BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

Chill, People! It Was Just a Campaign Promise! by SusanUnPC Lyn just e-mailed me to ask if anyone is tracking the number of campaign promises that Obama has broken. Do you know of such a list? I realize it would be rather long, and difficult to keep up. But one would hope. Here’s one of the latest, via Lyn, and from Political Punch blog at ABC News in “ Despite Campaign Pledge, President Obama Refuses to Use Word ‘Genocide’ When Describing Slaughter of Armenians “: Despite a campaign promise that he would boldly use the word “genocide” as president when describing the Ottoman Empire’s slaughter of up to 1.5 million Armenians in the early part of the last century, President Obama deliberately avoided use of that word in his statement today on Armenian Remembrance Day. “We’re profoundly disappointed,” Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, told ABC News. “All the more so because his statements on this in his record before he became president...

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...