Should be too horrible for belief, but it's not: the below forwarded from The Pen (The People's Email Network). Post and forward as widely as possible:


"CALL YOUR SENATORS RIGHT NOW AND DEMAND THEY VOTE DOWN THE LIEBERMAN-KYL AMENDMENT

In case you thought it was just an aberrant moment of lunacy last week when Lieberman pressed General Petraeus for an attack on Iran, just before the weekend he introduced an amendment to the defense bill to authorize exactly that.

No, we are not kidding. He has drafted language that any impartial observer would interpret as a DECLARATION OF WAR against ...   more »

You know the GOP is in trouble when Newt Gingrich and Murdox News’ Chris Wallace pontificate solemnly about “getting to the center.”

It happened this morning, during Hillary Clinton’s round of appearances on all three networks, Fox and CNN, largely to reinforce last week’s health-care presentation.

As always, Mrs. Clinton allowed herself to be put on the defensive by interviewers including Wallace. Watching some of the presidential candidates nominated by MSNBC and CNN as ‘front-runners’ always reminds me of Jon Stewart viewing video clips of John Kerry in 2004: throwing the arms up – “NO!” – “Do you WANT to ...   more »

Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, deserves much credit for conducting a hearing on administration proposals for FISA.

In the climate infected by this administration, and given the penchant by top officials of our Intelligence Community to do exactly what Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney want – no more, no less – it takes political courage to perform congressional oversight.

Yesterday’s hearing, held in the Agriculture Committee big room in Longworth Office Building, had testimony by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell and  DOJ Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Wainstein. ...   more »

Dept of Hey, nice going:

In a ghastly news report even for these corrupt times, an Assistant US Attorney in Florida’s northern district, John David Roy Atchison, has been arrested on charges that he traveled to Detroit to have sex with a five-year-old girl. Reportedly Atchison was caught in a wide-ranging sting operation involving an undercover officer posing as a mother offering her child for bids.

Speaking of helpless people and their children, this might be a good time to take a look at the federal cases Mr. Atchison has prosecuted.

He’s been a busy prosecutor by any ...   more »

Twentieth-century physics upended previous ideas about time, space and mass. Mass converts into energy; energy changes rather than being gained or lost; time and space are relative to each other. Albert Einstein, he of the adorable face, space-physics hair, and loving eyes, combined some premier principles into one simple formula.

Heading into the 21^st century – and stuck in Iraq, unless we the people do something about it – we need to apply some equally lucid conversion principles to the Iraq war.

Here is the simple formulation: the more time we spend in Iraq, the more lives ...   more »

The Associated Press reported yesterday that Barack Obama is calling for immediate though gradual withdrawal of all troops from Iraq, in a process that consensus estimates will take about a year.

Right call.

This is a matter of logic as well as of ethics as well as of survival.

Logic first: Our removing ourselves from Iraq is inevitable, since we are not going to stay there forever. The process of withdrawal is difficult and time-consuming, as every orderly movement of thousands of troops always is. Therefore, the time to start is now; postponing it will not make it any easier....   more »

Rhetoric over the past year or more about a 'timetable' for withdrawing from Iraq conforms to rhetoric back in 2002 and 2003 about 'disarming' Saddam Hussein. That word 'disarm' was fiendishly clever rhetoric. It was fiendishly effective circular argument, concealing the real question -- whether Saddam actually had weapons of mass destruction -- by begging the question. It re-worded the administration objective -- to invade a sovereign nation that had not attacked us -- making the objective sound constructive, even peaceable. It concealed the true target, Iraq, by making Saddam Hussein sound like the target, or more peaceably ...   more »

Once in a while a bit of reality seeps through, and into, those limited and pre-packaged ‘debates’ allowed by our large media outlets in the election campaign.

 

Last night’s New Hampshire Republican Debate, hosted by Fox News, is an example. Much as I would prefer not to give free advertising to or to do product placement for Rupert Murdoch, I have to admit that

1)      I watched the production;

2)      I was not surprised that viewers rated Congressman Ron Paul of Texas the ‘winner’ and that former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee came in second; and ...   more »

It’s been a Law & Order summer. Accepting cable offerings over the past couple of months has meant a strange and different kind of downtime: using non-occupation time at odd hours to catch up on several years’ worth of episodes of all three Dick Wolf productions – Law & Order marathons and mini-marathons, Special Victims Unit marathons, Vincent d’Onofrio marathons. Those last sort of resemble the last half hour of (Hitchcock’s) Psycho infused with Columbo and converted into television, but they’re still fun.

In fact on the whole it’s been an interesting experience. Of the three, SVU generally has the ...   more »