pinions of buddy don: law or man

everbidy knows the united states is a grate eggspearmint in gummint. the mane thang bout it is how tiz a gummint ruled by laws, not by individual humans. twuznt always so, as we know frum our own histry. the king of england at one time wuz above the law n could deecide who gut arrested without no trial, who gut tortchurd, who killt. me n miz bd has ancesters that wuz killt on a counta not bleevin in the rite flavor of christianty.

but we are governd by laws, not men, even if they are trine to change that to whar if mr bush (a man) deecides sumbidy is a enemy combatunt, that person dont have no rite to a trial by a jury nor to face them thats chargin him nor to make inny deefents. tiz agin whut we stand fer, but thays sum that thanks its ok.

tiz also the case that our gummint thanks it aint no big deal to go after innybidy that disagrees with em. so them that wuz agin the war wuz branded as traiters or blame-amurka-fursters or whutever. taint whut ye eggspeck in a land whar thays a free eggschange of idees, but thats how them adults in charge wonts it.

whut kinda news has these adults in charge brung us on this fine day? heres the list:

• Measure Would Alter Federal Death Penalty System; House Legislation to Renew USA Patriot Act Would Loosen Some Provisions for Execution:

  The House bill that would reauthorize the USA Patriot Act anti-terrorism law includes several little-noticed provisions that would dramatically transform the federal death penalty system, allowing smaller juries to decide on executions and giving prosecutors the ability to try again if a jury deadlocks on sentencing.
  
  The bill also triples the number of terrorism-related crimes eligible for the death penalty, adding, among others, the material support law that has been the core of the government's legal strategy against terrorism.

• Bush Aides Brace for Charges; Grand Jury May Hear Counts in Leak Case Today:

  In a possible sign that Fitzgerald may seek to charge one or more officials with illegally disclosing Valerie Plame's CIA affiliation, FBI agents as recently as Monday night interviewed at least two people in her D.C. neighborhood. The agents were attempting to determine whether the neighbors knew that Plame worked for the CIA before she was unmasked with the help of senior Bush administration officials. Two neighbors said they told the FBI they had been surprised to learn she was a CIA operative.
  
  The FBI interviews suggested the prosecutor wanted to show that Plame's status was covert, and that there was damage from the revelation that she worked at the CIA.

• Planned GOP Budget Cuts Target Programs Such as Foster Care [the good news is how ye wont half to wurry nun bout rich folks missin a nuther tax cut!]


• 2,000th Death Marked by Silence and a Vow; Bush Says War in Iraq Will Require More Resolve, While Protesters Plan Vigils:

  Washington marked the 2,000th American fatality of the Iraq war with a moment of silence in the Senate, the reading of the names of the fallen from the House floor, new protests and a solemn vow from President Bush not to "rest or tire until the war on terror is won."
  In a speech delivered just hours before the Pentagon announced the death of Staff Sgt. George Alexander Jr., Bush's voice cracked as he acknowledged those who have died in the war. "Each loss of life is heartbreaking" he said. "And the best way to honor the sacrifice of our fallen troops is to complete the mission and lay the foundation of peace by spreading freedom."
  
  Despite the mounting death toll and the growing public dissatisfaction with the war, Bush said that the United States is making steady progress by killing enemy fighters, training Iraqi troops and guiding Iraq toward democracy.

• Bigger, Stronger Homemade Bombs Now to Blame for Half of U.S. Deaths:

  BAGHDAD, Oct. 25 -- After 31 months of fighting in Iraq, more than half of all American fatalities are now being caused by powerful roadside bombs that blast fiery, lethal shrapnel into the cabins of armored vehicles, confronting every patrol with an unseen, menacing adversary that is accelerating the U.S. death toll.
  
  U.S. military officials, analysts and militants themselves say insurgents have learned to adapt to U.S. defensive measures by using bigger, more sophisticated and better-concealed bombs known officially as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. They are sometimes made with multiple artillery shells and Iranian TNT, sometimes disguised as bricks, boosted with rocket propellant, and detonated by a cell phone or a garage door opener.

• 3 Servicemen, 3 Stories of Dedication; Burials at Arlington Honor Those Who Fought in Iraq:

  Three men who chose to risk their lives for their country by serving in Iraq were laid to rest yesterday at Arlington National Cemetery. One had switched military branches to pursue his dream of flying helicopters; another could have retired but chose to remain in the service; and a third decided to reenlist on the condition that he be sent to Iraq.

• Vice President for Torture:

  VICE PRESIDENT Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that may be unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch: He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by Americans.

• Dick at the Heart of Darkness:

  If W. wants to show people now where the White House has been dishonored in far more astounding and deadly ways, he'll have to haul them around every nook and cranny of his vice president's office, then go across the river for a walk of shame through the Rummy empire at the Pentagon.
  
  The shocking thing about the trellis of revelations showing Dick Cheney, the self-styled Mr. Strong America, as the central figure in dark conspiracies to juice up a case for war and demonize those who tried to tell the public the truth is how unshocking it all is.
  
  It's exactly what we thought was going on, but we never thought we'd actually hear the lurid details: Cheney and Rummy, the two old compadres from the Nixon and Ford days, in a cabal running the country and the world into the ground, driven by their poisonous obsession with Iraq, while Junior is out of the loop, playing in the gym or on his mountain bike.

  Secrets and lies; Fitzgerald's indictments, if he brings them, could do more than convulse Washington -- they could reveal the hidden history of how we went to war:

  Oct. 26, 2005 | Tensions between Vice President Dick Cheney's office and the CIA were nearing a peak in the summer of 2003, months after the initial invasion of Iraq. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, fumed at what he saw as a "hedging strategy" by the CIA to deflect blame for bad Iraq intelligence.
  
  "I recall that Mr. Libby was angry about reports suggesting that senior administration officials, including Mr. Cheney, had embraced skimpy intelligence," wrote New York Times reporter Judith Miller, in a recent summary of her meetings from 2003. "Such reports, he said, according to my notes, were 'highly distorted.'"
  
  This is the context in which the White House lashed out against Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who had accused the administration of twisting intelligence to make a case for war, and Valerie Plame, his wife. The couple were living, breathing examples of the threat unchecked naysayers posed to the reputation of the Bush administration. So in the summer of 2003, White House officials leaked Plame's identity to the press in an effort to discredit her husband. Two years later, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is faced with the task of examining this same landscape as he decides whether to file charges for the leak of Plame's name.
  
  The stakes in Fitzgerald's investigation rose dramatically with the report in Tuesday's New York Times that Libby first learned about Plame from a conversation with Cheney -- not from journalists, as Libby reportedly told the grand jury. Whatever the legal implications of Cheney's alleged involvement, it puts the vice president himself squarely in the middle of the effort to discredit Wilson.

• The strange saga of Cheney and the "nuclear threat";
  Why did the veep suddenly lose interest in the evidence? :

  Oct. 26, 2005 | In the wake of the release of the Downing Street Memo, there has been much talk about how the Bush administration "fixed" its intelligence to create a war fever in the U.S. in the many months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. What still remains to be fully grasped, however, is the wider pattern of propaganda that underlay the administration's war effort -- in particular, the overlapping networks of relationships that tied together so many key figures in the administration, the neoconservatives and their allies on the outside, and parts of the media in what became a seamless, boundary-less operation to persuade the American people that Saddam Hussein represented an intolerable threat to their national security.
  
  Vice President Cheney, for instance, is widely credited with having launched the administration's nuclear drumbeat to war in Iraq via a series of speeches he gave, beginning in August 2002, vividly accusing Saddam of having an active nuclear weapons program. As it happens, though, he started beating the nuclear drum with vigor significantly earlier than most remember; indeed at a time that was particularly curious given its proximity to the famous mission former Ambassador Joseph Wilson took on behalf of the CIA.
  
  Cheney's initial public attempts to raise the nuclear nightmare did not in fact begin with his August 2002 barrage of nuclear speeches, but rather five months before that, just after his return from a tour of Arab capitals where he had tried in vain to gin up local support for military action against Iraq. Indeed, the specific date on which his campaign was launched was March 24, 2002, when, on return from the Middle East, he appeared on three major Sunday public-affairs television programs bearing similar messages on each. On CNN's "Late Edition," he offered the following comment on Saddam:
  
  "This is a man of great evil, as the President said. And he is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time."

• U.S. MILITARY DEATHS IN IRAQ; A Deadly Surge; The fatality rate for American troops shot up more than a year ago, and no political or military advance has been able to slow it:

  A year and a half ago, at the first anniversary of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the death rate for American troops accelerated. Since then, none of the political milestones or military strategies proclaimed by U.S. officials have succeeded in slowing the toll.
  
  This is among the most striking conclusions of a Times analysis of the fatalities, which have reached 2,000, U.S. officials announced Tuesday.
  
  Two other findings stand out:
  
  

  • The number of deaths attributed to roadside bombs has sharply increased. The bombs have overtaken rockets, mortars and gunfire as the greatest threat to U.S. troops and were responsible for more than half of combat deaths in the last year.
  
  
  • The war has taken a growing toll on National Guard and reserve units. Their soldiers now account for nearly one-third of the deaths, up from one-fifth earlier in the conflict.

• Finely, the most importunt articull in the bunch, witch thisn wuz writ by Lawrence B. Wilkerson, witch he served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell from 2002 to 2005 – The White House cabal:

  IN PRESIDENT BUSH'S first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security — including vital decisions about postwar Iraq — were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
  
  When I first discussed this group in a speech last week at the New America Foundation in Washington, my comments caused a significant stir because I had been chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell between 2002 and 2005.
  But it's absolutely true. I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal.
  
  Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy.

thang to member bout all this is how ifn yers a dictatership, yer the ultimate in rule of a individual man, not the rule of law. taint whut we wont in this cuntry!