By Dave Lindorff

    American Secretary of War Robert Gates knows a real leader when he sees one.  “Clearly, as far as I’m concerned,” he said, Vladimir Putin, and not President Dmitry Medvedev, "has the upper hand right now."

     Well hell, Gates should know. After all, he deals on a daily basis with the same peculiar situation here in the US, where the president also is a figurehead and the real power lies in the hands of Vice President Dick Cheney.

By Dave Lindorff

In the category of yawn-inducing stories that we knew all about
before they happened, comes word that the jury of senior uniformed
officers sitting in judgement of Osama Bin Laden’s chauffeur in the
first Bush-league military tribunal to actually go to a hearing at
Guantanamo Naval Station found the prisoner, Salim Hamdan…

Drum roll please…

Guilty of supporting terrorism.

I pause here for gasps of astonishment.

It’s awfully silent…

By Dave Lindorff

Some people are expressing consternation and disbelief at a report
by journalist Seymour Hersh that Vice President Dick Cheney had
discussed the idea in his office of having some Navy Seals dress up as
Iranians, and then putting them in faked Iranian speedboats to make a fake
attack on US ships in the Persian Gulf. The ensuing faked battle, with
fake Iranians shooting at US ships and US ships firing back, he
suggested, could be used to spark a war between the US and Iran.

` I don’t know why people would find it hard to believe that this
vice president would think up an idea like having Americans shoot at
other Americans in the interest of his own warped view of national
security.

After all, this is a guy who shoots his own friends.

By David Swanson, http://ConvictBushCheney.org

Dear Italy, I consider you a second home and some of your citizens a second family. I have spent more days on your beautiful soil than anywhere else in the world other than my home in the United States of America. Many of my fellow Americans will, I am sure, join me in asking you to lend us, your friends, a much needed helping hand. In doing so, I think you will be coming to the aid of yourselves as well, and of the rest of the world.

By Dave Lindorff

A federal district judge appointed by President George W. Bush to
the bench has done the right thing, ruling definitively this morning
that the President’s claim of absolute immunity for his advisors from
Congressional oversight and subpoena is “entirely unsupported by
existing case law.”

The ruling, by Judge John Bates, is as important as much because of
who issued it as it is for its impact upon Congressional investigations
into presidential wrongdoing.

Certainly the ruling will open the way for Democrats in Congress to
move harder to investigate the abuses of the current administration,
which have been stymied by administration refusal to provide witnesses,
even to come in and plead the Fifth Amendment protection against
self-incrimination.

If you haven't already, you can see the teaser trailer for the Stone biopic, "W," coming this fall.

There is also a wiki about it here, with a link at the bottom to the IMDB entry. I sure hope it covers the rise of the Bush Dynasty itself to some extent, including some of their more interesting dealings, going back to Prescott. I was disappointed that the film Stone produced for cable, "The Day Reagan Was Shot," neglected to the mention the strange Bush-Hinckley connection reported by the mainstream press at the time.

By Dave Lindorff

The dramatic hearing on presidential crimes and abuses of power
held on Friday by the House Judiciary Committee was both a staged
farce, and at the same time, a powerful demonstration of the power of a
grassroots movement in defense of the Constitution. It was at once both
testimony to the cowardice and self-inflicted impotence of Congress and
of the Democratic Party that technically controls that body, and to the
enormity of the damage that has been wrought to the nation’s democracy
by two aspiring tyrants in the White House.

By Dave Lindorff

Attorney General Michael Mukasey has caught some flak for
proposing, in an address to the American Enterprise Institute, that
Congress should declare war on Al Qaeda.

Instead, he should be applauded for his brilliant idea.

First of all, Mukasey is admitting, whether he wants to admit it or
not, that the Bush/Cheney program of capturing alleged terrorists and
holding them for years as enemy combatants without charge in detention
centers in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and various
undisclosed locations around the globe, and of torturing many of them,
are illegal actions that violate US law and International Law. So let’s
give him credit for that.

By Dave Lindorff

The sorry performance of the US corporate media, which blacked out
stories questioning the official line on the so-called “Iraq Threat”
until the nation was deeply mired in to pointless, bloody war in that
country, and which has almost completely ignored a three-year,
nation-wide movement calling for the impeachment of the president and
vice president, has continued.

By Dave Lindorff

There are two ways to view the news that the House Judiciary
Committee will be holding a hearing on impeachable crimes by President
George W. Bush.

One view would be that this is all a charade and that after all, it
will not be a real impeachment hearing, but rather, simply a hearing
into the impeachable crimes of the Bush administration. As committee
Chair Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) put it, “We’re not doing impeachment,
but he [Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who introduced 36 articles of impeachment]
can talk about it.” Viewed that way, this is not such a big deal. Rep.
Kucinich gets to make his case that the president is committing high
crimes and misdemeanors and abuses of power and war crimes, but then
Congressional Democrats will continue to ignore all the crimes as it
has done since taking control of Congress in November 2006.