Surge - verb

Definition: Temporary increase in the rate of flow.

Example: Blood was being shed in Iraq, but not fast enough for BushCo, so a surge was ordered, to turn their rivers red more quickly.



Updated to hilight the Iacocca quote.

I just wanted to remind everyone how we got to this point.

This is another reason to deny Bush any leeway regarding Iran.

When Ray-Gun removed the Fairness Doctrine, he also reduced the public service burden that radio and television used to carry.

It was the public service duty of radio and TV stations to broadcast "hard" news, and they lost money doing it in order to keep their broadcasting licenses.

In fairness to Congress, Bush was at the height of post 9/11 popularity and most of the country was still buying into every "terra alert" that Homeland Security put out. Many congressmen and senators were up to their necks in "terra" inspired phone calls saying "vote for it".

Some members of congress probably believed Bush would act in good faith and attempt to solve the "problem" diplomatically. I don't for the life of me understand why anybody who knows Bush would expect this, but I think some of them did.

There is something about being inside the beltway for an extended period of time that warps the perception of our leaders. They also knew that the media would breathlessly repeat every lie justifying the war and ignore the protests and people like Scott Ritter.

In many ways it was a test of political courage and some of our democratic representatives failed it, along with almost every Publican representative.

Pelosi won't start until she knows Reid can finish.

The day Harry Reid counts noses and there are 67 yes votes in the Senate, impeachment will move so fast it will make your head spin.

I remember the pundits and repugs screaming for Clinton to resign over Monica Lewinsky.

I thought it was ridiculous at the time. It involved sex between two consenting adults and thought nobody in their right mind would call that an impeachable offense.

Fast forward to BushCo's regime. They have lied to Congress about Iraqi war intelligence, outed Valerie Wilson, illegally wiretapped Americans, allowed New Orleans to drown and committed so many other criminal acts I can't list them all off the top of my head.

It's clear that BushCo is guilty of multiple offenses, any one of which is serious enough to warrant impeachment, yet all you hear from M$M about this is crickets chirping.

You'll see there is very little chance of a significant drop in the price of oil, now or ten years from now.

Generally, I like Chavez a lot more than I like his detractors. Chavez is fighting his own upper class and the US government in a country where the oil industry has typically had more power than the government. I can't prove it, but believe that he is most likely the target of a concerted disinformation campaign funded by BushCo and the oil companies. It would explain the way most stories about him are slanted to the right.

Every move Chavez makes is under a microscope and anything at all that might be negative is blown out of proportion.

It kind of reminds me of the way our press covered the Gore campaign in 2000.

Conviction is the tough part.

It takes 67 senators for a conviction. That means that 16 repugs would have to vote to remove Truthless Leader from office, as well as Lieberman.

However, editorials like this one are a step in the right direction. Pretty soon now, John Conyers is going to start asking a lot of questions that administration lackeys will not want to answer. These sycophants will ducking, dodging and lying live on C-SPAN every day for weeks on end as Mr. Conyers performs Congressional oversight hearings.

Since it is on C-SPAN, it will also draw M$M attention, just to keep their audience share.

Once this process starts, we could have a groundswell of public support for removing this POS POTUS from office that the repug senators can't ignore.

With Nixon and Watergate, it got to the point that the senators knew they would have to remove him from office if it came to a vote, just to survive politically. We may be on the verge of that happening again.

There are two important PR differences between Nixon's Watergate and BushCo's crime spree. The media in Nixon's day was not biased in his favor and the repug senators of his day weren't complicit in Nixon's crimes. These factors might make is harder for a repug senator to vote to impeach today than it was in 1974. These senators cosigned many of Bush's crimes.

However, the sheer volume of criminal activity conducted by BushCo may offset those PR differences. Once the average American sees what has gone on in the last six years, they will be a lot more interested in getting rid of Bush. They already know that Truthless Leader is a liar.

He's about to be exposed as a wanna-be dictator and a criminal.

Told him that W & Company made Clinton look like a choir boy.

He was very indignant & we agreed to disagree.

Prove to me the 2004 election wasn't stolen. Prove to me that the 2006 election wasn't rigged but the turnout overwhelmed the cheating. Look at the the accounting procedures used to count our votes and explain why they would be acceptable to a bank auditor.

There is documented evidence of voter suppression, tens of thousands of reported computer "glitches" that almost always favor the republican and die hard refusal to create an audit trail by crooked repub BOE officials like Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell.

There is a discrepancy in the exit polling versus the vote count beyond statistical norms. The difference is worse where DRE machines are used. This discrepancy requires a better explanation than "right wingers are shy."

If you claim an election was honest in the face of this evidence, the burden of proof is on you, so go ahead and prove these things. If you can't, then shut up about it.

At this point, I don't know if the machines are rigged or if the ruthlessness of the voter suppression skews the results, but until somebody proves otherwise, the elections in this country are a sham.

IMO, this is one of those areas where we democrats shoot ourselves in the foot.

Banning smoking in the workplace makes sense, but banning it in restaurants is overkill. You can make the restaurant have good air filtration so that the second hand smoke doesn't bother the non-smoking customers, but that is far enough.

Baning smoking in cars and at home, any home, is the kind of regulatory overkill that RW politicians love to talk about during campaigns. It's one thing to mandate legitimate public health concerns but it is quite another to meddle in people's lives when it isn't necessary or wanted.

That is why the public reacted like they did.

Despite the meme that was coming out of hate radio and the millions spent by Richard Mellon Scaife trying to destroy "ultra liberal" Bill Clinton, the American people knew impeachment was nonsense.

There are two important points to consider.

In the first place, if impeachment is warranted, it is not negotiable. It is the duty of congress to investigate and pursue it.

Secondly, there will not be a horrible reaction by the American people. Once the groundwork is laid by Conyers and others in Congress, the percentage of favoring impeachment of TruthLess Leader will be much more than 50%.

For starters, imagine FEMA officials trying to explain why they didn't use the existing plans for evacuating New Orleans, while under oath and the TV cameras are rolling. Imagine them explaining why the New Orleans evacuation plans that were supposed to be written by a private company that was paid $800,000 dollars were never finished.

Imagine officials from Cheney's office trying to explain the outing of Valerie Plame under oath while the TV cameras are on them. Imagine NSA officials being asked whose phone records are in the NSA database, why are they there and why didn't they obtain warrants from the FISA court, under oath while TV cameras roll.

I know all of these matters won't be done with live TV coverage, but a lot of them will.

The dirt on these people is mind boggling and it has only been kept under the rug because the republicans wouldn't subpoena the officials and hold hearings.

Officials will be subpoenaed and forced to testify under oath.

Once these crimes as uncovered, the process will take a life of it's own.

MSM will be forced to cover it. In the beginning that coverage will probably be snarky and dismissive, but once the American people start to see how many ways they have been lied to by this administration, they will pressure MSM and Congress for accountability.

Where LTTE come in is if MSM tries to play the "everybody is to blame" card, when clearly BushCo has committed an unprecedented number of crimes and assaults on the constitution.

There will be numerous investigations because it is the job of the legislative branch to keep tabs on the executive.

As soon as that cat is let out of the bag, it's going to have a life of it's own and I don't think it will be possible to stop it. The committee hearings will draw media attention and MSM will be forced to do it's frickin' job for a change.

Also, as H2O man stated, it is for the good of the country.

Besides, if we can expose to the average American how criminal and fascist this administration has become, we will guarantee a shift in the electorate that will go way beyond 2008.

There won't be impeachment hearings in January of 2007, but the investigations that begin in 2007 will eventually lead to an impeachment or more likely, Bush's resignation. The blue dog democrats will turn on Bush, followed by members of his own party as his crimes are publicized.

It'll be Nixon all over again and may take a while to gain momentum, but once this process begins, it is very powerful.

Bush was born on 3rd base and thought he hit a triple. He was AWOL from the National Guard during Vietnam. He's never accomplished anything on his own in his entire life.

Hitler was born a nobody and actually served in the military. He took a ruined country and turned it into a military power.

The comparison is clearly unfair to Hitler and the NAZIs. They might have been a little more evil than BushCo, but they were much more competent.