The Hollywood Liberal

Bush Outlaws War Protest - Citizens Face Full Asset Seizure

Rense.com
Excerpt
WELL IT HAS HAPPENED. THIS MANIACAL SON OF A BITCH HAS OUTLAWED ALL WAR PROTEST AGAINST THE IRAQ WAR HERE IN THE UNITED STATES.
PASSED INTO LAW JULY 17TH. SINCE CONGRESS IS TOO WEAK-KNEED TO STAND UP AND DO THE RIGHT THING

In one of his most chilling moves to date against his own citizens, the American War Leader has issued a sweeping order this week outlawing all forms of protest against the Iraq war.

President Bush enacted into US law an ‘Executive Order’ on July 17th titled “Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq”, and which says:

I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that, due to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by acts of violence threatening the peace and stability of Iraq and undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq and to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people….

HL’s Take
Seems we need to define “acts of violence.” Is marching in the street carrying a sign an “Act of Violence?” So this may be taken out of context. Will have to see how this plays out.

President of the Christian Action League, 74, Is Arrested after Allegedly Paying Hooker with Checks

Pensito Review
Excerpt:
Privette on two occasions allegedly paid the prostitute with checks then reported the checks stolen.

Rev. Coy Privette, the president of the Christian Action League, a North Carolina ultraconservative Christian political organization based in Raleigh, has been arrested for soliciting prostitution:…

The Christian Action League is funded by the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, and it is affiliated with the ultra-rightwing American Family Association.

For over three decades, Privette has been one of the best known and most outrageous spokesmen for “family values” and Christian extreme right politics in North Carolina. In the 1970s, he was serving as minister at the North Kannapolis Baptist Church when he joined the tide of evangelicals entering politics that included the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition. He served in the N.C. Legislature from 1984 to 1992, and has been a member of the board of commissioners in Cabarrus County since 1998.

He and his wife, Betty, have four children.

HLs Take
The more they preach family values, the more likely it is they are seeing prostitutes, or doing young boys. Like Shakespere said, thou dost protest to much…

Paul Craig Roberts former Reagan cabinet member was interviewed on the Thom Hartman show on Air America yesterday. Roberts who wrote an article on July 16, called “Impeach Now Or Face the End of Constitutional Democracy, states that we are in serious danger of Bush imposing martial law, in the US based on a new Executive Order he recently signed. All it would take is another 9/11. Michael Chertoff’s gut is telling him that L.A. and San Francisco could be hit with “dirty bombs” simultaneously. That’s a pretty specific gut feeling. If he’s right, they you know that they were behind it. Here is the audio interview in Quicktime. Takes a minute to load.

Radio Interview with Paul Craig Roberts

WARNING: A Real Dictatorship Coming!

Daily Kos
Excerpt:
I have never in my 50 years of life been more frightened then I am now. I have seen the arrogance of this White House and the massive damage done to our country. But the Katrina-size storm clouds are gathering folks. If we do not wake up now and flood Congress to impeach the President and Vice President, one year from now, Daily Kos may be banned and Markos himself may be disappeared, in a federal prison somewhere.

Even as I write these words I feel like a wild-eyed nutcase. If it were not for the OH SO REAL danger this country faces in the next 15 months or so as the people in power see their own doom and are determined to prevent their expulsion from power by suspending next year’s elections and declaring martial law WHEN the next 9/11 comes or events that can be construed as a national emergency to “justify” such actions, I would be holding my tongue and crossing my fingers.

I know that the readers on Daily Kos are all too aware of the evil intent of the Bush regime, but I fear even they, even you, are not alarmed enough. I fear you, like me until now, are hoping we can get through the next 15 months or so and throw the bums out in the 2008 election and hope that we avoid war with Iran and another 9/11.

FEMA Concentration Camps: Locations and Executive Orders

Mindfully.org
Excerpt:
There over 800 prison camps in the United States, all fully operational and ready to receive prisoners. They are all staffed and even surrounded by full-time guards, but they are all empty. These camps are to be operated by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) should Martial Law need to be implemented in the United States and all it would take is a presidential signature on a proclamation and the attorney general’s signature on a warrant to which a list of names is attached. Ask yourself if you really want to be on Ashcroft’s list. The Rex 84 Program was established on the reasoning that if a “mass exodus” of illegal aliens crossed the Mexican/US border, they would be quickly rounded up and detained in detention centers by FEMA. Rex 84 allowed many military bases to be closed down and to be turned into prisons.

Operation Cable Splicer and Garden Plot are the two sub programs which will be implemented once the Rex 84 program is initiated for its proper purpose. Garden Plot is the program to control the population. Cable Splicer is the program for an orderly takeover of the state and local governments by the federal government. FEMA is the executive arm of the coming police state and thus will head up all operations. The Presidential Executive Orders already listed on the Federal Register also are part of the legal framework for this operation.

The camps all have railroad facilities as well as roads leading to and from the detention facilities. Many also have an airport nearby. The majority of the camps can house a population of 20,000 prisoners. Currently, the largest of these facilities is just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. The Alaskan facility is a massive mental health facility and can hold approximately 2 million people.

Broader Privilege Claimed In Firings

Washington Post
Excerpt:

Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.

The position presents serious legal and political obstacles for congressional Democrats, who have begun laying the groundwork for contempt proceedings against current and former White House officials in order to pry loose information about the dismissals.

Under federal law, a statutory contempt citation by the House or Senate must be submitted to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, "whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action."

But administration officials argued yesterday that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges in cases, such as the prosecutor firings, in which the president has declared that testimony or documents are protected from release by executive privilege. Officials pointed to a Justice Department legal opinion during the Reagan administration, which made the same argument in a case that was never resolved by the courts.

"A U.S. attorney would not be permitted to bring contempt charges or convene a grand jury in an executive privilege case," said a senior official, who said his remarks reflect a consensus within the administration. "And a U.S. attorney wouldn’t be permitted to argue against the reasoned legal opinion that the Justice Department provided. No one should expect that to happen."

HL’s Take
Even if Democrats do bring contempt of congress charges. The person in charge of handling is none other then Alberto “Torture Boy” Gonzalez. Yeah like he’s going to stand up for the law.
The only way to stop Bush now is impeachment. Congress has shown repeatedly that they are not going to do that. See below for the story about how congress voted 100 to 0 to allow Bush to impose martial law in the event of the next disaster. Isn’t Hurricane season coming soon, or another staged terrorist attack. Mikey Chertoff can feel it in his gut afterall.

Old-line Republican warns ’something’s in the works’ to trigger a police state

Raw Story
Excerpt:

Thom Hartmann began his program on Thursday by reading from a new Executive Order which allows the government to seize the assets of anyone who interferes with its Iraq policies.

He then introduced old-line conservative Paul Craig Roberts — a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan who has recently become known for his strong opposition to the Bush administration and the Iraq War — by quoting the “strong words” which open Roberts’ latest column: “Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran.”

“I don’t actually think they’re very strong,” said Roberts of his words. “I get a lot of flak that they’re understated and the situation is worse than I say. … When Bush exercises this authority [under the new Executive Order] … there’s no check to it. It doesn’t have to be ratified by Congress. The people who bear the brunt of these dictatorial police state actions have no recourse to the judiciary. So it really is a form of total, absolute, one-man rule. … The American people don’t really understand the danger that they face.”

Working for the Clampdown

Z Magazine
Excerpt:
How many pipe bombs might it take to end U.S. democracy? Far fewer than it would have taken a year ago. The Defense Authorization Act of 2006, passed on September 30, empowers President George W. Bush to impose martial law in the event of a terrorist “incident” or if he or other federal officials perceive a shortfall of “public order” or even in response to antiwar protests that get unruly as a result of government provocations.

The media and most of Capitol Hill ignored or cheered on this grant of nearly boundless power. But now that the president’s arsenal of authority is swollen and consecrated, a few voices of complaint are being heard. Even the New York Times recently condemned the new law for “making martial law easier….”

Section 1076 of the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 changed the name of the key provision in the statute book from Insurrection Act to Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order Act. The Insurrection Act of 1807 stated that the president could deploy troops within the United States only “to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” The new law expands the list to include “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition”—and such “con- dition” is not defined or limited.

These new pretexts are even more expansive than they appear. FEMA proclaims the equivalent of a natural disaster when bad snowstorms occur and Congress routinely proclaims a natural disaster when there is a shortfall of rain in states with upcoming elections. A terrorist “incident” could be something as stupid as the flashing toys scattered around Boston last fall.

The new law also empowers the president to commandeer the National Guard of one state to send to another state for up to 365 days. Bush could send the New York National Guard to disarm the residents of Mississippi if they resisted a federal law that prohibited private ownership of semiautomatic weapons. Governors’ control of the National Guard can be trumped with a simple presidential declaration.

The story of how Section 1076 became law demonstrates how expanding government power is almost always the correct answer in Washington. Some people have claimed the provision was slipped into the bill in the middle of the night. In reality, the Administration signaled its intent and almost no one in the media or Congress tried to stop it.

The Katrina debacle appears to have drowned Washington’s resistance to military rule. Bush declared, “I want there to be a robust discussion about the best way for the federal government, in certain extreme circumstances, to be able to rally assets for the good of the people.”

His initial proposal generated only a smattering of criticism and there was no “robust discussion.” On August 29, 2006, the Administration upped the ante, labeling the breached levees “the equivalent of a weapon of mass effect being used on the city of New Orleans.” Nobody ever defined a “weapon of mass effect,” but the term wasn’t challenged.

Section 1076 was supported by both conservatives and liberals. Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), the ranking Democratic member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, co-wrote the provision, along with committee chair Sen. John Warner (R-VA). Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) openly endorsed it and Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), then-chair of the House Armed Services Committee, was an avid proponent.

HL’s Take
This is a very important article, you should click through and read the whole thing. Is the next 9/11 being set up as we speak. A lot of signs are pointing that way.

They all love the war, but none of them want to fight in it. I guess they’d rather be on the other end, getting rich off it, like Bush, Cheney, and the gang. Check out these pathetic weasles.

Bill Clinton criticizes Bush on Iraq

AP
Excerpt
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former President Bill Clinton on Thursday criticized President George W. Bush’s administration for failing in Iraq, saying their was no evidence of much-needed political or diplomatic progress.

“The point is, that there is no military victory here,” he said in an interview on ABC’s Good Morning America.

“There is no evidence that, whether we have a good day in a particular community or region in Iraq, that we have either the political reconciliation process within the country working or any diplomatic process that’s got a chance to help with the neighbors,” the former Democratic president said.

So, a new report that just came out is saying that Al Qaeda, is stronger now then it ever was. Whaat?, So we have been fighting them for the last 6 years and they are stronger now. What does that say about us, and the people in charge of fighting Al Qaeda. Failure
Bush has once again failed us, failed the military, and made the whole nation look like fools. Now this is all perfect news to Bush who wants Al Qaeda to be stronger then ever so we have to fight them forever. The longer the wars last the richer he gets. it’s as simple as that. So we go into Afghanistan to fight AQ and Bin Laden. We let Bin Laden get away at Tora Bora, the reason has still never been explained especially since Bush got up on that pile of rubble and promised to bring him in dead or alive. That was one of many Bush lies that the Republicans give him a pass on.

Intelligence Puts Rationale For War on Shakier Ground

Washington Post
Excerpt

The White House faced fresh political peril yesterday in the form of a new intelligence assessment that raised sharp questions about the success of its counterterrorism strategy and judgment in making Iraq the focus of that effort.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush has been able to deflect criticism of his counterterrorism policy by repeatedly noting the absence of any new domestic attacks and by citing the continuing threat that terrorists in Iraq pose to U.S. interests.

So Bush decides that the country that is harboring Al Qaeda, is not as important as a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Iraq is much more important in the war on terror, not only that, but “Saddam tried to take out my dad,” and lets not forget about the oil. So here we are 6 years later, AQ is flourishing in Pakistan (or are they? the whole story sounds to me like a BS attempt to try to divert from the fact that even Republicans are now defecting from Bush and his endless war policy.) and there are now AQ in Iraq when there wasn’t before. Somewhere the Failure Monkey peels a bananna and lets out a hearty laugh.

Confronted with a political brush fire, the president and his aides retreated to familiar ground, highlighting the parts of the report that they saw as supportive of their policies, particularly the need to confront Islamic radicals on the ground in Iraq.

In talking with reporters in the Oval Office yesterday, Bush concentrated on a single paragraph in the assessment that placed the enemy in Iraq in a larger context of international terrorism. The estimate said bin Laden’s organization will “probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qa’ida in Iraq, its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland.”

A candlelight vigil, and rally was held outside Congress at midnight. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Carl Levin, and other Democratic congressmen and women showed up and make speeches. Here are some excerpts.

Joe Lieberman spouting off in favor of endless war as usual.

Dianne Feinstein of California asks if anyone truly believes the war has improved America’s image to the world, if so she says they must be “smoking something”

When the Bush torture policy in Guantanamo was getting lots of negative press, and making us look no better then Russia under Stalin. Cheney and Rummy and the boys came up with a new plan. “Lets just kidnap the bad guys and ship them off to some foreign country, without telling anyone, not even his family. Then we can torture the F**k out of him to our hearts content.”
This secret program could have gone on for years without anyone knowing about it, except members of the CIA, who are not known as being coddler’s were so embarrassed by what Bush was doing that they blew the whistle on the whole thing, and it was finally reported by the Washington Post, throwing the whole thing open for public scrutiny. Of course the Bush administration likes to keep lots of things secret because once the people find out, they show their outrage of the evil. You know it’s bad when the CIA won’t even let you get away with it.

CIA dissenters helped expose renditions, says inquiry chief

Guardian UK
Excerpt

“Many leading figures in the CIA did not accept these methods at all,” Dick Marty (of the council of Europe) told a committee meeting yesterday. He said senior agency officials had agreed to help his investigation in return for anonymity. “People in the CIA felt these things were not consonant with the sort of intelligence work they normally do,” he said.
In his report late last month, Mr Marty presented evidence of a secret programme to transfer terror suspects to a network of detention centres where they could be interrogated without the protection of US or international law. Some of these prisons were on European soil, specifically in Poland and Romania, and were used from 2002 to 2005.

The rendition programme was exposed by the Washington Post in November 2005. The US president, George Bush, confirmed last year that the CIA had conducted such clandestine transfers of detainees, who were interrogated using what he described as “alternative procedures”.

Another Bush political appointee who had absolutely no training for the very important job he was given has resigned amid the type of colossal failure that the monkey particularly loves. Like Michael (Heckuva job Brownie) Brown, Jim Nicholson who was in charge of the Veterans Affairs committee, had no idea what he was doing. Previously Nicholson was the Ambassador to the Vatican, and chairman of the Republican National Committee, so what better way to reward him then giving him a job making sure that our veterans coming home from Iraq are being taken care of. Since Bush does not want to take care of the guys lucky enough to make it home alive from his meat grinder it makes perfect sense. Of course the administration Praised
him for a job so well done, but actually this guy was a perfect Bush screw up. Think Progress gives us a little list of his dubious achievements.

VA Secretary Resigns After Record Of Neglecting Veterans

Think Progress
Excerpt

In February 2005, Nicholson kicked off his tenure by calling praising a VA budget proposal that cut “health care staffing, reduced funding for nursing home care and [included] staffing cuts for the Board of Veterans Appeals.” He said it demonstrated of the Bush administration’s “ongoing commitment to provide the very best health care and benefits to those veterans who count on VA the most.” [LINK]

- In May of 2006, Nicholson waited two weeks to notify the Justice Department and FBI of the “largest loss of personal data in U.S. government history.” He then waited another full week before notifying the 26.5 million effected veterans of the theft. [LINK]

- In April of 2006, Nicholson rejected four separate bills “pending before Congress to reduce the 600,000-case backlog of veterans’ benefits claims.” [LINK]

- In May of 2007, the AP revealed that Nicholson awarded “$3.8 million in bonuses to top executives in fiscal 2006? — many as much as $33,000 — despite the department suffering from a $1.3 billion shortfall. [LINK, LINK]

A Louisiana lawyer who was charged by the IRS for refusing to file tax returns for the last several years has been acquitted. The federal tax law has been questioned for years about it’s legality in actually making people have to pay taxes. Of course the IRS will use its considerable resources to make sure that no one ever tries to stop paying them. They are a criminal enterprise supported by the American Government, who will harrass you literally to death if you ever question why you pay 1/3 of your income to them. So how long until an appeals court overturns this decision?

Local attorney acquitted on federal income tax charges

Shreveport Times
Excerpt

“The court could not find a law that makes me liable or makes my revenues taxable,” Cryer said. “The Supreme Court has ruled that the government cannot impose an income tax on anything but the profits and gains. When you work for someone you give your service and labor in exchange for money, so everything you make is not profit or gain. You put something into it.”

Tommy Cryer was indicted last year on two counts of tax evasion. The indictment alleged he evaded payment of $73,000 in income tax to the Internal Revenue Service during 2000 and 2001.

Cryer created a trust listing himself as the trustee, and received payments of dividends, interest and stock income to that trust, according to the indictment. He also was accused of concealing his receipt of the sources of income from the IRS by failing to file a tax return on behalf of that trust.

“I determined that my personal earnings were not 100 percent profits, some were income,” Cryer said. “I refuse to file, I refuse to pay unless they can show me I have a lawful reason to pay.”

“What I earned was my own personal labor. I am giving something in exchange. I’m giving my property and I don’t belong to anyone else.”

Cryer says he stopped filing returns more than 10 years ago after he investigated claims that income tax was a sham. He contends the law doesn’t actually tax personal earning.

Here is an entertaining little video that shows all the lies that Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Darth Cheney used to get us into the bloody quagmire without end in Iraq, which by the way has made us no safer from Al Qaeda, then we were before 9/11. That’s what the Bush administration is now telling us. While we have been fighting them over there, AQ has been getting stronger in the places we should have been fighting them, like Pakistan, and Afghanistan. But is was Iraq that the administration had a hard on for. Watch the video see the lies exposed

In the upcoming Presidential election, Democrats will have to win states that they lost in the last couple of elections, by that I mean they have to win states that they won the last two election but were stolen from them, namely Florida, and Ohio. If the dems. can manage to win one of those states, they will need some others with high electoral vote counts such as Colorado, or Arizona.
Then their is another option: just win Texas. According to the Wall Street Journal the Republican party is even in trouble in that bastion of everything conservative, here’s the story.

Wall Street Journal: The Troubled Texas GOP

Excerpt

Don’t believe that voters would ever draw such a conclusion in Texas? In June several national polls found younger voters are turning away from the GOP. One of them, conducted by CBS News, the New York Times and MTV, found that 54% of 17- to 29-year-olds would vote for a Democratic candidate for president, while only 32% would vote Republican.

Many Republicans would like to believe that they are only experiencing a temporary downdraft caused by the unpopularity of the Iraq war and President Bush–conventional wisdom that seems to forget that Mr. Bush’s success in gubernatorial and presidential elections is a large reason why the GOP completed its domination of state politics. It was only in 2002 that the party won control of the Legislature.

Not everyone, however, is buying this assessment. Royal Masset, a political consultant and longtime political director for the Republican Party of Texas–who played a key role in organizing the grassroots support that took the GOP from marginality to an overwhelming majority–has been predicting a reversal for years.

“There’s a certain inevitability in demographics,” he told me. “We knew that if we could win 40% of the Hispanic vote,” as Mr. Bush did in 2004, “we’d control Texas until 2030.” But in 2006, the number of Texas Hispanics who voted Republican fell to between 30% and 35% (depending on the poll).

Is this the reason why Bush is so in favor of “guest worker programs” and giving illegal immigrants a chance to stay here legally. Sure he wants it so his buddies in big business have a source of cheap labor and to do away with the middle class. But maybe Bush knows something that his more strident anti-immigration republicans don’t want to think about. More from WSJ

And why not? A similar flip happened in California in the 1990s. What was once Reagan Country became a Democratic stronghold. GOP Gov. Pete Wilson’s get-tough approach to immigration was an undeniable factor.

Here is a story about how the US used Psychologists to help them come up with their torture policy. These same Psychologists were used by the US to help soldiers overcome soviet style interrogation tactics. The CIA used those same tactics and turned them around for American soldiers to use against Al Qaeda. Of course torturing victims to talk does not work, eventually they will just tell you whatever it is you want to hear just to get the torture to stop. If you treat a suspect with respect, you are much more likely to find out what you want to know. Just like if you treat a country with respect (as opposed to just killing them all) they are much less likely to want to kill us and our soldiers. Of course the Bush administration knows this but they don’t practice it because they want the war to go on forever.

Rorschach and Awe

Vanity Fair
Excerpt

Zubaydah was stabilized at the nearest hospital, and the F.B.I. continued its questioning using its typical rapport-building techniques. An agent showed him photographs of suspected al-Qaeda members until Zubaydah finally spoke up, blurting out that “Moktar,” or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had planned 9/11. He then proceeded to lay out the details of the plot. America learned the truth of how 9/11 was organized because a detainee had come to trust his captors after they treated him humanely.

Al-Qaeda operative Khalid Shaikh Mohammed shortly after his capture, 2003. Corbis.
It was an extraordinary success story. But it was one that would evaporate with the arrival of the C.I.A’s interrogation team. At the direction of an accompanying psychologist, the team planned to conduct a psychic demolition in which they’d get Zubaydah to reveal everything by severing his sense of personality and scaring him almost to death.

This is the approach President Bush appeared to have in mind when, in a lengthy public address last year, he cited the “tough” but successful interrogation of Zubaydah to defend the C.I.A.’s secret prisons,

OK Sam, here’s a parachute and a rifle, knock yourself out.