Duty to Warn
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congressman Jerrold Nadler (NY-08), Chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, today held an oversight hearing on reforming the state secrets evidentiary privilege. The state secrets privilege allows the government to prevent public disclosure of testimony and materials in litigation if their disclosure would reveal information damaging to national security.
“When used properly, the state secrets privilege protects vital national security interests,” said Rep. Nadler. “However, in recent years, the state secrets privilege has been expanded to not only produce arguably unfair results by preventing disclosure of specific items of evidence but also has been used to block litigation altogether and prevent any examination of challenged government activity. We need to consider how we can reform the system to ensure that only truly sensitive information is kept secret.”
“When used properly, the state secrets privilege protects vital national security interests,” said Rep. Nadler. “However, in recent years, the state secrets privilege has been expanded to not only produce arguably unfair results by preventing disclosure of specific items of evidence but also has been used to block litigation altogether and prevent any examination of challenged government activity. We need to consider how we can reform the system to ensure that only truly sensitive information is kept secret.”
Here’s your question, class:
In his State of the Union, the President asked Congress for $300 million for poor kids in the inner city. As there are, officially, 15 million children in America living in poverty, how much is that per child? Correct! $20.
Here’s your second question. The President also demanded that Congress extend his tax cuts. The cost: $4.3 trillion over ten years. The big recipients are millionaires. And the number of millionaires happens, not coincidentally, to equal the number of poor kids, roughly 15 million of them. OK class: what is the cost of the tax cut per millionaire? That’s right, Richie, $287,000 apiece.
Mr. Bush said, “In neighborhoods across our country, there are boys and girls with dreams. And a decent education is their only hope of achieving them.”
So how much educational dreaming will $20 buy?
-George Bush’s alma mater, Phillips Andover Academy, tells us their annual tuition is $37,200. The $20 “Pell Grant for Kids,” as the White House calls it, will buy a poor kid about 35 minutes of this educational dream. So they’ll have to wake up quickly.
In his State of the Union, the President asked Congress for $300 million for poor kids in the inner city. As there are, officially, 15 million children in America living in poverty, how much is that per child? Correct! $20.
Here’s your second question. The President also demanded that Congress extend his tax cuts. The cost: $4.3 trillion over ten years. The big recipients are millionaires. And the number of millionaires happens, not coincidentally, to equal the number of poor kids, roughly 15 million of them. OK class: what is the cost of the tax cut per millionaire? That’s right, Richie, $287,000 apiece.
Mr. Bush said, “In neighborhoods across our country, there are boys and girls with dreams. And a decent education is their only hope of achieving them.”
So how much educational dreaming will $20 buy?
-George Bush’s alma mater, Phillips Andover Academy, tells us their annual tuition is $37,200. The $20 “Pell Grant for Kids,” as the White House calls it, will buy a poor kid about 35 minutes of this educational dream. So they’ll have to wake up quickly.
Early in the morning of October 22nd last fall several hundred people
quietly arrived on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Many of us were
organized into affinity groups. There was the anti-capitalist bike block.
There were Iraq Veterans Against the War. There was the group of people
dressed in polar bear costumes agitating through a portable sound system.
There were the young people from Students for a Democratic Society in their
yellow Campus Climate Challenge t-shirts. There was the Separate Oil and
State group. And there were Code Pinkers, some wearing giant bobble-heads of
Cheney, Bush and Rice.
We were united behind the short but clear slogan: No War, No Warming!
*End the war for oil in Iraq and all future wars for oil and natural gas.
*End the addiction to oil--and coal and natural gas--that are driving the heating of the earth, the climate disruption which will inevitably lead to more and more wars as our ecosystem and economies are devastated.
We were united behind the short but clear slogan: No War, No Warming!
*End the war for oil in Iraq and all future wars for oil and natural gas.
*End the addiction to oil--and coal and natural gas--that are driving the heating of the earth, the climate disruption which will inevitably lead to more and more wars as our ecosystem and economies are devastated.
Painful observations in the nation’s first state to act; no one has any business caring about this…who let these miserable freaks vote?
The horsemen slumber, the heroes in their graves; there is no music of the harp, no joy in the palace, as there was of yore.
--Beowulf
DES MOINES, IA: Iowans are known for their corn and love of politics. When it is time to elect a new President, they are the first state in the Union to act, with their confusing caucus and absurd over-coverage in the media. I believed the hype; I watched CNN and CSPAN (and CSPAN2, mind you) like an addict for the last couple months, unable to get enough information on this impending campaign season. My first as a professional journalist, and perhaps the most important in the history of America...was I thrilled? You bet your ass. I was going to Iowa, I was to glimpse History. Ah, sweet naivete; had I only known how many hicks, fools, and general miscreants we could fit into the wretched state of Iowa I would have stayed home. I was clueless...under-prepared...my research woefully inadequate, I finalized an expense agreement with my editor.
The horsemen slumber, the heroes in their graves; there is no music of the harp, no joy in the palace, as there was of yore.
--Beowulf
DES MOINES, IA: Iowans are known for their corn and love of politics. When it is time to elect a new President, they are the first state in the Union to act, with their confusing caucus and absurd over-coverage in the media. I believed the hype; I watched CNN and CSPAN (and CSPAN2, mind you) like an addict for the last couple months, unable to get enough information on this impending campaign season. My first as a professional journalist, and perhaps the most important in the history of America...was I thrilled? You bet your ass. I was going to Iowa, I was to glimpse History. Ah, sweet naivete; had I only known how many hicks, fools, and general miscreants we could fit into the wretched state of Iowa I would have stayed home. I was clueless...under-prepared...my research woefully inadequate, I finalized an expense agreement with my editor.
Today is Martin Luther King Day. It almost slipped past me unnoticed. In the car this morning, I caught a bit of one of his speeches. Four minutes, tops. Yet enough to get me thinking. After work, I researched which speech it was that I had gotten a tantalizing taste of. "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" was delivered at New York City's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967. I downloaded the speech and listened to it as I read along. The words flowed off the pages and out of my speakers and pooled around me, vibrant and alive. Has it really been forty years? Some days, it seems that we have made no progress at all.
When King was in his prime, I was a suburban teen, more concerned with matching my knee socks to my sweaters and skirts than I was about civil rights. It simply wasn't a part of my life. And when King was assassinated, exactly one year after giving this speech, he vanished into an overarching sadness that I dimly felt but could not articulate. I'd like to belatedly take a moment to honor a man whose vision still reverberates after all these years, if we will but listen.
When King was in his prime, I was a suburban teen, more concerned with matching my knee socks to my sweaters and skirts than I was about civil rights. It simply wasn't a part of my life. And when King was assassinated, exactly one year after giving this speech, he vanished into an overarching sadness that I dimly felt but could not articulate. I'd like to belatedly take a moment to honor a man whose vision still reverberates after all these years, if we will but listen.
January 10: On Thursday morning activists affiliated with the Washington Peace Center and others held a vigil outside the main gates of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia.
“We are here as citizen witnesses speaking out as reports continue to reveal the role of the CIA in the rendition of people who are clandestinely abducted, held without charge, denied access to lawyers or loved ones, abused, and tortured in places like Guantanamo and Bagram in Afghanistan...” said Malachy Kilbride, Washington Peace Center board president.
News reports have divulged that the CIA has covered up its role in the possible use of the torture technique known as water-boarding by destroying video evidence against apparent congressional opposition.
“I’m so tired of the illegal activities that the government is doing. I feel it is my responsibility to come from Wisconsin to stand with others against the illegal and immoral activities of this government…” said Joy First who traveled from Madison, Wisc., to participate in the CIA vigil and the January 11 International Day To Shut Down Guantanamo.
“We are here as citizen witnesses speaking out as reports continue to reveal the role of the CIA in the rendition of people who are clandestinely abducted, held without charge, denied access to lawyers or loved ones, abused, and tortured in places like Guantanamo and Bagram in Afghanistan...” said Malachy Kilbride, Washington Peace Center board president.
News reports have divulged that the CIA has covered up its role in the possible use of the torture technique known as water-boarding by destroying video evidence against apparent congressional opposition.
“I’m so tired of the illegal activities that the government is doing. I feel it is my responsibility to come from Wisconsin to stand with others against the illegal and immoral activities of this government…” said Joy First who traveled from Madison, Wisc., to participate in the CIA vigil and the January 11 International Day To Shut Down Guantanamo.
Over the past 18 months, a core group of Democrats and others from the left has steadfastly maintained that President Bush and Vice President Cheney should be impeached. Mainstream Democrats in Congress are sympathetic to their arguments, but most have bowed to the political reality that impeachment proceedings would gridlock the federal government in the last year of the Bush administration, distract lawmakers from resolving problems that affect the daily lives of Americans, and possibly trigger an endless cycle of reprisal impeachment attempts for future administrations.
There is another angle on this difficult question, raised by Rep. Michael Michaud in a Dec. 21 letter to Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. "There is no doubt that at the very least this Administration has dangerously expanded the scope of executive authority and flaunted the constitutionally defined separation of powers," Rep. Michaud wrote.
There is another angle on this difficult question, raised by Rep. Michael Michaud in a Dec. 21 letter to Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. "There is no doubt that at the very least this Administration has dangerously expanded the scope of executive authority and flaunted the constitutionally defined separation of powers," Rep. Michaud wrote.
Congressman Mike Michaud, a conservative and Blue Dog Democrat from Maine sent a letter over the holiday break to House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers calling for impeachment hearings of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Michaud is not among the 25 cosponsors of Rep. Dennis Kucinich's H Res 333 (also known as H Res 799), a resolution stipulating articles of impeachment against Cheney. Michaud is also not among a group of Judiciary Committee Members led by Rep. Robert Wexler who have called for hearings to begin, and who plan to send their own letter to Conyers this month. (Michaud is not on the committee.) But Michaud shares the position of congress members Wexler, Luis Gutierrez, and Anthony Weiner that hearings should be held first and articles drafted when and if called for by the evidence exposed. For reports on the progress of the various groups of congress members now pushing for impeachment of Cheney see: http://impeachcheney.org
Maine has been a hotbed of impeachment activism in recent months.
Michaud is not among the 25 cosponsors of Rep. Dennis Kucinich's H Res 333 (also known as H Res 799), a resolution stipulating articles of impeachment against Cheney. Michaud is also not among a group of Judiciary Committee Members led by Rep. Robert Wexler who have called for hearings to begin, and who plan to send their own letter to Conyers this month. (Michaud is not on the committee.) But Michaud shares the position of congress members Wexler, Luis Gutierrez, and Anthony Weiner that hearings should be held first and articles drafted when and if called for by the evidence exposed. For reports on the progress of the various groups of congress members now pushing for impeachment of Cheney see: http://impeachcheney.org
Maine has been a hotbed of impeachment activism in recent months.
"Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class."
—Al Capone
It has taken Nuremberg-class war crimes, craven ineptitude by Congressional Democrats, foreclosures on every other home in the neighborhood, and a metaphorical gun to our heads when we fill our gas tanks, but growing numbers of us US Americans are shedding our smug insularity.
“Ron Paul in 2008” has become the mantra for untold millions who are realizing that the establishment in the United States is an abomination that needs to be torn down and replaced. Ostensibly, Dr. Paul is the populist maverick we need to shake up the system and set our nation on a path to sanity and viability. His political coffers are overflowing with cash, almost none of which came from corporate or “special” interests. He is principled and consistent. And his position on a number of important issues aligns with the interests of the masses.
—Al Capone
It has taken Nuremberg-class war crimes, craven ineptitude by Congressional Democrats, foreclosures on every other home in the neighborhood, and a metaphorical gun to our heads when we fill our gas tanks, but growing numbers of us US Americans are shedding our smug insularity.
“Ron Paul in 2008” has become the mantra for untold millions who are realizing that the establishment in the United States is an abomination that needs to be torn down and replaced. Ostensibly, Dr. Paul is the populist maverick we need to shake up the system and set our nation on a path to sanity and viability. His political coffers are overflowing with cash, almost none of which came from corporate or “special” interests. He is principled and consistent. And his position on a number of important issues aligns with the interests of the masses.
Des Moines – With 40 percent of Iowa’s Republican caucus voters expected to come from the ranks of conservative Christians, peace activists occupied Mike Huckabee’s campaign headquarters in Iowa’s capital city today with signs asking the former Baptist minister, “Who Would Jesus Bomb?”
Eight members of the Iowa Occupation Project and Voices for Creative Nonviolence arrived at Huckabee’s Locust St. campaign office early Monday afternoon, waiting for the former Arkansas governor’s reply to a letter delivered two months ago that sought his pledge to completely withdraw from Iraq within 100 days of assuming office; halt all military actions against Iraq and Iran; fund the rebuilding of Iraq as well as health, education and infrastructure needs in the U.S.; and “…the highest quality health care, education and jobs training benefits for veterans of our country’s Armed Services.”
Brian Terrell, director of the Catholic Peace Ministry in Des Moines, said approximately 35 reporters, including a number of international journalists, were at Huckabee’s office during the protest.
Eight members of the Iowa Occupation Project and Voices for Creative Nonviolence arrived at Huckabee’s Locust St. campaign office early Monday afternoon, waiting for the former Arkansas governor’s reply to a letter delivered two months ago that sought his pledge to completely withdraw from Iraq within 100 days of assuming office; halt all military actions against Iraq and Iran; fund the rebuilding of Iraq as well as health, education and infrastructure needs in the U.S.; and “…the highest quality health care, education and jobs training benefits for veterans of our country’s Armed Services.”
Brian Terrell, director of the Catholic Peace Ministry in Des Moines, said approximately 35 reporters, including a number of international journalists, were at Huckabee’s office during the protest.