Why Bush impeachment doesn't make front page of LA Times, NY Times, or Washington Post

Yesterday, Dennis Kucinich introduced 35 articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush in the House of Representatives.

Click each image to see full front page:

He provided substantial evidence of criminal activity, evidence that included the president's own public statements that were prima facie confessions of criminal guilt, from admitting he ordered wiretaps and torture, admitting privately to ordering the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, to lying about the threat from Iraq and Iran in spite of overwhelming intelligence to the contrary, lying about available intelligence warning of the 9/11 attacks, to his forcing bureaucrats to lie about the cost of his Medicare drug bill and global warming, to the endemic cronyism from Iraq to Enron to Hurricane Katrina.

This did not merit front page coverage of the nation's top newspapers, the Washington Post, New York Times, or Los Angeles Times. The Washington Post had a small blurb on it their Washington news round up.


This all in spite of this being only the third time in American history a president was impeached, and the very first poll on impeaching Bush a few years back showed the same public support for it as there was for impeaching Nixon the day before he resigned and nearly double the peak support for impeaching Bill Clinton.

All of these papers equaly ignored Kucinich's articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney.

The newspapers do have one good excuse for not covering this: the Democratic leadership in Congress has said impeachment is "off the table," so Kucinich's resolution will likely go nowhere.

But that in itself is worthy of story. Nine years ago, we impeached a president for lying in a sexual harassment civil suit deposition. That could have prevented the plaintiff from getting a fair trial though the point is moot given that the judge threw out the case and Clinton had an ironclad alibi for his whereabouts at the time Paula Jones claimed the incident occurred.

By contrast, Bush's lies, imcompetence and corruption has cost the lives of thousands of our troops in an unnecessary war in Iraq, arguably thousands in a preventable terrorist attack, the lives of a million Iraqis and loss of much of the thin goodwill we enjoyed in the Middle East. It has also cost us our reputation as a model of respecting human rights and international law. And of course it has and will cost us trillions for his war, most of it going into the pockets of cronies who have a habit of doing poorly or not doing at all the no bid contracts we are given.

Apparently, Kucinich doesn't understand the difference between the seriousness of the offenses of Clinton and Bush.

Clinton's real offense was being competent and not completely subservient to the wishes of the wealthy and powerful (though he came close with NAFTA) compared to his Republican predecessor. Bush's offenses were merely against American taxpayers and voters, who matter only to the extent that they need to be snookered into ignoring government of, by, and for the wealthy, and against the powerless people of Iraq, who do not matter at all.

Wear orange until Bush and Cheney are impeached

I went to the fabric store to buy three different kinds of orange fabrics to mess around with. The high school girl who cut it for me ask why so much of the same color and I told her the World Can't Wait has come up with this campaign to show national, public support for impeaching Bush & Cheney. She got excited and said she was going to get all her friends to do it too.

The campaign would like to get critical mass on this by Labor Day, and especially have people wearing orange on ORANGE FRIDAYS.



The choice of colors has a couple of advantages:

• It echoes the orange revolution in the Ukraine, which is a great irony since Bush criticized that government for rigging elections when the exit polls didn't match the vote.
  
  
• Orange is a bright, annoying color, most people don't wear in most situations.
  
  
• Enough construction workers wear orange that it will make it look like even more support the campaign.
  
  
• It is also the color of the jumpsuits of the prisoners at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.
  
  
• Rush Limbaugh has been selling orange "Club Gitmo" wear for a while, so some dittoheads will unwittingly be participating in the campaign.
  
  

The World Can't Wait has bandanas and tees, but if you can't afford to buy anything from them, you could go to a thrift store and buy a couple of orange tee shirts, or a strip of fabric from a fabric store to make a bandana, scarf, or armband. You can also buy one of those rubber wristbands in orange.





Some variations you can do with this:

• Tie an orange ribbon to the antenna on your car or side mirrors.
  
  
• Send an orange postcard to your senators and reps with just the words IMPEACH NOW on it. (or maybe tell them you'll wear orange until they do their job and impeach, so every time they see the color they'll remember they aren't doing their job).
  
  
• Send that postcard to the White House too. What the hell. You know you're on the list already.
  
  
• Put an orange banner or background on your blog.
  
  
• You might also send a nice orange tie or scarf to your favorite White House press corps reporter and say you would be honored if they wore it at press conferences, especially when they're with Bush himself. (Whether or not you tell the reporter the significance of the color is up to you). Hell, Helen Thomas might wear it even if you tell her what it's for.
  
  
• Even better, when Cheney goes hunting, he will be supporting impeaching himself.
  
  

Will you participate in this campaign?

Katrina, New Orleans, & the GOP: Deep Thoughts

Hurricane Katrina gave Americans a rare chance to see first hand the kind of care and attention Baby Bush and the GOP normally reserve for Iraqis.

Click to see full-sized.

hurricane katrina new orleans louisiana iraq war black superdome fema michael brown president george w bush brownie african american cartooneditorial cartoon dead flood republican GOP conservative compassionate conservatism grover norquist terri schiavo political humor err on the side of life professor smartass iraq fascism ethnic cleansing political opinion smartass comments resistance censored news rebel photo

Bush celebrates black approval rating

President Bush has done what no other Republican president has managed: he has reduced his job approval rating among blacks to LESS than the margin of error in the poll.

The decades long GOP Southern Strategy after LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ending Jim Crow relied on a certain amount of subtlty to avoid alienating law and order whites in the North who weren't necessarily racist and blacks who would agree with GOP ideology if they didn't see themselves as the scapegoat.

The Bush administration has consistently lacked this finesse. While their words are sometimes concilliatory, their is no mistaking their actions.

We are not at war with Islam--we are just killing Muslims.

We do not favor the rich--we just give them massive tax breaks and war profits.

We don't hate poor black folks--we just leave them to drown in their own sewage and be eaten by alligators, and when they try to leave, we let white sheriffs block the exits.

KEY EXCERPTS:

A Polling Free-Fall Among Blacks
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, October 13, 2005; 3:09 PM

In what may turn out to be one of the biggest free-falls in the history of presidential polling, President Bush's job-approval rating among African Americans has dropped to 2 percent, according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.

The drop among blacks drove Bush's overall job approval ratings to an all-time low of 39 percent in this poll. By comparison, 45 percent of whites and 36 percent of Hispanics approve of the job Bush is doing.

the rest of the Washington Post article

african american black terrorism klan president george w bush job-approval rating ku klux klan , cartoon editorial cartoon Dan Froomkin southern strategy republican GOPconservative corruption hurricane katrina, occupation corruption halliburton political humor colonialism white mans burden professor smartass iraq democrat lies propaganda corporation fascism democracy political opinion A Polling Free-Fall Among Blacks george w bush, public opinion, opinion, public relations, washington post , worst president ever failure war criminal

Compassionate Conservatism III

Compassionate Conservatism II

what the GOP leadership fears

The woman in the wheelchair is old enough to have been around in Jim Crow times.

Now she and the little girl seem to be holding hands without a second thought.

In the wake of the hurricane, most black and white Americans saw themselves as on the same side, despite the GOP and their PR flaks attempts to create a racial divide and portray the survivors as savage looters and snipers.

I have often wonder if Martin Luther King was killed not for his civil rights work for blacks, or his opposition to Vietnam, but because the last cause he was involved in, that garbage workers strike, was showing that working class blacks and whites had more to gain as allies than enemies.

When divide and conquer doesn't work, the folks in the big house start to get worried.

We should do everything we can to keep this going.

Also posted at Democraticunderground.com
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=4728131&mesg_id=4728131

Core GOP belief

GOP strategist Grover Norquist has often spoken of "starving the beast" slashing taxes to force the slashing of government so that it is too weak to effectively regulate big business. His most infamous formulation of this is the quote in the motivational poster below, as is its natural consequence.

How long until the "culture of life" doesn't apply to you?

"Starve the Beast" in New Orleans

I posted this on Yahoo's Ann Coulter discussion board, so conservatives could see it.

______________________

For those of you unfamiliar with the phrase, "starve the beast," this explains it.

From Daily Kos:

Tragedy has a way of revealing character. The constant drumbeat of death from the war in Iraq, and now the cascading nightmare that is the Gulf Coast flood has peeled away the veneer and we can see the GOP leadership and the larger conservative movement for what it is: a sham. They have nothing. They offer nothing. They come to destroy, not to build. They have no vision for a greater public good because, for them, the very notion of a public good is anathema.

Make no mistake: as we watch our fellow citizens drown, starve, and die in the street in New Orleans, its not incompetence or lack of planning that is killing them. It is willful neglect. It is the direct result of reducing the government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." This is what "starving the beast" looks like.

For some 30 years the Republican party has packaged humanity's darkest and most craven weaknesses and pawned them off as its greatest virtues. Well, the reckoning is here and the conservatives are found wanting. When the chips are down we are a nation that cares for our citizens and we expect our government to be strong enough, capable enough, and compassionate enough to do the same.

.......

Rest in peace, Grand Old Party. America can no longer afford the drag that your self-delusions and cheap justifications put on our spirit. For those who are willing to turn back from pandering to the lowest common denominator and who choose to join us lifting up the better angels of our nature, we offer the hand of friendship. For the the rest: may the God whose name you have scandalized and used as cover for your lack of humanity have mercy on your degenerate souls.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/2/20401/46134

_________________________

The American people (and everybody else for that matter) aren't saints, which is why systems like communism don't work.

But neither are we the greedy, prejudiced, cruel, ignorant trolls the right is trying to convince us to be--and if you think that's extreme just listen to the excrement coming out of Rush Limbaugh's mouth about the hurricane survivors.

We have an obligation to our fellow citizens and it is not the same as saying we should make the rich live in cardboard boxes to say that they need to give back in taxes their fair share. At the very time we are struggling to respond to this hurricane, the Bush people are pushing to make repeal of the estate tax permanent--a tax that still let you keep most of the estate.

We have been a better country, and we can be again.