Down where we winter in Florida one of our favorite restaurants is located on George Bush Drive.  It’s a good place for local fish, but we have trepidations every time we consider going over there:  What will our snarky New York City friends think about us if they knew we're frequenting a place located on a street named after our fearless leader.

Once can make an argument that challenges the timing or the political usefulness of Kucinich's 35 Articles of Impeachment.

But I have yet to see an intelligent argument that says what Kucinich offered up is not based upon the facts as we have seen them, that avenues for investigation and discovery are not warranted for Congress to discuss the crimes of the Bush Administration. Nothing that Kucinich has done in offering up these Articles of Impeachment is damaging to the reputation of Congress.

Quite the contrary: It's the failure to discuss these issues, these violations of the nation's trust in the government that is truly the most damaging part of the equation.

But yet this place is peppered with snide, obnoxious ad hom attacks about Dennis Kucinich. I look for refutation of what he presented last night as not being factual, or that the charges he made are not warranted. I have have yet to find a credible argument against the charges made, based upon the facts in the case.

Also noted, the 'politically prudent' argument, which is just as repellent to my sensibilities; that somehow offering up the truth on the Floor of the House is going to damage the chances for election in 2008. It just turns my stomach to see those comments.

These cherry-picked bullet points are not intended as a substitute for actually reading Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein.  

Ever since Dwight David Eisenhower warned of the Military-Industrial Complex in 1960 and it is clear that you oppose the MIC at your peril. It seems that every time a caring charismatic effective opponent to war arises to challenge for leadership the effort ends in death and disappointment for progressive Democrats who seek a better more peaceful world.
Hillary Rodham Clinton should understand this and Barack Obama should be worried. Those who seek to bring an end to war and threaten the awesome financial interests of the Oil and Defense industries are systematically eliminated. That is why HRC's insensitive remarks citing the RFK assassination as reason for remaining in the race elicited such a strong visceral reaction from so many of us.

A Short History of the Munich Analogy, Part 3:
"Appeasement" & the  Persian Gulf War

    "A Short History of the Munich Analogy, Part 1" discussed the story of Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938 as a prominent rhetorical and ideological feature of American Cold War political discourse. "The Munich Analogy, Part 2: The Neocons and the Appeasement Meme"extended the discussion to the the neo-conservative "defense intellectuals" who became influential in the Reagan administrations of the 1980s, and for whom the Munich narrative was the central organizing principle of Cold War and Middle Eastern analysis.

As the clock ticks on towards the end of the Bush Presidency, I can't help but feel a nagging dread at the prospect of what mischief this President could cause in his final weeks (especially in light of his intentions to relax environmental regulations around National Parks, not to mention the "nazi appeaser" nonsense at the Knesset).

Presidents pull some interesting things out of their hats on the way out the door - whether its because of the freedom from professional accountability, or simply a last chance to pay back campaign supporters. Pardons are what we usually expect to see. Clinton, of course, caught hell for pardoning Marc Rich and others. More colorfully, Reagan expunged George Steinbrenner's record from his 1974 guilty plea on obstruction of justice and conspiring to make illegal contributions to President Nixon. Then, of course, there was Bush I's Christmas Eve pardons of Iran-Contra figures which came only days before former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was to stand trial for perjury.

The idea that Bill Clinton didn’t really win the presidency in 1992, or would not have won if third party candidate Ross Perot wasn’t in the race, is a long-standing right-wing talking point.  Incredibly, I have recently seen liberals making the same argument, apparently so full of anti-Hillary Clinton zeal that they are ready to denigrate any success in any way attributable to either of the Clintons.  In any case, it’s an idea badly in need of refuting.  

I don't know what a search of Politicians and their Crazy Pastors on traditional media would come up with. But without seeing the results, I'm willing to speculate the double standard in play on progressive Vs. conservative crazy pastor problems is just breathtaking:

Ed Brayton -- And did you see one article anywhere in the mainstream media about it? I've not seen one that even mentions that on May 2nd, the former president and father of the current president, George HW Bush, was paid by the world's most prominent fascist cult leader to give yet another speech on his behalf, with Moon on the same stage. And it happened right in Washington DC, where the media has no excuse for not knowing about it.

Jeremiah Wright? Come on.

The Moonies have just trumpeted the latest delegation of their dreaded leader, Sun Myung Moon, to the Bush presidential library in College Station, TX. The occasion: a statesmanlike party Moon was throwing in D.C., from April 28 to May 2, 2008, celebrating his dreams of influencing world events and burying Jesus Christ.

The host: George H.W. Bush.

Our friends over at Wonkette have recently posted a revealing video of Sen. Clinton struggling to figure out how to operate a beverage dispenser at a gas station. As some of you here might recall, during his reelection campaign, the current president's father was tarred by members of the press as being out of touch with the general public after receiving a tutorial on how supermarket checkout scanners work. Will Sen. Clinton end up being portrayed the same way? Click that 'Recommend' button and jump with me...

Crossposted at OpenLeft

In a logical turn of events, Barack Obama's recent appearance on Fox News, which while a good interview, was not an attempt to "take Fox on" as promised by an Obama surrogate on Greg Sargent's blog, has birthed much criticism. Many, including Chris and Kos, had hoped that Obama would in fact attack the network when asked inevitably irrelevant questions about the "scandals" around his campaign. Instead, it amounted to ironically Clintonian Triangulation, on issues such as abortion, taxes, regulation, and John Roberts. While he didn't "throw Kos under the bus" as claimed by many, he did use him as a point of distancing himself from "the Left." In a strange, though honestly predictable turn of events, many Obama supporters are refusing to criticize the move, and many are even defending it as a means by which to court more voters, with claims such as:

     I hope it's been an interesting week for those of you who've been following this Silver Bullet series. (Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 can be found here for those who may have missed them.) I figured the week of Earth Day was a good time to do this, and I've been wanting to get word of Dr. Bussard's work out to a wider audience for some time.
     To recap quickly, I started by sketching out the problem (energy supply vs. demand, global climate change, people), proposed a solution (nuclear fusion), spent a couple more days fleshing out the background on nuclear tech, and yesterday held forth on a new approach to fusion that just might be the real Silver Bullet solution. Today I'm going to end by riffing on the topic a bit and seeing if I can expantionate the dynamulon.  (more)

ABC has become the first major network to be duped into treating a right-wing smear of  Sen. Barack Obama as a non-political news story.

Despite his own prior reporting in an Aug 2000 Salon.com piece--in which he deftly exposed the very same right-wing smear merchants behind the "Expose Obama" ad--ABC Senior National Correspondent Jake Tapper has just published a piece on ABC.com that gives legitimacy to the blatant political agenda in the ad.

My father-in-law and I rarely make sense to one another. It's not surprising, because we don't have much in common. I'm a Gen-Xer, raised in a middle-class white household where my parents were white-collar, college-educated people. He's a Boomer, raised in a blue-collar, working-class household where nobody was college-educated and the work was done with your hands, not your brains. I'm essentially an atheist; he's a Mormon who was raised Ukrainian Orthodox. I'm from Southern California; he's originally from Long Island, New York. I'm as queer as they come, he's as straight as a string. He's conservative, I'm liberal. I'm working towards my Ph.D.; he never finished college and can't really get his head around how college is funded and how someone in graduate school supports themselves (fellowships and post-docs). The only thing we really have in common apart from our race (white) and our gender (male) is my partner, his son.

Not surprisingly, we don't get on very well. Why? Because we're operating in two completely different contexts. His context is one of hard (physical) work and unquestioning faith in God. Mine is one of thinking, pondering, asking questions, and never accepting the answers on more than a tenuous basis - the total antithesis of his worldview.

Let's talk about context after the jump.

United States War Crimes Against Iraq

Initial Complaint

Crimes Against Peace, War Crimes, Crimes Against
Humanity and Other Criminal Acts and High Crimes in
Violation of the Charter of the United Nations,
International Law, the Constitution of the United States
and Laws made in Pursuance Thereof.

  Read on to find out more.

A dynasty is called a dynasty because it has a long history.  And we shouldn't get sloppy and forget the history of American Dynasties like the House of Bush.  When the past is held in mind simultaneous with the present, well, things smell different.

For example, J.P. Morgan is guaranteed a no fail purchase of Bear-Stearns.

Well, back in 1919 George Herbert Walker (the grandfather of...

Updated: Carlyle Capital's assets were seized by lenders.
The Federal Reserve's latest action to deal with the subprime credit crisis temporarily bailed out Carlyle Capital a member of the Carlyle Group

The Fed announced a new temporary lending program that will allow participants in the bond markets to swap the mortgage-backed securities that they can't currently sell for highly liquid Treasurys that they can. The hope is that the extra money in the financial system will restore trust and keep prices of illiquid securities from plunging.

In recent days, large financial firms, including Thornburg Mortgage (TMA) and Carlyle Capital Corp. (CARYF), have faced margins calls on their mortgage-backed securities that they are unable to meet, threatening a downward spiral among their counterparties in a forced deleveraging.

Shares of Thornburg doubled in price after the news.

As an idealism not seen in politics since 1968 struggles to emerge, what can we learn from the life and death of Lee Atwater?