Digital Diary: Travel, Photography, Music, Politics, Humor and General Life around me
By now, you’ve heard about the Obama Girl, Amber Lee Ettinger, but now there are copy cats vids for almost all the candidates as seen below. This is such a rousing political season this year!
Hot for Hill
Stripping for Ron Paul Girl
Edwards girl is pushing buttons for her man
Wanna have sex with Kucinich Girl
I saw this in the Journal today which was odd but inspiring, being that the paper tends to lead for the republican constituency. It basically states the opinions of some moderate Republicans that think the current administration needs the reins pulled back a bit and the only way they can see doing this is giving some power over to the Dems. It’s unfortunate that these same republicans can’t put aside their partisanship and just join in with the Dems to confront the president and his administration, like the Congress was designed to do. At this point they’re only speaking out about their opinions. Politics is so verbose and public political stances that are made are rarely kept so I continue to say the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And the Republicans should have been eating before this years vote… Promising none the less.
Disillusioned Conservatives Believe Party Has Gone Adrift, See Value in Democratic Congress
By YOCHI J. DREAZEN
September 27, 2006; Page A4
WASHINGTON — As the White House and its Republican allies on Capitol Hill work to retain control of Congress in November’s elections, a small but vocal band of conservative iconoclasts say they would prefer to see their own party lose.
The array of former members of Congress and officials from Republican administrations dating to the 1970s are using opinion articles, speeches and interviews to make the surprising — and, to many of their friends and colleagues, near-heretical — argument that it would be better for the country if their party lost. Some say they plan to vote Democratic for the first time in their lives. The Republican rebels say the modern Republican Party has so abandoned its conservative beliefs that it deserves to be defeated by the Democrats.
[Combo]
Three factors are driving the conservative backlash against the Republican-led Congress. Fiscal hawks are furious about the growth of the federal government. Conservative lawyers such as Bruce Fein, who worked in the Nixon Justice Department and Reagan Federal Communications Commission, are upset that Congress allowed President Bush to claim expansive powers to eavesdrop on American citizens and detain suspected militants without trial. Others say the war in Iraq is a costly diversion from the war on terror.
Other Republicans couch their desire for Republican losses in political terms, arguing that Democratic control of Congress for at least two years would increase the chances of Republicans retaining the presidency in 2008, by giving Republican candidates high-profile Democratic targets.
“Every Republican I know thinks Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are the best things they have going for them,” wrote Bruce Bartlett, a Treasury Department official during the presidency of Mr. Bush’s father, referring to the top-ranking Democrats in the House and Senate. “Giving these inept leaders higher profiles would be a gift to conservatives everywhere,” he added in an essay, part of a series by conservatives published recently in Washington Monthly magazine, under the heading: “Time for us to go.”
“Republicans need a wake-up call,” Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman who now hosts an MSNBC talk show, says in an interview. “We ran in 1994 against runaway spending, exploding deficits and corruption. But with Republicans in charge of both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, what do we have? The same runaway spending, record deficits and culture of corruption.” He uses his show as a forum for those views and has published two essays on the theme.
Most Republicans, of course, don’t think it is time for the party to go anywhere and are irked at those who suggest otherwise. Mr. Scarborough says that after his essay was published in Washington Monthly, his invitation to serve as master of ceremonies at a congressional fund-raiser with President Bush was revoked under White House pressure. A White House spokeswoman says the administration decided “that there were better options for an emcee” at the event.
Even many conservative critics of the current Congress say they plan to hold their noses and work to retain Republican majorities in the House and the Senate, arguing that Democrats can’t be trusted to keep the country safe from terrorism or to sustain economic growth.
And White House officials wouldn’t welcome the stream of subpoenas and investigations that could come from Democratic-controlled congressional committees.
The Club for Growth, a conservative economic-policy advocacy group, says it will give $20 million this election cycle to Republicans who share its antitax beliefs, regardless of the candidates’ chances of winning a general election. The group backed conservative challenger Steve Laffey’s unsuccessful primary campaign against moderate Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, despite the Republican establishment’s belief that Mr. Laffey was unelectable.
Pat Toomey, president of the Club for Growth, says the group would be happy to see Republican moderates lose — Club for Growth declines to support Mr. Chafee in what is expected to be a tight race against his Democratic challenger — but stops short of campaigning against Mr. Chafee and other Republicans in the general election,
“Being Republican has to stand for more than having an ‘R’ after your name, and if that puts some seats in jeopardy, so be it,” Mr. Toomey says. “But accept losing the Republican majority altogether? I just can’t quite go there yet.”
Mr. Scarborough, for his part, says he can “build a strong intellectual argument” for voting Democratic but can’t bring himself to actually do so.
For the moment, Democrats appear less fractured than their rivals across the aisle. Many Democrats are so eager for an electoral victory that they are pragmatically backing candidates they once might have shunned.
Some Republicans, by contrast, having tasted congressional power for 12 years now — and control of the House, the Senate and the White House for nearly six — are ready to try being the opposition. Mr. Fein, the former Reagan and Nixon appointee, describes himself as a lifelong conservative who has voted for Republican candidates all his life and is disgusted by Democratic support for affirmative action — which he sees as institutionalized racism — and economic populism.
But he says that congressional Republicans have forfeited their right to control both chambers by failing to confront Mr. Bush over his expression of executive power, his interpretation of due process and habeas corpus, and his willingness to ignore legislation that he sees as an infringement of his war-fighting powers.
“A Democratic Congress will obviously not be promoting a conservative agenda, but at least they’ll have the incentive, which is critical right now, to exercise oversight and restraint on the president,” he says. “And that’s much, much more than you can say for the Republicans who currently run Congress.”
Mr. Fein recently bought a home in Florida and says he is scrambling to register to vote there in November, when he plans to do something he has never done before: cast a ballot for a Democrat. He says Democratic candidate Christine Jennings, who is running to fill the House seat vacated by Republican Senate candidate Katherine Harris, is “just the type of moderate I like.”
Write to Yochi J. Dreazen at yochi.dreazen@wsj.com
This is an opinion article with a many correct truths, which I have bolded for your skimming pleasure.
By Ted Rall Wed Oct 26, 9:18 AM ET
Cracks Appear in the Constitution
NEW YORK–The phone rings with a blocked caller ID but I know who it is. My friend the film critic has just put down the same article I’ve just finished reading, a front-page blockbuster in the New York Daily News. It says that George W. Bush knew about Karl Rove’s scheme to blow CIA agent Valerie Plame’s cover for years, that he was Rove’s partner in treason from the start, that his claims of ignorance were lies. The News article is anonymously sourced but we know it’s 100 percent true because the White House won’t deny that Bush is a traitor.
“So they’ll impeach him now, right?”
My friend asked the same thing in 2001 when recounts proved Bush lost Florida, when the 9/11 fetishist admitted that he’d never even tried to catch Osama, when WMDs failed to turn up in Iraq, and when his malignant neglect killed hundreds of Americans in post-Katrina New Orleans.
“This means impeachment. Right?” Wrong.
Any one of Bush’s crimes towers over the combined wickedness of Nixon and Clinton. And there are so many to choose from! How many times has Bush “made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States” (a key count in the Nixon impeachment)?
Stop laughing, you.
Unfortunately for my friend and the United States, impeachment is a political process, not a legal one. Nixon and Clinton faced Congresses controlled by the other party. Because Bush belongs to the same party as the majorities in the House and Senate, nothing he does can get him impeached.
Our failed Constitutional system means we’re stuck with this disastrous demagogue for three more years. Gloat now, Republican readers, but party loyalty’s stranglehold on impeachment can easily take the form of a complacent Democratic Congress overlooking the misdeeds of a batty Democratic president.
Any safe can be cracked; every system of safeguards breaks down eventually. We can’t get rid of Bush because the Founding Fathers, who were smart enough to think of just about everything, dropped the ball when they drafted the article that provides for presidential impeachment. Because there were no national political parties back in 1787, their otherwise ingenious system of checks and balances failed to account for the possibility that a Congress might choose to overlook a president’s crimes.
Small parties were active on the state and local level during the late 18th century, but James Madison, George Washington and most of the other Founders despised these organizations as harbingers of petty “factionalism” that ought to be banned or severely limited. Washington used the occasion of his 1796 farewell address to decry “the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally. It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration,” he warned. “It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection…In governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged.” Voting blocs were the enemy of good government.
In the new republic, Madison wrote in his seminal Federalist No. 10, political arguments should be considered on their own merits. Since candidates for and holders of political office would be judged solely as individuals, Congressmen would focus on the greater good rather than political alliances when weighing whether to impeach a president. Even when parties began to emerge as a national force in 1800, few politicians would have argued that a Democratic-Republican president should be safe from impeachment unless the Federalist Party happened to control Congress.
Another Constitutional breakdown, concerning the separation of powers, occurred in June 2004. More than a year after the Supreme Court decided in Rasul v. Bush that the nearly 600 Muslim men and young boys being held incommunicado at Guantanamo Bay were entitled to have their cases heard by U.S. courts, they remain in cold storage–no lawyers, no court dates. The Bush Administration simply ignored the ruling.
“[Bush’s] Justice Department,” Dahlia Lithwick wrote in Slate, “sees [the ruling] through the sophisticated legal prism known as the Toddler Worldview: Anything one doesn’t wish to accept simply isn’t true.” Because the Founding Fathers never anticipated the possibility that the nation’s chief executive would treat its final judgments with the respect due an out-of-state parking ticket issued to a rental car, the Supreme Court has been rendered as toothless as a gummy bear.
The more you look, the more you’ll find that our Constitution has been subverted to the point of virtual irrelevance. The legislative branch has abdicated its exclusive right to declare war to the president, who was appointed by a federal court that undermined the states’ constitutional right to manage and settle election disputes. Individuals’ protection against unreasonable searches have been trashed, habeas corpus is a joke, and double jeopardy has become routine as those exonerated by criminal court face second trials in civil court. Our system of checks and balances has collapsed, the victim of a citizenry more interested in entertaining distraction than eternal vigilance.
Where evil men rule, law cannot protect those who sleep.
~END~
So sites like Vote to Impeach Bush, while great to garner public support for the movement will not gain any political gain until the power of the Republicans sways to the left. A huge reason all votes will count in 2006 to push the political party to the Dems and see if they have the balls to enact some change.