Note the school bus.  Note the guardrail, which appears to be all that kept it from plunging into the river.  Also note the rear emergency exit, which looks to be the only way out (the main doors are blocked--ironically by the guardrail).  Then consider that the existence of both these structures is the result of regulations, those pesky little items that our neo-con friends are vociferously opposed to.

That's another thing we never hear regarding 9/11:  how many more people might have perished, if there hadn't been clearly-marked exits--which are also mandated by government regulations?

"We are here on Earth to fart around.  Don't let anyone tell you different."--Kurt Vonnegut

It is as if the political enemies of the republican administration might also be serving as his ally against the American people.

Kucinich’s bill, H. Res. 333, has 14 co-signers and is currently stuck in the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Civil Rights icon, John Conyers.

Conyers, who claimed to be on the side of impeachment a year ago, is ironically the sole authority preventing the impeachment bill from heading to the floor of the House for a full vote. House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, indicated on the same day the bill was introduced that it would never see the light of day.

Two powerful Democrats decry the abuses of power of the White House, while simultaneously suppressing the opportunity for the people’s representatives to vote on impeaching the executive branch leadership they whine about.

Congress could immediately call an end to the war in Iraq and demand the withdrawal of all troops from the Middle East. The president is merely the Commander-in-Chief, not the dictator. He doesn’t even have sole authority to declare war. That license is reserved for Congress. Yet, Congress refuses to exercise its power. It merely complains.

Congress could refuse to fund the war. That would force the president to withdraw his troops. He could, of course, require them to remain where they are and place them in jeopardy without needed materiel reinforcements and supplies. But Congress could also remove the president and vice president and then remove the troops.

Instead, Congress, which presumably represents the people, is comprised of quite a deceptive group of underlings serving the executive branch.

While all eyes and polls are on the president, the prissy Pelosi and the cunning Clinton in Congress are standing on the sidelines cheering as the façade of political enmity with Bush maintains the attention of the American people.

Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans represent the will of the American people, which poll after poll indicates overwhelmingly that we want an immediate withdrawal from the Middle East, come what may.

Additionally, we want a real, honest, thorough investigation of 9/11 by an independent authority with zero connections to the White House. Such an investigation ought to include the many legitimate scholars and experts (which include military, aviators, air traffic controllers, special ops, ex-CIA, etc) across the country who bring to the table a feast of evidence to be considered along with a veritable flood of questions that remain unanswered to this day.

America is at a critical juncture. As we approach a presidential election year, we have seen the executive branch speed up its efforts to solidify a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have seen the sabers rattling, targeting both Iran and Pakistan. We have seen the augmentation and expansion of presidential authority and executive privilege. We have seen the new creations of authority, including the latest National Continuity Coordinator.

We are now witnessing ongoing nationwide experiments, such as “Operation Noble Resolve,� that are supposed to ensure our safety in the case of a major terrorist attack.

America has been warned of a potential “false flag� operation to be conducted on our soil by our government in order to garner support for an attack on Iran. That warning came from Zbigniew Brzezinski in a testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Feb. 1, 2007. Millions of Americans are convinced that 9/11 was just such an event, ushering in unprecedented support for unilateral executive authority to abuse our military.

Today, we see the signs of two parties operating as two pockets of the same pair of political pants, walking all over the constitution and the will of the American people.

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/08/02/084752.php

Just want to say 'bravo' to Rachel for her impassioned speech today regarding the lack of infrastructure in the name of Neo-con outsourcing and money-making.  I couldn't agree more!!!

 I feel that the "for the people, by the people" aspect of our government has taken a permanent backseat to the desire for corporations to make money in this country.  A backseat in a vehicle on a crumbling bridge. 

Could one single day of funding the Iraqi war gone instead, into fixing this infrastructure problem?Ro

As we all file past the tomb of Ronald Reagan muttering the "Government is the problem" mantra, let us pause for a moment to genuflect to those great icons of the American Tax Revolt, Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, authors of California's 1978 initiative Proposition 13, which arguably was the snowball that started the avalanche.

Oh thank you, thank you, Howard, for saving us all these years from oppressive government and those evil evil taxes.

New slogan: Howard Jarvis, Terrorist.

It'd never work, of course.  Prop 13 was like. so, last millennium.  I mean, 1978?  Ancient history.  Only people who have a sense of history would even know who Howard Jarvis was, or what Prop 13 was and what it meant.

And I think that's about 250 people in this country.

OK, back to Paris Hilton and Dancing With the Stars now.  Nothing to worry about (except The Terrorists).  Watch TV!  Shop!  Be happy (unless we tell you to be frightened).

I hate to sound like Simon Cowell, but this week you became a star.

Please, tell Mark Green, while he keeps flushing AAR money down the toilet keeping Armstrong Williams and Alan Colmes on the air and firing Mark Riley, that he needs to take tonight's show and make it the iTunes free podcast of the year.

Repeat after me, Rachel: I point the finger at you, George Bush and Ronald Reagan, you put those people in the bottom of the Mississippi. Please, make it a blog title, and appear on every talk show to defend it.

Then, you're a star. Go, girl.

If you want me to, I will post on DailyKos and Democratic Underground, with the headline:

AAR's Rachel Maddow: Bush and Reagan to Blame for Bridge Collapse.

Would you commit to start the conversation there and wake people up?

Our nation is beyond flat broke. The neo-criminals have let the crooks rob the nation and that money is gone. The estimates I've heard is there is at least four trillion dollars being hidden offshore from taxation. How are we supposed to pay to fix all that which has been left to decay plus pay off our massive national debt when we've been robbed blind and the robbers couldn't care less about the state of our nation?

Rachel,

Thanks for making this the subject for today. I work for MN/DOT, and we have gone from a very vibrant department, recognized world wide for our leadeship, to what amounts to a second rate follower with a very demoralized and overworked workforce. This is the result of the politics of our Governor and Lt. Governor/Transportation Commissioner. The four years under that moron Ventura did not help matters any either.

Our department staffing - with the exception of management, of course - has been cut to the bone over the past 8 years. We do not have the manpower to properly live up to our mission statement, if it still actually exists; I have not heard a word about it in years. In the winter, we have about 100 snowplows sitting idle statewide because we have'nt the people to drive them. Management's idea for making up the deficit of drivers is to get desk drivers to plow snow. Our Bridge inspectors have been complaining for a few years now that we are in a crisis relative to the conditiion of our bridges, with no funding to properly maintain them. In the meantime Pawlenty keeps borrowing money for huge highly visible construction projects, and patting himself on the back for all of the projects we have going while leaving a financial time bomb for the next Governor to deal with. Our roads are like swiss cheese and many will need major repairs when we finally get someone who is willing to fund their maintenance. Our Union, AFSCME, has been trying to get the message out, but mostly they preach to the choir. A very small choir at that.

A majority of the citizens of this state wanted to see a gas tax increase - we have not had one since 1988. Our legislature passed it in the transportaion budget. Our illustrious Governor vetoed it because he has taken a pledge to the Minnesota Taxpayers' League, a cabal of rich folks mostly from the western suburbs of the Twin Cities, who probably wouldn't know a tax if it bit them. Because of this veto, MN/DOT is operating under a 'lights on' budget for the next two years. This has also cost MN/DOT matching funds from US/DOT. To see him stand there and talk about his concern and how we need to have inspections statewide, just pisses me off. It is so cynical. He has not cared up to now, but since he is hoping for national office, he is trying to shine up his image. Don't forget, this is the guy who forced an unprecedented shutdown of the Government  two years ago.

Fellow Air Americans, DO NOT BE FOOLED BY THIS MAN, if he were to be elected to the White House - a residence to which he reportedly aspires - we'll see more of the same that we have had for the past 7 years. All he cares about is his rich base of supporters. Watch this guy in the coming years and just say NO. 

Keep up the good work Rachel. 

Making the electoral college more democratic is a bad idea because it would cost Democratic candidates electoral votes?  How Republican of Rachel.  First time I've heard a (so-called) progressive argue against such efforts.

California Initiative No. 07-0032 is an audacious power play packaged as a step forward for democratic fairness. It’s the lotusland equivalent of Tom DeLay’s 2003 midterm redistricting in Texas, except with a sweeter smell, a better disguise, and larger stakes. And the only way Californians will reject it is if they have a chance to think about it first.

http://electionlawblog.org/archives/008987.html

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2007/08/06/070806taco_talk_hertzbe...

Rachel thank you so much for taking the time to discuss this disaster. I hope now that the rest of the country will wake up and see that this infrastructure problem deserves attention and action. I don't think any of us really believed something like this could happen so close to home, but we're waking up. We're shaken here in Minneapolis, but you give us hope.

Will Bush cancel the 2008 election?
by Harvey Wasserman & Bob Fitrakis

It is time to think about the "unthinkable."

The Bush Administration has both the inclination and the power to cancel the 2008 election.

The GOP strategy for another electoral theft in 2008 has taken clear shape, though we must assume there is much more we don't know.

But we must also assume that if it appears to Team Bush/Cheney/Rove that the GOP will lose the 2008 election anyway (as it lost in Ohio 2006) we cannot ignore the possibility that they would simply cancel the election. Those who think this crew will quietly walk away from power are simply not paying attention.

The real question is not how or when they might do it. It's how, realistically, we can stop them.

In Florida 2000, Team Bush had a game plan involving a handful of tactics. With Jeb Bush in the governor's mansion, the GOP used a combination of disenfranchisement, intimidation, faulty ballots, electronic voting fraud, a rigged vote count and an aborted recount, courtesy of the US Supreme Court.

A compliant Democrat (Al Gore) allowed the coup to be completed.

In Ohio 2004, the arsenal of dirty tricks exploded. Based in Columbus , we have documented more than a hundred different tactics used to steal the 20 electoral votes that gave Bush a second term. More are still surfacing. As a result of the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit (in which we are plaintiff and attorney) we have now been informed that 56 of the 88 counties in Ohio violated federal law by destroying election records, thus preventing a definitive historical recount.

As in 2000, a compliant Democrat (John Kerry) allowed the coup to proceed.

For 2008 we expect the list of vote theft maneuvers to escalate yet again. We are already witnessing a coordinated nationwide drive to destroy voter registration organizations and to disenfranchise millions of minority, poor and young voters.

This carefully choreographed campaign is complemented by the widespread use of electronic voting machines. As reported by the Government Accountability Office, Princeton University , the Brennan Center , the Carter-Baker Commission, US Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and others, these machines can be easily used to flip an election. They were integral to stealing both the 2000 and 2004 elections. Efforts to make their source codes transparent, or to require a usable paper trail on a federal level, have thus far failed. A discriminatory Voter ID requirement may also serve as the gateway to a national identification card.

Overall, the GOP will have at its command even more weapons of election theft in 2008 than it did in Ohio 2004, which jumped exponentially from Florida 2000. The Rovian GOP is nothing if not tightly organized to do this with ruthless efficiency. Expect everything that was used these past two presidential elections to surface again in 2008 in far more states, with far more efficiency, and many new dirty tricks added in.

But in Ohio 2006, the GOP learned a hard lesson. Its candidate for governor was J. Kenneth Blackwell. The Secretary of State was the essential on-the-ground operative in the theft of Ohio 2004.

When he announced for governor, many Ohioans joked that "Ken Blackwell will never lose an election where he counts the votes."

But lose he did….along with the GOP candidates for Secretary of State, Attorney-General and US Senate.

By our calculations, despite massive grassroots scrutiny, the Republicans stole in excess of 6% of the Ohio vote in 2006. But they still lost.

Why? Because they were so massively unpopular that even a 6% bump couldn't save them. Outgoing Governor Bob Taft, who pled guilty to four misdemeanors while in office, left town with a 7% approval rating (that's not a typo). Blackwell entered the last week of the campaign down 30% in some polls.

So while the GOP still had control of the electoral machinery here in 2006, the public tide against them was simply too great to hold back, even through the advanced art and science of modern Rovian election theft.

In traditional electoral terms, that may also be the case in 2008. Should things proceed as they are now, it's hard to imagine any Republican candidate going into the election within striking distance. The potential variations are many, but the graffiti on the wall is clear.

What's also clear is that this administration has a deep, profound and uncompromised contempt for democracy, for the rule of law, and for the US Constitution. When George W. Bush went on the record (twice) as saying he has nothing against dictatorship, as long as he can be dictator, it was a clear and present policy statement.

Who really believes this crew will walk quietly away from power? They have the motivation, the money and the method for doing away with the electoral process altogether. So why wouldn't they?

The groundwork for dismissal of both the legislative and judicial branch has been carefully laid. The litany is well-known, but worth a very partial listing:

The continuation of the drug war, and the Patriot Act, Homeland Security Act and other dictatorial laws prompted by the 9/11/2001 terror attacks, have decimated the Bill of Rights, and shredded the traditional American right to due process of law, freedom from official surveillance, arbitrary violence, and far more.

The current Attorney-General, Alberto Gonzales, has not backed away from his announcement to Congress that the Constitution does not guarantee habeas corpus. The administration continues to act on the assumption that it can arrest anyone at any time and hold them without notification or trial for as long as it wants.

The establishment of the Homeland Security Agency has given it additional hardware to decimate the basic human rights of our citizenry. Under the guise of dealing with the "immigration problem," large concentration camps are under construction around the US .

The administration has endorsed and is exercising its "right" to employ torture, contrary to the Eighth Amendment and to a wide range of international treaties, which Gonzales has labeled "quaint."

With more than 200 "signing statements" the administration acts on its belief that the "unitary executive" trumps the power of the legislative branch in any instance it chooses. This belief has been further enforced with the administration's use of a wide range of precedent-setting arguments to keep its functionaries from testifying before Congress.

There is much more. In all instances, the 109th Congress---and the public---have rolled over without significant resistance.

Most crucial now are Presidential Directive #51, Executive Orders #13303, #13315, #13350, #13364, #13422, #13438, and more, by which Bush has granted himself an immense arsenal of powers for which the term "dictatorial" is a modest understatement.

The Founders established our government with checks and balances. But executive orders have accumulated important precedent. The Emancipation Proclamation by which Lincoln declared an end to slavery in the South, was issued under the "military necessity" of adding blacks to the Union Army, a step without which the North might not have won the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order #8802 established the Fair Employment Practices Commission. Harry Truman's Executive Order #9981 desegregated the military.

Most to the point, FDR's Executive Order #9066 ordered the forcible internment of 100,000 people of Japanese descent into the now infamous concentration camps of World War II.

There is also precedent for a president overriding the Supreme Court. In the 1830s Chief Justice John Marshall enshrined the right of the Cherokee Nation to sovereignty over its ancestral land in the Appalachian Mountains . But President Andrew Jackson scorned the decision. Some 14,000 native Americans were moved at gunpoint to Oklahoma . More than 3,000 died along the way.

All this will be relevant should Team Bush envision a defeat in the 2008 election and decide to call it off. It's well established that Richard Nixon---mentor to Karl Rove and Dick Cheney---commissioned the Huston Plan, which detailed how to cancel the 1972 election.

Today we must ask: who would stop this administration from taking dictatorial power in the instance of a "national emergency" such as a terror attack at a nuclear power plant or something similar?

Nothing in the behavior of this Congress indicates that it is capable of significant resistance. Impeachment seems beyond it. Nor does it seem Congress would actually remove Bush if it did put him on trial.

Short of that, Bush clearly does not view anything Congress might do as a meaningful impediment. After all, how many divisions does the Congress command?

The Supreme Court, as currently constituted, would almost certainly rubber stamp a Bush coup. If not, like Jackson , he could ignore it as easily as he would ignore Congress.

What does that leave? There is much idle speculation now about what the armed forces would do. We also hear loose talk about "90 million gun owners."

From the public side, the only conceivable counter-force might be a national strike or an effective long-term campaign of general non-cooperation.

But we can certainly assume the mainstream media will give lock-step support to whatever the regime says and does. It's also a given that those likely to lead the resistance will immediately land in those new prisons being built by Halliburton et. al.

So how do we cope with the harsh realities of such a Bush/Cheney/Rove dictatorial coup?

We may have about a year to prepare. Every possible scenario needs to be discussed in excruciating detail.

For only one thing is certain: denial will do nothing.

--
HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is at www.solartopia.org, along with SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030. The FITRAKIS FILES are at www.freepress.org (where this article was originally published), along with HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, which Bob and Harvey co-wrote.

I don't like living in Soviet Russia anymore. Can we have our country back, please?

Gerald Markowitz and/or David Rosner, authors of Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution.  http://www.deceitanddenial.org/bios/  They're both located right in New York City!

The book "addressed a variety of aspects of health policy. Briefly, the book looked at questions regarding how two industries, the lead industry and the chemical industry, reacted when faced with information regarding the potential dangers of their products to human health during the twentieth century."  http://www.deceitanddenial.org

I relate this to infrastructure problems because it shows how private industry will avoid health and safety regulations to protect its bottom line.  At a time when privatization grows apace and pressure to privatize is ramped up with each disaster, these guys' insights are very worthwhile.