the military as commander in cheat.. uh chief WHILE you are also supposedly president.

Then there's White House spokesvermin Dana Perino, Tony Snow(job)'s even sorrier replacement who, when asked if it was appropriate for any country's leadership to choose arbitrarily to end his/her nation's democracy and civil liberties in the name of protecting its citizens from terrorism, said NO!

But all the Bushies have done, since even before Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, is spy upon us as its citizens without ANY proof any of us is jeopardizing national security, to wiretap and remove constitutionally protected liberties, all in the name of "homeland security." In fact, in the same week Perino uttered this startling declaration (and removing our liberties have NOT made us any safer, I must add), the Bushies had several new initiatives underway to snoop upon us without due cause.

Stop the insanity, people!

House Has Not Yet Killed Impeachment of Grand Emperor (VP) The Dick Cheney

While the Dem leadership seemed about as eager as most Repugs to kill it - and why they're so bashful about high crimes and misdemeanors when we're talking about treason committed in some of the most fundamental aspects of our society completely eludes me - it was Repugs who, thinking it might give Bush a "sympathy factor", who decided to let it hang around. (Somehow, I suspect only his parents give Bush much sympathy these days.)

Now others are pushing harder for the matter to go before the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by none other than John Conyers, a Dem who has shown he does not always buckle to popular pressure. Keep hope alive.

Cheney Impeachment Resolution And War With Iran

I also posted this at All Things Democrat but...

From Ramsey Clark, an appeal to action in advance of plans against war with Iran and acknowledging that Rep. - and Democratic presidential candidate - Dennis Kucinich’s priority resolution to be presented on the floor tomorrow (Tuesday, November 5th) calling for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney. Read the rest of this letter from Clark here.

President George Bush plans to attack Iran. From coast to coast, the people of this country are demanding impeachment, which may be the only way to stop him. We are acting now because a failure to impeach Bush with Vice President Cheney and other civil officers for crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity may condemn the world to war without end. Has he not made it clear that he intends to attack Iran?

Again and again he has threatened Iran with attack if it does not abandon its nuclear program and act to please him. The threat, like the use of force against a nation, is a violation of Article 2.4 of the Charter of the United Nations just as the threat of assault, like assault itself, is a crime in all legal systems. President Bush has unilaterally imposed the most comprehensive economic sanctions within his power against Iran, excepting of course the purchase of Iranian oil. Sanctions are crueler than the colonial whipping post because they harm infants, children, the elderly and the infirm.

When President Bush decides to launch missiles at Iran, he will proclaim the ecessity for his action to prevent nuclear terrorism, and save freedom and democracy. “This government does not torture people,” President Bush assures us despite Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, rendition, the staunch defense of torture by his legal advisers throughout his Presidency and what We the People know, as he knows we know. We are being told that truth is what the Decider says it is. As with Iraq before, he now says Iran is a nuclear threat to the U.S. and brooks no dispute of his decision.

Failure to act will place the United States and much of the rest of the world in great danger of spreading war and violence resulting from a direct attack ordered by President Bush against Iran, retaliation by Iran and the fueling of existing tensions and conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region.

Dick Cheney, Enemy of the State (And The World)

As I posted elsewhere...

I strongly (as in STRONGLY) encourage you to find your local listing for this week's PBS Frontline for a startling, scary profile of Vice DickPresident Dick Cheney's 30+ year war to take away civil liberties at the same astonishing pace as he wants to turn the American presidency and any notion of democracy into a game only Cheney and his pals can play.

I was riveted and sickened all at once; those who maintain BIG questions about the Bush Administration's possible complicity in September 11th will find new fodder with the revelations from Cheney's own hench cretins that as buildings still burned that day, The Dick was calling in his people to stage a coup against American democracy and the U.S. Constitution while giving the president more powers than our founding fathers EVER wanted to allow.

This material, fully documented, FAR EXCEEDS the imagination of George Orwell's 1984 and the machinations of Machiavelli. And yet, with all of that, what REALLY amazed me was that the dimbulb former Attorney General (although a dimbulb HAS to burn brighter than also former AG Alberto Gonzales) John Ashcroft ACTUALLY stood up for us when Cheney demanded the feds launch the most massive domestic spying and data mining operation against the American people in U.S. history.

The New Big Damned Bush Lie: "The Troops Will Have to Walk Home If We Don't Fund This War!"

Excuse me, but this is a total lie. One of so damned many. It's another Bush-Rove-Cheney spin to keep the weak-minded going "America's #1 So Let's Rustle Up Some Muslims and Their Oil." The media then repeats the damned lies until most of America knows the story by heart.

If the war stopped tomorrow, there would be plenty of money to bring all these troops home. What will hurt our troops is one more day on the job, and May's looking to be the deadliest this year for our soldiers, not to mention Iraqi civilians.

What the president - none of the Bush Administration in fact - will NOT tell you is that they want this funding bill signed not to pay for what we've done, but to:

• secure the Iraq oil we're stealing through a forced mandate to the Iraqi government in which we demand oil/energy companies get record-high takes on Iraqi crude that we've already been stealing for four plus years now
• help Republican politicians who are happy to use U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians as expendable photo ops
• shore up Bush's delusional base
• (quite probably) help fund Bush's next mecca: an (extremely ill-advised and not just bordering ON the lunatic) attack on Iran

Bush and the loyal GOP have proven everyday, in every way (cuts in services, filthy or ill-equipped medical services, opposition to combat pay and pay raises, educating troops' children - I could list these all night) that an American soldier or an Iraqi citizen does not begin to rate the value of billions and billions of dollars of crude oil.

This isn't about our soldiers at all, folks. It's about An Empire of Diminishing Crude Oil" and those lovely coming $4-5-6? dollar per gallon fuel prices we're paying while the Bushies tell us we need to write big corporate welfare checks to mega-profitting energy companies to build their refineries for free. This, while they de-fund fuel alternatives.

Vermont Senate: Impeach Bush Administration

Here's the details of today's vote in the Vermont state senate, echoing resolutions already passed in many of the Green Mountain state's communities on Town Meeting day last month.

Say Hello to ...

The New Democracy Project

God only knows that, after 6+ years of the Bush Empire in which the thing that matters LEAST of all is the will of the people, not to mention the laws the rest of us must live by while allowing the Bushies must answer to no one, least of all the edicts of the U.S. Constitution, we truly NEED a new Democracy... one that does not act like an absolute monarchy, an energy company empire, a dictatorship run by the biggest Dick (Cheney) of them all.

Couched In The Iraq "Surge" Vote Is Very Sweet Deal for American Fuel/Energy Companies

I am massively pissed that the Senate voted today to approve an additional - and whopping! - $122 Billion (we've already spent well more than half a trillion on the war that would pay for itself) for Bush's Iraq "surge" regardless of provisions for a time line for an exit strategy.

But getting too little attention is a part of this bill which HANDS mostly American energy/fuel companies a deal for Iraq oil which will give them an unheard of percentage of profits. I would think that Iraq oil belongs to Iraq and that the Bushies should NOT be able to give it away to Exxon, etc.

From Think Progress on the Iraq "redeployment":

The Senate Appropriations Committee “approved a $122 billion measure Thursday financing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but also calling on President Bush to pull combat troops out of Iraq by next spring. The bill, approved by a voice vote, is similar to one the House began debating Thursday. The White House has threatened to veto the House measure and issued a veto threat against an earlier, similar version of the Senate withdrawal language.”

And once again, the bully monarch Bush demands things go HIS way, or the low way.

Osama bin Laden Missing From Bush's Threat 1,982 Days

Bob Geiger, each Monday, fills us in on the Osama bin Missing clock, or how long since President (man, it still hurts to type that) George W. Bush declared he would get Osama "dead or alive".

Bob's on a well-deserved vacation with his family, so here we are: 1,982 days since that declaration.

I no longer believe that Bush ever actually tried to find Osama.

There's an old saying, and yes, I think even people in Texas say it, that the truth usually lies somewhere between two extremes. Well, take the extreme from Bush that Osama was entirely responsible for 9-11 and everything bad around it as one, with the other extreme that Osama was the manufactured bogeyman that the Bush Administration, in its thirst for unlimited power and domination, put up as responsible for a series of events they helped orchestrate as the OTHER end of the spectrum.

Now, the middle ground between those extremes suggests that the Bushies have far more complicity in 9-11 than we perhaps ever will feel comfortable in accepting. and that we have no intention of finding Osama because, as our designated bogeyman, serves a much better purpose "on the loose", as a fear factor for us all, so Bush can continue his "War on Terror" which seems to create far more world terror than it resolves.

Absolute Must Read: Brzezinski's "The Road Map Out of Iraq"

This op/ed - this copy from the Salt Lake Tribune - by former military man and Carter-era NSA chief Zbigniew Brzezinski truly is a must read (what are you waiting for, hmmm?); here's a big snip:

The war in Iraq is a historic strategic and moral calamity undertaken under false assumptions. It is undermining America's global legitimacy. Its collateral civilian casualties, as well as some abuses, are tarnishing America's moral credentials. Driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability.

Yet major strategic decisions in the Bush administration continue to be made within a very narrow circle of individuals - perhaps not more than the fingers on one hand. With the exception of the new Defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, these are the same individuals who have been involved from the start of this misadventure, who made the original decision to go to war in Iraq and who used the original false justifications for going to war. It is human nature to be reluctant to undertake actions that would imply a significant reversal of policy.

From the standpoint of U.S. national interest, this is particularly ominous. If the United States continues to be bogged down in protracted, bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and much of the Islamic world. Here, for instance, is a plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran: Iraq fails to meet the benchmarks for progress toward stability set by the Bush administration. This is followed by U.S. accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the United States blamed on Iran, culminating in a "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran. This plunges a lonely United States into a spreading and deepening quagmire lasting 20 years or more and eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Indeed, a mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potential expanding war is already being articulated. Initially justified by false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the war is being redefined as the decisive ideological struggle of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism. In that context, Islamist extremism and al-Qaida are presented as the equivalents of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and then Soviet Russia, and 9/11 as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack that precipitated U.S. involvement in World War II. This simplistic and demagogic narrative, however, overlooks that the Nazi threat was based on the military power of the most industrially advanced European state and that Stalinism was not only able to mobilize the resources of the victorious and militarily powerful Soviet Union but had worldwide appeal through its Marxist doctrine.

In contrast, most Muslims are not embracing Islamic fundamentalism. Al-Qaida is an isolated, fundamentalist aberration. Most Iraqis are engaged in strife not on behalf of an Islamist ideology but because of the U.S. occupation, which destroyed the Iraqi state. Iran, meanwhile, though gaining in regional influence, is hardly a global threat; rather, it is politically divided, economically and militarily weak. To argue that the United States must respond militarily to a wide Islamic threat with Iran at its epicenter is to promote a self-fulfilling prophecy. No other country shares the Manichean delusions that the Bush administration so passionately articulates. And the result, sad to say, is growing political isolation of and pervasive popular antagonism toward the United States.

Get the rest here.