"In radio and TV appearances the final days of the campaign, Lieberman also frequently said that a Democratic majority of 60 votes, a filibuster-proof level, would be a bad thing."
And yet so many of you talk of that filibuster-proof Democratic majority as the ultimate prize.
Dream on as long as Lieberman is one of that '60.' At least the Republicans did not get on their hands and knees and grovel when Jim Jeffords bolted their Party in '01.
You'd think one SOFA couldn't break two Constitutions, but you'd be wrong.
Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has threatened to resign if the parliament does not pass the security agreement on November 24.
Some MPs are complaining that by the constitution, the agreement should have been turned over to the relevant parliamentary committees. Only if the latter reported it out should the government have proceeded with the first reading. Instead, the agreement went straight to the full parliament.....
Experts testifying, and members of Congress commenting, at a hearing Thursday on the Status of Forces Agreement insisted that it is a treaty and must be ratified by the Senate.
But when has Article I (or its client-state counterparts) been noted by Addington and co., except with derision?
If SOFA makes it through the Iraqi "legal" process, and is ratified by the Rump (and rogue) Parliament known as the Bush Administration, it will be yet another unconstitionality to confound Obama's lawyers, and their Iraqi counterparts, for years to come.
I commend Addington on his ingenuity. He and his friends will never be prosecuted for war crimes- the Administration of his successors will be trying to negotiate foreign-policy landmines through the Supreme Court, which has no taste for this kind of thing.
Consider this alarming fallout from the Siegelman story:
By all appearances, the federal government - including law enforcement - has become and arm of both GOP corporate donors and their purchased government officials. That is the real K Street project scandal. If you have any doubt, then explain to me while the below crimes have yet to be investigated:
MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA - In two states where US attorneys are already under fire for serious allegations of political prosecutions, seven people associated with three federal cases have experienced 10 suspicious incidents including break-ins and arson.
These crimes raise serious questions about possible use of deliberate intimidation tactics not only because of who the victims are and the already wide criticism of the prosecutions to begin with, but also because of the suspicious nature of each incident individually as well as the pattern collectively. Typically burglars do not break-into an office or private residence only to rummage through documents, for example, as is the case with most of the burglaries in these two federal cases.
Watergate was one break-in. This is 10 and 2 cases of arson. And the FBI does nothing? The DOJ does nothing? As I have said before, both Gonzales and Mukasey have become accessories after the fact by obstructing justice. When this administration leaves office, both Gonzales and Mukasey need to be investigated for their continued obstruction not only in the Siegelman's case, but also the cases of Paul Minor, Wes Teel, John Whitfield, Oliver Diaz Jr., at al. Siegelman is but one victim of this ongoing bigger-than-Watergate series of politically motivated crimes. What are you going to do about this?
Well, if Bush leaves office and pardons the players in this un-American criminal saga on his way out, then justice will never be served. If Bush is impeached, however, he cannot pardon the witnesses. Do you see why impeachment is necessary? Again, what are you going to do about this? Or are you too busy celebrating the Obama victory with no thought of these victims?
Yes, but the American people don't want impeachments. Pelosi sees no evidence of criminality. Conyers writes another letter.
Bush is free to pardon himself.
Lieberman's own party will never endorse him again.
The party he abandoned is agonizing over how they can entice him back.
Only one of these parties remains a haven for traitors, warmongers, and Bachmann-like bussers of Bush.
Remember that next time you go to the ballot.
I posted a few weeks ago on the apparent cross purposes of the United States and Israel, and its likely connection to the raid on Syria.
Consider ArmsControlWonk's new analysis of the latest neocon cul de sac in the Middle
East in this light, re the efforts by the US to pressure the UN (yet again) to run a 'special inspection' of a site of suspected Syrian nuclear activity, the "Box on the Euphrates:"
A very curious set of stories appeared yesterday about the results of environmental sampling that the IAEA conducted at the AlKibar site.
Diplomats -- which is to say, not the IAEA staff -- told AP's George Jahn, Reuter's Mark Heinrich and DPA's Arthur that the IAEA DG ElBaradei's report for the 27-28 November Board of Governors meeting will indicate that "samples ... contained traces of uranium ... was processed and not in raw form."
.....The presence of processed uranium (it is unclear it is enriched or in the form of metal) has many possible implications. There wasn't supposed to be any reactor fuel on site and the IAEA didn't find any evidence of graphite -- though that isn't particularly exculpatory (see: Mark Hibbs, "Evidence form IAEA graphite probe not critical to Syria reactor case," Nuclear Fuel 33:21, p. 7). Maybe it was cross contamination from the North Koreans. Or maybe Syria has some enrichment efforts.
But, at least today, I think the story hit the papers as part of an effort to press ElBaradei to request a "special inspection" in Syria.
Iglesias is the man to clean the "Augean stables."
Assuming Obama is interested in such a project.
The Lebanese Government has just announced the capture of two Israeli spies implicated in the assassination of a leading Hezbollah figure:
Lebanon's military intelligence has captured two members of a spy network suspected of working for the Mossad since the 1980s, according to an army statement. The military also said the men were involved in intelligence gathering ahead of the assassination of Hezbollah's second-in-command, Imad Mughniyeh.
The two suspects have confessed to gathering information on the movements of local politicians, the Lebanese army said on Saturday.
I think Bush/Cheney, and an undetermined contingent of the Republican Party, have not necessarily lost anything by their time in the WH, despite that fact that Republican operatives outside this group have correctly noted that the Republican brand is "dog food" thanks to them.
In 2001, at the start of this nightmare, the Bush Administration earned the gratitude of Bill Clinton by putting the stopper on a Republican investigation of Janet Reno:
The first time Bush asserted executive privilege, in 2001, he inherited claims from the Clinton administration. Representative Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana, was demanding information from the Justice Department pertaining to the tenure of the former attorney general, Janet Reno, but the Bush administration refused, saying it would set a bad precedent. Burton backed down.
Prof. Sandy Levinson, at the highly respected site Balkinization, has an article on the dangers of having a President who was not impeached, survived (unlike Nixon) to the end of his term, and is now free to wreak as much chaos on the Adminisration of his successor as he cares to, knowing that he faces no obstacles and has nothing to lose and everything to gain by some final "experiments" in misrule.
The damage that Bush wreaked with his raid on Syria, whose only purpose of significance was to derail SOFA, sets the stage for his successor to run into difficulties of a helicopters-in-Saigon variety in Iraq- and we know that whoever that President is will not have his popularity elevated as a result.
Likewise, Bush was not authorizing his drones to rain down bombs on Waziristan until the outcome of this election became fairly clear.
Read Levinson's piece.
One of Congress' most fateful decisions, in 1999, was to let the Independent Counsel Act lapse. The reason, evidently, was that President Clinton's impeachment was terribly embarrassing to the Democratic party, so much so, in fact, that Vice-President Al Gore refused to campaign with President Clinton in 2000, and chose Joe Lieberman, a Democrat bold enough, or sanctimonious enough, to openly denounce President Clinton's behavior, as his running mate. Those who say that Democrats prospered, or Republicans suffered, from these choices- at least, those Democrats- Gore, and many others swept out in the elections of 2002- are evidently living in a counterfactual universe, akin to the ones in which the Confederacy is detached from the Union to this day.
Democrats took the view that the Republicans had abused the system, which was true- but then forgotten the crucial point, which is, why they had created the system in the first place.? Its function was to keep the Executive in check; did Democrats ask themselves, as they should have, if this function was still necessary?
The Syrian raid accomplished very little from a military point of view.
It may have stunning repurcussions politically, however, and I don't mean only in the Middle East.
For certain, it will wreck the SOFA that is crucial to a restoration of Iraqi sovereignty and precondition of 'success' in Iraq. The Iraqis' great- and justified- fear is that the U.S. will use Iraq as Fortress Mesopotamia, from which to launch attacks on its neighbors- as, indeed, it just did.
Iraq's neighbors, most pertinently Iran and Syria, also fear this- despite an asinine LAT article, that sounds as if it were written by Fred Barnes, speculating that Syria may have invited the attack.
They may have- If so, well played on their part. At a time when the U.S. is rousing a nuclear-armed Islamic nation- Pakistan- to fury because of repeated violations of its sovereignty, nothing could damage the U.S.'s reputation even further than to shamelessly violate the sovereignty of yet another Islamic nation, making our hypocrisy in denouncing Russia's violation of Georgia's territorial you-know-what even more egregious, and eliciting new levels of disgust from what once may have been U.S. allies.
The Syrians, too, know that their own ally, Iran, does feel gravely threatened by the U.S. presence in Iraq. And in turn, Iran's closest ally- far closer than Syria itself- is none other than the nation the attacks were launched from.
So there were 'sixteen more words' of lying to the American people. At this point, with Democrats and Republicans colluding to keep impeachment off the table, and Speaker Pelosi claiming to have seen no evidence of criminality that would induce her to put it back, despite the fact that the founders would have been disgusted with her-
We can assume that we are studying the behavior of this Administration only for academic purposes.
So I will just note that just as he blackmailed the Bosnians in 2002, threatening to withdraw diplomatic and military aid if the Bosnian government did not comply with his criminal demands, we can note that he is currently blackmailing the Iraqi Government in a very similar manner. And we can assume that the raid on Syria is connected with this extortion.
Is it any wonder that the American people, too, feel as if they have been the victims of the world's largest racketeering operation?
So the Government case says Ivins spent more than a year perfecting his odd strain.
So he could use it to make the case against Iraq, perhaps (as it was known we had provided Iraq with anthrax via Donald Rumsfeld in our perpetual 'paid on both sides' meddling in the region)?
There is no evidence of such a motive anywhere in the Gov't's case.
And it appears that it's mere coincidence that, at the point when he had nearly perfected his methods, such a case became most compelling to the PNAC-addled minds that constitute the Executive Branch and its ancillary regions (OVP), for reasons known to all of us- well I should amend that; it is known they had, in their minds, a compelling case already; let me say rather that such a case became easiest to sell to all concerned.
And then it was mailed to two prominent Senate Democrats.
But Ivins was a registered Democrat.
Motive, please.
Now that the U.S. has engaged in another brutally stupid act, it is time to call attention again to its utterly cynical and completely self-defeating nature.
As another poster has remarked, the past is prologue, so I will start with that:
Overnight, the US has managed to turn the press coverage to its favor by putting out releases that focus on "rat lines" and the like, i.e. "The US and Iraqi government accuse Damascus of being reluctant to guard its borders and not doing enough to stop militants, including those from al-Qaeda, crossing the border into Iraq."
But the real question is why now. Syria has been improving border compliance steadily. Patreaus [sic]announced this month that Syria has brought down infiltration from 100 to 20 a month. [from Syria Comment.]
Well, another answer to 'why now?' would be that now that al-Maliki has ensured that ethnic cleansing made Baghdad a Shiite city, and with U.S. help he prevailed over his Shiite enemies (cf. the battles of Sadr City and Basra, which despite Admin propaganda, could not have been won without U.S. superweapons), he has now turned his attention to the 'Sunni Awakening' who were so fortuitious to Gen. Petraeus' cause. And these Awakened, who were to have been transferred from U.S. to Iraqi payrolls, have discovered that it was better for them when they relied on 'the kindness of strangers.'
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