30 Attainable Affirmations

Yeah, these are all possible. 

1. As I let go of my feelings of guilt, I am in touch with my inner sociopath.
2. I have the power to channel my imagination into ever-soaring levels of suspicion and paranoia.
3. I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else’s fault.
4. I no longer need to punish, deceive, or compromise myself, unless I want to stay employed.
5. In some cultures what I do would be considered normal.
6. Having control over myself is almost as good as having control over others.
7. My intuition nearly makes up for my lack of self-judgment.
8. I honor my personality flaws, for without them I would have no personality at all.
9. Joan of Arc heard voices, too.
10. I am grateful that I am not as judgmental as all those censorious, self-righteous people around me.
11. I need not suffer in silence while I can still moan, whimper, and complain.
12. As I learn the innermost secrets of people around me, they reward me in many ways to keep me quiet.
13. When someone hurts me, I know that forgiveness is cheaper than a lawsuit, but not nearly as gratifying.
14. The first step is to say nice things about myself. The second, to do nice things for myself. The third, to find someone to buy me nice things.
15. As I learn to trust the universe, I no longer need to carry a gun.
16. All of me is beautiful, even the ugly, stupid and disgusting parts.
17. I am at one with my duality.

Source: Suburban Guerrilla » 30 Attainable Affirmations

 

Technorati Tags: Useful - Interesting - Psychology - Sociology

Refocusing the Impeachment Movement on Administration Officials Below the President and Vice-President

This is a brilliant idea. Below are a few excerpts from the article by John Dean (yes, that John Dean). To fully understand the concept it would be well worth your time to read his article in full. This would be a Win, Win situation for the entire country, left and right. 

The Republican Congress shamed itself when it impeached and tried President William Jefferson Clinton. It was a repeat of what an earlier Republican Congress had done to President Andrew Johnson, following the Civil War. Both proceedings were politics at their ugliest.

Democrats, when they undertook to impeach Richard Nixon, moved very slowly, building bipartisan support for the undertaking. Nixon, of course, resigned, when it became apparent that the House had the votes to impeach and the Senate had the votes to convict, with his removal supported by Democrats and Republicans, and conservatives and liberals alike.

Getting the necessary two-thirds supermajority in support of impeachment in today's Senate, which is virtually evenly-divided politically, is simply not possible. With forty-nine senators of the 110^th Congress members in good standing with the Republican Party, and most of them rock-ribbed conservatives, even if the House produced evidence of Cheney personally water-boarding "Gitmo" detainees in the basement of his home at the Naval Observatory, with Bush looking on approvingly, there are more than thirty-three GOP Senators who still would not vote to convict. (Senate Republicans who have no problem with torture, or with removing the right to habeas corpus, and who refused to exercise any oversight whatsoever of Bush or Cheney, are hardly going to remove these men for actions in which they too are complicit.)

Pelosi and Reid have long understood this reality, and rather than do to Bush and/or Cheney what Republicans did to Clinton - impeach him in the House merely because they had the power to do so and they wanted to tarnish him, only to lose their battle decisively in the Senate - they are simply not going to play the same game. Politically, this is smart. Americans do not want another impeachment, particularly when Bush and Cheney will be out of office in January 2009.

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Lowering the aim of an impeachment effort to focus on those who have aided and abetted, or directly engaged in, the commission of high crimes and misdemeanors, would have all the positives, and none of the negatives, of going after Bush and Cheney. It would not be an effort to overturn the 2004 election, but rather to rid the government of those who have participated, along with Bush and Cheney, in abuses and misuses of power; indeed, many among them have actually encouraged Bush and Cheney to undertake the offensive activities.

Many of these men (and a few women) are young enough that it is very likely that they will return to other posts in future Republican Administrations, and based on their experience in the Bush/Cheney Administration, they can be expected to make the offensive conduct of this presidency the baseline for the next president they serve. Impeachment, however, would prevent that from happening.

It will be recalled that Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution states: "Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States." (Emphasis added.) After any civil officer has been impeached, under the rules of the Senate, it requires only a simple majority vote to add the disqualification from holding future office.

In addition, it is likely that the impeachment process of any official in a position below that of the president or vice president, would be treated the same as the impeachment of federal judges. The work is done in both the House and Senate by special subcommittees, so it does not consume the attention of the full bodies until the final votes.

Source: FindLaw's Writ - Dean: Refocusing the Impeachment Movement on Administration Officials Below the President and Vice-President

 

Technorati Tags: Politics - Democrat - Impeachment - Interesting

Why Would Bush Be Retaining A Criminal Lawyer?

There's more to this than we'll probably ever know. Thom Hartman announced on his show today (12/12/06) that a retainer had been taken out on Criminal attorneys for himself and Cheney, I'm not a subscriber to the show so I don't have a working link to direct you to, but if it come's from Thom I'm sure it's good info. The article below addresses the issues as they apply to Fitzgeralds investigation, But personally, I think there's a whole lot more to this than is being disclosed to the public.

Mr. Bush has acknowledged that he had met with a Washington criminal lawyer, Jim Sharp, about the possibility that prosecutors might want to interview him about the case. So far, the White House has made no mention of Cheney's interview or whether it influenced the president's decision to meet with Sharp, the Times notes.
Mr. Bush is not thought to be a focus of the grand jury inquiry, the Times says. On Thursday, Mr. Bush said he did not object to the prosecutors' inquiry.
The decision by Mr. Bush and Cheney to seek private legal counsel is routine for high-level officials when they become involved, even tangentially, in legal issues unrelated to their official duties, the Times observed.

Source: Cheney Said Questioned On CIA Leak - CBS News

 

Technorati Tags: Politics - Bush - Interesting

Who Can Arrest The President?

 This really needs to be read by everyone. It's a question posed at  The Straight Dope, and, I think it should be mandatory for all U.S. citizens to know just who has the authority.

Another issue raised by the conviction of a sitting president is pardon. Can the president pardon himself? Once again, there is no clear answer in the Constitution. Amar says a sitting president cannot pardon himself; ex-White House counsel John Dean says, in effect, "why not?"

While no president has ever pardoned himself, the law supports the president's authority to do so. Scholarly inquiry into the subject was provoked first by fear that Richard Nixon would pardon himself to escape Watergate; later by thought that George H. W. Bush would do so because of the Iran-Contra grand jury; and most recently by concern about Bill Clinton's problem of a possible post-Presidency indictment and trial. And while a few scholars have concluded that the president cannot pardon himself, many more believe that he can.

There are a couple of international implications here too. What I've said so far applies to arrest and trial of the president in the United States. What if he's visiting another country?
First, as a matter of international law, officers from one country cannot arrest someone in another country. To do so is considered a violation of the asylum country's sovereignty. To be sure, many courts have concluded that the right to complain about the violation belongs to the asylum state and not an individual defendant. Under U.S. law a defendant who is illegally arrested can usually still be prosecuted. So if the president left the country, the U.S. could retrieve him for prosecution, knowing that if the asylum country complained, we'd have an international incident on our hands.
If we decided to comply with international law, we could try to extradite him, assuming the U.S. had an extradition treaty with the asylum country. Most extradition treaties exclude political crimes, though, so depending on the charge, this approach might not work. In that case the United States Attorneys' Manual helpfully lists the following fallback options: requesting expulsion or deportation from the asylum country (called rendition), deportation from a third country (if the fugitive is dumb enough to leave the asylum country for one with less favorable extradition policies), lures ("A lure involves using a subterfuge to entice a criminal defendant to leave a foreign country so that he or she can be arrested in the United States, in international waters or airspace, or in a third country for subsequent extradition, expulsion, or deportation to the United States. Lures can be complicated schemes or they can be as simple as inviting a fugitive by telephone to a party in the United States"), red Interpol notices (a sort of international arrest warrant), revocation of U.S. passport (which will often result in deportation), and foreign prosecution.
One problem with foreign prosecution is head of state and head of government immunity. Persons holding either post are immune from liability or arrest while in office under international law. Once out of office, they can be sued or prosecuted for their private acts, but remain immune for their official acts. In the Pinochet case, the UK House of Lords reviewed the law of official immunity and concluded that international crimes are not official acts. This is the plight of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who

was visited by the police in the Ritz Hotel in Paris and handed a warrant, issued by Judge Roger LeLoire, requesting his testimony in the matter of disappeared French citizens in Pinochet's Chile. Kissinger chose to leave town rather than appear at the Palais de Justice as requested. He has since been summoned as a witness by senior magistrates in Chile and Argentina who are investigating the international terrorist network that went under the name "Operation Condor" and that conducted assassinations, kidnappings, and bombings in several countries.

So writes Christopher Hitchens in an article published on Slate.com in 2002. Hitchens says, "It is known that there are many countries to which he cannot travel at all, and it is also known that he takes legal advice before traveling anywhere." A former president could find himself in a similar situation.
In sum, whether the president can be prosecuted prior to impeachment remains controversial. After impeachment, the president can definitely be prosecuted in the U.S. Even in another country, the president could be prosecuted for acts that weren't part of his job or violated international criminal law.

Source: Straight Dope Staff Report: Who has the power to arrest the President?

 

Technorati Tags: Politics - Bush - Useful - Interesting

Where the nukes are: 20 miles from downtown Seattle

We're number one!.. We're number one!

To be hit first that is. 

Nearly one-quarter of America's 9,962 nuclear weapons are now assigned to the Bangor submarine base on Hood Canal, 20 air miles northwest of downtown Seattle.

This makes Bangor the largest nuclear weapons storehouse in the United States, and possibly the world.

The share of the nation's nuclear armaments at Bangor is higher than it has ever been for two reasons:

• The warheads assigned to the ballistic missile submarines stationed at Bangor and at Kings Bay, Ga., now constitute more than half of the U.S. strategic weapons force.

Source: The Seattle Times: Local News: Where the nukes are: 20 miles from downtown Seattle

 

Technorati Tags: Military - Nuclear - Interesting - Washington State - Seattle - Navy - Submarine

Liberal-tarians. The Best Of The New Parties?

Here's a brief excerpt from an article published by the Cato Institute. I personally liked it, and found myself one step closer to finding my true political leanings. 

Conservative fusionism, the defining ideology of the American right for a half-century, was premised on the idea that libertarian policies and traditional values are complementary goods. That idea still retains at least an intermittent plausibility--for example, in the case for school choice as providing a refuge for socially conservative families. But an honest survey of the past half-century shows a much better match between libertarian means and progressive ends. Most obviously, many of the great libertarian breakthroughs of the era--the fall of Jim Crow, the end of censorship, the legalization of abortion, the liberalization of divorce laws, the increased protection of the rights of the accused, the reopening of immigration--were championed by the political left.

Furthermore, it has become increasingly clear that capitalism's relentless dynamism and wealth-creation--the institutional safeguarding of which lies at the heart of libertarian concerns--have been pushing U.S. society in a decidedly progressive direction. The civil rights movement was made possible by the mechanization of agriculture, which pushed blacks off the farm and out of the South with immense consequences. Likewise, feminism was encouraged by the mechanization of housework. Greater sexual openness, as well as heightened interest in the natural environment, are among the luxury goods that mass affluence has purchased. So, too, are secularization and the general decline in reverence for authority, as rising education levels (prompted by the economy's growing demand for knowledge workers) have promoted increasing independence of mind.

Yet progressives remain stubbornly resistant to embracing capitalism, their great natural ally. In particular, they are unable to make their peace with the more competitive, more entrepreneurial, more globalized U.S. economy that emerged out of the stagflationary mess of the 1970s. Knee-jerk antipathy to markets and the creative destruction they bring continues to be widespread, and bitter denunciations of the unfairness of the system, mixed with nostalgia for the good old days of the Big Government/Big Labor/Big Business triumvirate, too often substitute for clear thinking about realistic policy options.

Hence today's reactionary politics. Here, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the rival ideologies of left and right are both pining for the '50s. The only difference is that liberals want to work there, while conservatives want to go home there.

Source: Liberaltarians

 

Technorati Tags: Liberaltarian - Politics - Progressive - Left Wing - Right Wing