There is a house party for Elizabeth Warren’s Senatorial Campaign that will be held in Southbridge on Saturday, December 3 from 5 to 7 PM.  Sharon and I plan to be there.

If anybody in the area would like to attend, send me an email and I will give you the details.  I have to report to the hosts all the names of people planning to attend.

Use the email address sturbridgeforelizabethwarren@gmail.com. You can send email by clicking the previous link or by pasting this address into your email tool.  I have verified the validity of the email address. Previously, I had trouble with the spelling.

You can sign the petition at DemandProgress.org. Here is a bit of what you will see if you follow the previous link:

An unimaginable violation of due process: The Senate just voted to allow the military to detain American citizens indefinitely — without even charging them with a crime — if they are said to be suspected of terrorism.

As Senator Dianne Feinstein put it, “Congress is essentially authorizing the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens, without charge,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein.”

Thankfully, President Obama has threatened to veto the bill, noting that:

Applying this military custody requirement to individuals inside the United States, as some Members of Congress have suggested is their intention, would raise serious and unsettled legal questions and would be inconsistent with the fundamental American principle that our military does not patrol our streets.

Obama only has a few days to make up his mind: Will you urge him to make good on his veto threat?  Just fill out the form at right.

PETITION TO PRESIDENT OBAMA: We urge you to stand by your threat to veto the new National Defense Authorization Act as passed by Congress.  Allowing indefinite military detention of American citizens — without even being charged — is an unfathomable violation of due process.

It is just so hard to imagine that we have come to this.  In defense of this ridiculous bill Carl Levin pointed out that the the Supreme Court has already approved this kind of behavior.  What a sad commentary on the Supreme Court.

President Obama and his promised veto are all that stand in the way of this heinous proposal.  If he keeps his promise, this alone will be reason enough to re-elect him in 2012.  If he fails, _________ (fill in the blank).

To get more background on this issue, see my previous posts Senate defeats challenge to indefinite detention provision, Battlefield America: U.S. Citizens Face Indefinite Military Detention in Defense Bill Before Senate, and Block expansion of presidential power to make war and imprison.

It is sad to read the article Senate defeats challenge to indefinite detention provision on Raw Story.

The polarized US Senate on Tuesday beat back an attempt to set aside proposed rules on detention of terrorism suspects, defying a White House veto threat and criticisms from the FBI and the Pentagon.
…
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who voted against Udall’s amendment, accused Obama of overrelying on the FBI and other civilian institutions in fighting suspected terrorists.

That exact dependence which worked pretty well under Clinton and was decried by Bush.  Bush was the one who changed all that so that the 9/11 attack was not prevented.  The FBI had detected it actually, but their warnings went unheeded.  The Air Force stood by and watched it happen.

Why does Lindsay Graham want to use proven defective methods and forgo proven effective methods?  Who, exactly, is Lindsay Graham working for?

Is the preference for methods that are proven failures part of the Republican strategy to demonstrate that government does not work?

It is hard to imagine that Inouye (D-HI) voted against the amendment.  Wasn’t this country’s atrocious internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II enough proof of the dangers of going down this path?

It is easy to believe that Brown (R-MA) voted to defeat the challenge.  It just adds one more reason why Elizabeth Warren must replace Brown in the Senate at the next election.

If all the money goes to the super-rich, who is going to buy the stuff that will create the jobs new need? I don’t know where all this spending comes from for Black Friday, but when the truth comes out, you will know how you have been hood-winked again. It’s like Lucy Van Pelt(the rich) pulling the football away from Charlie Brown(the middle class), never in the entire life of the Peanuts comic strip did she ever let him kick the football.

So let us hear the explanation from the real economy once again. Unlike the comic strip, enough of the real life Republican Charlie Browns will wake-up eventually. We just have to repeat the message often enough.

The article Battlefield America: U.S. Citizens Face Indefinite Military Detention in Defense Bill Before Senate expands on the warnings I have posted earlier. See also Block expansion of presidential power to make war and imprison.

Below are excerpts of the transcript from the video interview shown in the article.

The Senate is set to vote this week on a Pentagon spending bill that could usher in a radical expansion of indefinite detention under the U.S. government. A provision in the National Defense Authorization Act would authorize the military to jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect — anywhere in the world — without charge or trial.
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And one other point, another very controversial provision in the bill and what the administration has particularly objected to, is the mandatory military custody provision which would say anyone suspected of terrorism in any way connected to Al Qaeda would have to be put into military custody. So, the government wouldn’t even have the option. So, all these FBI investigations that are thwarting terrorist attacks and local police investigations, immediately that would have to be turned over to the U.S. military, and that would become a military action here in the United States, on U.S. soil.

What is the ulterior motive of shifting terrorist investigations from the successful civilian police force to the less successful military? Remember, it was the Bush administration that scoffed at the Clinton administration’s successful foiling of terror plots by treating these plots as criminal activity. It was the Bush administration that failed to stop the 9/11 attacks because they believed more in military intervention than police intervention.

I can understand why the top 1% would want their power enhanced and would want laws passed so they could make more money. What I cannot understand is why they would want their minions in Congress to destroy this country. After all, they have to live here, too. Maybe they think that a member of the top 1% would never fall out of favor so much that one of their own would ever be subject to these provisions of indefinite detention without trial. What fools they be.

As Sharon points out, just think how easy it would have been for the Republicans to get rid of Bill Clinton. They would have just had to disappear him rather than try to impeach and convict him.

Here is Jon Stewart of the Daily Show discussing how Faux Noise covered the President’s Thanksgiving Day message.

If the video fails to run, click on this link.

This video shows why we will all miss Barney Frank in Congress. With any luck, he will just be making more television appearances than he did when he was in office.

Apparently, there is no amount of sarcasm that will ever stop a determined interviewer from asking the next stupid question.

This video is a discussion about science, society, and the universe with Stephen Colbert, who is out of character, at the Kimberley Academy in Montclair, New Jersey on January 29, 2010.

The interview is both funny and enlightening. It is worth the 90 minutes you’ll spend watching it.

I received the following email:

To see why it might be important to sign this petitioin, read the previous post Is Obama Fulfilling the Neocon Dream of Mass Regime Change in Muslim World? and view the referenced video.

The upshot of that previous post is that the decision to go to war has probably already been made and it is probably unstoppable, but that is no reason for not trying.

The Democracy Now article Glenn Greenwald: Is Obama Fulfilling the Neocon Dream of Mass Regime Change in Muslim World? introduces the video with the following:

Political blogger Glenn Greenwald recently wrote about retired General Wesley Clark’s recollection of an officer telling him in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks that the then U.S. Secretary of Defense had issued a memo outlining a plan for regime change within five years in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. We play an excerpt of Clark’s comments and ask Greenwald to respond.

So, if you are wondering why President Obama’s foreign policy is so bellicose, I have no explanation. The video in the above article at least shows you what the policy seems to be. Who actually is in control in this administration and how did they come to have such control? Did we know we were voting for these people to have control, whoever they are?