Tom Rocks Out
January 31st, 2006
On my way home tonight, a local radio station played Green Jelly’s “Three Little Pigs.” Yeah, it’s silly, but I caught myself head-banging to it anyway.
Categories: I do too have a life | 2 Comments
Is Incompetence Cause for Impeachment?
January 31st, 2006
I was listening to a show on XM’s public radio and they were interviewing a former Congresswoman who had written an article about impeaching Bush. I wasn’t in the car long enough to catch the name of either than Congresswoman or the article, but they did briefly discuss the notion that impeachment could be triggered by incompetence. The argument ran that the President swears and oath to uphold and execute the laws of the country and the duties of the office President. If the President consistently fails to perform those duties appropriately, then he or she has violated that oath and thus could be impeached. The host recoiled from that notion and even the Congresswoman seemed to think it more of an intellectual exercise than a legitimate argument. I am not so sure.
The Constitution does not define what constitutes an impeachable offense — it uses the vague terms “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Defining the offense is left to the Congress. And while it is true hat the sentence is written in terms reserved for crimes instead of incompetence, our society recognizes that negligence — a form of incompetence — can be a kind of crime. If a doctor does such a poor job of treating you that he slides from simply being bad at his job to being negligent, then if you die that doctor may be arrested. If a company builds a product in a negligent fashion and people are hurt using that product, the leaders of that company may be charged with a crime.
Assume for the sake of argument that something like that has happened in the Bush Administration. We know that the Bush Administration choose the timetable for the invasion of Iraq and we further know that they “went to war with the army [they had]” — an army that apparently did not have a plan for the occupation or proper equipment. Does that not rise to the level of negligence? Bush appointed people with no emergency management experience to head FEMA — a position that has an enormous effect upon how many people can be saved after a natural disaster. Brown failed miserably and as a result people who should have survived Katrina did not. Does that not rise to the level of negligence?
And if negligence is present, then why does that not rise to the level of a high crime or misdemeanor? At what point does incompetence become impeachable? I have to believe that the point is somewhere on this side of “never”.
Categories: Politics | 4 Comments
Random Thought
January 31st, 2006
“Chevy Compensator” would be a good name for an SUV.
And according to a Google search, I’m not the first one to think so.
Categories: Humor, I do too have a life | 5 Comments
Bush Suppression of Science and the End
January 31st, 2006
When push comes to shove, Bush always chooses his donors over the truth:
After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be “dire consequences” if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews.
….In one call, George Deutsch, a recently appointed public affairs officer at NASA headquarters, rejected a request from a producer at National Public Radio to interview Dr. Hansen, said Leslie McCarthy, a public affairs officer responsible for the Goddard Institute.
Citing handwritten notes taken during the conversation, Ms. McCarthy said Mr. Deutsch called N.P.R. “the most liberal” media outlet in the country. She said that in that call and others, Mr. Deutsch said his job was “to make the president look good” and that as a White House appointee that might be Mr. Deutsch’s priority.
….Mr. Acosta, Mr. Deutsch’s supervisor, said that when Mr. Deutsch was asked about the conversations, he flatly denied saying anything of the sort. Mr. Deutsch referred all interview requests to Mr. Acosta.
Ms. McCarthy, when told of the response, said: “Why am I going to go out of my way to make this up and back up Jim Hansen? I don’t have a dog in this race. And what does Hansen have to gain?”
And why is this so important? Because we are rapidly approaching the point beyond which we simply cannot do anything to prevent the coming disaster:
Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend.
This “tipping point” scenario has begun to consume many prominent researchers in the United States and abroad, because the answer could determine how drastically countries need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years. While scientists remain uncertain when such a point might occur, many say it is urgent that policymakers cut global carbon dioxide emissions in half over the next 50 years or risk the triggering of changes that would be irreversible.
There are three specific events that these scientists describe as especially worrisome and potentially imminent, although the time frames are a matter of dispute: widespread coral bleaching that could damage the world’s fisheries within three decades; dramatic sea level rise by the end of the century that would take tens of thousands of years to reverse; and, within 200 years, a shutdown of the ocean current that moderates temperatures in northern Europe.
Ahh well — Exxon’s quarterly profits are very good this year, and, really, what else matters?
Categories: Environment, Politics | 3 Comments
Losing the Filibuster
January 31st, 2006
So the Dems lost the filibuster. This was pretty much expected, I think. Up until this weekend, there was no effort to push the filibuster, and even over the weekend none of the left leaning groups — the PFAW, the NARAL — participated in trying to sway senators. This was an entirely authentic grassroots effort “organized” by a bunch of semi-anonymous bloggers and their readers. That has gotten noticed, and made certian people nervous. This was a spontaneous, self organizing onslaught that helped create a filibuster attempt out of nothing more than conviction. That is a start, but it is not the end by any stretch of the imagination.
The truth of the matter is that the other side is just better organized. The Dem leadership did a terrible job preparing for the hearings, and while their individual performances were actually fairly well done (even Biden, for those all-too brief moments when his duty to the country overcame his love of his own voice, was effective), there was no support from outside parties. No one on the paid left seems to understand the modern media or how to penetrate the fog of the modern media. The right has its own network and owns the radio talk dial. The left has nothing like that. The right has spent forty years attacking the media for a non-existent liberal bias. The left has only now, in the last couple of years, begun to build organizations to hold the media’s feet to the fire when they stray form the facts and into right wing talking points. We are far behind in terms of the infrastructure that it takes to operate effectively in the modern media climate.
Leftist groups are even worse. They hoarded millions of dollars in anticipation of these fights, and then did practically nothing. There was no drumbeat of ads over the course of the nomination, there was almost no presence by these groups on the talk show circuit, and there was certainly no co-ordination amongst themselves or the Democratic Party apparatus. And none of these groups create a sense of fear. Senators from blue states felt free to vote for cloture on a nominee who has made no secret, during his political career, of his opposition to Roe v. Wade. Lincoln Chaffe, who NARAL endorsed in his re-election bid because he was pro-choice, absolutely betrayed them today by voting for cloture. And NARAL apparently intends to do nothing about that. They should be going after his scalp, and Lieberman’s and Cantwell’s. But they aren’t. And that is why they continue to lose. The NRA and the Club For Growth have plenty of scalps. Until NARAL and PFAW take some scalps themselves, they are worse than useless.
These kinds of things take time. It took the far right decades to gain control of the media and the GOP. The process our end has just begun, and, as Matt Stoller points out, there have been some victories. I would add the ascension of Dean to the DNC chair and the defeat of the gutting of Social Security to Stoller’s list. Progress is being made, even if it doesn’t feel like it now. There is more to be done, but it is work that can be done. Through events like the filibuster push and channeling money away from ineffective organizations, change can be done. It already has been done. It will take a lot of effort — we are trying to break twenty years of bad habits and overcome twenty years of bad politics — but the work is worth doing.
Speaking of scalps, both Liebermann and Cantwell have primary challengers this year. Taking those two Fox News Democrats out would be a very large step in the right direction.
Categories: Politics | 3 Comments
