BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

Since the only political news anyone is paying any attention to this week involves hookers or orgies... Didn't this moron say he'd "bring dignity back the White House"? Feh!! Now we just have to decide who is going to get the task of cleaning up after him... George Bush has been tied to a prostitution ring involving as many as 50,000 women and girls. The prostitutes, some as young as 13, are among the 1.2 million desperate Iraqis who fled to Syria after Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to the U.K. Independent. Bush's invasion destroyed the Iraqi government and unleashed a wave of political and sectarian violence that has killed over 1 million Iraqis and forced 4 million to become refugees, according to the UN. Facing starvation, as many as 50,000 women and girls have been forced into prostitution in Syria alone, according to Hana Ibrahim of the Women's Will Association. "70 percent to 80 percent of the girls working this business in Damas...

MORE NEWS CHANNELS, LESS NEWS I used to be a news junkie. By the time I hit high school I was rivetted by the Watergate trials being televised and the Roe v. Wade trial. My friends couldn't understand that I really enjoyed the evening news. It made me think about the world outside of the small, oppressive little town I lived in. And somehow, I felt it connected me to the rest of humanity. But that's all changed. News is now slanted. Stories rise and fall in a few days with zero follow up. The public has a short attention span and big, smokin' ALL ABOUT ME attitude. Everyone's up for their 15 minutes or to cover their own ***. My father, of blessed memory, used to tell me it was the "hooray for me , scr*w you" attitude. He was so right. Nothing real gets covered unless someone up on the media food-chain approves it. Nothing. The news bores me now. It gives me sound bytes instead of facts. Its so blatantly downslid into some sort of sick tabloid-esq...

All The President's Liars Where the Hell are The Washington Post and New York Times on McClellangate?! by Steve Young Do the investigative reporters at the Washington Post and New York Times fall under the Writers Guild Contract? Are Bernstein and Woodward too busy in makeup? Can the WGA and Producers get together and give satirical news an exemption? While the Writers Strike keeps The Daily Show from cleverly pointing out the obvious, The Washington Post and New York Times ignore the obvious altogether. We've been lied to by this White House. Who says? Scott McClellan, the guy who was paid to lie for the guys who lied in the first place. Of course, if he really wanted to bare his soul he would have let Helen Thomas write the foreword of " What Happened: Was I Lying Then Or Am I Lying Now?" Point is, other than blogs and the Keith Olbermann network - and the Writers Strike continuing to keep Jon Stewart, Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert on the sidelines - we're left...

The Treason of the Mainstream Democrats by R.W. Behan "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." --Article III, Section 3, United States Constitution (emphasis added) The mainstream Democrats—represented, say, by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and Christopher Dodd—have not levied war against the United States. Their treason lies instead in committing the second offense: they adhere to enemies of the country, giving them aid and comfort. The enemies are President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney. Like no other president and vice president in history, these men attacked their country. It was not our geography George Bush and Richard Cheney invaded. Instead they abandoned and subverted the bedrock institution of our Constitutional democracy: the rule of law. By word and deed, Mr. Bush repeatedly and arrogantly ...

The Case for Impeachment Why we can no longer afford George W. Bush (An excerpt from an essay in the March 2006 Harper's Magazine. By Lewis H. Lapham.) A country is not only what it does - it is also what it puts up with, what it tolerates. - Kurt Tucholsky On December 18 of last year, Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D., Mich.) introduced into the House of Representatives a resolution inviting it to form “a select committee to investigate the Administration's intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment.” Although buttressed two days previously by the news of the National Security Agency's illegal surveillance of the American citizenry, the request attracted little or no attention in the press—nothing on television or in the major papers, some scattered applause from the left-wing blogs, hea...

New Poll Shows Majority Favors Impeachment - It Also Shows Independents Aren't "In the Middle" at all. By Dave Lindorff from THE SMIRKING CHIMP The latest poll by American Research Group [1], showing that 54 percent of Americans favor impeaching Vice President Dick Cheney, and that 46 percent favor impeaching President Bush, is encouraging news for impeachment advocates. Despite a corporate media blackout on impeachment that means almost nobody in the country knows that there is already a Cheney impeachment bill in the House with 14 co-sponsors (HR 333), over half the country nonetheless wants Cheney to get the boot. And despite House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's insistence that "impeachment is off the table," almost half the people in the country say they want the president impeached. But other information in this scientific poll, which was conducted by random telephone calls to 1100 Americans during July 2-3, should have Democrats like Pelosi and other party le...

AT LEAST I WASN'T THE ONLY ONE THINKING THIS Are the Hitler Parallels Too Close for Comfort? by John Whitehead "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it." ~ George Santayana On May 9, 2007, with little attention from the snoozing media, George W. Bush issued a "presidential directive" that allows him to assume control of the federal government following a "catastrophic emergency." Although the directive doesn't specifically identify the types of emergencies that would qualify as "catastrophic," it is vague enough to encompass "any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function." As Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive noted, it could include "another 9/11, or another Katrina, or a major earthquake in California." In fact, the languag...

INFINITY MINUS 140,216 STILL LOVE YOU, KEITH!! by David Edwards and Muriel Kane "In Watergate, America was astounded by the fact that 18 1/2 minutes of secret presidential recordings were missing," stated Keith Olbermann on Monday. "Tonight the latest Bush administration scandal, as yet unchristened, makes that figure seem like a drop in the proverbial bucket. Try this number: Infinity minus 140,216. Karl Rove's improper emails. The 140,000 are the ones still preserved. The rest -- the infinity part -- the ones that were destroyed." Olbermann went on to describe the "jaw-dropping scandal" uncovered by Congressional investigators, where, in the most serious breach of the Presidential Records Act since its enactment, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of emails improperly sent by White House officials through outside emails servers may have been illegally destroyed. As one example of the vast scope of the destruction, only 130 of Karl Rove's em...

Has God Changed the Rules? A psychiatrist takes the pulse of America's Christians by Carol Wolman This is a very confusing time. The most powerful nation in the world, led by a "Christian" president and backed by a "Christian" coalition, is flouting every law of God and man, slaughtering and torturing at will. Yet Bush is so thoroughly identified as a man of God in the eyes of his followers, that they put his name inside the fish symbol, and use it as a bumper ornament. Eighty-five percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians, as followers of Jesus Christ. Jesus taught us to love our neighbors, love our enemies, and to forgive seventy times seven, not to punish and retaliate. As Jim Wallis and Sojourners magazine repeatedly point out, Jesus was nonviolent, healing people and raising them from the dead rather than maiming and killing as the "Christian" government of the US is doing. How can we understand this schizophrenia, this refusal to see...