Kagan is Bad Choice for Supreme Court, Says Libertarian Party
Wes Benedict, Executive Director of the Libertarian Party, issued the following statement today:
“Elena Kagan is another bad pick for the Supreme Court. If confirmed, it is likely that she will vote on cases with the intent of advancing political policy goals. Kagan will probably vote to advance liberal policy goals, just as some other justices vote to advance conservative policy goals. That is not the place of justices, who should be applying the Constitution, not trying to rewrite it to make society work better according to their views.
“However, the bitter battles over Supreme Court justices expose a more serious problem in our federal government: the legislative and executive branches simply refuse to take the Constitution seriously.
“Once upon a time, Congress felt it had a duty to legislate in accordance with the Constitution. Likewise, past presidents believed that they should veto laws that were not clearly constitutional. But in more recent years, both branches have thrown this crucial duty away. Now their attitude seems to be, ‘We can pass anything we want to, and let the Supreme Court deal with it if they don’t like it.’ That was absolutely not what the American Founders had in mind.
“We shouldn’t have to worry so much about who gets appointed to the Supreme Court. It shouldn’t be the case that a single justice can make all of American society lurch from one direction to another. They shouldn’t have that much power.
“Republicans who want to throw stones at Kagan, ought to ask themselves why they supported the Bush Administration’s blatantly unconstitutional Patriot Act, or why they supported huge expansions of the blatantly unconstitutional Medicare program. When they were in power, they showed absolutely no respect for the Constitution.
“I wish that President Obama had picked a nominee with more regard for the original intent of the Constitution. But even more than that, I wish that he and the members of Congress would stop shirking their responsibility to apply the Constitution themselves.”
For more information, or to arrange an interview, call LP Executive Director Wes Benedict at 202-333-0008 ext. 222.
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Top Ten Worst Things About the Bush Years
The Bush Decade – Ten Worst Things;
Or, the Rise of the New Oligarchs
A great article about the worst of the Bush years. Here are a few highlights. For more, read the whole article as it appeared on the NewsTrust.net website:
- 10. Stagnating worker wages and the emergence of a new monied aristocracy. Of all the income growth of the entire country of the United States in the Bush years, the richest 1 percent of the working population, about 1.3 million persons, grabbed up over two-thirds of it. The Reagan and Bush cuts in tax rates on the wealthy have created a dangerous little alien inside our supposedly democratic society, of the super-rich, with their legions of camp followers (sometimes referred to as ‘analysts’ or ‘economists’ or ‘journalists’). The new lords and ladies are the Dick and Liz Cheneys and the people for whom they shill. They are the Rupert Murdochs and the Richard Mellon Scaifes, and they are guaranteed to own more and more of the country as long as more progressive taxation (i.e. pre-Reagan, not pre-Bush) is not restored. They are the ones who didn’t want a public universal health option, did not want the wars abroad to end abruptly, did not want the Copenhagen Climate convention to succeed. They are driven by pure greed and narrow profit-seeking for themselves. They always get their way, and they always will as long as you poor stupid bastards buy the line that when the government raises their taxes, it is taking something away from you.
Read the entire article 10 worst things about the Bush years here. - 9. Health and food insecurity increased for ordinary Americans. Health care costs skyrocketed. Most Americans in the work force who have health care are covered via their employers. ‘From 1999 to 2009 health insurance premiums increased 132%” for the companies paying most of the costs of coverage to their employees. Euromonitor adds, “Average private health insurance premiums for a family of four in 1999 were US$5,485 per annum or 7.2% of household disposable income. 2008 premiums were estimated at US$12,973 per annum or 14.8% of average household disposable income.” By Bush’s last year in office, food insecurity among American families was at a 14-year high. About 49 million Americans, one in six of us, worried about having enough food to eat at some points in that year, and resorted to soup lines, food stamps, or dietary shortcuts. Some 16 million, according to the NYT, suffered from ‘“very low food security,” meaning lack of money forced members to skip meals, cut portions or otherwise forgo food at some point in the year.’
Read the entire article 10 worst things about the Bush years here. - 8. The environment became more polluted. The Bush administration was the worst on record on environmental issues. Carbon emissions grew unchecked, and the threat of climate change accelerated. In fact, Bush muzzled government climate scientists and had their reports rewritten by lawyers from Big Oil.
Read the entire article 10 worst things about the Bush years here. - 7. The imperial presidency was ensconced in ways it will be difficult to pare back. But note that its powers were never used against the oligarchs (unlike the case in Putin’s Russia), but rather deployed to ensure the continued destruction of the labor movement and the political bargaining power of workers and the middle class, and to harass and disrupt peace, rights and environmental movements. A part of this process was the abrogation of fourth amendment protections against arbitrary search, seizure and snooping into people’s mail and effects, and of other key constitutional rights…
Read the entire article 10 worst things about the Bush years here. - 6. The Katrina flood and the destruction of much of historic African-American New Orleans, and the massive failure of the Bush administration to come to the aid of one of America’s great cities.
Read the entire article 10 worst things about the Bush years here. - 5. The Bush administration’s post-2002 mishandling of Afghanistan, where the Taliban had been overthrown successfully in 2001 and were universally despised. The Bush administration’s attempt to assert itself with a big troop presence in the Pashtun provinces, its use of search and destroy tactics and missile strikes, its neglect of civilian reconstruction, and its failure to finish off al-Qaeda, allowed an insurgency gradually to grow…
Read the entire article 10 worst things about the Bush years here. - 4. The Iraq War, in which the US illegally launched a war of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, displaced 4 million (over a million abroad), destroyed entire cities such as Fallujah, set off a Sunni-Shiite civil war, allowed Baghdad to be ethnically cleansed of its Sunnis, practiced systematic and widespread torture before the eyes of the Muslim Middle East and the world, and immeasurably strengthened Iran’s hand in the Middle East. All this on false pretexts such as ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or ‘democratization,’ for the sake of opening the Iraqi oil markets to US hydrocarbon firms– a significant faction of the oligarchic class.
Read the entire article 10 worst things about the Bush years here. - 3. The great $12 trillion Bank Robberry, in which unscrupulous bankers and financiers were deregulated and given free rein to create worthless derivatives, sell impossible mortgages to uninformed marks who could not understand their complicated terms, and then to roll this garbage up into securities re-sold like the
Cheshire cat, with a big visible smile of asserted value hanging in the air even as their actual worth disappeared into thin air.
Read the entire article 10 worst things about the Bush years here. - 2. The September 11 attacks on New York and Washington by al-Qaeda, an organization that stemmed from the Reagan administration’s anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s and which decided that, having defeated one superpower, it could take down the other. Al-Qaeda’s largely Arab volunteer fighters had confronted the Soviets over their occupation of a major Muslim country, Afghanistan. Bin Laden was himself a Neoliberal Oligarch, but he broke with the Gulf consensus of seeking a US security umbrella, thus creating a fissure within his powerful social class. Al-Qaeda viewed the US as only a slightly less objectionable occupier, though they were willing to make an atliance of convenience in the 1980s. But they were increasingly enraged and galvanized to strike, they said, by the post-Gulf-War sanctions on Iraq that killed 500,000 children, the debilitating Israeli occupation of the Palestinians, and the establishment of US bases in the holy Arabian Peninsula (with its oil riches that Bin Laden believed were being looted for pennies by the West, aided by a supine and corrupt Saudi dynasty).
Read the entire article 10 worst things about the Bush years here. - 1. The constitutional coup of 2000, in which Bush was declared the winner of an election he had lost, with the deployment of the most ugly racial and other low tricks in the ballot counting and the intervention of a partisan and far right-wing Supreme Court (itself drawn from or serving the oligarchs), and which gave us the worst president in the history of the union, who proceeded to drive the country off a cliff for the succeeding 8 years. And that is because he was not our president, but theirs. Read the entire article 10 worst things about the Bush years here…
Read the entire article 10 worst things about the Bush years here.
Downsize DC Internet Radio Show
Today, Sunday March 30, on the Downsize DC Conference Call, Libertarian Jim Babka’s two-hour radio show, will air at at 3:06 PM Eastern (2:06 PM Central, 1:06 PM Mountain, and 12:06 PM Pacific). The focus of today’s show will be about the Real ID Act.
Not only does Mr. Babka contend that Real ID is not good for America, but he also believes it is anti-American. He is not alone. He’ll provide a great many details about what’s going on in the fight because we’re now at the point where we need to turn up the pressure at a national level. This will be a show featuring some good news.
For the last two years the battle has shifted to the states on this issue and he wants to hear from the activists working in the states. What’s happening in your state?
Please let him know at CALL at DOWNSIZEDC dot ORG (we ask that you type that address in as it sounds because if we provide a hyperlink, spam harvesting programs will snag the address, and make a headache out of it).
To call-in during the show the toll-free number is 1-800-259-9231.
And, by the way, if you want to send a message to Congress asking them to repeal the Real ID Act, you can do so at the website, DownsizeDC.org.
The best way to hear the program is on the Genesis Communications Network website.
And previous episodes are available as mp3 “attachments” to posts on our DownsizeDC.org blog.
Damn politics, let’s dance
Damn politics, let’s dance
By Pepe Escobar
Forget Ohio. Forget the mathematics. Forget all the lawyers. By any measure, in terms of direct – not indirect, Electoral College democracy – George W Bush has won this referendum. A president who was never above a 50% approval rate in the past few months, who lost all three debates with challenger Senator John Kerry, but now has a majority of almost 4 million in the popular vote, has in fact won the referendum on himself.
Fasten your seat belts: it’s going to be a bumpy ride. Control of the presidency, Senate, House. A popular mandate. Four more years. Possibly four more wars. In a nutshell, chief strategist Karl Rove got the evangelicals out in force. According to a series of Gallup polls, 42% of Americans declare themselves evangelicals or born-again Christians. Bush always had a head start of 42%.
The widely sung-and-danced-to youth vote never materialized. The 18-to-29 generation voted in exactly the same numbers as in 2000: first-time voters – a pro-Kerry majority, worried about the economy and the war on Iraq – were only 10% of the electorate. The 30-to-44 group was even more scarce. So much for great expectations. An army of Democrats, an army of pollsters and even a few Republicans made fools of themselves. The youth vote meant, in essence, “damn politics, let’s dance”.
The exit polls were all horribly wrong. The blogosphere was basically calling a Kerry victory as soon as the polls closed. A Harris poll was also predicting Kerry. The exits had Kerry leading Bush among men by 51%-49%, and among women by 53%-47%. The final exits for Ohio had Kerry winning 52%-48%. Blogger Kevin Drum was saying that “in a way it’s the ultimate in navel gazing. The bloggers all read the media and the media call bloggers to find out what they’re reading.”
Then the blogosphere went dead for an hour, an hour and a half, two hours – as if the virtual world was trying to absorb the avalanche of red states and the news from Florida and the nail-biting Ohio crawl. There was widespread talk that the Republicans were trying everything to steal the election in the courts, trying to get the courts to stop
voting while people were already in line when the polls closed, trying for a ruling against provisional ballots.
Desperate Democrats started spinning that provisional ballots in Ohio would decide everything. It would take at least 11 days, according to the Ohio state secretary. All this while Bush’s lead in Ohio was increasing.
PNAC’s program
The United States may have gone to the polls as a divided, uncertain, paralyzed-by-fear nation. Today it’s still a divided, uncertain, paralyzed-by-fear nation, but now with a clear mandate for the state really to rock the geopolitical boat.
The “most important election of a lifetime” has sent a clear message to the whole world: the face of America in the next four years – barring a Richard Nixon-style impeachment – will be of unilateralism, the “war on terror” possibly progressively escalating into a clash of civilizations. And pay attention to the “axis of evil” hit list – the official and the bootleg. Bush II will attack what it defines as “state terrorism” – Iran, Syria – instead of the global jihadi network. It will continue to rely on Pakistan to “decapitate” the odd “high-value al-Qaeda”. It won’t engage in diplomacy to address the political causes of terrorism. It won’t engage in a cultural and ideological effort to try to counteract the global jihad – especially now that Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri have changed the rules of the asymmetrical game from a religious clash to a political struggle against imperialism.
Total concentration of right-wing power – legitimized by the popular vote: this is the new neo-conservative dream turned reality. So the road ahead is to flatten the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah in Iraq, bomb Iran because of its supposed nuclear aspirations, depose President Hafez Assad in Syria, crush the Palestinian resistance, and remodel the Middle East by “precision strike” democracy.
There will be serious blowback. A new pan-Islamic nationalism, for example, featuring Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s Shi’ite masses allied with the Sunni triangle to kick out the Americans from Iraq, eventually supported by both Iran and Saudi Arabia. Iraq crisscrossed by guerrillas and Iran penetrated by US intelligence, both leading – plus Shi’ite eastern Saudi Arabia, where the oil is – to a new, catastrophic oil shock.
And then the neo-conservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC) – which virtually took over the US government – will create a major confrontation with China. Asia, beware:
http://www.newamericancentury.org
The faith-based, apocalyptic evangelicals have won this battle against the “reality community”. Bush won despite Tora Bora, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib. The crusade continues. In God we trust – and also in Osama bin Laden. He got exactly what he wanted.
