popplers

Friday quickies (angry political version)

My anger and disgust with this administration is apparently unbounded, as it increases every day, with every news story I read or listen to. I feel that there is nothing that I can do to influence the outcome of anything that happens in government, and every day I read something else that makes me want to scream and scream and scream. Why aren't there 218 Representatives and 66 Senators who are willing and eager to impeach W? Barring that, why couldn't Congress reauthorize and reinstate the Office of the Independent Counsel? Paging Mr. Starr: there are some allegations of misconduct that we'd like you to look into. Currently making my head spin:

• Halliburton received a contract to build centers with "temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs." I can't wait to see what "new programs" get cooked up for us over the next 907 days.
  
• Historian Sean Wilentz ponders the Dubya legacy: Worst. President. Ever. "Instead of emphasizing any political, diplomatic or humanitarian aspects of a war on Iraq -- an appeal that would have sounded too "sensitive," as Cheney once sneered -- the administration built a "Bush Doctrine" of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative threats and embracing principles previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S. foreign policy-makers, even at the height of the Cold War. The president did so with premises founded, in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking."
  
• Checks and balances, my ass. More bizarro logic: Bush will "faithfully execute the law in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution," but he can ignore any statute passed by Congress that conflicts with his Constitutional interpretation, including "military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ''whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research."