Progressives were highly incensed over the use of torture under the Bush-Cheney team that made Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib household terms denoting harsh abrogation of fundamental liberties under the U.S. Constitution and international law.

As Massimo Calabresi noted in the July 12 issue of Time, the Obama "White House ... has moved steadily to the right on national security in the past 18 months."

This movement by the Obama Administration has led to a rare clash between the executive branch and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

A New Winter Soldier Speech Regarding Healthcare
By Tom Wieliczka

I've revised Senator John Kerry's 1971 Winter Soldier Speech to Congress, from being about The Vietnam War to being about Healthcare.

I simply took Senator Kerry's words:  

"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake."

and converted that portion of his speech into one concerning healthcare and and people that get red-flagged or go through rescission with their health claims.

These are the revised last five paragraphs of that original speech.....

It is a deep infamy that will greet Rush Limbaugh in any historical evaluation of the slime he has unleashed in what is euphemistically referred to as radio commentary.

Limbaugh's current siege of the hateful merging with the tasteless relates to the current thug activity occurring as political and civic leaders along with administrators coalesce in town meetings in which efforts are made to explain about President Obama's health care proposal.

Distortion muddied debate waters when, early in his first administration, President Bill Clinton sought to introduce a comprehensive national health care proposal.  

Here you are expressing shock that Nancy Pelosi could actually suggest that the CIA would veer from the truth!  You have both said that such a disgraceful act should bar her from serving as Speaker of the House.

Ah, and how touching it was, Republican Minority Leader Boehner, for you in your outrage to say that the CIA had no reason to lie.

All you needed, Newt and John, to make your Washington carnival complete was a conga line led by you to the accompaniment of Shirley Temple singing "The Good Ship Lollipop."

Another important sign of such dangerously dysfunctional behavior involves an inability to reason and construct thinking not on realistic application of facts, where even then a person can reach a wrong conclusion, but in absurdly dysfunctional applications of subject matter to reach nonsensical conclusions.

Fox's right wing propaganda panderer Bill O'Reilly has succumbed in both areas with disastrous results.  

His interview of Jeremy Glick, whose father died as a first responder to the 9/11 tragedies, provided an instance of a frothing at the mouth O'Reilly who shut off Glick's microphone after he strayed from the acceptable course set out by the moderator of a love feast for George W. Bush and the acceptance that he was the hero and national symbol for 9/11 leadership.

The key question for these self-righteous Republicans was:  "Did Clinton lie?"  The corollary was that if President Bill Clinton lied on the subject of whether or not he had sex with White House intern Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office then grounds for impeachment existed.  

It is doubtful that thoughts of the stains on Lewinsky's blue dress have left the "chaste conscience" of "moralist" Ann Coulter for a single waking minute since the Clinton-Lewinsky liaison occurred.  

To put the issue in perspective, the lie that Clinton ultimately acknowledged he told was in an affidavit in a civil legal case.  Virtually any domestic relations attorney or psychologist dealing with matrimonial affairs would concur that perhaps the single leading instance of lying occurs when spouses deny extra marital affairs, the type of conduct applicable in the case against Clinton for impeachment.

When the AG told Congress he didn't recall any Constitutional guarantee of habeas corpus, I was stunned.   I didn't realize Art. I, Sec. 9 of the Constitution was a figment of my imagination.  At least that explains why no one uses it anymore.  

This week really surprised me, though.  I hear Congress just granted more unchecked powers to Gonzales.  I can't understand how that happened.  It's like no one recalls his testimony.  It was awhile before I figured out the problem: we haven't been supportive enough.

Instead of calling them Vichy Democrats who cower in front of glass-jawed bullies, we should be supporting them.  We've done it before.  We can do it again.  In 2006 we gave them a mandate.  You and I know the majority of America was behind them.  The problem was they didn't feel it.  That's our fault.  We need to show them we're behind them.

Working together, we can solve this ...

A classic example occurred when yesterday's (July 24) New York Times reported that Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, concerned that George W. Bush is playing politics with key legislation he threatens to veto, announced their intention to seek a meeting with him to resolve the impasse.

The article brought immediately to mind a term Jerry Brown used when he was California's governor, "planetary realism."  To request such a meeting with Bush at this time to resolve a legislative impasse flies in the face of planetary realism.

The article brought to mind as well that so frequently repeated film footage from 1940 showing a thoroughly flummoxed Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain standing in the balcony of his residence at 10 Downing Street holding proudly aloft a piece of paper.

Nancy Pelosi is dead wrong!  People voted in 2006 to end the Iraq War going on under a man who has confused the presidency with a dictatorship.

In a July 16, 2007 letter to the editors of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer James Maynard of Sammamish, Washington has said something that should have been said long ego.  

He begins his thought provoking, psychological-sounding letter quoting a Founding Father of the U.S.A. and its fourth president, James Madison, who said, "Those who are to conduct a war cannot, in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges, whether a war ought to be commenced, continued or concluded."

Ms. Berge did not hesitate to lash out against both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Patty Murray of Berge's home state of Washington.  

Berge asserts that Pelosi and Murray have turned a blind eye to some of the worst lawbreakers in American history, all the while pretending that the U.S.A. has a good justice system.

Ruth Berge minces no words as she boldly declares:

Once that the American people spoke loud and clear in the 2006 elections by ending Republican leadership in both houses of Congress polls clearly revealed that the cutting edge issue was the Iraq War and the desire to extricate America from it.  

Americans voted for Democratic candidates not because of any strong party preference, but based on a desire to end an unpopular foreign conflict with mounting death tolls and no end in sight.

As British government functionaries worked quietly behind the scenes, shrewdly seeking not to raise temperatures, the focus was on getting all British naval personnel held by the government of Iran home safely.  

At that point Bush entered the scene, filling the air with harsh, vitriolic rhetoric, the kind of unneeded, ill-informed bluster that can destroy delicate diplomatic initiatives.  At that point the British government in diplomatic jargon told Bush to butt out and shut up.  He was told that his efforts were neither required nor wanted.

A debt of gratitude should go to those in the British government who promptly removed Bush's uncouth and unneeded presence from the scene.  The wisdom of that action bore results as the British sailors are leaving Iran without any political repercussions visible on the horizon.

"Our legislators at both the federal and state level are equally bound by Article 6 of the United States Constitution to support it.  To ignore the assault that has occurred is dereliction."

As for Democrats who have failed their constitution-bound duty to begin impeachment proceedings, we must censure Nancy Pelosi emphatically.  How dare Nancy decide, "Impeachment is off the table."

Apparently instead of demanding that impeachment investigations begin immediately, Nancy has demanded a larger airplane to supply for herself and those she deems worthy to be taken along for the ride, at taxpayer expense, of course.