Ed "warrantless wiretap" Whitacre to chair "new" GM

This can be filed in the truly absurd department, or as Snagglepuss might say "unbelievable, even."

If not for FISA "reform" that gave the telcos retroactive immunity, Edward E. Whitacre Jr. would be in jail - you see, back when Ed's AT&T performed the "warrantless surveillance" for the Bush Administration, it was a felony.

Instead, the Obama administration is awarding him with the General Motors Chairmanship - say what?

When he was running AT&T, he said he didn't use computers or text messaging. Yesterday, he told the press in an interview after his appointment: “I don’t know anything about cars.” It figures. Just what GM and the US auto industry needs.

Ed "Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?" Whitacre is also the same guy that lobbied so heavily against net neutrality, something Obama told us he supported.

Whitacre, it turns out, is just another in the long line of executives running GM who knows next to nothing about cars, going back to Roger Smith, who destroyed the company's pride and global competitiveness in the 1980's - and it's been downhill ever since.

It's a damned shame. I was never a huge GM guy, but one had to respect them, and the cars they made. The American auto industry was a benchmark for the world and the American automobile was a symbol of our culture and the envy of the rest of the world. Buick, Pontiac, Chevrolet, Oldsmobile and Cadillac were all incredible brands with passionately loyal customers. Now, most people are embarrassed to admit they own one of these cars.

The choice of Whitacre for GM is a black eye for the Obama administration and a clear indicator that politics in Washington have not changed. "We the people" are screwed, as usual.

Former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq Calls for Accountability for War Crimes

The former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Ricardo Sanchez, is now calling for an investigation of Bush-era policies. According to PR-Newswire:

General Sanchez, the former top coalition commander in Iraq, called for a Truth Commission so we might fully understand the failure of the military and civilian command to honor the pledge of our constitution.

Sanchez, the first General to go on record to call for a Truth Commission, stressed that the outcome must embrace a variety of solutions, including prosecution.

Last week also brought to light two under-reported stories: 1) Cheney personally led secret Congressional briefings on torture methods, and 2) as early as 2004, the Red Cross privately expressed concerns to Colin Powell that U.S. detention and interrogation methods violated international law.

I think one of the reasons we're not seeing more pressure on these charges from Democrats is because it is not a purely Red-state or Bush-Cheney problem, and that politicians on all sides, Republicans and Democrats, will be implicated.

Former Interrogator Rebukes Cheney for Torture Speech

Dick Cheney's claim that torturing detainees has saved American lives is patently false. Watch as Matthew Alexander, the senior military interrogator for the task force that tracked down Al Qaeda-in-Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, explains how Cheney's torture policy was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of American servicemen and women.



Read rest of article at http://www.bravenewfoundation.org/

Why regulating Wall Street isn’t enough

From Byron DeLear, author, lecturer, former US Congressional Candidate in Missouri and co-founder of Friends of Article V Convention.


Our Founding Fathers were all about preventing tyranny as they were throwing off the yoke of the British Empire; the despotism of Crown and Church, they could see it a million miles away and designed our government to prevent it.

Their remedy? Checks-and-balances, compartments of government self-regulated through inter-agency skepticism and scrutiny.

Given the recent Wall Street bailouts in the amount of trillions upon trillions, deficit spending and skyrocketing debt, it seems as if an important protection to help Washington be more accountable is missing from the Founder’s design. But it isn’t. It just hasn’t been used.

A consensus has emerged on how to fix the rules in our broken financial system - Regulation. This response to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression sees the deregulation that had occurred in the banking and mortgage industry - combined with good ol’ fashioned greed - as the primary cause of the collapse. It follows then, that by restoring key corporate oversight, a future economic meltdown will be averted. Only regulating Wall Street won’t be enough.

Wall Street had a silent partner in creating this mess: Washington, DC. Without the collusion between Wall Street and Washington, this debacle wouldn’t have been possible. The lobbyist driven repeal of important protections such as the Glass Steagall Act in 1999 or the unregulated mania of corporations like AIG, Bear Stearns or Lehman would never have occurred without a complicit Congress, essentially bribed to be asleep at the switch. We have witnessed, quite literally, the ‘Enron-nization’ of the American economy.

In our nation’s history, the Federal government has offered top-down guidance to the States. Sometimes in the form of a moral check-and-balance as in the case of women’s voting rights or guaranteeing African-Americans entry into schools in the South. America became stronger through these interventions. But the reverse, a restraining check-and-balance to an excessive Federal government, is also necessary. When Washington has grown beyond its means, overreaching and incapable of self-correction, the people must intervene.

This was the purpose of the convention clause of Article V of the US Constitution, to give the people an opportunity to offer solutions to a recalcitrant Congress unwilling or unable to act. When corruption has become institutionalized into the Federal government, the States can petition for a convention to propose amendments to the Constitution, a process occurring outside of Washington, bypassing the entrenched corruption. Before becoming law, amendments would have to be ratified by three-fourths of the States, eliminating any extreme or radical proposals.

But ideas like a Balanced Budget Amendment, which would help to root out abuse and cronyism inherent in the system today, could be introduced and seriously debated through our nation’s first Article V Convention. Delegates would assemble, C-SPAN would cover it, we would all get educated a little more and our representative democracy reinvigorated. There is a critical reason why the convention clause exists, and the Framer’s put it there not to be ignored, but to provide a “peaceful alternative to a violent revolt” during times of strong popular frustration with the Federal government.

Constitutional scholars believe we have been denied our right to a convention. To date, there have been 754 valid applications from all 50 States for an Article V Convention that have hit the doorstep of Congress, far surpassing the two-thirds threshold needed (34). The research documenting these applications was completed last year by an intrepid non-partisan group of legal experts, a retired Michigan Supreme Court Justice and impassioned citizens from every State. The Friends of Article V Convention (FOAVC.org) assert that Congress has not only failed in its non-discretionary duty to issue the call, but is purposefully quashing the convention as a perceived (and real) threat to its power.

Aside from the partisan polemics surrounding the recent Tea Parties, it’s clear that millions of Americans of all political stripes are voicing deep concerns for the future of our country. They see the massive influence of lobbying power, industries writing their own laws, shameless earmark abuse and trillion dollar bailouts as the symptoms of a broken system.

President Eisenhower once remarked about Article V,

“Through their state legislatures and without regard to the federal government, the people can demand a convention to propose amendments that can and will reverse any trends they see as fatal to true representative government.”

It may be time to finally heed the original design our Founding Fathers built into the law of the land for just such an occasion - they did have a couple things right after all.

Byron can be reached at: ByronDeLear@gmail.com

Iraq 'Smoking Gun' Witness Found Dead

From: IndictBushNow.org

The prisoner Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who apparently under conditions of extreme torture, agreed to say that al-Qaeda was linked to Saddam Hussein, and whose testimony became a key source to justify the invasion of Iraq, has been found dead.

Several weeks ago, Human Rights Watch investigators discovered the missing inmate and talked to him. He had been secretly transferred by the administration to a prison in Libya after having been held by the CIA both in secret “black hole prisons” and in Egypt.

After recanting his testimony and revealing that he was forced to make false statements about Iraq under torture, Libi suddenly turns up dead.

A Libyan “newspaper source” says that his death is an apparent suicide. Many disagree, and want a full scale investigation:

This is not a political choice. It is a legal imperative. Mr. Libi’s death must be the first business of the investigation. When other prisoners who had been kept at secret sites were sent to Guantanamo, the Bush administration and the CIA intentionally kept Mr. Libi from being part of that transfer. Mr. Libi was publicly stating that the Iraq-al-Qaeda links attributed to him from his torture sessions were not true.

He was Exhibit A in the indictment that alleges that tortured confessions and the contrived legal justifications of torture set up by Justice Department lawyers in July/August 2002 were central to the launch of the war against Iraq.

His testimony would support the case that torture was ineffective, that it did not, as Cheney proclaims, “protect the country from terrorist attack.” But, rather, that torture was used for the personal political goals of Bush and Cheney.

Arlen Spector a watershed moment or just politics?

With Arlen Spector, one of the last moderate Republicans, leaving the Republican party, it makes one wonder where the party is headed. In defining what constitutes being Republican, Ronald Reagan, said it is:

"our belief in restraining government spending, pro-growth policies, tax reduction, sound national defense, and maximum individual liberty.”

I'm not a Reagan fan, but other than the idea that "lower taxes solve all problems" I pretty much support the above positions. So why am I not a Republican? It's because, with a few exceptions, these words are not backed up by the deeds of the party.

Republicans have been responsible for the most massive increases in government spending in our country's history, first under Reagan, and then under W. Their deficit spending may prove to be the end for America - at the very least it is certainly inconsistent with their purported "small government" stance. Far from it - Republicans have become the party of big government.

Likewise, individual liberty appears to have no place in the Republican agenda (other than mock self-serving support for the second amendment). It was Republicans who wire-tapped and otherwise spied on hippies in the 60's and, heaven knows who, under GW Bush - before 9/11. It's Republicans who are as guilty of attacking the constitution as Democrats, if not more so. Consider the Bush administration's extravagant claims to presidential power. Nixon considered declaring martial law and he would have done so, until he realized there were 50 million armed law-abiding citizens standing in the way (Nixon's Justice Department had a list, called the ADEX file, of thousands of known dissidents who were to be picked up immediately). Detaining Americans without legal or constitutional recourse. Warrantless searches on Americans. The list goes on. It's Republicans who want to tell us all how to live, who to marry, who to sleep with, what to do with our bodies, and what god we should pray to. The Republicans can make no valid claim to being the party for individual liberty.

So if you believe in the ideals expressed by the party's hero, then it would appear you're no longer welcome in this Republican party. In an NY Times OP-ed piece, moderate Olympia Snowe says it well:

There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a majority while shrinking our ideological confines and continuing to retract into a regional party.

So are these things factors in Spector's decision to change from Republican to Democrat? Who knows. Cynics say it is simple politics, that the move is needed in order for the senator to win the next election. Even if that is true, it says something about the party. It says his constituency of Pennsylvania voters have already forsaken the Republicans.

On the other hand, much like Europeans, the Democrats don't appear to stand for anything in particular. This leaves them wide open to attacks as "tax and spend" or "socialist".

Both these parties need a reboot.

Right-wing supports 3G

No longer able to compete on substance, the republicans are falling back to their old stand by: Guns, God, and Gays.

When all else fails, do your best to tap into base fears and paranoia. Cheney is everywhere lately telling anybody who will listen that we are "less safe" (why does anyone still believe a single word out this man's mouth?).

The Vermont Equal Rights Decision appears to be a rallying cry for right-wing extremists.

What is this, 2004? The republicans have officially run out of ideas.