EXCERPT: A quick update for those who missed yesterday's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos". Democratic Senator Russ Feingold called for Senate Censure of President Bush.
From the transcript:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Tomorrow in the Senate you'll introduce a resolution to censure George W. Bush Let me show it to our viewers. It says, Resolved: that the United States Senate does hereby censure George W. Bush, President of the United States, and does condemn his unlawful...

EXCERPT: Yesterday, the elephant walked into the Senate Intelligence Committee chambers and disappeared.
Faced with the frightening prospect of public hearings and establishment of active Congressional oversight of the NSA warrantless domestic spying program, the White House dispatched it's erstwhile Big Gun, Cheney, to strongarm stray Republicans back into line.
Following the party-line vote on a measure that countered Jay Rockefeller's (D-WV) motion for a full investigation and...

EXCERPT: One thing the NeoCrazies learned from Watergate is to keep the law on your side. Nixon was impeached for covering up the illegal deeds of his administration rather than for the misdeeds the White House authorized.
Bush, aided and abetted by a Republican Congress, is trying to use the weight of law, under the guise of national security, to cover up his administration's misdeeds.
Nixon had his CREEP Dirty Tricksters and his Plumbers Unit. Bush has Alberto Gonzales and Porter Goss...

EXCERPT: Before I hoist my goblet with the cheery gathering at Akman's article, I'd like to address one of Bryan's Fauxized comments that jumped off the page at me:
"But the stakes are at least as high . . . a world dominated by representative governments with civil rights, human rights, and personal freedoms . or a world dominated by a radical Islamic Wahhabi movement, by the Jihad, under the Mullahs and the Sharia (Islamic law). I do not understand why the American Left...

EXCERPT: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was an age of wisdom, it was an age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness…"
-- Charles Dickens
Congress has recessed for its President's Day break with little progress on deciding what to do about the NSA warrantless domestic spying program, however, a consensus seems to be building that puts Congress and the...

EXCERPT: If the Palestinians' election of Hamas to power didn't bring home to you that a democracy and personal liberties aren't synonymous, then the Bush Administration with its campaign financing carrots and its NSA secret warrantless eavesdropping program should. If, after reading this article and its companion, The Elephant Mired In Political Muck, you still believe all is fine and well in the United States, I'd suggest you need to do some research.
In different...

EXCERPT: This may sound like the allegory of Sabu, the elephant herding moron-boy, after all, but politics often blends truth and fantasy so seamlessly that one can't tell where one ends and the other begins.
Remember freshman Representative Schmidt (R-OH) who called Representative John Martha (D-PA) "a coward" on the House floor? Well, she'd eked out a narrow victory, in a heavily Republican district, against political unknown opponent Paul Hackett, attorney, Iraq War...

EXCERPT: The Vice President bagged a lawyer on Saturday and for the past two days, as President of the Senate, he's been after bigger, more dangerous, game.
Congress appeared ready to launch an investigation into the Bush Administration's warrantless domestic eavesdropping program last week, but an armed-to-the-teeth White House elephant hunting expedition may have wounded that effort.
The Senate Intelligence Committee is scheduled to vote tomorrow (Wednesday) on a...

EXCERPT: In spite of questioning the legality of the President's warrantless domestic spying on Americans, there's near universal public agreement that spying on suspected terrorists should be conducted. However, little attention has been devoted to the nature of the domestic spying program Americans want.
Vice President Cheney spun that question into a political issue last week in his address to the Conservative Political Action Conference:
"I recognize that some have...

EXCERPT: Salaam. Zan, your article is superb and I thank you for speaking out.
As you subtly point out, the issue really isn't about Islam, cartoons or violence, the vilification and dehumanization of Muslims -- these are merely symptoms. The cartoons themselves are yet another example of how Westerners have come to take their freedoms for granted -- to a degree that any meaningful respect for those freedoms and self-responsibility, in the exercise of those freedoms, has been all but...