Postmillenialism - An Eschatology of Hope by Keith A Mathison Paperback - 287 pages including indices.
The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield Mine is a paperback - 282 pages
The following excerpt links to a full length, must read, disturbing but necessary diatribe:
Obama’s Abortion Extremism
by Robert George
Oct 14, 2008
Sen. Barack Obama’s views on life issues ranging from abortion to embryonic stem cell research mark him as not merely a pro-choice politician, but rather as the most extreme pro-abortion candidate to have ever run on a major party ticket.
Barack Obama is the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of President of the United States. He is the most extreme pro-abortion member of the United States Senate. Indeed, he is the most extreme pro-abortion legislator ever to serve in either house of the United States Congress.
Yet there are Catholics and Evangelicals-even self-identified pro-life Catholics and Evangelicals – who aggressively promote Obama’s candidacy and even declare him the preferred candidate from the pro-life point of view.
WASHINGTON, July 17 (UPI [click to see original]) — Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft told a congressional committee Thursday that he does not believe waterboarding is torture.Ashcroft testified before the House Judiciary Committee, CNN reported. The committee is holding hearings on whether the Bush administration permitted torture to be used on suspected terrorists.
“I believe a report of waterboarding would be serious, but I do not believe it would define torture,” Ashcroft said.
Ashcroft said that as far as he knows U.S. agents used waterboarding three times on suspects who “would be labeled as high-value detainees.” He said he had heard from former CIA Director George Tenet that “enhanced interrogation techniques” had yielded valuable information.
Earlier this year, President Bush vetoed a bill that would have outlawed some interrogation techniques, including waterboarding or simulated drowning. The bill would have limited the CIA to techniques allowed in the Army Field Manual.
WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.
See this related Countdown (MSNBC – Keith Olbermann / Rachel Maddow) video:
I know this is old news – but this video is one of the most disturbing videos I have ever seen.
Grant me this: my reaction is an emotional reaction – which is why I want to hear your comments…
But my emotional reaction is this: This incident illustrates to me the visceral feeling of the abuse against America and against the world of the abject lawlessness of our Executive, Judiciary and Legislature.
Seriously, this makes me cry.
Don’t get me wrong – I have read the whole issue (according to Wikipedia), I know that the man was insisting on talking in a troubling way in public, and that he didn’t go calmly… but he DID offer just to get up and leave calmly before they tased him for no apparent reason.
Take these facts into consideration and then read my question at the bottom; it concerns John McCain being willing to hold two drastically opposing positions professed on the same day, and accusing Obama of close to treason for holding one of the two same opinions as he himself puts forth. Am I wrong about this?
*Even if the surge has brought violence down, by last September, as many as 70% of Iraqis said that security had deteriorated in our “Surge” areas.
*The Administration of Iraq (P.M. Nouri al-Maliki) has demanded that we leave by 2010 – and are happy with Barack Obama’s timetable (See MSNBC video), remember!- John McCain said that if they asked us to leave, we would have to go (a blog distillation of the CFR original).
Question: “What would or should we do if, in the post-June 30th period, a so-called sovereign Iraqi government asks us to leave, even if we are unhappy about the security situation there?”
McCain’s Answer: “Well, if that scenario evolves than I think it’s obvious that we would have to leave because — if it was an elected government of Iraq, and we’ve been asked to leave other places in the world. If it were an extremist government then I think we would have other challenges, but I don’t see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people.”
IN FACT, even the Bush Administration has now made it seem that they will #1) indeed begin withdrawal and #2) move our troops to Afghanistan (like Barack Obama said).
SOOOOO – EVERYONE IS ON THE SAME PAGE… WE ARE LEAVING, WE LEGALLY HAVE TO LEAVE, WE ETHICALLY HAVE TO LEAVE, THE AMERICANS WANT OUT, THE IRAQIS WANT US OUT…..
….but….
John McCain says, “I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war. It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign. [FOX, A good Countdown Vid]“
What does he think losing is? Coming home?… What does he think he will or can do as president? He blames Obama’s plan for potentially “Losing the WAR”….RIGHT AFTER SAYING HE WILL COME HOME SOOOOOONER than Obama. It sounds like he just blamed these people for wanting us gone: 1) America, 2) the Iraqi People, 3) the Iraqi government, 4) the United Nations, 5) the Bush Administration.
But that was only after saying that HE TOO would do the same thing. What? Yes. What he said, actually makes NO sense, it only has the APPEARANCE of making John McCain a better Commander, even though he is actually saying he opposes his own plan, the one he is being FORCED to take, which will finally force him to do what America and Iraq want…to the chagrin of the Military Industrial Complex.
[Watch the video - same Countdown Video].
REMEMBER – there is no defined way of saying WHAT this war actually is. Iraq already HAS a democratic government now. We apparently don’t care about LAW or Constitution, or decency. We just care about securing the rights to more oil.
Karl Rove is not showing up to court because the White House is guiding him not to do so (“Executive Privilege” [see article]). Part of questioning is about pressure in the Justice Department for the removal of judges considered politically unfavorable to the Bush administration.
The attorney general yesterday rejected growing congressional calls for a criminal investigation of the CIA’s use of simulated drownings to extract information from its detainees, as Vice President Cheney called it a “good thing” that the CIA was able to learn what it did from those subjected to the practice.
The remarks reflected a renewed effort by the Bush administration to defend its past approval of the interrogation tactic known as waterboarding, which some lawmakers, human rights experts and international lawyers have described as illegal torture.
Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said Justice Department lawyers concluded that the CIA’s use of waterboarding in 2002 and 2003 was legal, and therefore the department cannot investigate whether a crime had occurred.
“That would mean that the same department that authorized the program would now consider prosecuting somebody who followed that advice,” he said.
Somehow, all tied in here, are the people and the actions swirling around getting the American people to ignore when big people do really obvious bad things.
And the Red Cross says that the Geneva Convention rules are, no question, being broken – in such a serious way that an international tribunal might need to try OUR GOVERNMENT!
—-HEY! Why was it okay to invade a foreign country without legal grounds?
We didn’t have UN grounds; we didn’t have Congressional vote to declare war; we told Hans Blix to get out of Dodge so we wouldn’t bomb him even though he said there was no evidence yet to justify a war.
Why was it okay to tackle Saddam… because he was torturing people!
“But wait!” you say, “That’s what WE’RE doing!”
You’re not supposed to notice that part.
—REMEMBER!— the invasion of Iraq AND distribution of oil there was EXPECTED by the Bush Administration BEFORE he was in office the FIRST TIME… BEFORE 9/11 (which had, of course, nothing to do with Iraq).
Suskind's Book (based on Paul O'Neill's info)
From a transcript of a 60 Minutes episode which I actually saw [click to see the transcript], Paul O’Neill, George Bush’s Treasury Secretary from the beginning, reveals these things in a book (The Price of Loyalty):
And what happened at President Bush’s very first National Security Council meeting is one of O’Neill’s most startling revelations.
“From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic “A” 10 days after the inauguration – eight months before Sept. 11.
“From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime,” says Suskind. “Day one, these things were laid and sealed.
As treasury secretary, O’Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as “Why Saddam?” and “Why now?” were never asked.
“It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this,’” says O’Neill. “For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.”
And that came up at this first meeting, says O’Neill, who adds that the discussion of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting two days later
He got briefing materials under this cover sheet. “There are memos. One of them marked, secret, says, ‘Plan for post-Saddam Iraq,’” adds Suskind, who says that they discussed an occupation of Iraq in January and February of 2001.
——————————————————————————–
Based on his interviews with O’Neill and several other officials at the meetings, Suskind writes that the planning envisioned peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals, and even divvying up Iraq’s oil wealth.
He obtained one Pentagon document, dated March 5, 2001, and entitled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield contracts,” which includes a map of potential areas for exploration.
“It talks about contractors around the world from, you know, 30-40 countries. And which ones have what intentions,” says Suskind. “On oil in Iraq.”
During the campaign, candidate Bush had criticized the Clinton-Gore Administration for being too interventionist: “If we don’t stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we’re going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I’m going to prevent that.”
“The thing that’s most surprising, I think, is how emphatically, from the very first, the administration had said ‘X’ during the campaign, but from the first day was often doing ‘Y,’” says Suskind. “Not just saying ‘Y,’ but actively moving toward the opposite of what they had said during the election.”
Ron Paul explains why he is opposed to the “compromise” FISA wiretap bill (June 20):
Mr. Speaker, I regret that due to the unexpected last-minute appearance of this measure on the legislative calendar this week, a prior commitment has prevented me from voting on the FISA amendments. I have strongly opposed every previous FISA overhaul attempt and I certainly would have voted against this one as well.
The main reason I oppose this latest version is that it stillclearly violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution by allowing the federal government to engage in the bulk collection of American citizens’ communications without a search warrant. That US citizens can have their private communication intercepted by the government without a search warrant is anti-American, deeply disturbing, and completely unacceptable.
In addition to gutting the fourth amendment, this measure will deprive Americans who have had their rights violated by telecommunication companies involved in the Administration’s illegal wiretapping program the right to seek redress in the courts for the wrongs committed against them. Worse, this measure provides for retroactive immunity, whereby individuals or organizations that broke the law as it existed are granted immunity for prior illegal actions once the law has been changed. Ex post facto laws have long been considered anathema in free societies under rule of law. Our Founding Fathers recognized this, including in Article I section 9 of the Constitution that “No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.” How is this FISA bill not a variation of ex post facto? That alone should give pause to supporters of this measure.
Mr. Speaker, we should understand that decimating the protections that our Constitution provides us against the government is far more dangerous to the future of this country than whatever external threats may exist. We can protect this country without violating the Constitution and I urge my colleagues to reconsider their support for this measure.
MSNBC Countdown with Keith Olbermann discusses congressional bill [Dennis Kucinich] requesting the Impeachment of the President with 35 charges to his case. (June 10, 2008 )
Kucinich is not alone: Robert Wexler (D – Florida) tonight (June 25, 2008 ) directly called for Bush impeachment on Countdown:
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/06/12/uscourt-gitmo.html THE SUPREME COURT SAYS DETAINEES HAVE HABEAS CORPUS!!!! Some of our Guantanamo Prisoners have been in jail for 6 years WITHOUT A CHARGE! Out of the 270 men there, we are now going to try 80 of them finally, and send the rest home. WHAT? If we have to send them home, that means we never had charges on them (even secret ones – unless they are ones we aren’t willing to share). If we are willing to let them go, then we have been guilty of kidnap and hostage holding! Which we are.
The vote was 5-4, with the court’s liberal justices in the majority. Conservative judges, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, wrote dissenting opinions warning of the effect of the ruling at a time of “war with radical Islamists.”
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, said, “The laws and constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”
TRUE THAT! Anthony Kennedy. John Roberts has shown that his loyalty is to party/administration ideology over against his responsibility to uphold the CONSTITUTION! From Wikipedia (on Supreme Court Checks and Balances): in Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton writes: “A constitution is, in fact, and must be regarded by the judges, as a fundamental law. It therefore belongs to them to ascertain its meaning, as well as the meaning of any particular act proceeding from the legislative body. If there should happen to be an irreconcilable variance between the two, that which has the superior obligation and validity ought, of course, to be preferred; or, in other words, the Constitution ought to be preferred to the statute.” From Reuters:
The majority consisted of the court’s four liberals — Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, plus the moderate conservative Kennedy, who often casts the decisive vote.
The four conservative dissenters were Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, both appointed by Bush, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
See Keith Olbermann on the issue when the right of Habeas Corpus was being taken away:
American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007 (Introduced in House)
HR 3835 IH
110th CONGRESS 1st Session H. R. 3835
To restore the Constitution’s checks and balances and protections against government abuses as envisioned by the Founding Fathers.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
October 15, 2007
Mr. PAUL introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary, and in addition to the Committees on Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and Select Intelligence (Permanent Select), for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned
A BILL
To restore the Constitution’s checks and balances and protections against government abuses as envisioned by the Founding Fathers.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the `American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007′.
SEC. 2. FINDINGS AND PURPOSE.
(a) Findings- Congress makes the following findings:
(1) Unchecked power by any branch leads to oppressive transgressions on individual freedoms and ill-considered government policies.
(2) The Founding Fathers enshrined checks and balances in the Constitution to protect against government abuses to derail ill-conceived domestic or foreign endeavors.
(3) Checks and balances make the Nation safer by preventing abuses that would be exploited by Al Qaeda to boost terrorist recruitment, would deter foreign governments from cooperating in defeating international terrorism, and would make the American people reluctant to support aggressive counter-terrorism measures.
(4) Checks and balances have withered since 9/11 and an alarming concentration of power has been accumulated in the presidency based on hyper-inflated fears of international terrorism and a desire permanently to alter the equilibrium of power between the three branches of government.
(5) The unprecedented constitutional powers claimed by the President since 9/11 subtracted national security and have been asserted for non-national security purposes.
(6) Experience demonstrates that global terrorism can be thwarted, deterred, and punished through muscular application of law enforcement measures and prosecutions in Federal civilian courts in lieu of military commissions or military law.
(7) Congressional oversight of the executive branch is necessary to prevent secret government, which undermines self-government and invites lawlessness and maladministration.
( 8 ) The post-9/11 challenges to checks and balances are unique in the Nation’s history because the war on global terrorism has no discernable end.
(b) Purpose- The American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007 is intended to restore the Constitution’s checks and balances and protections against government abuses as envisioned by the Founding Fathers.
SEC. 3. MILITARY COMMISSIONS; ENEMY COMBATANTS; HABEAS CORPUS.
(a) The Military Commissions Act of 2006 is hereby repealed.
(b) The President is authorized to establish military commissions for the trial of war crimes only in places of active hostilities against the United States where an immediate trial is necessary to preserve fresh evidence or to prevent local anarchy.
(c) The President is prohibited from detaining any individual indefinitely as an unlawful enemy combatant absent proof by substantial evidence that the individual has directly engaged in active hostilities against the United States, provided that no United States citizen shall be detained as an unlawful enemy combatant.
(d) Any individual detained as an enemy combatant by the United States shall be entitled to petition for a writ of habeas corpus under section 2241 of title 28, United States Code.
SEC. 4. TORTURE OR COERCED CONFESSIONS.
No civilian or military tribunal of the United States shall admit as evidence statements extracted from the defendant by torture or coercion.
SEC. 5. INTELLIGENCE GATHERING.
No Federal agency shall gather foreign intelligence in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (50 U.S.C. 1801 et seq.). The President’s constitutional power to gather foreign intelligence is subordinated to this provision.
SEC. 6. PRESIDENTIAL SIGNING STATEMENTS.
The House of Representatives and Senate collectively shall enjoy standing to file a declaratory judgment action in an appropriate Federal district court to challenge the constitutionality of a presidential signing statement that declares the President’s intent to disregard provisions of a bill he has signed into law because he believes they are unconstitutional.
SEC. 7. KIDNAPPING, DETENTIONS, AND TORTURE ABROAD.
No officer or agent of the United States shall kidnap, imprison, or torture any person abroad based solely on the President’s belief that the subject of the kidnapping, imprisonment, or torture is a criminal or enemy combatant; provided that kidnapping shall be permitted if undertaken with the intent of bringing the kidnapped person for prosecution or interrogation to gather intelligence before a tribunal that meets international standards of fairness and due process. A knowing violation of this section shall be punished as a felony punishable by a fine or imprisonment of up to 2 years.
SEC. 8. JOURNALIST EXCEPTION TO ESPIONAGE ACT.
Nothing in the Espionage Act of 1917 shall prohibit a journalist from publishing information received from the executive branch or Congress unless the publication would cause direct, immediate, and irreparable harm to the national security of the United States.
SEC. 9. USE OF SECRET EVIDENCE TO MAKE FOREIGN TERRORIST DESIGNATIONS.
Notwithstanding any other law, secret evidence shall not be used by the President or any other member of the executive branch to designate an individual or organization with a United States presence as a foreign terrorist or foreign terrorist organization for purposes of the criminal law or otherwise imposing criminal or civil sanctions.
