"When a new President from a different party takes office, he has an opportunity to alter the political correlation of forces in the United States by rearranging what government does. If this doesn't begin to happen in the first six months of the new Administration, it probably won't happen at all. Right now, President George W. Bush has a much better opportunity than you'd expect--given his nonexistent margin of victory, his inexperience, and his soothing, unambitious campaign rhetoric--to remake the Republican Party in national politics.
"Social Security, the biggest federal program, makes for a good example. From a Republican point of view, an ideal relationship between the government and the people might look like this: Social Security, although it is packaged as insurance, is really a welfare program; workers pay taxes to the government, which sends the money on to retirees. Instead, workers could have individual retirement accounts, whose managers they could designate themselves. Then they would become members of what conservatives like to call "the investor class," which is to say that, as they enter senior-citizenhood, they would care more about how the markets are doing than about the level of government benefits. As John Goodman, the head of a conservative think tank in Dallas and an occasional adviser to Bush over the last few years, puts it, "They would tend to resist government actions that reduce the value of their investments."
"The same principle of loosening the bond between voters and government could be applied elsewhere. In the case of the second-biggest program, Medicare, the government could give states a lump sum that people could use to buy private health insurance. Public education could be financed more through individual vouchers and less through direct government support of schools. The tax system could be made less progressive, with fewer brackets, so that the non-rich would bear a greater share of the burden and would therefore begin to think of government programs, with newly awakened suspicion, as costing them money. A program of tax cuts stretching out over many years would make it more difficult for the Democrats to launch new programs that would increase voters' loyalty to them. All these changes would have the collateral benefit of strengthening Republican interest groups, like stockbrokers, and weakening Democratic interest groups, like public-employees' unions." --Nicholas Lemann, 2/14/01
"Two months after the Supreme Court stepped in to halt the counting of votes and Democratic candidate Al Gore conceded the presidency to George W. Bush, official Washington is moving towards a coalition government in all but name, with the Democrats playing the role of junior partners. The most bitterly contested election in more than a century has been followed by the Democrats' acceptance, without protest, of an illegitimate government and its program of social and political reaction....There is a profound social logic behind the rapprochement between the Bush administration and the congressional Democrats. Bush makes an appeal to the Democratic Party, not merely out of crude political calculation, but because the social base of his own government is extremely narrow. It is impossible to impose drastic changes in social policy in the United States by relying exclusively on the support of multimillionaires, Christian fundamentalists and other right-wing fanatics.
"The Democratic Party, like the Republicans, rests on an ever more narrow social base. The more it has moved to the right, adapting itself to the reactionary consensus within the financial and corporate elite, the more it has alienated the working class and middle-class layers that once formed its mass base of support. The AFL-CIO trade unions, which remain one of the Democratic Party's main props, have themselves undergone a dramatic decay, declining sharply in both membership, as a percentage of the workforce, and in influence over the working class. Today the Democrats rest largely on sections of finance capital and more privileged layers of the middle class, including the civil rights establishment and those sections of the minority population that have risen economically on the basis of government set-asides and subsidies. It is significant that in the debate which has broken out within the Democratic Party on the causes of Gore's defeat, the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council, which Clinton, Gore and Lieberman all support, has declared that Gore lost the election because he went too far to the left in his populist attacks on Bush's tax cut plan. This argument ignores the actual course of events—Gore's turn to populism produced an upsurge of support, until he largely abandoned it during the debates. It also ignores the fact that Gore did not really lose the election, winning the popular vote by 600,000 and losing Florida and the presidency only because of the anti-democratic intervention by the Supreme Court.
"More fundamentally, as in all such disputes in official political circles, the 50 percent of the population who did not vote are left out of the equation. These were disproportionately drawn from the poor and working class. (By one revealing study, of those who voted last November 7, some 70 percent owned shares of stock, compared to 50 percent of the population as a whole.) The Democratic Party refuses to challenge the legitimacy of the Bush administration, above all, because to do so could open the door for a much more radical political development in the United States. American politics sits on a social power keg. The working people, who constitute the vast majority of the population, are excluded from any political influence. The gulf between the two officially sanctioned political parties and the working class has been growing steadily for decades, fueled by the staggering rise in the level of social inequality, which has reached levels unprecedented since the days of the nineteenth century robber barons. In a society in which one percent of the population owns nearly half the national wealth, the two big business parties necessarily confine themselves to a struggle over who can best represent and defend the interests of the uppermost layers, while making purely demagogic appeals to win the votes of the masses.
"In the 2000 election, particularly in Florida, the political implications of the growth of social contradictions have starkly emerged. It is impossible to maintain capitalist democracy under conditions of such acute polarization between rich and poor....In recent weeks there have been muted expressions of concern in the...media about the danger of a major political shift in the United States. The New York Times, in a review of the crisis in the Democratic Party published February 4, voiced the fear that 'if activists become discouraged by Democrats in Washington, finding them too accommodating to Mr. Bush, they could become alienated from traditional party politics.... As both Democrats and Republicans cast themselves as centrists, the emergence of these activists could create new problems for the Democrats by yanking the party to the left.'" --Patrick Martin, 2/13/01
"Three big Texas energy producers, all of which made lavish contributions to George W. Bush's presidential campaign, stand to gain from soaring electricity prices in California. That's one reason the watchdog group Public Citizen says Bush has no interest in promoting price caps, even though such caps are recommended by Republican as well as Democratic governors and members of Congress. Prices for energy coming into California are going through the roof, threatening to bankrupt utilities and hurt the state's businesses, which already are struggling with the gathering recession. In the final days of his administration, Bill Clinton ordered power plants tied into the California grid system to sell excess juice to the state. When Bush took office, he extended the order for two weeks, but strongly indicated he would not offer such help in the future. After looking through financial documents, Public Citizen says it's no wonder the president defers to the corporations. Seven major out-of-state power producers and power marketers [,three from Texas,] posted $6.5 billion in after-tax profits in 2000, according to Public Citizen, which argues they stand to make even more with California's new bailout bill calling for floating $10 billion worth of bonds.
"The key company here is Enron, with a gross income of $777 million, triple that of a year ago. CEO Ken Lay is friends with and a backer of George Bush Sr., Business Week reports in a lengthy piece this month on the firm. After Clinton's victory in 1992, the company hired as consultants two heavies from the first Bush administration, Secretary of State James Baker and Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher Sr. Enron was also the single biggest booster of George W. while he was Texas governor, giving him over $550,000. In last year's presidential race, Enron provided corporate jets and gave $250,000 for the GOP convention in Philadelphia, the magazine goes on to say. Lay served as the campaign's energy advisor. According to Public Citizen, Enron gave $1.1 million to Bush and the Republican National Committee in last year's presidential race. After Bush won the White House, the exec personally put up $100,000 for the inauguration, then signed on as a main advisor to the new administration's Energy Department. --James Ridgeway, 2/11/01
"The selling of George W. Bush's tax cut relies heavily on salami tactics — slicing away opposition a bit at a time. To understand how fundamentally misleading that sales pitch is, we must look at the whole salami. Basically, there are three federal taxes on individuals. The payroll tax, which is levied at a flat rate of 15.3 percent of income up to a maximum of almost $70,000, is the main tax paid by about four out of five families. The income tax is less than 10 percent of income for most families, but it rises to around 30 percent of the income of million-dollar earners. And the inheritance tax, which applies only to estates of more than $675,000 (twice that for couples), is a tax on only the very well off: a mere 2 percent of estates pay any tax, and most of the tax is paid by a few thousand multimillion-dollar estates each year....
"Conservatives who decry the burden of taxes always include the payroll tax in their calculations. And when arguing for tax cuts, the administration starts with numbers that include the whole salami. Again and again we hear about that projected surplus of $5.6 trillion. You shouldn't believe that projection, but for what it's worth more than half of it (the more credible half) comes from Social Security and Medicare — programs financed by payroll taxes. When it comes to tax cuts, however, Mr. Bush's people ignore the payroll tax — that is, they propose no cut in the tax that is most of what most families pay, while demanding a large cut in the income tax, which falls mainly on the affluent. And they want to eliminate the inheritance tax, which is overwhelmingly a tax on the downright wealthy....
"By proposing to eliminate a tax that falls entirely on the rich, to cut a tax that falls mainly on the well off, but to ignore the main tax paid by most people, the administration has made a deliberate decision to tilt tax relief strongly toward the top of the scale. Families earning $50,000 per year would on average get a tax break of about $800 annually; families earning $1 million would get about $50,000. Yes, well-off families currently pay a higher share of their income in taxes — but not that much higher. And no, it's not "class warfare" to point out that the tax cut disproportionately benefits the very, very affluent....The administration pretends that it is offering broad tax relief for working families. Last week Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill declared that the plan "would focus on helping those people who are close to the low-income and middle-income brackets," adding that "it would affect every American that currently pays taxes." This statement isn't technically a lie: "close to" need not actually mean "in," and "affect" need not mean that a family's taxes are actually reduced. But one has to say that Mr. O'Neill, whom the press has portrayed as a straight talker, is learning his new trade very quickly.
"The pretense that this is a populist tax cut is aided by careful slicing of that salami. The Bush people love to point out that families in the lower brackets will see a greater proportional reduction in their income taxes than those in the top bracket; they hope you won't notice that the main burden on such families is not the income tax but the payroll tax, which will not be cut, and that the children of the wealthy will receive large additional tax relief from the elimination of the inheritance tax. Those staged events with "tax families" slice the salami even thinner, carefully avoiding any reference to the major beneficiaries. The only high-income taxpayer, and the only likely inheritor of a taxable estate, [pictured at these photo ops] is Mr. Bush himself. --Paul Krugman, 2/11/01
Strom Thurmond, the nation's oldest and longest-serving senator, has decided to cut back on his routine of gaveling the Senate to order. Thurmond, 98, has been slowed by fatigue in recent days, and last weekend he checked into Walter Reed Army Medical Center for observation, spokeswoman Genevieve Erny said Friday. The South Carolina Republican returned to work on Monday, but has missed several opening sessions. Since Republicans captured the Senate in 1995, Thurmond, the president pro tem, has been a fixture calling the Senate to order and asking the chaplain to recite the prayer. Erny said he decided several weeks ago to cut back on this responsibility. But she said Thurmond has not missed a committee or floor vote this year. As a member of the Judiciary Committee, he participated in the hearings on former Sen. John Ashcroft's nomination to be attorney general.
Thurmond, who lives alone, has been hospitalized several times during the past year when he wasn't feeling well. Recently he entered the hospital after blacking out at a restaurant, Erny said. Republicans claim control of the Senate, though it is split 50-50, because Vice President Dick Cheney holds the tie-breaking vote. If Thurmond were to retire, the Democrats would gain the majority, allowing them to name committee chairmen and have more control over the agenda. Thurmond was elected to the South Carolina House as a Democrat in 1932, ran for president in 1948 on the Dixiecrat ticket, was first elected to the Senate in 1954 and switched to the Republican Party in 1964. --AP, 2/10/01
"With the state's budget squeeze getting tighter each week, a growing number of Texas lawmakers are speaking openly for the first time in a decade about raising taxes, while others want to tap into a state fund that is set aside for the most dire of fiscal times. Along with their unexpected proposals for finding more money, some Democrats are also dishing out blame for why the state needs new money -- and pointing at President Bush and the tax cuts he backed as governor in 1997 and 1999. "I told you so," said Sen. Mario Gallegos, D-Galena Park, a frequent critic of the tax cuts, which will total $2.6 billion over the next two years. Without that money, the state will still be able to spend $108 billion during the 2002-2003 budget cycle, which begins Sept. 1, to maintain current services. But it will likely have less than $1 billion for costly new programs such as health insurance for teachers, a Medicaid expansion or state worker pay raises....
"Some Democrats -- even those who supported some of the Bush-backed tax breaks -- say searching for money is a problem the state should never have faced. "We should have never supported now-President Bush's proposal to return over $1 billion in tax relief. Now, we're really in the hole," said Sen. Carlos Truan, D-Corpus Christi. "He got elected president, yet we were left holding the bag here." And with Bush now proposing a $1.6 trillion cut in federal taxes, several Texas lawmakers said the discussion about the state's fiscal situation is especially timely. "We gave the tax breaks too soon without fully recognizing what our needs are," said Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, and chairman of the Criminal Justice Appropriations subcommittee. "I hope they don't do that on a national level."" --AAS, 2/9/01
Wednesday, February 7, 2001 WASHINGTON --
" He came, he saw, he left -- and hardly anyone in Washington seemed to notice. The first meeting between Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and President George W. Bush may have been front-page news in Canada. But it was barely a footnote in the United States, where Americans have trouble finding Canada on a map, let alone naming its leader. "Isn't Trudeau still in there?" asked one puzzled commuter, who was disappointed to hear that Pierre Trudeau left office in 1984 and died last year. "Jean who?" said another. "I should know his name but I don't." Forget about the world's longest undefended border, obligingly invoked by both leaders at their joint appearance. Forget about the world's largest trading relationship. Forget about the weight of history or the reality of geography. The truth is that Canada remains largely unknown to Americans, and the Prime Minister's visit on Monday was unlikely to change that.
"The American press virtually ignored Mr. Chrétien's visit, despite recent efforts by Canadian diplomats to raise the country's profile -- American journalists, for instance, are sometimes invited to embassy social events to which Canadian journalists are not. In The New York Times, the Prime Minister's visit was dispatched yesterday with an eight-paragraph story on Page 8. It did mention that Ottawa "angled hard" to ensure that Mr. Chrétien was Mr. Bush's first foreign visitor, much as officials deny the importance of that distinction. In The Washington Post, Mr. Chrétien's visit was more prominent; he merited a 16-paragraph story on Page 4 under the headline, "Chretien, Bush Strike Up the Bond." The story was accompanied by a photograph of the smiling pair seated in the Oval Office. If Mr. Chrétien's visit was largely unpublicized, it was because the White House seemed to want it that way. This was a "working" meeting -- short, informal and modest, with none of the pomp, such as an honour guard or an exchange of gifts. It seemed to have been organized hurriedly.
"It was an invisible visit," said John Arundel, a burly stock broker who works a block from the White House, where Mr. Bush dined with Mr. Chrétien. "No one even knew he was here. There were no crowds outside the gates. There should have been a splash but, well, it's Canada." Although seemingly unaware until recently that the Prime Minister's last name is not Poutine [a Canadian fast food concoction that, during the primaries, Bush thought was the name of the Canadian Prime Minister], Mr. Bush apparently wants to ingratiate himself with Mr. Chrétien. The two leaders met together with only their national security advisers for 40 minutes, and then were joined by key advisers, including Vice-President Richard Cheney, for a 90-minute dinner in the White House's Old Family Dining Room. "You've got a hell of a boss," the President told Canadian Foreign Minister John Manley last night after the dinner. Clad in a jogging suit, the President offered his assessment when he saw Mr. Manley who was still at the White House in talks with Secretary of State Colin Powell an hour after the dinner had ended. Mr. Bush characterized the session as an ice-breaking meeting. "And it didn't take long to break the ice," he said.
"The President also [waspishly] joked that he'd like to do some fishing with Mr. Chrétien, appearing to be well aware of the Prime Minister's criticism of former prime minister Brian Mulroney for fishing with his father, George Bush Sr., when he was president. In fact, as officials attempted to end the brief news conference, Mr. Bush stopped to take a question on whether he intended to go fishing with the Prime Minister. "I've got a very important answer to give. The question was fishing," he said, winking at reporters. "We talked about fishing. And I would hope some day to be able to go and catch small-mouth bass on the Prime Minister's equivalent of Camp David," the U.S. presidential retreat. He added that "if things work out well," Mr. Chrétien can join him for fishing at his Texas ranch where Mr. Bush has stocked a lake with large-mouth bass.
"Mr. Chrétien said he looked forward to fishing with Mr. Bush, although he insisted he had no regrets about disparaging his predecessor, Brian Mulroney, for his highly publicized angling expeditions with Mr. Bush's father when he was president. Both leaders played down any suggestions that political differences or the Prime Minister's close relationship with Mr. Bush's Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, might put a strain on the relationship. Mr. Chrétien's nephew, Raymond Chrétien, the former ambassador to Washington, caused a stir during the runup to the U.S. election when he said that Canada might find it easier to work with Democrat Al Gore because he was more familiar with Canada than was Mr. Bush. After the election, the Prime Minister himself questioned the wisdom of Mr. Bush's $1.6-trillion (U.S.) tax-cut plan, the central plank in his election platform. Mr. Bush plans to send his tax plan to Congress this week and yesterday held a news conference to begin the sales job to get it passed. Mr. Chrétien said the Americans were more like cousins than friends and can count on Canadian support, though "minor" differences can crop up from time to time. [Bush, in turn, graced the occasion with another of his famous "Bushisms": ""I confirmed to the prime minister that we appreciate our friendship."] --Shawn McCarthy, Paul Koring, and Andrew Cohen, Toronto Globe and Mail, 2/7/01
"Will the Bush administration be a friend to Scientology? Officials at the controversial religion — which many critics have called a cult — have been boasting about its ties to the current administration, and are saying that the president’s support of faith-based social programs could mean that the government will funnel tax money its way. ONE SUCH PROGRAM is Applied Scholastics, a Los Angeles-based operation that promotes the teaching methods of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Applied Scholastics has been successful with church and community tutoring programs, especially in some inner cities in California — but Scientology foes have charged that it’s a front for the church and a recruiting tool. A recent issue of Freedom, the official Scientology magazine, features a picture, taken back at the President’s Summit for America’s Future, with Barbara and George H. Bush embracing both a high-ranking executive of the Church of Scientology and John Travolta, the actor who is a member and vocal advocate of Scientology. Colin and Alma Powell are also in the photo, which was taken when the church officials went to the summit in Philadelphia, during the Clinton years, to promote Applied Scholastics.... “The Bushes have long been associated with faith-based programs that address the needs of our society,” says cult and alternative religion expert Rick Ross, whose Web site, www.rickross.com, outlines the Bushes’ connections to the Rev. Moon and his various programs. “Some of these groups are very controversial and may have alternative agendas. So when we talk about funding faith-based programs, we should proceed very cautiously.” --Jeannette Walls, 2/5/01
Two events have occurred recently that make crystal clear that a solid case is shaping up for the impeachment of the five United States Supreme Court Justices that handed the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush. The first event was a little reported lecture given by Chief Justice William Rehnquist to the Catholic service group, the John Carroll Society on January 7, 2001. According to an account in the Washington Post, Rehnquist gave the talk and suggested "...that sometimes members of the court have to become involved in political matters to prevent a national crisis." According to the Post, "The speech 'helps explain what was in Rehnquist's mind about why he took jurisdiction under such questionable circumstances' in Bush v. Gore, said Michael Les Benedict, a scholar of the Hayes-Tilden election who teaches history and constitutional law at Ohio State University." The Post further reports Benedict saying that in the speech "He's [Rehnquist] making a rather clear statement of what he thought the primary job of our governmental process was ... That was to make sure the conflict is resolved peacefully, with no violence." What is striking about this news report is that it tells us the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court has invented for himself and his four colleagues an extra-legal rationalization for intruding into the political process. Just where in the Constitution does the Supreme Court get its power to decide presidential elections? Isn't this 'judicial activism' at its worst? The straw man Rehnquist sets up for this foray is "preventing a national crisis." And that evokes images of the sweet song of the despot, "In exchange some of your freedom, I will provide you with safety and security." Reflection on this quite astonishing reasoning by Rehnquist should remind us of what Benjamin Franklin told us about the value of our freedoms in light of imagined or even real threats to our comfort. Franklin warned us that: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." One wonders if Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, O'Connor, and Kennedy have become so accustomed to the trappings of absolute judicial power that they have discarded the restraining principles that our patriot founders suffered for in the American Revolution 225 years ago.
The second...event making the case for action against the Supreme Court's 'Gang of Five' is the publication in the most recent issue of The Nation magazine of an article by... prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi entitled: "None Dare Call It Treason." ...The case against the five Supreme Court Justices who voted to award the nation's highest office to George W. Bush is laid out in a concise, understandable, and powerful manner in the Bugliosi monograph....In a nutshell this is what he demonstrates. On December 12, 2000, five members of the Untied States Supreme Court, Chief Justice Rehnquist along with Justices Scalia, Thomas, O'Connor, and Kennedy rendered a decision that found a way, "... to aid their choice for President, Bush, in the suppression of the truth, finally settling, in their judicial coup d'etat, on the untenable argument that there was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause..." Bugliosi cites numerous legal scholars, including conservatives, that call the court's ruling clearly politically motivated. Which means, Bugliosi says, "...that this is tantamount to saying, and can only mean, that the Court did not base its ruling on the law." He then emphatically explains the ramifications of this court action: "The stark reality, and I say this with every fiber of my being, is that the institution Americans trust the most to protect its freedom and principles committed one of the biggest and most serious crimes this nation has ever seen -- pure and simple, the theft of the presidency. And by definition, the perpetrators of this crime have to be denominated criminals." (All emphasis Bugliosi's) In six devastating points Bugliosi makes the case against the Gang of Five:
1. Florida state law says that the Florida Supreme Court has the authority in challenged election certification matters to "provide any relief appropriate under the circumstances" such as the manual recount it ordered on December 8. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the recount with, as Bugliosi writes, "...the haste of a criminal, Justice Scalia ... wrote, unbelievably, that counting these votes would 'threaten irreparable harm to the petitioner [Bush]...by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election. In other words, although the election had not yet been decided, the absolutely incredible Scalia was presupposing that Bush had won the election -- indeed had a right to win it -- and any recount that showed Gore got more votes in Florida than Bush could 'cloud' Bush's presidency."
2. The 5-4 decision for Bush was handed down as an unsigned opinion, usually reserved for unanimous rulings. Bugliosi points out that "...on the run and in a guilty state of mind, none of the five Justices, even the brazen shameless Scalia, wanted to sign their name to a majority opinion of the Court reversing the Florida Supreme Court's order to recount the undervotes."
3. Buglisoi notes that even the Court itself knew that the so-called equal protection argument was bogus -- for just two weeks earlier, on November 22, they denied review of a Bush assertion that "the lack of a uniform standard to determine the voter's intent violated the equal protection clause..."
4. While changing its mind and deciding that now the equal protection argument was adequate for their purposes, why then, Bugliosi asks, didn't the Supreme Court send the case back to Florida with the requirement that a statewide standard be used in counting the undervotes? To get the results they sought, the five Justices resorted to a fatuous and contrived reliance on dates and deadlines. Yet Justice Stevens's dissent observed that "... in 1960, Hawaii appointed two slates of electors and Congress chose to count the one appointed on January 4, 1961..." Therefore, "nothing prevents the majority (the five Justices) ... from ordering relief appropriate to remedy that violation (the equal protection argument) without depriving Florida voters of their right to have their votes counted."
5. In finding a way to decide for Bush, the five Justices did a complete U-turn on their well-known philosophy of adherence to federalism and state's right.
6. The use of the equal protection argument has a logical consequence. Bugliosi writes: "... the Court knew that its ruling (that differing standards for counting votes violate the equal protection clause) could not possibly be a constitutional principle cited in the future by themselves, other courts or litigants. Since different methods of counting votes exist throughout the fifty states." Meaning, of course that "...to apply the equal protection ruling of Bush v. Gore would necessarily invalidate virtually all elections throughout the country." So what did Rehnquist, Scalia and the others do? They said this ruling was "... limited to the present circumstances ..." In other words, Al Gore was the only person they had to punish and, as Bugliosi says, "... the Court was interested in and eager to grant relief to, one person and one person only, George W. Bush."
Vincent Bugliosi makes it clear to all of us what happened in the 2000 election and what it means. "The right of every American citizen to have his or her vote counted, and for Americans (not five unelected Justices) to choose their President was callously and I say criminally jettisoned by the Court's majority to further its own political agenda." Readers should find the time to study the entirety of Mr. Bugliosi's article.
Wwhere does one go for justice in Bush's America of 2001? Does anyone believe that an "Attorney General Ashcroft" would appoint a Justice Department special prosecutor to investigate the five Supreme Court Justices that put him and his boss in power? Does anyone believe that radical Republican House or Senate members, so eager to drive President Clinton from office for alleged 'high crimes' will now call for justice for the Justices that put their 'President' in office? Perhaps this is the beginning of Americans realizing the consequences of a 'stolen' presidency. We can now experience the frustration of freedom-loving people who live in third world dictatorships where there is nowhere to turn but to the oppressing regime itself for justice. Yet the defense of freedom, liberty, and our government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" demands that justice be done. Before it is too late we should first call upon the American Bar Association to launch an immediate ethics investigation into the conduct of its five members who serve on the land's highest court. Such an investigation should include possible conflicts-of-interest that have been already reported in the press -- O'Connor's statements before the election about wanting to retire but not willing to do so if a Democrat were elected president; Scalia's two sons who were working for law firms representing the Bush campaign; and Clarence Thomas's wife working for an organization that was soliciting resumés for a possible Bush presidency. Then we should ask patriotic and courageous members of the United States House of Representatives to follow Article II, Section 4, of the United States Constitution and initiate impeachment proceedings against these members of the Supreme Court -- Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, O'Connor, and Kennedy. The charges being that the five Justices appear to have intentionally broken their oaths to uphold the Constitution by violating the constitutionally provided manner that prescribes how the president and vice president are to be elected. Therefore, the charges should be the high crimes of unlawfully usurping Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, and conspiracy to usurp Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution. --Dave Chandler, 1/27/01
BUSH WATCH: THE NOVELby Jerry Politex
I drove my silver Audi down Mesa Drive, the spine of Cat Mountain, hung a left at the cat's tail, drove quickly up the hilly, winding 2222 in low gear, took a right onto Balcones Drive, and came to a stop in the rear parking lot of Chez Zee.
Another sunny, warm early spring day in Northwest Austin, Texas. The lunch crowd was pretty much thinned out by now, so I had choices of parking spaces. I got out of the car, the turbines winding down, and stood by the rear entrance to the restaurant, a pretty-good place for not very expensive Southwestern food. I didn't have long to wait.
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