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Mark wrote:If Poland invaded Belarus tomorrow, then I don't believe it would be an issue for me, as I doubt we're relying too much on either country for anything.

So, if we do not depend on someone for anything we do not care if they get invaded? Did I understand it right?

I hope Poland would win, however, as they were great fighters in WW2, and many of them fought alongside our army (though got little official recognition for such bravery, more to the shame of our leaders).

Didn't more Poles fight on the Eastern Front alongside the Russians than in the West? In fact, about 20 divisions of them did.

Well, Belarus were expert fighters themselves during the war. And they suffered greatly (25% of the entire population perished in WW2)

Leonid wrote:I suppose it takes a "loser" not voting for losers and believing and counting on himself only, instead of counting on a nanny-state. I gladly accept the charge.

ROFL:)

You did vote for losers, and, in the end, you will rely on the nanny-state.

I, on the other hand, do not need nany-state for myself, but I would rather those less fortunate than me have its benefits. Ergo, the difference between me and a schmuck like you.

Sorry, Eugene, I was being a little crass there with my tongue-in-cheek comment about who I'd want to "win". Of course I don't want them to go to war with one another.

But I will always respect the Polish people for their bravery during WW2, as well as the Czechs, as a fair number of both joined our RAF. 8)

Also more Czechs joined the Soviets than did the Western allies...

From University of Missouri Law School Website ( http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/project ... court.html ):

Politics and the Supreme Court
Few would deny that the political values of justices, as well as theories of constitutional interpretation, play a role in their decisions in specific cases. The conservative wing of the Court, for example, generally favors a restrictive interpretation of the federal commerce power (and therefore a broad view of states' rights), favors an expansive interpretation of the 11th Amendment, and rarely votes to overturn criminal convictions. The conservatives also take a skeptical view of affirmative action, are likely to reject most substantive due process, procedural due process, and establishment clause claims, and are generally reluctant to expand the fundamental rights strand of equal protection law (unless the plaintiff is George Bush, cynics would say). The moderate-liberal wing of the Court is likely to take the opposite side on all of the above-mentioned issues.

Another way of dividing Supreme Court justices is between "judicial activists" (those who are relatively willing to invalidate acts of federal and state legislatures and executive branches) and "advocates of judicial restraint" (those who are more reluctant to use their judicial power to invalidate). There are both conservative and liberal judicial activists. Justices Scalia and Thomas, for example, are conservative activists while Justice William O. Douglas was a liberal judicial activist. Current thinking suggests that Chief Justice Roberts is likely to prove to be a conservative advocate of judicial restraint, possibly in the mold of John Marshall Harlan. There also have been liberals on the Court who advocated judicial restraint, including Felix Frankfurter.

THE POLITICAL MAKE-UP OF THE CURRENT COURT
Seven members of the current Supreme Court were appointed by Republican presidents. Two justices (Ginsburg and Breyer) were nominated by a Democratic president.
THE ULTRA-CONSERVATIVES: Scalia (appointed by Reagan) and Thomas (appointed by George Bush, Sr.)
CONSERVATIVES: C. J. Roberts (appointed by George W. Bush),
O'Connor (appointed by Reagan, and soon to be replaced), and Kennedy (appointed by Reagan)
MODERATES: Stevens (appointed by Ford), Souter (appointed by George Bush, Sr.), Ginsburg (appointed by Clinton) and Breyer (appointed by Clinton).
LIBERALS: There are no current members of the Court that are properly considered "liberal." Recent members of the Court who might be called liberals include Republican (Eisenhower) appointees Brennan and Warren, Republican appointee (Nixon) Blackmun, and Johnson appointees Marshall, Fortas, and Goldberg. The last "ultra-liberal" on the Court was William O. Douglas, a Roosevelt appointee.

While we're at it...

Senate confirms Alito

The Senate confirmed Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court on Tuesday by a vote of 58-42, a day after an attempt by some Democratic senators to block his nomination fizzled.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/01/31/alito/index.html

This was, perhaps, predictable. Republicans do hold a numeric superiority in U.S. Senate, so any up-or-down vote would have borne it out.

King George
by The Progressive
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0131-23.htm
“Some legal questions are hard. This one is not. The President’s authorizing of NSA to spy on Americans is blatantly unlawful.”—Geoffrey Stone, University of Chicago law professor

There comes a time when the nakedness of the emperor can no longer be denied. Such a time is now.

George Bush’s policy of eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without a warrant proves he has placed himself above the law. Add this to the long list of other impeachable offenses—lying the country into war, torturing prisoners, exporting detainees for torture, paying columnists to propagandize the American public—that George W. Bush has committed, and put it at the top.

The President swears an oath of office that he will uphold the Constitution and faithfully execute the laws of the land.But he has been brazenly flouting the law that prohibits domestic spying without a warrant.
When The New York Times revealed on December 16 (after sitting on the story for a year and then omitting details at the request of Administration officials!) that Bush ordered the National Security Agency to monitor “the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years,” I expected Bush to deny it or to say he was going to review the policy. Instead, he has been vehemently defending that policy, citing both his authority under the Constitution as commander in chief and Congress’s authorization to go after Al Qaeda.

These were the very same rationales that the Bush Administration put forward at the Supreme Court in the 2004 case of Yaser Hamdi, one of the U.S. citizens Bush detained without charge or trial for more than two years.

The Supreme Court was especially critical of Bush’s end around the courts. “A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in the court’s majority opinion. She warned, in her own italics, of the danger of an approach that “serves only to condense power into a single branch of government.”

Bush, however, keeps invoking the state of war as a justification. At a December 19 press conference, he said his Administration bypassed going to a court and getting a warrant, as required by the Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA), because he wanted to “move faster and quicker.”

Leaving aside the fact that the law already allows the government to move expeditiously and then seek a warrant seventy-two hours after the fact, Bush’s excuse could have been used by any President at any time in our history to flout the law in a time of war.

During the Cold War, for instance, Presidents needed to “move faster and quicker,” too, since the Soviets had hundreds, then thousands, of intercontinental ballistic missiles that could annihilate the United States. But that didn’t give Eisenhower or Kennedy permission to violate a citizen’s right to privacy whenever they wanted to.

Many people have been scratching their heads about one paradox in this whole scandal: The FISA court almost never turns the President down. Of some 19,000 requests for warrants, the court has rejected only five, says James Bamford, an expert on the NSA. So why didn’t the President just go get this rubber stamp?
It may be that the Administration worried that some of its specific requests were simply too intrusive and expansive even for the pliant FISA court, and so Bush’s people simply skirted the court. Or it may not have wanted to do the paperwork. “The court has been subjecting the applications to closer examination,” Richard Lacayo of Time magazine reported. “It made what the Justice Department calls ‘substantive modifications’ to ninety-four of last year’s requests—for example, reducing the scope, timing, or targets in the original application.”

“If you’re calling Aunt Sadie in Paris, we’re probably not really interested.”—Dick Cheney

But I suspect that the Bush decision to bypass the court had less to do with practicality and more to do with ideology: The Bush folks, especially Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, do not believe the President has to answer to anybody when it comes to his conduct as commander in chief. Just as Cheney urged Bush not to go to the United Nations, so, too, he urged Bush not to go to the FISA court. Each is a fetter on Presidential power. And Cheney fantasizes about a President completely unfettered.

“I believe in a strong, robust executive authority,” Cheney said on December 20. The NSA’s spying, he added, was “totally appropriate and consistent with the constitutional authority of the President.” Faulting Congress for pursuing Reagan in the Iran-Contra scandal, Cheney said, “The President of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy.”

Gonzales, the chief law enforcement officer in the country, testified at his confirmation hearing in January 2005 that the President could disregard the law.

“I do believe there may come an occasion when the Congress might pass a statute that the President may view as unconstitutional,” Gonzales told Senator Patrick Leahy. “Obviously, a decision as to whether or not to ignore a statute passed by Congress is a very, very serious one, and it would be one that I would spend a great deal of time and attention [on] before arriving at a conclusion that, in fact, a President had the authority.”

So Bush, with Cheney and Gonzales whispering in each ear, defiantly says he’s going to do whatever the hell he wants.

When he signed the anti-torture law in late December, for instance, Bush reserved the right to ignore it, The Boston Globe reported. Bush specified in a “signing statement” that said he would construe the law “in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as commander in chief” with the objective “of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.”

Bush may intend to use such “signing statements” to nullify just about any act of Congress he chooses.

We haven’t seen such disdain for our system of checks and balances since the days of Richard Nixon. And like Nixon in the Pentagon Papers case, Bush is trying to shift blame to the press and to the whistleblowers, denouncing the leak as “shameful.” Gonzales is now pursuing the leaker, though he has a double conflict of interest.

First, he’s an old crony of Bush’s.

Second, and more importantly, when he was White House counsel, he was one of the architects of the NSA spying program. So much so that he and Chief of Staff Andrew Card had “to make an emergency hospital visit to John Ashcroft, then the Attorney General, to try to persuade him to give his authorization” to continued NSA spying after Ashcroft’s deputy, James B. Comey, refused to go along, according to The New York Times.

Rather than investigating the leaker, Gonzales should be investigating himself—and Bush.

But, of course, he won’t do that. Nor is he appointing a special prosecutor to look into the matter. Nor does he seem to be recusing himself from the leak investigation, as he has an obligation to do. Even Ashcroft recused himself from the Karl Rove case.

“It is completely and facially unethical for Gonzales to head this investigation,” says Jonathan Turley, professor of constitutional law at George Washington University.

The NSA spying scandal cries out for an impeachment inquiry. Our democracy cannot survive the assertion of Presidential power to be above the law.

Senator Russ Feingold made this point quite well. “The President believes that he has the power to override the laws that Congress has passed. This is not how our democratic system of government works. The President does not get to pick and choose which laws he wants to follow. He is a President, not a king. . . . He’s President George Bush, not King George Bush.”
Even some conservatives who have often supported Bush have come out strongly against the NSA spying (though The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard applauded it).

“The executive branch cannot unilaterally set the rules and enforce the rules, then eliminate court review of possible civil liberties violations,” said Robert Levy, the libertarian Cato Institute’s senior fellow in constitutional studies. Bush’s policy “makes a mockery of the principle of separation of powers.”

Conservative legal scholar Bruce Fein, who served as associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan Administration, was even more blunt."If President Bush is totally unapologetic and says I continue to maintain that as a wartime President I can do anything I want—I don’t need to consult any other branches—that is an impeachable offense,” he said on The Diane Rehm Show. “It’s more dangerous than Clinton’s lying under oath because it jeopardizes our democratic dispensation and civil liberties for the ages.”

“The chilling danger created by President Bush’s claim of wartime omnipotence to justify the NSA’s eavesdropping is that the precedent will lie around like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of the incumbent or any successor who would reduce Congress to an ink blot.”—Bruce Fein, writing in The Washington Times, January 4

Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute was on the same program and echoed Fein’s comments. “I think if we’re going to be intellectually honest here, this really is the kind of thing that Alexander Hamilton was referring to when impeachment was discussed,” said Ornstein.

Richard Nixon was impeached, in part, for such power grabs and privacy invasions. One of the three articles of impeachment that came out of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 said: “Using the powers of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in disregard of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens.”

If you replace Nixon’s name with Bush’s, the article still stands.

So Long, Tom, You Hypocrite
by Molly Ivins, Boulder Daily Camera
In general, I'm against kicking 'em when they're down ... unless really awful people are involved. I figured Tom DeLay is so awful, plenty of people would gang up on him and I could pass.

Imagine my surprise when the toughest question one famous TV tough guy could come up with was, "Do you think you invested too much in the Republican Party?" Another inquired whether DeLay could think of any mistakes he'd made. I waited with bated breath for the immortal, "I wish I could learn not to work so hard," but no, he couldn't think of a single one.

Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay first came to power promising to restore democracy to the House of Representatives, supposedly suffering from then-Speaker Jim Wright's tyrannical regime. Even after the Rs drove Wright from office, however, bipartisanship was out of the question for DeLay. In the budget fight and government shutdown of 1995, DeLay rejected compromise and famously said, "It's time for all-out war."

I never minded DeLay being a tough guy — it was his syrupy claims to carry the banner for Christianity that I found offensive, as he frog-marched the House toward being a cash-operated special-interest machine. The idea of putting pressure on lobbyists to give only to Republicans, pressuring lobbying firms into hiring only Republicans and then letting lobbyists sit at the table during committee meetings where legislation was written — it was just screaming overt corruption.

Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich turned the U.S. House of Representatives, "the people's House," into a pay-for-play machine for corporations. Put in enough money, get your special tax exemption, get your earmarked government contract, get your trade legislation and your environmental exemption, get rid of safety regulation.

I'd like to address the idea that what DeLay did was only "payback" for the alleged sins of Jim Wright and then-House Majority Whip Tony Coelho, that it's "our turn," so why not act like Dan Rostenkowski? It's a great way to rationalize misbehavior, even if the misbehavior is as disproportionate as Wright's ethical peccadillo compared to the open corruption of DeLay's "K Street Project," selling Congress to the lobby.

I've watched enough switches of political power and use of the "payback" excuse to realize that what the new Ins call "payback" has little to do with whatever the new Outs used to do. It is, instead, a direct reflection — "projection," the shrinks call it — of the ethical values of the Ins onto the Outs. Every time you hear a misdeed justified by, "Well, they used to do it," you can generally mark off a 50-percent to 75-percent exaggeration.

To get a real sense of DeLay's cynicism and recklessness, forget the stuff the press loves, like the "free golfing trip" to St. Andrew's. Instead, take note of the following example.

The Northern Marianas Islands are a U.S. protectorate (so it can label goods "Made in the USA") in the Pacific being used as a sort of labor gulag, with workers imported from China and elsewhere and paid pitiful wages. Jack Abramoff had a contract with the government of the Marianas to lobby against stopping the flow of immigrant labor to the islands and to prevent a minimum-wage bill from getting to the floor of the House.

The islands are home to classic sweatshops. In 1996 and 1997, Abramoff billed the Marianas for 187 contacts with DeLay's office, including 16 meetings with DeLay. In December 1997, DeLay, his wife and their daughter went on an Abramoff-arranged jaunt to the Marianas. DeLay brunched with the Marianas' largest private employer, textile magnate Willie Tan.

Tan had to settle a U.S. Labor Department lawsuit alleging workplace violations. According to the book "The Hammer" by Lou Dubose and Jan Reid, among the violations common on the islands is forbidding women to work when they are pregnant, thus leading to a high abortion rate.

Evidently, DeLay didn't have time to look into such allegations, since he was busy playing golf and attending a dinner in his honor, sponsored by Tan's holding company. According to The Washington Post, it was at this dinner that DeLay called Abramoff "one of my closest and dearest friends." He also reminded those present of his promise that no minimum wage or immigration legislation affecting the Marianas would be passed.

"Stand firm," he added. "Resist evil. Remember that all truth and blessings emanate from our Creator." He then went with Tan to see a cockfight.

This is why DeLay's professions of Christianity make me sick. He was there. He could have talked to the workers. Instead, he chose to walk with the powerful and do real harm to the very people Jesus mandated we especially care for.

Guys,

We are discussing on General Chat whether or not to return to the old forum. Please chime in.

Why 2008 Will be a Perfect Storm for Republicans
By Mark Green
In hindsight, we can see why incumbent parties have been blamed and creamed in federal elections, like Republicans in 1974 after Watergate and Democrats in 1994 after the failure of health care. Looking ahead, with 13 months to go, a perfect storm is gathering force that will likely decimate Republican strength in federal and state races.

There is no one earthquake producing a political tsunami but rather four separate seismic events that together—short of another terrorist attack or a new war against Iran—will alter the electoral terrain of America.

Iraq: Consider the numbers: when asked who can best end the Iraq war, only 5 percent of Americans in a recent poll said President Bush; consistent majorities of 70 percent want the war to end soon and 60 percent believe Bush misled us into this conflict. Claims of progress may momentarily quell public anger over this monumental blunder—say, General Petraeus's putting a happy face on the war. But such optimism is now as convincing as General Westmoreland's expecting "light at the end of the tunnel" in Vietnam or Baghdad Bob's denying American troops were anywhere near the Baghdad airport while those troops were seizing it.

What exactly can GOP candidates say next fall in the face of no WMD, no link between Saddam and 9/11, no ties between Saddam and al Qaeda, no flowers for "liberators," 5 million refugees both out of and within Iraq, Administration approval of torture, over 30,000 American dead and wounded as well as over 100,000 Iraqis killed -- not to mention an increase in terrorism world-wide? "Give us more time" for a war that's lasted longer than World War II?

None of this worked in 2006 and will be even less pervasive in 2008. As Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) recently acknowledged after a Senate vote on the war, the public knows this is Bush's and the Republican's war and will reward or punish candidates accordingly.

Economy: Most economic forecasters are predicting a one in two chance of a recession due to the foreclosure crisis leading to a credit crisis. Nor can Republican candidates convincingly cite Bush's eight-year record if '08 goes flat. Average monthly job creation and economic growth under Clinton was 237,000 and 3.6 percent; under Bush, it's 53,000 and 2.6 percent. Even if there's no recession but merely a slowdown, incumbent parties historically still lose seats and the White House if economic growth falls below 3 percent in the election year, as now seems inevitable.

At the same time, this Administration's record on spending and deficits—turning a projected $5.6 trillion surplus into $3 trillion in deficits—is dividing its own business base, according to Wall Street Journal last week. Now when asked which party would better maintain prosperity, it's Democrats by 54-34 percent according to Gallup.

And for the first time in several generations, the economic debate may include not only growth but also distribution. Static median income over the Bush years combined with winner-take-all increases in wealth by the top 1 percent have not gone unnoticed. A Pew Poll in 1988 found that by 71 to 25 percent, Americans thought themselves “haves” rather than “have nots”; by 2001, it was 48 to 48 percent. Any such data or arguments provoke Republicans to shout, “class warfare.” But this is blaming the mirror for the image. Can conservatives explain how ExxonMobil's Lee Raymond earned more per hour in 2005 than his average employee earned per year?

Intolerance: The GOP claiming to the "party of Lincoln" is a pretense long beyond its expiration date. During the Cold War, Republicans could successfully run against Reds and Blacks. Yet with the decline of Communism and the Southern Strategy, GOP strategists have instead turned to targeting terrorists, immigrants and gays. Hence all those terror alerts and anti-gay referenda in 2004, and strident anti-immigrant rhetoric in 2007. But can the GOP rely simply on white men to win, blowing off racial and other minorities in a country increasingly minority? Bush's small gain in the black vote from 8% in 2000 to 11% in 2004, including a pivotal 16% in Ohio, helped cement his narrow victory.

The recent refusal of leading Republican presidential candidates to attend key black, Latino and gay debates prodded former vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp to complain, “We sound like we don't want immigration; we sound like we don't want black people to vote for us. What are we going to do—meet in a country club in the suburbs one day?” It won't suffice any longer for 2008 convention organizers to put every minority delegate on the stage, hoping pictures will substitute for policy.

Children: President Bush made good on his threat to veto the expansion of the SCHIP program to extend health insurance to another 4 million children, notwithstanding the bi-partisan support of 43 governors and an 84 percent majority in a CBS-New York Times poll. He complains that such a move would federalize, even socialize, health care. So will he now end Medicare and Medicaid?

Yes, it would cost another $35 billion annually, but that would be entirely covered by a proposed increase in the tobacco tax. It's revealing that an administration which didn't veto any spending bills for six years and didn't sweat $50 billion in oil subsidies and $10 billion a month for Iraq now draws the line against providing health care to children at no-cost to the federal budget. It approaches political suicide for the Bush Administration and four top GOP presidential candidates to elevate the rhetoric of free-market fundamentalism over the reality of millions of children lacking health insurance.

Pro-war and anti-growth, anti-minorities, anti-children. Not a good way to run for election.

Beyond these four problems, a variety of other realities combine to dig Republicans into an even deeper hole. Recent polls show Democrats are more trusted on every domestic and foreign policy issue: education, health care, environment, economic growth, fiscal discipline, even terrorism. The number of Americans who self-identify as Republican is at a seven year low. While Americans believing the country is "on the wrong tack" was 50 percent in 2002 and 2004, it's now 67 percent. National Democratic committees and presidential candidates are outraising their Republican counterparts better than 2 to 1. And then there's the fact that Republicans are defending 22 Senate seats in 2008 compared to 12 for the Democrats. Nine Republican Senate seats are now considered vulnerable (Alaska, Colorado, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Maine, Minnesota, Oregon and Virginia).

Adding it all up: look for Democrats to end up with a near filibuster-proof 58 Senate seats (up from 51) and 260 House seats (up from 213 in 2005 and 233 in 2007). The 2006 and 2008 elections would then be the equivalent of a rolling realignment, comparable to the 51, 49 and 53 House seats that switched hands in 1958, 1974 and 1994 respectively. For when there's a tidal wave of sentiment, it doesn't tip some close contests but nearly all close contests. What John Kenneth Galbraith said of Black Monday 1933 is true for the GOP today: "The end had come, but it was not yet in sight."