By PAUL KRUGMAN
The New York Times
Editorials/Op-Ed
Published: December 19, 2005

Not long ago Peter Ferrara, a senior policy adviser at the Institute for Policy Innovation, seemed on the verge of becoming a conservative icon. Before the Bush administration's sales pitch for Social Security privatization fell flat, admiring articles about the Bush plan's genesis often gave Mr. Ferrara credit for starting the privatization movement back in 1979.

Now Mr. Ferrara has become a different sort of icon. BusinessWeek Online reports that both Mr. Ferrara and Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, were paid by the ubiquitous Jack Abramoff to write "op-ed articles favorable to the positions of some of Abramoff's clients."

Now, I never had any illusions about intellectual integrity in the world of right-wing think tanks. It has been clear for a long time that so-called analysts at many of these think tanks are, in effect, paid to support selected policies and politicians. But it never occurred to me that the pay-for-play schemes were so blatant. [...] Read the rest at NY Times Select: http://tinyurl.com/7rhbv I will try to find a site that has posted it. So far I don't see one.


© Virginia Metze

"Citizens for Legitimate Government" sent this alert out yesterday evening (Sunday):

From the people who brought you FEMA: US uses live bird flu viruses in vaccine experiment 18 Dec 2005 In an isolation ward of a Baltimore hospital, up to 30 'volunteers' will participate this April in a bold experiment: A vaccine made with a live version of the most notorious bird flu will be sprayed into their noses. [The Bush bioterror team is in a hurry to get the pandemic party started, in order to implement a full-blown police state. Dictator Bush needs to justify his warrantless eavesdropping and to insure re-authorization of the Patriot Act.]
http://www.legitgov.org/index.html#breaking_news (scroll down)


© Virginia Metze

Long, very complete discussion

By Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 18, 2005; A01

In his four-year campaign against al Qaeda, President Bush has turned the U.S. national security apparatus inward to secretly collect information on American citizens on a scale unmatched since the intelligence reforms of the 1970s.

The president's emphatic defense yesterday of warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens and residents marked the third time in as many months that the White House has been obliged to defend a departure from previous restraints on domestic surveillance. In each case, the Bush administration concealed the program's dimensions or existence from the public and from most members of Congress.

Since October, news accounts have disclosed a burgeoning Pentagon campaign for "detecting, identifying and engaging" internal enemies that included a database with information on peace protesters. A debate has roiled over the FBI's use of national security letters to obtain secret access to the personal records of tens of thousands of Americans. And now come revelations of the National Security Agency's interception of telephone calls and e-mails from the United States -- without notice to the federal court that has held jurisdiction over domestic spying since 1978.
[...]

No president before Bush mounted a frontal challenge to Congress's authority to limit espionage against Americans. In a Sept. 25, 2002, brief signed by then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, the Justice Department asserted "the Constitution vests in the President inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority."

[...]

"There is a lot of discussion out there that we shouldn't be dividing Americans and foreigners, but terrorists and non-terrorists," said Gordon Oehler, a former chief of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center who served on last year's special commission assessing U.S. intelligence.

By law, according to University of Chicago scholar Geoffrey Stone, the differences are fundamental: Americans have constitutional protections that are enforceable in court whether their conversations are domestic or international.
[...] Read the rest at: http://tinyurl.com/8c7ld


© Virginia Metze

CensureBush.org

Campaign Launched in Response to New House Legislation

The AfterDowningStreet.org coalition, an alliance of over 100 grassroots organizations, has launched a new campaign called CensureBush.org in order to support new legislation introduced by Congressman John Conyers that would censure President Bush and Vice President Cheney and create a select committee to investigate the Administration's possible crimes and make recommendations regarding grounds for impeachment.

H.Res.635 would create a select committee - modeled after Sam Ervin's Watergate committee - to investigate the Administration's intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, and retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment.

H.Res.636 and H.Res.637 would censure, respectively, Bush and Cheney for failing to respond to requests for information concerning allegations that they and others in the Administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war in Iraq, misstated and manipulated intelligence information regarding the justification for the war, countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of persons in Iraq, and permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of the Administration, for failing to adequately account for certain misstatements they made regarding the war, and – in the case of President Bush – for failing to comply with Executive Order 12958.

These two efforts are complementary - H.Res.635 seeks accountability for the Bush administration's monumental crimes, while H.Res.636 and H.Res.637 seek accountability for their coverups.

Ask your Congress Member to support these efforts!
http://capwiz.com/pdamerica/issues/alert/?alertid=8329176

More information: http://www.censurebush.org

The House Judiciary Committee Democratic staff has just released an extensive report titled "The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Cover-ups in the Iraq War." It is available at
http://www.censurebush.org

The After Downing Street / Censure Bush Coalition has organized over 60 town hall forums around the country on January 7th and plans to make these new developments in Congress a focus of many of those events: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/event

IMPEACHMENT HITS THE NEWS

Time for Impeachment By Doug Ireland
http://www.impeachpac.org/?q=node/87

Rep. John Lewis Calls for Impeachment
http://www.impeachpac.org/?q=node/88

Se. Barbara Boxer Seeks Expert Opinions on Impeaching Bush
http://www.impeachpac.org/?q=node/90

Raising the Issue of Impeachment By John Nichols, The Nation
http://www.impeachpac.org/?q=node/97

Washington Post Polling Editor Is Furious Because People Want Impeachment http://www.impeachpac.org/?q=node/98


FORWARD THIS INFORMATION



http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=impeach
http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=Downing+Street+Memo

http://tinyurl.com/aca5o



http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=impeach
http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=Downing+Street+Memo