December 2008 archive

Have you guys seen “Prop 8 – The Musical?” If not, I really hope you’ll take a look. I love Margaret Cho and Kathy Najimy. But Jack Black as Jesus????? You gotta see this!

The first veil: Ten percent of us will pierce the first veil and find the world of politics. We will vote, be active and have an opinion. Our opinions are shaped by the physical world around us; we have a tendency to accept that government officials, network media personalities and other “experts” are voices of authority. Ninety percent of the people in this group will live and die without having pierced the second veil.

Dear Attorney General Holder, we the undersigned citizens hereby petition you to aggressively investigate and prosecute the many and various crimes we believe have been committed both by and under the Bush Administration.

For eight long years the Citizens of the United States have stood by helplessly and watched as crime after crime has been committed by the President, the Vice President and their political appointees and staff. Including the corruption and politicization of the Department of Justice which you now head. In fact the corruption of your department, the DOJ, is indeed one of the greatest crimes they have committed, as it has shielded them, not just from full prosecution as evidenced in the Scooter Libby/Valerie Plame case, but from nearly all accountability and investigation by the corruption of the subpoena process by which our laws hold our officials accountable. No citizen is immune from subpoena, and neither should be our government officials. Your department has not only been politicized and abused, it has been used to, as Patrick Fitzgerald put it, “throw sand in the face of the umpire.”

We as citizens are subject to the rule of law, and we demand that our government and its officials be as well. We as citizens have lost faith in our justice system, as we have watched it be abused by the Bush Administration. Only you Attorney General Holder can restore that faith. And it may only be restored by the aggressive and unrelenting prosecution of those who have corrupted it. One of the most important founding principles of America is that no man is above the law. That principle must be restored and it is your responsibility to do so. The eyes, and the hopes, of our nation are upon you Attorney General Holder, at this critical time.

The list of offenses is long, ranging from minor violations of the Hatch Act to what a former president and head of the CIA classified as treason, the exposure of an entire CIA counter-terrorism network:

GEORGE H.W. BUSH: “I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.”

(insert rest of list, which we shall build, here)

These investigations and prosecutions that we so strongly urge you to undertake and pursue will have many consequences. Some of them could prove to be politically inexpedient for or new president and especially for the Democratic congress that has refused to fully uphold and pursue their own investigations and prosecutions. We urge you just as strongly to, unlike your predecessors Attorneys General Mukasey and Gonzales to ignore these political considerations and consequences in the pursuit of justice.

Our justice system has been corrupted and compromised. Our standing as an nation that hews to the Rule of Law above all else has been gravely and perilously threatened.  Only one man, standing independent from all other considerations, can restore both our standing, the Rule of Law in our great nation, and the integrity of the Department of Justice itself, Attorney General Holder. And that man is you. We are counting on you.

In the spring of 2007, 6 months after taking control of Congress in the November 2006 midterm elections by running on an “end the Iraq occupation” platform throughout 2006, the Democratic controlled congress under the leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned around 180 degrees, stuck their thumbs in the eye of the public who had given them their majority based on the expectations of ending the occupation, and gave George Bush the first Iraq supplemental funding bill ever passed by a Democratic congress, in their determination that the US would control the oil resources of Iraq and have a central base from which to attempt to expand that hoped for control across the Middle East.

Their dreams of empire have since developed a badly cracked and shattered facade but not died out, and that first supplemental funding bill was to become only the beginning of a two year long series of betrayals of their mandate, as the Democrats put all of their energy into enabling Bush with multiple Iraq supplemental funding bills and selling the same old deathtrap in Iraq with a shiny new Democratic paintjob, and over the past couple of months enabling and participating in the theft of nearly nine trillion dollars from taxpayers as they have fallen all over themselves to hand bags of cash to their criminal friends on Wall Street who have been busy as beavers all this time wrecking the US and global economy.

 

All in all it’s just another brick in the thread.  

(Originally posted as my Open Thread on WWL)

Yesterday, what I really woke up thinking about, before I read Aristeides “Make Peace” essay and got sidelined into my careful optimist ramble, was the Death Penalty.

Why? Hell, I don’t know. I would venture it was because my 9 year old asked a few days prior “Suicide is against the Law?”

We had been watching a show, and some agent or another was tricking a guy into testifying, by claiming she would arrest him for attempted suicide if he didn’t ‘fess up.

I answered, laughing, “Yeah, Jake, but its kind of hard to arrest someone who actually does it.”

::I stand, Look at imaginary dead body on the floor::

“You have the right to remain silent.”

::Dramatic pause, glance at Jake::

“Check. Looks like that one’s covered.”

~~kid starts giggling at me, I look back at the floor~~

“You have the right to call an attorney.”



::Dramatic pause, roll eyes at kid::

“Not gonna happen. Even if I gave him the dime.”

~~kid laughing like crazy~~

We cracked up. He’s far too young for the question to have been frightening as it may be during the teen angst years, and I could tell he just thought it weird.  But the idea of legislating life and death reappeared in my brain, with a bunch of thoughts stuck to it.

Not the least of which, individual suicide is against the law, yet businesses who are legal ‘people’ get money for trying to commit suicide.

Your suicide? Arrest! Wallstreet suicide? Punishable by REWARD.