I’m just testing a gallery script using two photos I took some years ago out in the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve. Click on the images below.
Update: Well, it’s not like it wasn’t going to work, but just in case you were wondering, the script works like a champ.
Our media should really bow their heads in shame. Not only did they fail to fulfil their watch dog role three years ago, before the republican president engaged in his war of choice against Iraq, our media now fails to inform the public on just how it was that Bush and crew willfully mislead our nation into war. All right, all right, so am being a little harsh, but that’s only because I care — my rancor comes from a place of love; love for the ideal of what committed and idealistic journalists can and do do for democracy. Well, I guess I should also add that there are two kinds of media journalists, really. There are print journalists, whom by enlarge have done a far, far better job than their counterparts in the broadcast media.
It is this second group, broadcast journalists, that should really be taken to the woodshed, and not be let out till they’ve done their penance — the fact is that these journalists are just glorified TelePrompTer readers, always in pursuit of ratings to please their corporate masters. I would go as far as denying these TelePrompTer readers any media credentials and barring them from all newsrooms — they simply don’t deserve to even be called journalist nor to be associated with anything having to do with news.
And now to the point of my rant.
It is only until now that the NY Times has deemed it worth their while to cover the Downing Street Memos, which even I covered here about a year ago — that’s right, a year ago. If you recall, these are the documents that high ranking British government officials prepared for Prime Minster Blair summarizing meetings between the Bush and Blair governments some eight months before the Iraqi invasion. The documents make it blatantly clear that the republican president, Bush, was ready to go to war (even though he publicly claimed the opposite):
Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
Read that again. Here’s a British government official telling Prime Minister Blair that the republican president was going to war, no matter what and that, in fact, the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of invasion. Now, some simply interpret that as the Bush Administration placing an emphasis on evidence to support the invasion of Iraq. Of course, there’s another interpretation, a more sinister interpretation. And that’s that the republican president would go as far as fabricating evidence to invade Iraq. There’s certainly evidence to support the conclusion the Bush Administration would, in fact, fabricate evidence by provoking Iraq:
Mr Bush told Mr Blair that the US was so worried about the failure to find hard evidence against Saddam that it thought of "flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours". Mr Bush added: "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of UN resolutions]".
Of course, am certainly not the only one that’s noticed the lack of coverage that this subject has received, in spite of the Downing Street Memos finally being written about in our so-called paper of record.
Peter Daou writes about the memo and how we, Liberals, simply lack the media organization to be able to make this a nationally talked about issue — similarly to how conservatives manage, on a regular basis, to inject their narratives into our national discourse. Daou points out that, unlike conservatives, Liberals simply lack what he calls the Media Triangle, that is: grassroots, politicians and media surrogates working in concert to affect the national discourse. The Liberal media triangle is broken, the grassroots is ineffective at affecting our elected politicians and there simply aren’t any influential, much less reliable, liberal voices in our mainstream media.
According to Daou, the Downing Street Memos story is the perfect sort of hook to build a narrative on, one that can cut to the heart of the thin national defense veneer that republicans still enjoy. However, until we figure out how to get the Liberal media triangle going, we’ll always be merely reacting to the conservative narratives that they tell us about ourselves.
Kevin Phillips, author of American Theocracy, where he concludes that the republican party is the first religious party in American history, offers us this provocative thought on Bush’s failed presidency:
[T]he possibility of having an "incompetent" president with a 35% job approval rating in office for almost three more years represents enough of a threat to an unhappy and beleaguered United States that a wide-ranging debate is in order [to remove Bush from office].
Read this very provocative and damming post over at HuffingtonPost.com.
This is truly remarkable: now bills can become law without going through the constitutionally mandated process. Incredible! Don’t republicans have any respect for anything that the constitution stands for? Are they so contemptuous of what our founding fathers fought for that, it seems, at every turn republicans wantonly disregard and trash the principles enshrined in our constitution? The truth is that, in spite of what they claim, of course republicans don’t value nor respect the constitution, since it reminds them of everything that their party stands against. Habeas Corpus, who needs that? republicans ask. Privacy? Pluuuze, republicans respond. First Amendment? What’s that!? Separation of church and state? Come on, that’s so post Enlightenment, we don’t need that. On and on republicans go on trashing the very core of our democracy.
And now we have the latest from the anti-constitution republicans: a bill no longer needs to pass the House for it to become law.
For anyone who took fifth-grade social studies or sang "I’m Just a Bill," how legislation turns to law always seemed pretty simple: The House passes a bill, the Senate passes the same bill, the president signs it.
"He signed ya, Bill — now you’re a law," shouts the cartoon lawmaker on "Schoolhouse Rock" as Bill acknowledges the cheers.
But last month, Washington threw all that old-fashioned civics stuff into a tizzy, when President Bush signed into law a bill that actually never passed the House. Bill — in this case, a major budget-cutting measure that will affect millions of Americans — became a law because it was "certified" by the leaders of the House and Senate. [Washington Post, Wednesday, March 22, 2006]
That’s right, under these anti-constitution republicans the supreme law of the land can be ignored in place of political expediency. Since this bill was signed by Bush, pro-constitution and other concerned groups have come forward to defend our founding document from the onslaught of republican attacks.
Public Citizen, a legislative watchdog group, sued yesterday to block the budget-cutting law, charging that Bush and Republican leaders of Congress flagrantly violated the Constitution when the president signed it into law knowing that the version that cleared the House was substantively different from the Senate’s version.
Keep in mind that, as anti-constitution republicans have done in the past, for example when Bush admitted to breaking the FISA law, republicans don’t dispute that they have chosen to ignore the constitution; they simply argue that, for reasons of convenience, that it is simply easier to skirt the constitution (and any law that stands in their way):
No one disputes the central facts of the lawsuit: Last December, Vice President Cheney broke a tie vote in the Senate to win passage of a bill that would cut nearly $40 billion over five years by reducing Medicaid rolls, raising work requirements for welfare, and trimming the student loan program, among other changes.
[...]
As the measure was being sent to the House last month, a Senate clerk inadvertently changed that 13-month restriction to 36 months, a $2 billion alteration. With the mistaken change, the measure squeaked through the House, 216 to 214.
Once the mistake was revealed, Republican leaders were loath to fight the battle again by having another vote, so White House officials simply deemed the Senate version to be the law.
How convenient, a Senate clerk inadvertently made a mistake. Please, if the immediate past serves as any lesson, at all, then it is this: republicans don’t simply make mistakes; in stead, republicans believe that they can get away with anything, so they ignore procedure and the law, knowing full well that in all likely hood they’ll get away with their law breaking or misdeed. Just think of it, midterm redistricting in Texas, a stolen election in Florida, collaborating with ENRON to create an energy crisis in California that lead to the recall of a Democratic governor, and, of course, there’s their war of choice, and on, and on, and on. Anti-constitution republicans believe that they are above the law and that they can get away with anything — this was no mistake, no way. They simply were too careless in their eventual cover up, that’s all.
As this case makes its way through the courts it’ll be curious to see where it ends up. If it ends up before an anti-constitution republican appointed judge we may see a new precedent being set, wherein a bill need not be approved by Congress as long as it’s signed by a quasi-monarchial president. However, if the judge that hears this case has any integrity, the only conclusion should be obvious:
"The Constitution is broad and vague on a number of things; this is not one of them," Zeigler said. "The same bill must be passed by House and Senate and signed by the president. Otherwise it’s not law. Case over."
