i hate George Bush!

[dissention]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

Well what the hell does the 40's have to do with anything these days. She referred to the U.S. training terrorists. I took that to mean they were currently doing it. I was like WTF Mea Culpa

It's all part of the argument that America is usually the one that f*cks themselves. We did with Castro, we did with Saddam, we did with the 9/11 hijackers; the list goes on and on. We want it both ways all the time.

[Hawkeye]

Stevie - Lindsey, Country's gonna collapse - Country's not gonna collapse. It's basically the same no matter what disscussion on The Ledge We Just Disagree. Isn;t that a Beetles song

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by dissention

It's all part of the argument that America is usually the one that f*cks themselves. We did with Castro, we did with Saddam, we did with the 9/11 hijackers; the list goes on and on. We want it both ways all the time.

Agreed. That is why we should change our policies regarding fossil fuels. But, the big three oil companies pretty much own the world and will until the last drop is extracted. Sad, very sad.

[dissention]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

Agreed. That is why we should change our policies regarding fossil fuels. But, the big three oil companies pretty much own the world and will until the last drop is extracted. Sad, very sad.

Which is why I was crossing my fingers that the Iraqi's would burn the oil fields last year.

Check this out, too:

http://www.moveleft.com/moveleft_ess...icans_only.asp

Condoleezza Rice Shows Contempt For Congressional Democrats and Their Constituents; Republicans Only Briefing on Iraq

by Eric Jaffa, April 27, 2004

Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor, gave a briefing to members of Congress about the war in Iraq on April 22, 2004. This is proper. But she managed to turn the event into something obnoxous. She excluded House Democrats, thereby slighting almost half of Congress and the millions of people they represent.

Congresswoman Betty McCollum (D-MN) discusses this in a letter to the editor published in the Minneaoplis Star Tribune on April 27, 2004:

Last week Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives were given a closed-door briefing by Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, about the Iraq war, the extension of duty for U.S. troops and the June 30 handover of Iraqi sovereignty. Democrats in Congress were not invited and not allowed to participate.
Together, Reps. Martin Sabo, James Oberstar, Collin Peterson and I represent almost 2.5 million Minnesotans, including U.S. troops, reservists and National Guardsmen and women serving in Iraq, as well as their families here at home. Our nation is at war, yet our Republican colleagues are privileged to national security briefings while Democrats are shut out. It appears the Bush administration and the Republicans in Congress don't want to inform us about the situation in Iraq.

Our troops and their families have my support, but my constituents and I deserve to know if President Bush has a plan for a war that is costing hundreds of American lives, thousands of Iraqi lives and $4.7 billion per month. Minnesotans should expect their members of Congress, whether Democrat or Republican, to be given equal, not separate and unequal, access to briefings on this vital national security issue.

Rep. Betty McCollum,

Washington, D.C.

[Hawkeye]

Safest, perhaps. Because it owns the most weapons. You have enough weapons to blow the rest of the world off the map.

See we agree on something. Security Baby. It pays.

[The Tower]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

Then why was the issue of EC before the Court? I thought they were asserting it. That article above suggests they are. I could be wrong though.

Here ya go- read the whole thing.

NINA TOTENBERG reporting:

The conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch and the liberal environmental group the Sierra Club filed suit to find out just how much influence energy executives had. They sued under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, known by the inelegant acronym FACA. Judicial Watch filed a similar suit in the Clinton years to find out information about first lady Hillary Clinton's health task force, and back then a federal appeals court ruled that the White House had to release information about outsiders who participated in the process.

It is precisely that information that Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club have been trying to get hold of from the Cheney energy task force for the last three years. The administration has resisted, claiming that since all the members of the task force are full-time government employees, the task force is not covered by the disclosure requirements of the Advisory Committee Act. But when the federal judge in charge of the case ordered a limited production of documents to see if that was true, the administration took an extraordinary appeal: first to the Circuit Court of Appeals and, when it lost there, to the Supreme Court.

What is extraordinary about the appeal is that it came midcase, and that is usually not allowed. Nor are complaints about the pretrial document production orders known as discovery orders. Today, the government's Supreme Court advocate, Solicitor General Ted Olson, told the high court that this case is different because the document production, the discovery order here, struck at the heart of the president's constitutional power to get confidential advice from whomever he wants. Thus, he said, the lower court order violated the constitutional separation of powers.

But Justice Anthony Kennedy wondered if the president wasn't invading the judicial branch's power to craft how cases are handled, and Justices Souter and Ginsburg asked how they could resolve the issues in this case without a factual record and a lower-court judgment on the merits of the case. Olson contended that this case is much like the Nixon Watergate tapes case, where the Supreme Court accelerated consideration. But Justice Kennedy pointed out that President Nixon had claimed executive privilege over his tapes, whereas here the president has not claimed executive privilege.

Justice ANTHONY KENNEDY: In the Nixon case, the president exercised his privilege, and that was overruled.

Mr. TED OLSON (Solicitor General): The president is in the position of having to defy a court order, risk sanctions of some sort...

Justice KENNEDY: But you're not defying a court order if you exercise a privilege.

TOTENBERG: Olson responded that the court should take the president at his word when he says that every member of his energy task force is a government employee and, thus, not covered by the disclosure provisions of the advisory committee law. Otherwise, he said, everything the president does would be subject to a FACA lawsuit in a heartbeat. But Kennedy and other justices were struggling with why there should be a different set of pretrial discovery rules for the president and vice president.

Justice KENNEDY: How do you describe the general exception that you want us to have for discovery disputes in the district courts?

Mr. OLSON: When the...

Justice KENNEDY: When it involves the vice president it's different?

Mr. OLSON: Well, it certainly does when it involves the president or the vice president in core constitutional functions.

TOTENBERG: Why then, asked Justice Stephen Breyer, didn't the president invoke executive privilege? That would have prompted a clear appeal route without making any exceptions.

Mr. OLSON: Executive privilege may not have covered every scrap of paper. It would have required the president and the vice president to spend time with documents deciding whether or not to exert executive privilege.

TOTENBERG: Justice Kennedy responded wearily, `I hear in your argument echoes of every discovery complaint I've ever listened to.'

But if Olson had a tough ride, lawyer Alan Morrison, representing the Sierra Club, got a rodeo rough-up when he rose to make his argument. Justice John Paul Stevens was perhaps the most skeptical, clearly suggesting that in a case like this, the pretrial discovery process would produce as much information as a win at the end of the case.

Justice JOHN PAUL STEVENS: What do you get if you win the lawsuit? That's the thing I really haven't been understanding here.

Mr. ALAN MORRISON (Attorney, Sierra Club): We get copies of all the papers that were exchanged in the entire advisory committee process. The adviso...

Justice STEVENS: Have you not asked for those in discovery?

Mr. MORRISON: We have asked for a discovery request which the government contends are very broad and could include some of those things. Our discovery plan...

Justice STEVENS: And are they right?

Mr. MORRISON: They could be interpreted as being right, but not in light of what the district court said.

TOTENBERG: The district court judge, in fact, ordered the White House to produce records of who participated in task force meetings, subgroup meetings and who saw and had input in the task force reports. Justice Breyer picked up on that, contending that government can't live in a cocoon in developing policy.

Justice STEPHEN BREYER: This is not a discovery statute; this is not a Freedom of Information Act statute. This is a blue-ribbon committee statute.

Mr. MORRISON: No, Your Honor, if you...

Justice BREYER: And if you turn it into the latter...

Mr. MORRISON: It is partially...

Justice BREYER: ...you'll stop every lower-level official in government when he's creating legislative policy from getting on the phone and calling up whoever he pleases. Now you understand that argument. I want your response.

Mr. MORRISON: All right. We concede that both this committee and the executive office of the president and anyone else can call anyone they want at any time without triggering FACA. Only if you have a formalized committee and if you bring people in to participate in the same manner as other committee members...

Justice ANTONIN SCALIA: That would require voting.

Mr. MORRISON: Not necessarily, Your Honor.

Justice SCALIA: I've always been puzzled by that in your briefs, `to participate in the same manner as other committee members.' It seems to me the essence of being a committee member is having a vote in the outcome.

TOTENBERG: That was Justice Antonin Scalia, whose refusal to disqualify himself from the Cheney case because of a duck-hunting trip he took with the vice president in January, has provoked considerable controversy. If anyone expected the ebullient Scalia to remain silent, however, they were wrong. Indeed, Scalia opined at some length on what he views as the mistaken notion that executive privilege claims should be resolved by the courts instead of the political process.

Justice SCALIA: That is not my view of executive privilege. I think executive privilege means whenever the president feels that he is threatened, he can simply refuse to comply with a court order. And after that, it's a struggle between two branches. And if you view executive privilege that way, forcing him to assert executive privilege is really pushing things to an extreme that should not very often occur in this republic.

TOTENBERG: Scalia's view of executive privilege may not be held by a majority of the court, but for the purposes of this case, his long track record on deferring to executive power all but assures his vote for Cheney. Today's argument suggested that he may well be in the majority on that. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by dissention

Which is why I was crossing my fingers that the Iraqi's would burn the oil fields last year.

And you call yourself an an environmentalist

I know, Minute Rice is screwing up. I just hope America gets it on Nov. Sadly, I know FAR to many people who think W hung the moon, etc.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by Lux

Actually I don't agree. I mean, I agree that they exist, but I don't agree that they should.

So, no nation should arm itself. That actually would be great if all nations could be trusted. But, they cannot. So, we have to arm ourselves.

[Sugar]

Originally Posted by Lux

Safest, perhaps. Because it owns the most weapons. You have enough weapons to blow the rest of the world off the map.

We can't forget that we only have borders with two other countries; as long as neither the Mexicans or the Canadians get uppity that's just a lucky break we caught.

[dissention]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

And you call yourself an an environmentalist

I know, Minute Rice is screwing up. I just hope America gets it on Nov. Sadly, I know FAR to many people who think W hung the moon, etc.

*scurries off to buy an Exxon*

And yeah, Shrub hung the moon, then he drilled into it to see if there was any treasure.

[dissention]

Originally Posted by Lux

And Israel has proven itself to be very trustworthy hasn't it?

Eek. Let's not talk about them or I'll be blown off the board. Palestine gets a raw deal sometimes, IMO.

[strandinthewind]

Cheney, not W is asserting the EP. Hmmm, that makes it more interesting. In theory Cheney is not part of the Exec. Branch in that he is also part of the Legislative Branch. As that article above suggests, THE vp has no official exec. role unless the Pres. is no longer in office. But, in this case, like in Hillary's case, he was perfoming a function for the exec. branch and he is quasi - part of that branch. What an intersting legal argument. I cannot wait to see what the Court does in this. Thank you for correcting me

[Hawkeye]

We can't forget that we only have borders with two other countries; as long as neither the Mexicans or the Canadians get uppity that's just a lucky break we caught.

.
.
I meant to say that earlier too. Great Point. Those two oceans are like our best friends. And whoich is probably why I put Austrailia at number 2. You guys are probably safe then us. Who's ever heard of any war involving Austrailia. And you guys got fleetwood MAc to come to your Country, how can you beat that.

[dissention]

Originally Posted by Lux

Yes they get a bad deal! They are subjected to living conditions that are technical violations of human rights, as worded by the UN, yet we don't invade and overthrow Sharon.

If I were to walk down the street and say that, I'd be stoned. But I totally agree. My sympathy has always been with them, not the Israeli's.

[Hawkeye]

sorry I didn't know that.yeah WWII sucked. England actually got the **** bombed out of them then too. Meanwhile America (at least the 48) we're at home watching Bugs Bunny. Geesh I'm starting to get why people hate us now