Is Cheney ticket-toast?

Is Cheney ticket-toast?

Daily Kos is talking about it.

Anonymoses is talking about it.

My comment (today) at Daily Kos was:

If Cheney is found to have any connection at all to the outing of Valerie Plame, he'll be off the ticket pronto. I've been suspecting this possible Plame-outing-connection is a good part of the reason why the nervous "oust Cheney" movement has lately begun in Republican circles.
Also, when Bush was asked how Edwards would stack up against Vice President Cheney, he replied: 'Dick Cheney can be president. Next?'
YET--- recent polls show that American voters actually prefer Edwards to Cheney, both as vice president and, should it come to that, as president. Respondents in the most recent NBC poll preferred Edwards over Cheney by 45 to 38 percent.
Not good news for the Bush/Cheney ticket at all.

Voter disenfranchisement-How far have we come from 1876?

Voter disenfranchisement-
How far have we come from 1876?

It may be a vain hope that this presidency will end in impeachment, but the past four years have been an object lesson in what can be accomplished once you get the Voting Rights Act, the 15th and the 19th Amendments out of the way..


As a descendant of Presidential candidate Samuel J. Tilden, who lost in the dubious 1876 election, I was interested to have read this passage from a compelling article titled "What to the Slave is the 4th of July?" written by William Jelani Cobb, assistant professor of history at Spelman College:

Watch the opening scenes of Fahrenheit 9/11 and you can't help but think that Michael Moore was creating a dramatic re-enactment from the pages of W.E.B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction. A brief history lesson: Reconstruction, the twelve-year period following the Civil War in which African Americans — some of whom were former slaves — were elected as sheriffs, state representatives, members of congress and even governors and senators, came to a grinding halt with the election of 1876. That year, the results from the contest between the Republican nominee, Rutherford B. Hayes, and the Democratic nominee, Samuel J. Tilden, were so close that the election was thrown to the House of Representatives to be decided. For those interested in the ironic echoes of history, a key factor in the close margin lay in the failure to count votes from blacks living in Southern states — including, as you have already guessed, Florida. The House brokered a behind-doors deal allowing for Hayes' election in return for concessions to the Southern Democrats who so hated Reconstruction, clearing the way for a series of reactionary governments that oversaw the increased incarceration of African Americans as a money-making venture, the rise of sharecropping as an exploitative labor system, an explosion of mob violence directed at blacks and the rise of Jim Crow.

Echoes of the sad results of the infamous 1876 election ring still today. Have you ever considered that the disfranchisement of black voters may have paved the way to all of the following accomplishments?

On the cusp of its 228th birthday, this country is mired in a seemingly endless occupation of Iraq — despite the return of "sovereignty" to the Iraqi "government." The current Presidential administration has misled the public, squandered international goodwill, authored the most disastrous foreign policy in recent memory, undercut the authority of the United Nations, undermined due process by creating secret military tribunals for civilian offenses, curtailed freedom of speech and spent billions waging war in the name of eliminating a false threat to national security. Add into the equation its contempt for international treaties, hostile ecological politics, its implication in the war profiteering of Halliburton and the damning accusation that the Bush administration deliberately blew the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame as retribution for her husband's criticism of their Iraq policy, and you have a broad pattern of dishonesty and political incompetence. (If Douglass was around today, he would, almost certainly be asking "What to the Iraqi citizen is the 4th of July?")

I wonder---will we sit back silently and watch the same thing happen to our presidential election in November, 2004?

___________________

"Without a vote, a voice, I am a ghost inhabiting a citizen’s space...I want to walk calmly into a polling place with other citizens, to carry my placid ballot into the booth, check off my choices, then drop my conscience in the common box."

Joe Loya, a disenfranchised American voter

Ronald Reagan to Bush: Do you think dead Iraqis go to Heaven?

Ronald Reagan to Bush: Do you think dead Iraqis go to Heaven?

On the O'Franken Factor show on Air America this afternoon, Ronald Prescott Reagan told Al Franken he thought there was an important question to be asked of President Bush:

Do the tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens we've killed in this optional war go to Heaven when they die?

Reagan believes it's an important notion to put forward to a President who alleges to pride himself on his faith-based morality.

He also said it wouldn't hurt if Bush explained to the American people why he lied about the reasons for our invasion of Iraq. He believes the American people are owed the real reasons and the Bush administration has never offered those reasons.

Official Reports Will Reveal Widespread Intelligence Failure

Official Reports Will Reveal Widespread Intelligence Failure
Will do more than fix blame on Bush and Blair--Will scream for institutional changes

The pending releases (July 9th and 14th) of two highly critical reports (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and The "Lord Butler" report) on US and British prewar intelligence leading up to the Iraq war are allegedly the most damaging attack yet on the intelligence used to justify the war and are expected to be a blow for Bush and Blair. The impact of the findings are expected to do more than fix official blame, however. Instead, they'll likely expose a worldwide intelligence failure. Lord Butler is expected to "comment sharply" on the way the chairman of Whitehall's joint intelligence committee interpreted secret information supplied by MI6. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, a retired British diplomat, has heavily criticized the Bush administration for accepting the "wrong analysis" from the very well-(U.S.)-paid Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, who downplayed the threat of insurgency and got no curious argument from G.W. Bush.

A similar charge will accompany the US Senate's intelligence findings. The Niger/uranium-buy question (which resulted in Joseph Wilson's revelations and the treasonous subsequent Novak-facilitated outing of Wilson's wife Valerie Plame as a CIA agent) will be covered in the Lord Butler report. On July 26th, the 9-11 Independent Commission report will also undoubtedly be highly critical of the CIA.