Congressman Kucinich's Impeachment Resolution, the Parallel to Nixon, and Why Even Nixon's Defenders Finally Abandoned Him

I love reading John Dean. He speaks truth, whole truth, and nothing but the truth to power. However, I respectfully disagree with Mr. Dean on one point when he says, "Only if Republicans understand the institutional damage they are tolerating is there any true chance of remedial action." The leadership of the Democratic Party seems just as unwilling to respond to the impeachable offenses of President Bush. Nonetheless, if I read Dean correctly, the Grand Ole' Party of limited governmental power, individual rights, and moral accountability is not living up to its heritage. Tisk, tisk, tisk!



By JOHN W. DEAN
Friday, Jul. 25, 2008

Before I found myself wrestling with a nasty summer cold/flu bug, I had planned to travel to Washington to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, which is holding a hearing today on “Executive Power and Its Constitutional Limitations.”

While this was not billed as an impeachment hearing, it was my understanding that I would follow the testimony of Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, who introduced a new impeachment resolution on July 10. The resolution states that President Bush “deceived Congress with fabricated threats of Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction to fraudulently obtain support for an authorization for the use of force against Iraq and [he] used that fraudulently obtained authorization” to proceed to war in Iraq.

Given the fact that Bush will be out of office in less than six months, it is not likely that the Kucinich resolution will receive the consideration it deserves. This is unfortunate. It has been clear to me since 2004, when I wrote Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, in which I analyzed the basis for the very charge that Kucinich has now leveled, that Bush’s actions with regard to Congress – in essence, telling Congress and the American people a deadly lie involving the nation’s blood and treasure – constituted, without question, a “high crime” and impeachable behavior.

It struck me that given my knowledge of the Nixon presidency, and because few in Congress today realize that Nixon was sent packing for a far lesser lie, I might focus my testimony on why Nixon was removed from office. In short, I might be able to add some perspective for the Kucinich resolution. In this column, I will also offer the perspective my experience with Nixon affords, as I consider the case for impeaching Bush.

Congress Is Well-Aware Of Bush’s Imperial Presidency and Its Abuses of Power

Based on conversations with members of the House and Senate, and countless public statements, there is no question that Congress understands that the Bush/Cheney presidency treats its members as if they were, and should be, a decidedly lesser branch. Nixon did the same, but with a difference. When Nixon was president, Congress reached a point where it was determined to end his abuses of presidential power. Yet pointing out this out would have been testifying to the obvious, and there is nothing I could say that would give those on Capitol Hill without spine the fortitude needed to take action. As with Nixon, Congress will have to stand up to the bully at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue on its own – or never do so.

Also, there is no shortage of witnesses who can discuss the abuses of power by Bush and Cheney, to create a record of how they have gone beyond established constitutional limitations. The examples are well-known: their excessive and unnecessary secrecy, their incessant stonewalling and refusal to provide information to Congress, the issuance of executive orders that have rewritten important laws (like Bush’s virtual repeal-by-executive-order of the Presidential Records Act of 1978), their politicization of the Department of Justice, their striking disregard for civil liberties, their exclusion of Congress from the necessary national security information when it votes on legislation like the FISA amendments (leaving Congress with no idea what the changes do or do not do), their deceiving Congress about the reasons for war in Iraq, their relentless expansion of purported executive prerogatives, their ongoing politicization of the federal judiciary, their violations of longstanding treaties in order to embrace a policy of torture, their utilization of the concocted theory of executive power known as “the unitary executive theory,” and their endless signing statements accompanying legislation and claiming the right to not enforce laws enacted and signed by the president. And this is to name merely a few of the matters with which the Congress is painfully familiar.

Based on prior subcommittee hearings, the House Judiciary Committee knows well that the checks and balances of the Constitution do not work when the Executive Branch has made itself preeminent among its co-equals, and made a mockery of the separation of powers, as Bush and Cheney have done. Nor is there any real mystery on Capitol Hill about how this happened, for it is the clear result of the action – and inaction – of the conservative Republicans in Congress who assisted Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II with their increasingly radical expansion of presidential powers. Ironically conservatives once opposed an excessively powerful presidency but they now favor it because they believe they can more easily win the White House than control of Congress.

Neither the federal courts nor voters have been inclined to rein in an outsized American presidency under the Republicans, because the federal judiciary is dominated by conservative Republicans who think an all-powerful president is good, and the average American voter does not have a clue about the cost he or she pays for an imperial presidency. So it has come down to the congressional Democrats (and a few moderate Republicans) to deal with the bloated presidential powers that have disrupted the Constitution’s balance.

Again, the House Judiciary Committee would not need me to tell them how dire the situation has become, or how impotent the Congress has grown as Republicans game the system. While many Democrats on the committee, I am sure, would agree with my analysis, the ability to act hinges on Republicans: Only if Republicans understand the institutional damage they are tolerating is there any true chance of remedial action.

Accordingly, I thought if I could merely make the point that conservatives, at one point, decided that they could not tolerate Nixon’s imperial behavior, and explain exactly why they came to that decision, it might clear the Republicans’ focus to deal with Bush and Cheney. Unfortunately, explaining this Nixon-versus-Congress history would be no easy task, for I discovered how ignorant current members of Congress are about Watergate when testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee a few years ago. At that hearing, South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsay Graham made statements and asked questions about Watergate that were less informed that I get from today’s average high school student.

But I did have a thought about how I might place Watergate in perspective for uninformed members of Congress, particularly Republicans; I thought it would be helpful to report a conversation I had with Nixon’s most articulate, knowledgeable, and persuasive defender – a conservative Republican about whom members of the committee may have heard.

When Nixon’s Defenders Abandoned Him, and Why They Did So

Only Democrat John Conyers of Michigan, who is now the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was involved in the 1974 proceedings to impeach Nixon. Chairman Conyers would recall well the member of the committee who had provided Nixon his most vigorous and effective defense: Charles E. Wiggins of California.

Wiggins, recognized by his colleagues as one of the better lawyers on the committee, made a powerful case that a president should only be impeached if he had committed a crime, and at the time there was no evidence directly linking Nixon to criminal conduct. However, when the Supreme Court ruled against the president in United States v. Nixon and forced the release of the “smoking gun” tape, it revealed that Nixon had been involved in the Watergate cover-up from the outset. Wiggins, and most other conservatives, then reached the “painful conclusion” that Nixon had to go. In short, conservatives wanted nothing to do with a liar.

This is not speculation on my part; rather, there is more to the story. I had known Chuck Wiggins from my days as Chief Minority Counsel of the House Judiciary Committee and although I had not seen him since my testimony as White House counsel in 1974 during the Nixon impeachment proceeding, we met again at Hastings Law School for a symposium in early February 2000 to examine Watergate 25 years after it all had happened. In 1984, President Reagan had appointed Wiggins to serve as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He was still seated as a senior judge, notwithstanding the fact he was almost totally blind.

(Remarkably, Wiggins traveled alone, with no seeing-eye dog or walking stick. He told me that he could still make out images so that he did not walk into walls or people, and that he could still read with the assistance of an electronic magnifying device that enlarged books and papers, but that he would soon lose all sight.) As the Hastings conference was coming to an end, we discovered we were both on the same flight back to Los Angeles, and decided to travel together, so we could continue our conversation on the topics the conference raised.

Wiggins’s View of Nixon’s Misconduct: Why the Lies Led Even Nixon’s Defenders to Change Their Minds

When the flight back to Los Angeles was delayed, we found a quiet corner at the San Francisco terminal. Judge Wiggins told me that, during the Watergate era, he, along with a number of other conservative Republicans and Democrats, was preparing to mount a powerful defense of Nixon on the House floor, and that they had good reason to believe they had a serious shot a defeating the efforts to impeach him – until the Supreme Court ruled that Nixon had to release his tapes, and they found they had been lied to about Nixon’s true role.

Wiggins believed that the lawyers representing Nixon had done a terrible job, and that Nixon should have claimed not merely “executive privilege,” but also taken the Fifth Amendment and invoked the State Secrets privilege as well to block access to his tapes. He had every right to do so, and had he done so, he would not have been forced from office. It would have been bad press, but he would have survived. (I agree with Judge Wiggins’s analysis.)

Wiggins had no doubt that the June 23rd tape showed that Nixon had participated in conspiracy to obstruct justice regarding the Watergate investigation. However, Wiggins also thought there was an argument to be made that a president could not obstruct a federal investigation, since he himself had the theoretical power and authority to establish the parameters of that investigation. In addition, it could also be argued that Nixon’s actions on June 23, 1972 had been taken based on the advice of his counsel (who believed national security issues were involved) and of his former attorney general (who similarly believed national security issues might be at stake).

As for the other charges in the articles of impeachment, Wiggins said he and the other Nixon defenders had planned to make fools of the Democrats by showing that everything that had been set forth in the articles had been done by Democratic presidents many times over. It was the classic defense: Two wrongs don’t make a right, but in law and politics they make a respectable precedent. But what neither Wiggins nor other Nixon apologists were prepared to defend was Nixon’s lying to Congress and the nation.

After the smoking gun tape surfaced, none of these various defenses and strategies were relevant, because no member was prepared to defend Nixon’s obvious lies about Watergate. As today’s hearings continue, it will be interesting to see if any members of Congress are prepared to defend Bush and Cheney’s lies about taking the nation to war in Iraq. Disturbingly, it has been clear for some time that Bush and Cheney did indeed lie – and that their lies fit within a clear, extensive pattern of abuse of power. Yet condemnation from Congressional Republicans has yet to be heard. Sadly, it seems possible that today’s Republicans -- unlike Wiggins and the other Nixon apologists who changed their minds when confronted with proven presidential lies -- have no moral lines that they will draw.

John W. Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former counsel to the president.

Copyright © 2008 FindLaw, a Thomson Reuters business. All rights reserved.

Anagrams for Paul Griffin Jones

Among the 62510 possible anagrams for my name, one stood out on the page:


Profane Sinful Jig


If you would like to see your own anagrams, visit: http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram/

© 2008 Wordsmith

Politics Before Truth!

McCain: A ‘Pretty Good Timetable’

Ok, I am really starting to get confused now...Senator McCain supports the al-Maliki withdrawal timetable that jives with Senator Obama?!



Pulled from The Caucus, The New York Times Politics Blog
July 25, 2008, 7:24 pm

By Michael Cooper

First the Iraqi government gave Senator Barack Obama a boost by seeming to embrace his proposal for a 16-month timetable for withdrawing American troops from Iraq. But could Senator John McCain, who built his candidacy in large part on his opposition to a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, possibly be following suit?

“I think it’s a pretty good timetable,” Mr. McCain said Friday in an interview on CNN’s “The Situation Room,’’ before adding that it should be based “on the conditions on the ground.’’

For months Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has railed against setting timetables for withdrawing from Iraq, and has criticized Mr. Obama, his Democratic rival, for suggesting one. But in recent days the debate has shifted as Iraqi officials, including Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, moved closer to Mr. Obama’s position.

In the interview on CNN Mr. McCain first seemed to downplay any possibility that Mr. Maliki would actually ask for the United States to withdraw its troops in the next 16 months to two years. “He won’t,’’ he said, explaining that he knows Mr. Maliki well.

Then, asked why he thinks Mr. Maliki had called 16 months a pretty good timetable, Mr. McCain gave his enigmatic answer.

“He said it’s a pretty good timetable based on conditions on the ground,’’ Mr. McCain said. “I think it’s a pretty good timetable, as we should — or horizons for withdrawal. But they have to be based on conditions on the ground. This success is very fragile. It’s incredibly impressive, but very fragile. So we know, those of us who have been involved in it for many years, know that if we reverse this, by setting a date for withdrawal, all of the hard-won victory can be reversed.’’

Democrats exulted, sending around the statement to reporters to suggest he was coming around to Mr. Obama’s way of thinking. The McCain campaign did not explain the timetable remark, but said that Mr. McCain’s position remained that he wants the troops to withdraw based on conditions on the ground.

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Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Israeli paper publishes Obama Western Wall prayer

Can I rightfully share something we are not supposed to know? Feel free to speak truth to me if you think not so...



From CNN's PoliticalTicker Blog

Posted: 03:00 PM ET

JERUSALEM (AP) — A written prayer that Barack Obama left this week in the cracks of the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest site, asks God to guide him and guard his family, an Israeli newspaper reported Friday.

"Lord — Protect my family and me," reads the note published in the Maariv daily. "Forgive me my sins, and help me guard against pride and despair. Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just. And make me an instrument of your will."

The paper's decision to make the note public drew fire. The rabbi in charge of the Western Wall, Shmuel Rabinovitz, said publishing the note intruded in Obama's relationship with God.

"The notes placed between the stones of the Western Wall are between a person and his maker. It is forbidden to read them or make any use of them," he told Army Radio. The publication "damages the Western Wall and damages the personal, deep part of every one of us that we keep to ourselves," he said.

Another Israeli paper, Yediot Ahronot, published an article Friday saying it had also obtained the note but decided not to publish it to respect Obama's privacy.

Many visitors to the 2,000-year-old Western Wall leave notes bearing requests and prayers.

Obama did so during a pre-dawn visit there Thursday, following a day spent meeting Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

Maariv published a photograph of the note, which it said had been removed from the wall by a student at a Jewish seminary immediately after Obama left.

Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs would neither confirm nor deny the note was Obama's.

The handwriting appeared to match a message Obama inscribed Wednesday in the guest book at Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial, and was written on stationery from the King David Hotel, where Obama stayed while in Israel.

The visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories was part of an international tour meant to shore up Obama' s foreign affairs credentials.

At the Western Wall, Obama was greeted by a crowd of curious onlookers and photographers. He donned a white skullcap, listened to a rabbi read a prayer, and inserted a folded white piece of paper between the stones. One hardline Israeli protester shouted, "Obama, Jerusalem is not for sale."

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How do you respond to “I don’t want to get blacker, Daddy!”

He who has ears, let him hear...



Bishop T.D. Jakes
Senior Pastor, The Potter’s House

I am delighted to see a continued rational discussion about race relations in this country. I know many find it painful and some would rather not discuss it at all. But like a good marriage, sometimes communication is the only way to create unification. Therefore, I applaud CNN for having the foresight to lead a discussion that hopefully will produce more love and a shared concern for people you see every day but might not know what they see when they live in the same world and breathe the same air that you do.

Often I pen words as a pastor, sometimes as an entrepreneur, and occasionally as a citizen with an opinion. But today, I have been asked to share a story as a father, and a person of color, who knows firsthand the challenges of raising children of color. I love this country and I am very proud to be an American. In spite of its many challenges and disappointments, I fervently believe that the benefits of living in the United States ultimately outweigh the liabilities.. But in the interest of sharing a “what is it like to be you” story, I will add this one to the discussion. To be sure, we are not all monolithic. Many, many, blacks have raised their children surrounded by masses of blacks and have faced a different challenge than mine.

I have twin boys who are almost 30 years old now. But when they were very young, I was sitting with both of them in the predominantly white environment of my home in West Virginia talking about things fathers discuss with their sons. I shared with one of my sons, that when I was his age my skin tone was very much like his, very light. In a matter of fact way, I mentioned that as I got older, my skin darkened and changed to become much more like his brother’s skin, which was darker.

My son, whose skin tone was lighter, began to cry profusely. I was befuddled by his reaction, but when your 7-year-old is crying without a reason and you love him, you investigate it immediately! So I asked him why he was crying. He blurted out, “I don’t want to get blacker, Daddy!” He looked at me in total anguish and said something that left me astounded. He said, “Because if you are black they hate you more.” He cried so hard that I took him in my arms so that he couldn’t see that I too was shedding a tear or two, myself. I was hurt for both of my sons, and I was hurt with them.

I was stunned. How could I have let myself be so busy trying to provide for my family, that I didn’t realize how I had not equipped them for the harsh realities of a world that can at times be both cold and unwelcoming to those who are outside of our “norm?” Do not misunderstand me, I know all too well from my own experiences, how things can be when you are a minority in a majority world. But what I didn’t know, was that this 7-year-old had encountered this level of anguish at such an early age, and that he had resolved in his own way that if he could avoid getting any blacker he might not have to feel the painful consequences of looking different. I doubt that it was overt racism, no sheets draped over the heads of the KKK, or Rodney King style beat downs in the back of the school. No, these were tears running down the face of a child who had been victimized by subtle covert racist distinctions right in front of my face and I didn’t even know it was happening in his world.

I sat on the floor holding two weeping children as my wife and I began to explain what a gift it is to be yourself, and to love who you are and how you are made. I told them how wonderfully God has created them in the skin they were in! It led to one of the richest, most rewarding discussions of my children’s lives and they still refer to it to this day!

It was then that it became crystal clear the importance of teaching our children the value of being African American and the value of their own self-worth. Sadly when one speaks of this teaching – African Americans to love themselves, their community or accomplishments, many outside of the realities of our life relegate such pride inappropriately as prejudice. I dare say that no race is exempt from prejudice and blacks like all people can have their biases. But pride and prejudice are not the same thing at all. In fact without the conscious effort to give black children the supplement of self esteem to replace the steady diet sent through media and other methods of communication that subtly suggest inferences of inferiority, they live with a disadvantage that is difficult to overcome in early their ages. Our children desperately need to see people who look like them, who have done well and have been accepted by mainstream America so they will know that it is possible. Today we are seeing more black, brown, and female faces slipping through the glass ceiling to positions of prominence and finding there a new breed of more accepting people. We all need a conscious concerted effort to help showcase these persons to whom young Blacks, Latinos and girls can aspire. Still we who are in the village that cares for children of all races, must be careful to insure that we do not innocently or consciously malign innocent minds with insensitivity to the unique nuances of their needs.

Looking back at that moment with my sons, my regret at that moment was that I had not started sooner. My tears resulted from outrage and shame. I was outraged because the children who I loved were dealing with such hideous experiences so early; and I was ashamed that I was so busy struggling to feed them that I didn’t think to equip them sooner for the harsh realities to which I naively thought they hadn’t experienced. I was wrong!

This lack of “self-love” and the negative self-image that accompanies it, is not limited to those children raised in the inner city. Though my wife and I were struggling financially at the time, my older children were never raised in the inner city and grew up in what would be ordinary neighborhoods of moderate- to middle-class income. No sagging pants, no boom boxes, and no gangs were prevalent at the time. Instead they attended what I thought were good schools, we had low crime, well manicured lawns, active PTA’s, youth programs – the true American dream. Believe it or not, it is easy to become almost invisible in even these otherwise wholesome environments. Their classrooms were predominantly white, the teachers, principals and staff were generally white, their sports and, cheerleading teams were primarily white, as were the dances and birthday parties they attended. Without a strong injection of self-worth and appreciation for their differences, these types of experiences can leave many children of color losing themselves, trying to fit in with others.

If one takes a look at many of the social ills that haunt the African-American community – the proliferation of gangs, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy, high school drop out rates, lower test scores – much of it can be tied back into a lack of self appreciation of who they are. To be sure, many of our families have been self-destructive, and some have been admittedly extremely dysfunctional. There is no question that we are not without some blame for many of the challenges we face today. The self-esteem issues are exasperated by absentee fathers, substance abuse, and many other circumstances that add to the conundrum of the lagging behind of our people. Yet, I shared my story to say that even when a black family overcomes those hurdles, and the father is at home, the family is stable, and the parents are involved with the school, etc., there is still an added invisible weight that saddles down the mind and cripples the soul of our children at incredibly early ages.

The baggage of being different is only crippling when the child is left to carry it without an intentional awareness of cultural diversity, sensitivity training and supervision in private and public schools to ensure that what they learn at school is education and not the devaluation that comes when those who make decisions do not look like the ones they decide about.

I am reminded of the young mainstream girls that we have seen and read about because of their struggle with bulimia and anorexia. They are bombarded with images everywhere you turn of rail thin women and are told, this is beautiful. Similarly, my children were bombarded with images of blonde, straight hair, blue-eyed children and were told this is beautiful. Their perception of normal was skewed based on their surroundings. The take away message is that if you are going to integrate the class, the staff, the pictures, the books, then all involved must reflect that commitment to ensure a healthy environment for those we seek to serve.

If all else fails, it must be the responsibility of the parents to instill the worth and value into our children as early and as often as possible. We must not shirk that responsibility. But if we can gain help from all people to make sure that no person is left dreading the skin they are in, we will really be the people that God meant for us to be. If people in general, and children in particular, are not exposed to their own culture, music, dance and food, all of us have to work to make sure that they experience that exposure. They must see images on the wall and around them that reflect their characteristics, and teach them to enjoy their unique appearance, language, skin tone or whatever it may be that sets them at risk of being a part.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words still ring soundly today, “Judge me on the content of my character and not the color of my skin.” Can a brother get a good Amen?

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Nine Reasons to Investigate War Crimes Now

My heart was saddened to hear today that a potential Obama Administration would only investigate the "most egregious" Bush Administration crimes. Sigh...It looks like power ultimately protects power rather than truth and justice. I stand a little less impressed by Senator Obama and the change that he purports to bring. Below you will find an excellent article from The Nation on why our governmental officials should be held to account, rather than granted immunity and protected.



By Jeremy Brecher & Brendan Smith

July 18, 2008

Retired General Antonio Taguba, the officer who led the Army's investigation into Abu Ghraib, recently wrote in the preface to the new report, Broken laws, Broken Lives:

"There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

Should those who ordered war crimes be held to account? With the conclusion of the Bush regime approaching, many people are dubious, even those horrified by Administration actions. They fear a long, divisive ordeal that could tear the country apart. They note that such division could make it far harder for the country to address the many other crises it is facing. They see the upcoming elections as a better way to set the country on a new path.

Many Democrats in particular are proposing to let bygones be bygones and move on to confront the problems of the future, rather than dwelling on the past. The Democratic leadership sees rising gas prices, foreclosures, and health care costs, as well as widespread dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, as playing in their favor. Why risk it all by playing the war crimes blame game? Perhaps some Democratic leaders are also concerned that their own role in enabling or even encouraging war crimes might be exposed.

Meanwhile, the evidence confirming not only a deliberate policy of torture, but of conspiring in an illegal war of aggression and conducting a criminal occupation, continues to pile ever higher. Bush's own press secretary Scott McClelland has revealed in his book, What Happened, how deliberately the public was misled to foment the attack on Iraq. Philippe Sands' new book, Torture Team, has shown how the top legal and political leadership fought for a policy of torture--circumventing and misleading top military officials to do so. Jane Mayer's The Dark Side, reveals that a secret report by the Red Cross--given to the CIA and shared with President Bush and Condoleezza Rice--found that US interrogation methods are "categorically" torture and that the "abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the US government in jeopardy of being prosecuted."

Despite the reluctance to open what many see as a can of worms, there are fresh moves on many fronts to hold top US officials accountable for war crimes.

Courts: US courts have issued a barrage of decisions against the Administration's claim that they can do anything and still be within the law. The Supreme Court ruled June 12 that the Administration cannot deny habeas corpus rights to Guantánamo detainees. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals on June 30 overturned the Pentagon's enemy combatant designation of a Chinese Muslim held in Guantánamo for the last six years. A Maine jury in April acquitted the Bangor Six of criminal trespass charges stemming from protesters' claim that the "Constitution was being violated by the Bush Administration's involvement in Iraq."

Congressional investigation: Rep. John Conyers has recently brought top policy-makers, including former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff David Addington, and this week former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and former Attorney General John Ashcroft before a House Judiciary subcommittee and grilled them on their role crafting the Administration's torture policy.

Senate hearings in June revealed that treatment of Guantánamo captives was modeled on techniques allegedly used by Communist China to force false confessions from US soldiers.

Impeachment: Despite Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi's instruction to keep impeachment "off the table," Rep. Dennis Kucinich for the first time brought an impeachment resolution to the House floor that incorporated a devastating, thirty-five article indictment spelling out Bush Administration war crimes and crimes against the Constitution. Now Rep. Conyers has announced that the Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on the charges July 25. Even after the Bush Administration leaves office, the judges it appointed who appear complicit in war crimes--notably torture policy architect Judge Jay S. Bybee--could still be impeached.

Truth commission: In response to General Taguba's accusations, New York Times Op-Ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof has just called for the establishment of a truth commission--like that of post-Apartheid South Africa--with subpoena power to investigate the abuses in the aftermath of 9/11 and "lead a process of soul searching and national cleansing."

International: In May, Vanity Fair magazine published an article by British human rights attorney Philippe Sands, in which he described the reasons Administration lawyers face a real risk of criminal investigations if they stray beyond US borders. The British parliament is about to launch an investigation of Washington's lying to the British government about its use of its facilities for "extraordinary rendition." Constitutional lawyer Jonathan Turley recently said, "I think it might in fact be time for the United States to be held internationally to a tribunal. I never thought in my lifetime I would say that." Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson publicly advised Feith, Addington, And Albert Gonzales "never to travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel."

Prosecution: According to a recent Mellman Group survey commissioned by the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans of all political stripes overwhelmingly support the appointment of an independent prosecutor to investigate both the destruction of the CIA's interrogation tapes and the possible use of torture by the agency. Every segment of the electorate--including majorities of Democrats (82 percent), independents (62 percent), and Republicans (51 percent) -- want to hold this administration accountable for its role in the destruction of the torture tapes.

Vincent Bugliosi, the former Los Angeles County Prosecutor who has won twenty-one convictions in murder trials, including Charles Manson's, has just published The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, which argues that there is overwhelming evidence President Bush took the nation to war in Iraq under false pretenses and must be prosecuted for the consequent deaths of over 4,000 US soldiers.

Dean Lawrence Velvel of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover is planning a September conference to map out war crimes prosecutions against President Bush and other administration officials. Velvel says that "plans will be laid and necessary organizational structures set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and, if need be, to the ends of the Earth." Reps. John Conyers, Jerrold Nadler, and Bill Delahunt have called on Attorney General Michael Mukasey to appoint a special counsel to investigate the rendition of Canadian citizen Maher Arar to Syria.

Citizen action: Voters in Brattleboro and Marlboro, Vermont this spring approved a measure that instructs police to arrest President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for "crimes against our Constitution," should they venture into those precincts.

All these developments suggest approaches that might be used to hold Bush Administration war criminals accountable. Establishing accountability for US war crimes in the Iraq war era is the sine qua non for initiating a new era on different principles.

Here are nine reasons why we must not let bygones be bygones:

1. World peace cannot be achieved without human rights and accountability.

According to Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunals, "The ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to law." Moving in that direction will be impossible unless such responsibility applies to the statesmen of the world's most powerful countries, and above all the world's sole superpower. US support for the war crimes charges like those just brought by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir will represent little more than hypocrisy if US Presidents are not held to the same standard.

2. The rule of law is central to our democracy.

Most Americans believe that even the highest officials are bound by law. If we send mentally-disabled juveniles to prison as adults, but let government officials who authorize torture and launch illegal wars go scot-free, we destroy the very basis of the rule of law.

3. We must not allow precedents to be set that promote war crimes.

Executive action unchallenged by Congress changes the way our law is interpreted. According to Robert Borosage, writing for Huffington Post, "If Bush's extreme assertions of power are not challenged by the Congress, they end up not simply creating new law, they could end up rewriting the Constitution itself."

4. We must restore the principles of democracy to our government.

The claim that the President, as commander-in-chief, can exercise the unlimited powers of a king or dictator strikes at the very heart of our democracy. As Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson put it, we, as citizens, would "submit ourselves to rules only if under rules." Countries like Chile can attest that the restoration of democracy and the rule of law requires more than voting a new party into office--it requires a rejection of impunity for the criminal acts of government officials.

5. We must forestall an imperialist resurgence.

When they are out of office, the advocates of imperial expansion and global domination have proven brilliant at lying in wait to undermine and destroy their opponents.

They did it to destroy the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. They'll do it again to an Obama Administration unless their machinations are exposed and discredited first.

6. We must have national consensus on the real reasons for the Bush Administration's failures.

Republicans are preparing to dominate future decades of American politics by blaming the failure of the Iraq war on those who "sent a signal" that the US would not "stay the course" whatever the cost. Establishing the real reasons for the failure of the US in Iraq--the criminal and anti-democratic character of the war--is the necessary condition for defeating that effort.

7. We must restore America's damaged reputation abroad.

The world has watched as the United States--the self-proclaimed steward of democracy--has systematically broken the letter and spirit of its Constitution, violated international treaties, and ignored basic moral tenets of humanity. As former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora recently pointed out to the Senate Armed Services Committee, our nation's "policy of cruelty" has violated our "overarching foreign policy interests and our national security." To establish international legitimacy, we must demonstrate that we are capable of holding our leaders to account.

8. We must lay the basis for major change in US foreign policy.

Real security in the era of global warming and nuclear proliferation must be based on international cooperation. But genuine cooperation requires that the US entirely repudiate the course of the past eight years. The American people must understand why international cooperation rather than pursuit of global domination is necessary to their own security. And other countries must be convinced that we really mean it.

9. We must deter future US war crimes.

The specter of more war crimes haunts our future. Rumors continue to circulate about an American or American-backed Israeli attack on Iran. A recently introduced House resolution promoted by AIPAC "demands" that the President initiate what is effectively a blockade against Iran--an act seen by some as tantamount to a declaration of war. Nothing could provide a greater deterrent to such future war crimes than establishing accountability for those of the past.

Holding war criminals accountable will require placing the long-term well-being of our country and the world ahead of short-term political advantage. As Rep. Wexler put it, "We owe it to the American people and history to pursue the wrongdoing of this Administration whether or not it helps us politically or in the next election. Our actions will properly define the Bush Administration in the eyes of history and that is the true test."

About Jeremy Brecher
Jeremy Brecher is a historian whose books include Strike!, Globalization from Below, and, co-edited with Brendan Smith and Jill Cutler, In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond (Metropolitan/Holt). He has received five regional Emmy Awards for his documentary film work. He is a co-founder of WarCrimesWatch.org.

About Brendan Smith
Brendan Smith is a legal analyst whose books include Globalization From Below and, with Brendan Smith and Jill Cutler, of In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond (Metropolitan). He is current co-director of Global Labor Strategies and UCLA Law School's Globalization and Labor Standards Project, and has worked previously for Congressman Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and a broad range of unions and grassroots groups. His commentary has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, CBS News.com, YahooNews and the Baltimore Sun. Contact him at smithb28@gmail.com.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080804/brecher_smith

Copyright © 2008 The Nation

Iraq appears to share Obama's pullout hope

This does not necessarily reflect that Senator Obama has high marks for foreign policy acumen; rather, it could reflect the utter poverty and depravity of President Bush's foreign policy skills. Senator McCain would be well advised to distance himself from Bush!



from MSNBC News Services
updated 11:45 a.m. CT, Mon., July. 21, 2008

BAGHDAD - Iraq’s government welcomed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Monday with word that it apparently shares his hope that U.S. combat forces could leave by 2010.

The statement by Iraq’s government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, followed talks between Obama and Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki — who has struggled for days to clarify Iraq’s position on a possible timetable for a U.S. troop pullout.

Al-Dabbagh said the government did not endorse a fixed date, but hoped American combat units could be out of Iraq sometime in 2010. That timeframe falls within the 16-month withdrawal plan proposed by Obama, who arrived in Iraq earlier in the day as part of a congressional fact-finding team.

“We are hoping that in 2010 that combat troops will withdraw from Iraq,” al-Dabbagh told reporters, noting that any withdrawal plan was subject to change if the level of violence kicks up again.

As he departed from talks with al-Maliki and President Jalal Talabani in Baghdad's heavily protected Green Zone, Obama said, "We had a very constructive discussion." Obama also plans meetings with U.S. military commanders who will outline recent progress in the war he has opposed from the start.

This was the third stop on a foreign tour designed to gather information while burnishing the Democratic contender’s foreign policy credentials. National security issues are the one issue area in which Obama trails Republican John McCain in the polls.

The Iraqi government comment on troop withdrawals could be embraced by the Obama campaign, but may irritate White House officials. The Bush administration has refused to set specific troop level targets and only last week offered to discuss a “general time horizon” for a U.S. combat troop exit.

At the White House on Monday, Press Secretary Dana Perino said she had not heard the latest statement from al-Dabbagh. But responding to the continuing debate over withdrawal, Perino said the U.S. shares the goal of bringing U.S. troops home based on security success.

"The key issue is that they understand it will not be arbitrary; it will not be a date that you just pluck out of thin air; it will not be something that Americans say, `We're going to do — we're going to leave at this date,' which is what some have suggested," she said.

The Iraqi stance also is another wrinkle in a confusing series of remarks and denials in recent days.

Al-Maliki was quoted last week by the German magazine Der Spiegel appearing to endorse Obama’s 16-month timetable. The Iraqi leader’s aides have since said his comments were misunderstood, and he is not taking sides in the U.S. election.

The U.S. military also took the unusual step of translating and distributing the Iraqi government reaction to the Der Spiegel article.

On-the-ground inspections
The meetings with Iraqi officials came after Obama began his first on-the-ground inspection of Iraq since launching his bid for the White House.

It marked the second major leg of a war zone tour that opened in Afghanistan. The contrasts in tone and message were distinct.

Obama sees the battle against the resurgent Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan as America’s most crucial fight and supports expanding troop strength there to counter a sharp rise in attacks.

But Obama had opposed the Iraq invasion and now worries that an open-ended U.S. combat mission here will sap military resources and focus — at a time when Iraq violence has dropped to its lowest level in four years.

The Illinois senator — traveling with Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. — arrived first in the southern city of Basra, the U.S. Embassy said.

Basra is the center for about 4,000 British troops involved mostly in training Iraqi forces. An Iraqi-led offensive begun in March reclaimed control of most of the city from Shiite militia believed linked to Iran.

His meetings in Baghdad included one with the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and other military chiefs outlining the significant gains in recent months against both Shiite militia and Sunni insurgents including al-Qaida in Iraq.

McCain: 'He was wrong about the surge'
The White House and military leaders — and many residents of Baghdad — trace the momentum back to last year’s buildup of more than 30,000 troops in areas around Iraq’s capital. McCain has tried to hammer Obama on his criticisms of that military surge.

In an interview Monday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” McCain said he hoped Obama would now “have the opportunity to see the success of the surge.”

“This is the same strategy that he voted against, railed against,” McCain said. “He was wrong about the surge. It is succeeding and we are winning.”

All five surge brigades have left Iraq, but there are still about 147,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, more than in early 2007.

Iraqi leaders also pressed Obama for more clarity on his long-term vision for relations with Washington. Such discussions have added importance since Iraq and U.S. negotiators appear stalled in efforts to reach a long-range pact to define future U.S. military presence and obligations.

American diplomats hoped to reach a final accord by the end of the month, but it now seems the goal is a stopgap “bridge” document that would maintain the status for U.S. forces once a U.N. mandate on their presence expires at the end of the year. Such as move would leave the hard bargaining to the next president.

Obama arrived following talks Sunday in Kuwait with the emir, Sheik Sabah Al Ahmed Al Sabah. Earlier he met with U.S. military commanders and troops in Afghanistan and held talks with President Hamid Karzai.

He is scheduled to go on to Jordan, Israel and European capitals.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25774091/

© 2008 MSNBC.com

If today's Congress presided over Watergate...

Article II, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution requires the following action:

"The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."

Why have we never done so?! Our Founders proscribed a citizen President, not an Emperor, King, General, Oligarch, Lord, or Czar! Unless "We the People" believe, practice, and defend our Constitution, it will be taken away...from within.



Original Cartoon Link: http://theweekdaily.com/article/index/87119/3/3/If_today%27s_Congress_presided_over_Watergate

© 2008 The Week Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.
THE WEEK® is a registered trademark owned by Felix Dennis.

THEWEEKDAILY.COM is a trademark owned by Felix Dennis.

Black and White Twins: Brothers from the Same Mother

Why is this so surprising? I heard in Sunday school when I was just a kid that we are all brothers...since we have the same Father!



From MSNBC's The Body Odd
Posted on Thursday, July 17, 2008 4:43 PM PT
By Linda Dahlstrom

Some things aren’t always black and white. Then again, sometimes they are – like the twin sons born July 11 to a German couple.

The first baby that was born, Ryan, has light skin and blue eyes. His brother, Leo, is dark-skinned with brown eyes.

"None of us could believe it," the maternity ward's head doctor, Birgit Weber, told one news source. "Both kids have definitely the same father."

Stephan Gerth is German and white. His wife, Florence Addo-Gerth, is from Ghana and has dark skin.

It was “a real surprise,” Gerth told the German newspaper Die Welt, adding that the most important thing to him isn’t color, but that everyone is healthy.

The odds are one in a million, say doctors, but it can happen with fraternal twins due the genetic soup in our backgrounds. Peter Propping, former director of the Institute for Human Genetics at Bonn University, told Die Welt that the black mother may have had some white ancestors, or that the white father may have had black ones. Very occasionally, the roll of the DNA die may cause the baby of biracial parents to inherit only the genetic coding for one color.

Rare though they are, the German twins do have some company. In the past few years, at least three mixed race couples have welcomed twins who were also black and white.

• In 2005, British couple Kylie Hodgson and Remi Horder, both born to mixed-race parents, had twin girls – one who is blond and fair-skinned and one who has dark coloring.
• In 2006, Kerry Richardson, who is of Nigerian and English descent, and her partner, who is white, gave birth to twins who were both born light-skinned. But as they got older, one got darker while the other got lighter.
• Natasha Knight, of Australia, welcomed a blue-eyed blond baby girl and her sister, who has brown hair, eyes and dark skin in 2006. Knight’s older daughter has blond hair, blue eyes and light olive skin. Knight is of Jamaican and English descent; the father is German.

In 1993, another set of black and white twins was born to the Dutch couple, Wilma and Willem Stuart, but it turned out to be a case of an in-vitro mix-up. The parents, who are both Caucasian, were mystified when the twins were born, but fell deeply in love with both of them. However, after about a year, genetic tests revealed that while one of the twins was biologically related to both parents, the other twin was not.

The hospital called it a “deeply regrettable mistake.” It soon became apparent that a device similar to a large eyedropper had been used twice, causing another man’s sperm to be mixed with Willem’s. The couple remembers two other couples in the waiting room the day of the procedure. One of them was black.

Being of different races and coming from different fathers hasn’t stopped the Stuart boys from closely bonding. While the dark-skinned boy did eventually meet the man who was his biological father, the brothers consider themselves full twins. In 2005, they attended a twins festival and proudly won the “Least alike twins” award.”

“For the two boys, being celebrated for their differences finally answered all the questioning looks, nasty teasing, and outright expressions of disbelief they've endured all these years,” Wilma Stuart told Dateline, which has been following the family since 1993.

Stephan Gerth and Florence Addo-Gerth, the parents of the newest set of “black and white” twins, know they’ll face some incredulous stares.

"I imagine sitting in a playground where the other mothers will call me crazy when I tell them the boys are twins," Florence told www.peacefmonline.com.

Like all siblings, their differences are more than skin deep. The twins also have distinctly different personalities, say their parents. Leo, the dark-skinned baby, is quieter; Ryan, his light-skinned brother, is temperamental. "When he's hungry, he's hard to stop,” said the mother.

She says her children were born looking exactly as they should. "God has decided that my children should have different skin colors," she says.

http://bodyodd.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/07/17/1205061.aspx

© 2008 Microsoft

New York Times reports that Representative Rangel gets bargain on apartments

Here is an excellent example of ego, hypocrisy, conflict of interest, and corruption by greed. If the Democratic Party truly inclines to the needs of the poor and marginalized, then what justification could be used here? Thank you NYT for speaking truth to power!



By David Kocieniewski
updated 8:13 p.m. CT, Thurs., July. 10, 2008

While aggressive evictions are making rent-stabilized apartments increasingly scarce in New York, Representative Charles B. Rangel is enjoying four of them, including three adjacent apartments in a sprawling penthouse overlooking Upper Manhattan, courtesy of one of New York’s premier real estate developers.

Mr. Rangel, the powerful Democrat who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, uses his fourth apartment, six floors below, as a campaign office, despite state and city regulations that require rent-stabilized apartments to be used as a primary residence.

Mr. Rangel, who has a net worth of $566,000 to $1.2 million, according to Congressional disclosure records, paid a total rent of $3,894 monthly in 2007 for the four apartments at Lenox Terrace, a 1,700-unit, six-tower luxury development with doormen that is described in real estate publications as Harlem’s most prestigious address.

The current market-rate rent for similar apartments in the building would total $7,465 to $8,125 a month, according to the Web site of the owner, the Olnick Organization.

The Olnick Organization and other real estate firms have been accused of overzealous tactics as they move to evict tenants from their rent-stabilized apartments and convert them into market-rate housing.

Tensions are especially inflamed in Harlem, where the rising cost of living and the arrival of more moneyed residents have triggered anxiety over the future of the historically black neighborhood. And Vantage Properties, a company established by Olnick’s former chief operating officer, has attracted billions in private equity financing by promising investors that it can aggressively convert tens of thousands of rent-stabilized apartments, many in Harlem.

Yet Mr. Rangel, a boisterous critic of other landlords’ callousness, has been uncharacteristically reticent about Olnick’s actions.

State officials and city housing experts interviewed by The New York Times said that, while the law does not prohibit tenants from having more than one rent-stabilized apartment, they knew of no one else with four of them. Others suggested that the arrangement undermines the purpose of rent regulation.

“There are families who manage to get two, when one tenant marries another, things like that,” said Dov Treiman, a lawyer who publishes The Housing Court Reporter, a legal trade publication. “But I’ve never heard of any tenant managing to get four.”

Mr. Rangel’s use of the fourth apartment as an office, in addition to his 2,500-square-foot penthouse, was especially troubling to some advocates, given the city’s chronic shortage of housing for low- and moderate-income residents.

“Whether it’s an elected official or not, no one should have four apartments, especially when one is being used as an office,” said Michael McKee, treasurer of the Tenants Political Action Committee, who was not aware of the particulars of Mr. Rangel’s situation when he was interviewed.

Mr. Rangel, who was first elected to Congress in 1970 and is one of the city’s most recognizable elected officials, has written and spoken extensively about his devotion to his home in Harlem, but does not appear to have ever publicly acknowledged that he has been permitted to lease four rent-stabilized apartments there. According to a public records database and interviews with neighbors, he has lived in the building since the early 1970s, but it is not clear when he amassed the four units.

Mr. Rangel, 78, declined to answer questions during a telephone interview, saying that his housing was a private matter that did not affect his representation of his constituents.

“Why should I help you embarrass me?” he said, before abruptly hanging up.

Olnick officials declined to discuss when or why they decided to permit Mr. Rangel to lease multiple rent-stabilized units. Asked why he had been allowed to use one as an office, Jeanette Bocchino, a spokeswoman for the company, replied: “This is a private matter for the Olnick Organization and Mr. Rangel to evaluate.”

Mr. Rangel is not the only prominent resident with a rent-stabilized apartment at Lenox Terrace. Gov. David A. Paterson told The New York Sun in May that he pays $1,250 for a rent-stabilized two-bedroom apartment in the complex that rents for $2,600 or more at market rates. Basil A. Paterson, the governor’s father, pays $868 per month for his apartment there, in the same building as Mr. Rangel’s apartments, according to state records.

Percy E. Sutton, the former Manhattan borough president and a longtime ally and friend of Mr. Rangel’s, also lives at Lenox Terrace, though records about his rent were not available.

Under state and city rent regulations, tenants can continue renewing the lease in their rent-stabilized apartments for as long as they use it as a primary residence, and landlords can increase rent only by an annual percentage set by a city board.

A spokesman for the governor said that Mr. Paterson, who owns a home in an Albany suburb and recently moved into the executive mansion, considered Lenox Terrace his primary residence. A secretary to the elder Mr. Paterson, who owns a home on Long Island, said he could not be immediately reached.

Luminaries are nothing new at Lenox Terrace, a large development on 135th Street between Fifth and Lenox Avenues. The Olnick Organization built it 50 years ago as the first luxury community in Harlem. The family-run company has a broad portfolio of retail, commercial and residential buildings, and holds a contract to house federal government offices in Morristown, N.J.

According to Federal Election Commission records, Mr. Rangel received $2,000 in campaign contributions from Sylvia Olnick, an owner of the company, in 2004. His separate political action committee received $2,500 donations from her in 2004 and 2006.

In addition, city records show that in 2005, a lobbyist for the Olnick Organization met with Mr. Rangel and Mr. Paterson, who was then the Senate minority leader, as the company set out to win government approvals of a plan to expand Lenox Terrace and build another apartment complex in the Bronx. Ms. Bocchino said that Mr. Rangel was one of hundreds of people with whom Olnick consulted about its expansion plans in 2005, but she would not discuss whether Mr. Rangel had been asked — or agreed — to promote the project. Neither project has advanced.

Mr. Rangel’s penthouse residence, which has custom moldings and dramatic archways, is decorated with Benin Bronze statues and antique carved walnut Italian chairs, and was featured in the 2003 book, “Grace and Style — African Americans at Home,” by Michael Henry Adams (Bullfinch Press).

The book does not mention that the units are rent-stabilized, but says that the penthouse had been assembled by combining separate apartments. Mr. Rangel’s wife, Alma, is quoted describing the congressman as “the shopper in this family” who has a penchant for hunting down antiques like cut-glass champagne flutes and walnut chests to furnish their elegant abode.

The State Department of Housing and Community Renewal does not publicly release information about rents paid by tenants in rent-regulated apartments. But The New York Times obtained a copy of the agency’s 2007 rent roll report for Mr. Rangel’s building , which showed that the congressman holds the leases on Apartments 16M, 16N, 16P and 10U.

Neither Mr. Rangel nor the company would describe the dimensions or layouts of the apartments, but neighbors and a doorman said the apartments included a studio, a one-bedroom and a two-bedroom on the 16th floor. A Times reporter visited the 10th floor office, a one-bedroom.

The records showed that the congressman paid $1,329 monthly for his two-bedroom apartment, which is about half the $2,600 market-rate rent the development now charges new tenants. For the adjacent one-bedroom, he also paid $1,329. The one-bedrooms are now rented for $1,865 and up.

He paid $606 a month for the adjacent studio apartment, while market rents for studios there are now $1,300. He pays $630 for the 10th-floor office, and federal election records show that he splits the cost between his Congressional re-election fund, which has raised more than $3.6 million this election cycle, and his National Leadership PAC, a committee he controls, which raised more than $1.6 million.

Some Congressional ethics experts, while saying it appears legitimate for Mr. Rangel to have one rent-stabilized apartment, question whether his acceptance of the additional units may violate the House of Representatives’ ban on members’ accepting gifts of more than $100. They suggest that the difference between what Mr. Rangel pays for the second, third and fourth apartments and what a new market-rate tenant would pay — some $30,000 annually — could be considered a gift because it is given at the discretion of the landlord and it is not generally available to the public.

Landlords can — and routinely d0 — force tenants who have more than one rent-stabilized apartment to give up any additional units.

Meredith McGehee, policy director for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center in Washington, said she was not familiar with the particulars of Mr. Rangel’s accommodations, but said that under House ethics rules, a gift is defined as any “gratuity, favor, discount, entertainment, hospitality, loan, forbearance, or other item having monetary value.”

Mr. Rangel, who earns $169,300 base pay as a congressman, owns a villa in the Dominican Republic that is worth $250,000 to $500,000, his disclosure form states. He has also bought and sold properties in recent years; he bought a condominium in 2004 in Sunny Isles, Fla., for $50,000 to $100,000 and sold it last year for $100,000 to $250,000. In 2004 he also sold a building on 132nd Street, just around the corner from Lenox Terrace, for $250,000 to $500,000. He owns mutual funds with a combined value between $266,000 and $765,000

Mr. Rangel is among New York’s most influential politicians. He is a member of the legendary “gang of four” black Democratic power brokers — along with Mr. Sutton, the former Manhattan borough president; former Mayor David N. Dinkins; and the senior Mr. Paterson, the former secretary of state and the governor’s father — who have dominated Harlem affairs for a generation.

A sharp political tactician and a prodigious fund-raiser, Mr. Rangel is frequently re-elected with more than 80 percent of the vote. In the 1990s he wrote and won approval of the Federal Empowerment Zone demonstration project, a $5 billion program to revitalize urban neighborhoods throughout the country. More than $200 million of that money has been steered to the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, where Representative Rangel has served on the board, and which has been credited with helping spur Harlem’s resurgence.

But critics, including some Harlem residents, complain that Mr. Rangel has too often used his public office to help himself and his friends. In 1999, Mr. Rangel was forced out as chairman of the Apollo Theater foundation after the state attorney general’s office charged that the board had failed to collect more than $4 million owed to the theater by a company controlled by his ally, Mr. Sutton. Mr. Rangel and Mr. Sutton denied any wrongdoing.

Last year, government watchdog groups criticized Mr. Rangel for pushing through a $1.9 million earmark to build the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College of New York, which is slated to include an office for Mr. Rangel and a presidential-style library for his official papers. The congressman and the college said that by lending his name to the project, Mr. Rangel had helped the school raise millions from private donors.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25629176/

© 2008 MSNBC.com

EPA knocks $900,000 off value of a life

I was beginning to think that the Bush Administration considered some lives more important than others (white versus black, rich versus poor, Republican versus Democrat); but, it looks like I was wrong. They think that every American is worth-less! I think we, the people, are fiddling while Bush burns Rome.



The Associated Press
updated 3:34 p.m. CT, Thurs., July. 10, 2008

WASHINGTON - It's not just the American dollar that's losing value. A government agency has decided that an American life isn't worth what it used to be.

The "value of a statistical life" is $6.9 million in today's dollars, the Environmental Protection Agency reckoned in May — a drop of nearly $1 million from just five years ago.

The Associated Press discovered the change after a review of cost-benefit analyses over more than a dozen years.

Though it may seem like a harmless bureaucratic recalculation, the devaluation has real consequences.

When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule. The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation, such as tighter restrictions on pollution.

Consider, for example, a hypothetical regulation that costs $18 billion to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At $7.8 million per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at $6.9 million per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted.

Some environmentalists accuse the Bush administration of changing the value to avoid tougher rules — a charge the EPA denies.

"It appears that they're cooking the books in regards to the value of life," said S. William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, which represents state and local air pollution regulators. "Those decisions are literally a matter of life and death."

Dan Esty, a senior EPA policy official in the first Bush administration and now director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, said that "it's hard to imagine that it has other than a political motivation."

Agency officials say they were just following what the science told them.

How figure is reached

The the EPA figure is not based on people's earning capacity, or their potential contributions to society, or how much they are loved and needed by their friends and family — some of the factors used in insurance claims and wrongful-death lawsuits.

Instead, economists calculate the value based on what people are willing to pay to avoid certain risks, and on how much extra employers pay their workers to take on additional risks. Most of the data is drawn from payroll statistics; some comes from opinion surveys. According to the EPA, people shouldn't think of the number as a price tag on a life.

The EPA made the changes in two steps. First, in 2004, the agency cut the estimated value of a life by 8 percent. Then, in a rule governing train and boat air pollution this May, the agency took away the normal adjustment for one year's inflation. Between the two changes, the value of a life fell 11 percent, based on today's dollar.

EPA officials say the adjustment was not significant and was based on better economic studies. The reduction reflects consumer preferences, said Al McGartland, director of EPA's office of policy, economics and innovation.

"It's our best estimate of what consumers are willing to pay to reduce similar risks to their own lives," McGartland said.

Economist at odds

But the EPA's cut "doesn't make sense," said Vanderbilt University economist Kip Viscusi. The EPA partly based its reduction on his work. "As people become more affluent, the value of statistical lives go up as well. It has to." Viscusi also said no study has shown that Americans are less willing to pay to reduce risks.

At the same time that the EPA was trimming the value of life, the Department of Transportation twice raised its life value figure. But its number is still lower than the EPA's.

The environmental agency traditionally has placed the highest value of life in government and still does, despite efforts by administrations to bring uniformity to that figure among all agencies.

Not all of the EPA uses the reduced value. The agency's water division never adopted the change and in 2006 used $8.7 million in current dollars.

From 1996 to 2003, the EPA kept the value of a statistical life generally around $7.8 million to $7.96 million in current dollars, according to reports analyzed by The AP. In 2004, for a major air pollution rule, the agency lowered the value to $7.15 million in current dollars.

Just how the EPA came up with that figure is complicated and involves two dueling analyses.

Viscusi wrote one of those big studies, coming up with a value of $8.8 million in current dollars. The other study put the number between $2 million and $3.3 million. The co-author of that study, Laura Taylor of North Carolina State University, said her figure was lower because it emphasized differences in pay for various risky jobs, not just risky industries as a whole.

Advisor: 'Numerology,' not science

The EPA took portions of each study and essentially split the difference — a decision two of the agency's advisory boards faulted or questioned.

"This sort of number-crunching is basically numerology," said Granger Morgan, chairman of EPA's Science Advisory Board and an engineering and public policy professor at Carnegie Mellon University. "This is not a scientific issue."

Other, similar calculations by the Bush administration have proved politically explosive. In 2002, the EPA decided the value of elderly people was 38 percent less than that of people under 70. After the move became public, the agency reversed itself.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25626294/

© 2008 MSNBC.com

Rove ignores committee's subpoena, refuses to testify

Of all the lessons learned during the Richard Nixon fiasco, surely we do not have to replay compulsory process trumping executive privilege. The courts have been very clear on this matter. Alas, transparency and accountability have not be hallmarks of our presidents lately (e.g. Nixon, Clinton, Bush II). I wonder what these words really mean to President Bush, and by proxy his administration: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" (Article II, Section I of the U.S. Constitution). Speak Truth to Power!



WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Karl Rove, President Bush's longtime political guru, refused to obey an order to testify before a House Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday.

Rove's lawyer asserted that Rove was "immune" from the subpoena the committee had issued, arguing that the committee could not compel him to testify due to "executive privilege."

The panel is investigating allegations that Rove and his White House allies dismissed U.S. attorneys and prosecuted officials who they saw as political opponents.

The panel subpoenaed Rove in May after his lawyer, Robert D. Luskin, made clear the former White House deputy chief of staff would not appear voluntarily.

Luskin responded immediately that Rove still would not appear, prompting a threat of prosecution from the Judiciary Committee chairman, Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, and Rep. Linda Sanchez, a California Democrat who chairs the subcommittee on commercial and administrative law.

"A refusal to appear in violation of the subpoena could subject Mr. Rove to contempt proceedings, including statutory contempt under federal law and proceedings under the inherent contempt authority of the House of Representatives," Conyers and Sanchez wrote.

"We are unaware of any proper legal basis for Mr. Rove's refusal to even appear today as required by the subpoena," Sanchez said Thursday morning when Rove failed to show up. "The courts have made clear that no one -- not even the president -- is immune from compulsory process. That is what the Supreme Court rules in U.S. v. Nixon and Clinton v. Jones."

In May, Conyers contrasted Rove's refusal to testify before Congress with his paid work as a commentator for the Fox News Channel and Newsweek magazine.

"Although he does not seem the least bit hesitant to discuss these very issues weekly on cable television and in the print news media, Mr. Rove and his attorney have apparently concluded that a public hearing room would not be appropriate. Unfortunately, I have no choice today but to compel his testimony on these very important matters."

Rove's lawyer cited a letter from the Justice Department saying Rove is "constitutionally immune from compelled congressional testimony." He said Rove is willing to submit to an "informal interview" or to answer written questions about the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, whose ouster Rove is accused of orchestrating.

"Threatening Mr. Rove with sanctions will not in any way expedite the resolution of the issue," Luskin wrote in a letter to the panel on Wednesday.

Luskin noted in May that his client had already received a separate subpoena from the Senate Judiciary Committee. "While the [House] committee has the authority to issue a subpoena, it is hard to see what this will accomplish, apart from a 'Groundhog Day' replay of the same issues that are already the subject of litigation," the lawyer wrote, referring to a movie in which a person lives the same day over and over again.

Luskin added that "issues of executive privilege and separation of powers" could limit Rove's testimony.

In response, Conyers said the two committees are focusing on different matters, with the House committee delving into the prosecution of the former Alabama governor, a Democrat who lost his bid for re-election in 2002 and was convicted on corruption charges in 2006.

Conyers also noted that other former White House officials have testified under subpoena in the past and have dealt with issues of executive privilege on a case-by-case basis. "Mr. Rove should follow the same course," he said.

Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, called the subpoena "a sham."

The Democratic-controlled Congress has been battling for months to force the White House to disclose information about the firing of the attorneys and the prosecution of Siegelman.

Current and former White House aides have refused to testify, citing executive privilege.

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/10/rove.subpoena/index.html

Copyright 2008 Cable News Network

Iraq Wants Withdrawal Deadline

D'oh! I think someone at the White House forgot to get the talking points to Ali al-Dabbagh and Nuri al-Maliki. Will President Bush and Senator McCain permit Iraq to make their own decisions...even if it results in Iraq asking us to completely leave and a subsequent cozying up to Iran? Things that make you go...hummm?!

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- A deadline should be set for the withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces from Iraq, and the pullout could be done by 2011, an Iraqi government spokesman said Tuesday.

Ali al-Dabbagh said any timetable would depend on "conditions and the circumstances that the country would be undergoing." But he said a pullout within "three, four or five" years was possible.

"It can be 2011 or 2012," al-Dabbagh said. "We don't have a specific date in mind, but we need to agree on the principle of setting a deadline."

Al-Dabbagh's comments come as the United States and Iraq try to negotiate a framework governing the stationing of U.S. and allied troops beyond the end of 2008, when the current U.N. mandate for coalition forces expires.

Al-Dabbagh said any such deal should include a withdrawal deadline. A day earlier, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki also said he favored a short-term accord that would spell out a withdrawal schedule for U.S. troops. VideoWatch report on how al-Maliki favors a timetable »

But in Washington, State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos said U.S. negotiators are "looking at conditions, not calendars."

"Two things we've made very clear from the beginning of the process -- the first is that we're going to deal as sovereign nations working towards an agreement that satisfies both of our needs, and secondly that we're not going to be discussing individual parts of this negotiations during the negotiation process itself," Gallegos said.

Since taking control of U.S. Congress in 2007, Democrats have tried unsuccessfully to impose timetables for troop withdrawals. Some of the attempts were thwarted by filibusters from Republicans in the Senate.

Harry Reid, the Democratic leader of the U.S. Senate, told reporters: "I agree with Maliki."

"We should have a timeline. We've been wanting one for a long time," said Reid, D-Nevada.

Reid said it is time for the United States to "take off the training wheels and let Iraq handle their own affairs."

The Pentagon has repeatedly said conditions in Iraq including political and security milestones -- not timetables -- would guide whether the United States will remove troops. Those milestones include reduced levels of sectarian violence, political reconciliation and stronger Iraqi forces.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Tuesday the Iraqis have made clear that any withdrawal would be "based on conditions on the ground."

Maliki is "a politician," McCain told MSNBC. "He is a leader of a country that's finally coming together. The fact is that we and the Iraqis will deal in what is in the national security interests of both countries."

The United States is in the process of withdrawing the last of its five "surge" brigades -- those sent to Iraq in 2007 to bolster U.S. forces there. On Monday, Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said violence in Iraq was down to its lowest point in four years and a decision whether to drop the number of troops below the level immediately preceding the surge would come later this year.

The Bush administration has been trying to strike a security deal with Iraq by the end of July, but disputes over the basing of U.S. troops and what authority they would have within Iraq make it unlikely an agreement will be reached by then, al-Dabbagh said.

"We still have our points of disagreement, and we are working on reaching the middle ground that will always guarantee us Iraq's sovereignty," al-Dabbagh said.

CNN's Saad Abedine and Mike Mount contributed to this report.

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/07/08/us.iraq/index.html

© 2008 Cable News Network

U.S. condoned Kurdish oil deal: Contract contradicted Bush administration's public stance

Another likely example of the Bush Administration's difficulty with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So, help us God!

WASHINGTON - U.S. officials condoned Hunt Oil Co. efforts to obtain an exploration deal with Iraq’s Kurdish regional government, contrary to public statements discouraging it, according to documents cited by a congressional committee.

When the agreement was announced in September, it was criticized as undermining efforts to strengthen Iraq central government, which still had no national oil revenue-sharing law.

Bush administration officials expressed public concern and denied any knowledge of the contract.

On Wednesday, U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman released e-mails and letters obtained by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that appeared to show the opposite.

“Contrary to the denials of administration officials, advisors to the president and officials in the State and Commerce Departments knew about Hunt Oil’s interest in the Kurdish region months before the contract was executed,” Waxman, a California Democrat, wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

In one e-mail, Hunt Oil’s general manager wrote: “There was no communication to me or in my presence made by any of the 9 state department officials with whom I met ... that Hunt should not pursue our course of action leading to a contract. In fact, there was ample opportunity to do so, but it did not happen.”

Spokesmen for the State Department and Hunt Oil were not immediately available for comment.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey said Wednesday that “we continue to stand by our previous statements that the U.S. government made its objections to this arrangement known both to the company as well as to the KRG (Kurdistan Regional Government),” The Washington Post reported.

Waxman’s office released documents dating to June 2007, saying they raised questions about U.S. involvement in recently announced negotiations between the Iraqi government and major U.S. and multinational oil companies.

He told Rice he was seeking information about a possible U.S. role in the efforts of those companies to obtain Iraqi contracts.

“You and other administration officials have denied playing any role in these contracts. In the case of Hunt Oil, however, similar denials appear to have been misleading,” Waxman wrote.

The government of Iraq’s northern Kurdish region announced on September 8, 2007, that it had signed a gas and oil production sharing contract with a unit of Hunt Oil and with Impulse Energy Corp.

Hunt Oil Chief Executive Ray Hunt denied that his ties to the Bush family and the Republican Party helped his company cut a deal with the largely autonomous region.

Hunt said in a Wall Street Journal interview in October the company received no government advice before striking the deal.

“The fact is, as a matter of policy, we never have and never will go to the government of the U.S. and ask the government’s advice on anything we do from a business point of view,” he was quoted as saying.

Iraq has the world’s third-largest oil reserves, which are mainly in the north and the south of the country.

Kurdish officials have clashed with Baghdad over the national oil law, which will determine how contracts are awarded and how revenues are distributed. The northern Iraqi region has signed several exploration deals with foreign firms, which Baghdad says are illegal.

updated 3:20 a.m. CT, Thurs., July. 3, 2008

Copyright 2008 Reuters

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25506968/

© 2008 MSNBC.com

The Long Road to Forgiveness

I believe in the redemption of sins...



All Things Considered, June 30, 2008

On June 8, 1972, I ran out from Cao Dai temple in my village, Trang Bang, South Vietnam; I saw an airplane getting lower and then four bombs falling down. I saw fire everywhere around me. Then I saw the fire over my body, especially on my left arm. My clothes had been burned off by fire.

I was 9 years old but I still remember my thoughts at that moment: I would be ugly and people would treat me in a different way. My picture was taken in that moment on Road No. 1 from Saigon to Phnom Penh. After a soldier gave me some drink and poured water over my body, I lost my consciousness.

Several days after, I realized that I was in the hospital, where I spent 14 months and had 17 operations.

It was a very difficult time for me when I went home from the hospital. Our house was destroyed; we lost everything and we just survived day by day.

Although I suffered from pain, itching and headaches all the time, the long hospital stay made me dream to become a doctor. But my studies were cut short by the local government. They wanted me as a symbol of the state. I could not go to school anymore.

The anger inside me was like a hatred as high as a mountain. I hated my life. I hated all people who were normal because I was not normal. I really wanted to die many times.

I spent my daytime in the library to read a lot of religious books to find a purpose for my life. One of the books that I read was the Holy Bible.

In Christmas 1982, I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior. It was an amazing turning point in my life. God helped me to learn to forgive — the most difficult of all lessons. It didn't happen in a day and it wasn't easy. But I finally got it.

Forgiveness made me free from hatred. I still have many scars on my body and severe pain most days but my heart is cleansed.

Napalm is very powerful but faith, forgiveness and love are much more powerful. We would not have war at all if everyone could learn how to live with true love, hope and forgiveness.

If that little girl in the picture can do it, ask yourself: Can you?

This essay was produced by Anne Penman for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. NPR's This I Believe is independently produced by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with John Gregory and Viki Merrick. All material is copyright protected by Atlantic Public Media and This I Believe, Inc.