It does not matter if there’s only 18 months, or only 18 weeks, or only 18 days left in office for the George W Bush administration. It does not even matter if impeachment is likely to be successful. Either impeachment is the right thing to do or it isn’t. I for one believe that it isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s the essential thing to do. How do we stop a rogue presidency? How do Americans stand up to an administration that believes it is above the law?

What We Can Do:

Sign up to stay informed, and…

Contact the House Judiciary Committee

Call Speaker Nancy Pelosi: (202) 225-0100

Resources:

Impeachment Reading:

Bill Moyers talks with Bruce Fein and John Nichols

 

Act On Impeachment, Now

 

A National Treasure Calls For Impeachment

 

Update: 

Via Avedon, more impeachment must-reading:

The Moral Imperative for Impeachment

An argument for impeachment as a moral and political prerogative

What happened to the Oath?

 

~

Posted: July 23rd, 2007 under Impeachment.
Comments: none

It was one year ago today that BSP’s feisty and intrepid proprietor Ollie Ox  set up blogshop in Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District.   From its very first post a year ago to today’s,  BSP has been and is now more than ever THE essential site for news from Minnesota’s Fighting First.

Please join me in wishing Ollie and Bluestem Prairie a happy first birthday and many happy returns.
Oh, and if you really want to show BSP some love,  go give some money to Tim Walz’s campaign.  

Congrats! 

 

Posted: July 13th, 2007 under General, Minnesota politics.
Comments: none

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s level:

 

Elevated!

 

Department of Homeland Security forces have been mobilized, with authorization to tap into our national Alka-Seltzer reserves if necessary. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted: July 11th, 2007 under General, Michael Chertoff, War on Terra.
Comments: none

In Pamplona it’s time for San Fermin and its famous running of the bulls..

Meanwhile, back home in Key West with Hemingway’s famous six-toed cats…

~

Posted: July 10th, 2007 under General, Hemingway, LOLcats.
Comments: none

Oh, for — !  My old buddy Travis at Rain Storm has tagged me with that Eight Things meme.    Travis, Travis… how can I ever repay you?  Ehh,  I’m sure I’ll eventually think of something appropriate.  Needless to say, I’d watch my back if I were you.  

Drumroll, please… 

1. All right, here are the rules. 2. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts. 3. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves. 4. People who are tagged need to write on their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. 5. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
 

Okey dokey.  Onward we plunge:

1)  I’m left-handed.  When I play guitar I strum with my left hand and finger the frets with my right hand, without reversing the strings the way most left-handers do, I hear.  This makes it look to right-handers like I’m playing upside down and makes their heads ache like they’s fixin’ to explode.  

2)  I’m double jointed, which may explain why I’m able to do the previous item (e.g. I play a G chord backwards).

3)  I’ve always been bored with my hair color, but never quite bored enough to color it.  Now that I’m hitting my mid fifties and my hair is turning more and more  gray every day — and with really nice streaks of white and silver — I could not be happier.  Turn baby turn!

4)  Whenever a salt shaker gets tipped over at my table, I immediately pour a little bit of salt into my right hand and toss it over my left shoulder.  Because that’s what my mom always did.   Ja,  so it’s Norskie superstition.  Deal with it.  

5)  When I was 13 I entertained lustful thoughts about Soupy Sales. 

6)   I know the words to “Yellow Submarine” in Swedish. 

7)   At Chipotle I always order in Spanish, to the immense amusement of the staff.  “Si, un poco sour cream-o, por favor..”

8)  I’m getting shorter.  In 1987 I was 6′ even; in 2007 I’m only 5′ 10 1/2″.   I hate that!

Wow, that was easier than I thought.  Now comes the hard part:  trying to think of 8 people who haven’t already been tagged. 

Nah; I barely know 8 people altogether, so I hereby send out a general tag to anybody who wants to do this meme.   Have at it, me hearties. 

 

 

Posted: July 5th, 2007 under General, Memes.
Comments: 1

Scooter Libby is a convicted felon. George W. Bush intervened to spare him jail time. In order to do so, Bush circumvented the processes he himself had put in place for pardons and commutations. Bush did this because Scooter Libby was Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and possibly to continue to guarantee that Libby would not reveal that which he was convicted of lying about.

This is no longer a complex issue. George W. Bush does not believe in the rule of law. And he does not believe that his friends should have to go to jail when they break the law. And he believes that his friends and colleagues are more important than anyone else in America. He believes they are above the law.

Jeff Fecke, Blog of the Moderate Left

If you agree with the above, and I do, do what I just did and call the comment line at the White House to tell them so.

The comment and switchboard lines have been constantly busy all morning. It took me 3 attempts to get through and leave a comment, so keep trying. Oh, and please don’t waste any more of my time today with lectures about what a waste of time this is. Believe it or not, I do know that BushCo doesn’t care what I think and won’t hear what I say. THe point of this calling exercise is purely the therapeutic benefit of talking back to the  Bush administration.   Try it.

Then, after that, round up the phone numbers of your senators and congresspeople and call them too.  Tell them to unleash hell on the Bushies and not to hold anything back.  It does not matter if there’s 18 months or 18 days or 18 minutes left in Bush’s term.   The Bush gang are criminals. They need to be taken down.

Posted: July 3rd, 2007 under General.
Comments: none

Barb O’Brien of the Mahablog will be on a religion panel at Yearly Kos next month.

Wow — next month?  Tempus is fugiting way too celeriter. Eheu!  (Gesundheit.) 

Marshaling her thoughts in preparation for that panel, the Mahabarb has written a four part series titled the Wisdom of Doubt.  On the surface it’s a collection of reflections on the alarmingly doubt-free thought processes — if you can call them that — of George W. Bush (on display again today  via the Carpetbagger Report:)

“It’s like there’s no adult supervision; he’s oblivious” 

But O’Brien delves far deeper than that.  Her observations are informed by commentary ranging from Reinhold Niebuhr to Christopher Hitchens, from St. Augustine to Glenn Greenwald. 
Be prepared to spend a lot of time with each of these four posts. This is not lightweight bloggedy frippery, my young dears.  This is a heady mix,  rich in insight and enlightenment.  Is it any wonder why we call her our “Mahabarb”? This is greatness of mind; greatness of blog.
For your reading convenience, here are links to all four parts of The Wisdom of Doubt.  Take your time. Small bites.  Chew carefully.

From Part I:

Our culture looks at doubt as something to overcome.  Being without doubt is celebrated as a virtue, and if you do have doubts you are supposed to replace them with certainties as soon as possible.  But I say the ideal is to have faith
and doubt in balance.  This includes faith in and doubt about yourself.  Too much doubt is crippling, but so is not enough doubt, although in a different way.

Our President, for example, is a man without doubt.  This may be the single biggest reason he’s a disaster at his job.

The Wisdom of Doubt, Part I 

From Part II:

Essentially, “moral clarity” is about bullshitting yourself. It’s about not dealing honestly and compassionately with all aspects of a moral issue. Instead, the “morally clear” begin with the position they want to take and work backward to justify it, scamming themselves and others when necessary to achieve the desired outcome. This twisted way of achieving “clarity” is founded in the dualistic thinking Glenn Greenwald writes about. This dualism assumes one side of an issue must be “good” and the other must be “bad.” Thus, in much anti-choice literature embryos can talk and women who choose abortions are either ignored or assumed to have evil or selfish motivations. But real-world moral issues often involve multiple “good” sides. It is actually quite rare for people and facts to so neatly sort themselves into “good” and “bad” boxes as the morally clear want to sort them. And by achieving “clarity” based on lies and false assumptions, the “clarifiers” actually create more pain and complication.

The Wisdom of Doubt, Part II 

From Part III:

Moral absolutism and “valueless relativism” are just mirror images of each other. Ego and desire inflame the religious and nonreligious alike, to much the same result. A person can wear his Jesus T-shirt and holler hallelujah a hundred times a day, and still be an egotistical, desire-driven wretch underneath. And an egotistical, desire-driven wretch with religion is likely to use religion as an excuse to gratify his ego and desires.
[...]
Trust me; when people say “we’re doing this obnoxious thing not for ourselves, but for God” — they’re doing it for themselves. If not for material gain, it’s for ego gratification, or territorial marking, or something else selfish and ugly clanking about in their ids. They’re just bullshitting themselves about the God thing. Count on it.

The Wisdom of Doubt, Part III

From Part IV:

Now, some of you are probably thinking Hitchens is right and that religion is the root of all evil. Religion is, unfortunately, an easy thing to be fanatical about. Religion presents itself as a solution to our deepest pain and fears. It’s a perfect escape route for people running away from themselves. This is particularly true of dogmatic, authoritarian religions.

In Escape From Freedom, Erich Fromm wrote that people who fear personal freedom, who are uncomfortable with their own autonomy, tend to escape into authoritarianism and conformity. Religion that combines passion with absolutism is the perfect medium for fanaticism.
[...]
History shows us that when authoritarian religion gets mixed up with political power, the results can be nasty. The Inquisition — which was as much about political authority as church authority — is a grand example. We should fear for the Middle East; whose residents seem determined to fold themselves into some kind of authoritarian Islamic theocracy. And we should fear for ourselves as long as fundamentalism is affecting the outcome of elections.

The Wisdom of Doubt, Part IV

 

 I wouldn’t miss that panel at YK for anything.  See you in August, Barb!

 

 

  
 

Posted: July 3rd, 2007 under George W Bush, Good vs. Evil, Religion.
Comments: none