I was listening to Jerry this morning and he had, at least I think, one of his best shows to date. He had on Jay Gilbert, a Cincinnati DJ who’s collected music of patriotism and protest that he uses in college and high school presentations. Some of them I have heard before….but others….not at all. There was this one country-type song called “An Open Letter To My Teenage Son” by Victor Lundberg. Here are the last few lines of the song……see if you can figure out if this one is one of patriotism or protest!
Also…check out the line about women…..different generation for sure!!

And I will remind you that your mother will love
you no matter what you do, because she is a woman
And I love you too son
But I also love our country and the principles for which we stand
And if you decide to burn your draft card
Then burn your birth certificate at the same time
From that moment on, I have no son

Air American Radio will re-broadcast this show on the 4th of July

By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

A rolling sense of awe has enveloped the mainstream news media since yesterday’s Supreme Court decision on Guantanamo. The specifics of the decision are part of the discussion, to be sure, but the sense of amazement has a more basic root. After all this time, after a seemingly endless series of over-reaching power grabs by the Bush administration, someone with a big enough stick finally got in the way and said, “No.”

“In rejecting Bush’s military tribunals for terrorism suspects,” reads the analysis in Friday’s Washington Post, “the high court ruled that even a wartime commander in chief must govern within constitutional confines significantly tighter than this president has believed appropriate.”

In short, the fellow in the Oval is beholden to the law, and to the Constitution. (more…)

Bruce Shapiro
The Nation

The only surviving World War II veteran on the Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens, appointed three decades ago by a President as Republican as W., delivered the plain and airtight message: President Bush violated every standard of the military code, the US Constitution and international law with its order for military tribunals at Guantánamo. In its implications if not always its direct findings, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld is to Bush what the Pentagon Papers case was to Richard Nixon: a devastating rebuke to a President who thought he had a blank check; a clear reaffirmation of the rule of law even–or especially–in times of national crisis.

The Court’s Hamdan ruling emphatically does not shut Guantánamo down. Indeed, the Court majority took pains to assert that the attacks of September 11 ignited the President’s war powers and they do not challenge “the Government’s power to detain [Salim Ahmed Hamdan] for the duration of active hostilities.”

The ruling unambiguously declares that the President may not simply invent trials that conform to no known standard of law, which are not necessitated by urgent battlefield conditions, and deny defense lawyers access to evidence. It also dismantles every element of the Administration’s case, from the conspiracy-to-commit-war crimes charges against the Yemeni national who was Osama bin Laden’s driver in Afganistan to the necessity of an improvised process governed by no act of Congress. “Any urgent need…is utterly belied by the record,” Justice Stevens writes. “Hamdan was arrested in November 2001 and he was not charged until mid-2004. These simply are not the circumstances in which, by any stretch of the historical evidence or this Court’s precedents” justify a drumhead military commission.

In particular, Justice Stevens’ majority ruling deals a devasating blow to tribunal rules which violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Convenions. Indeed, the most signficiant news in Justice Steven’s Hamdan majority ruling is fierce insistence on the power of international law, and in particular the Geneva Conventions, which the Administration has long dismissed as irrelevant to non-state actors like Al Qaeda volunteers. Such dismissals are nonsense, according to Justice Stevens’ ruling: the Geneva Conventions’ Common Article 3 clearly prohibits “the passing of sentences…without previous judgment…by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees … recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.” For three years, Administration lawyers have argued that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply to its “war on terror”. That argument is finished.

The Administration was probably prepared to lose the Hamdan tribunals. It is not clear, however, that the White House is ready for the sweeping implications of the Supreme Court’s firm invocation of internationally recognized human rights standards. Black sites, secret interrogations, torture, the whole panoply of lawless methods embraced by Bush and Rumsfeld now stand exposed.

At bottom, the Hamdan ruling is what legal scholar Jack M. Balkin calls “democracy-forcing”: It restores checks and balances, strips the President of illegally-seized powers, and requires the President to go back to Congress for an open debate on any new tribunals he would like to establish, as well as any revision to the nation’s adherence to international law. What Justice Stevens and the five-vote Court majority have done is raise the floor on human rights–not just for Bin Laden’s driver and not just at Guantánamo, but in Washington itself.
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By DAVID E. SANGER and SCOTT SHANE
NY TIMES

The Supreme Court’s Guantánamo ruling on Thursday was the most significant setback yet for the Bush administration’s contention that the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath have justified one of the broadest expansions of presidential power in American history.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney spent much of their first term bypassing Congress in the service of what they labeled a “different kind of war.” Now they will almost certainly plunge into negotiations they previously spurned, over the extent of the president’s powers, this time in the midst of a midterm election in which Mr. Bush’s wartime strategies and their consequences have emerged as a potent issue.

The ruling bolsters those in Congress who for months have been trying to force the White House into a retreat from its claims that Mr. Bush not only has the unilateral authority as commander in chief to determine how suspected terrorists are tried, but also to set the rules for domestic wiretapping, for interrogating prisoners and for pursuing a global fight against terror that many suspect could stretch for as long as the cold war did.

What the court’s 5-to-3 decision declared, in essence, was that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had overreached and must now either use the established rules of courts-martial or go back to Congress — this time with vastly diminished leverage — to win approval for the military commissions that Mr. Bush argues are the best way to keep the nation safe.

For Mr. Bush, this is not the first such setback. The court ruled two years ago that the giant prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was not beyond the reach of American courts and that prisoners there had some minimal rights. (more…)

Associated PRess
MSNBC

Congress on Thursday took a major step toward allowing oil and gas drilling in coastal waters that have been off limits for a quarter-century, but a battle looms in the Senate over the issue.

And the Bush administration’s support for the legislation, which was approved by a 232-187 vote in the House, is lukewarm.

The House bill would end an Outer Continental Shelf drilling moratorium that Congress has renewed every year since 1981. It covers 85 percent of the country’s coastal waters — everywhere except the central and western Gulf of Mexico and some areas off Alaska.

Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., a leading proponent for lifting the ban, said he believes a majority of the Senate wants to open the protected waters to energy companies.

Asked about White House opposition to some parts of the bill, especially a provision that would give tens of billions of dollars to states that have drilling rigs off their coasts, Pombo said, “I dare them to veto this bill.”

“They don’t like us giving money back to the states. I think it’s right,” Pombo told reporters after the vote. Forty Democrats joined most Republicans in favor of ending the drilling moratorium. (more…)

side note: yes, past presidents have been using these “signing statements” when signing laws, however, if you look at the numbers, Bush has taken it way too far, like he seems to do with everything.

by NewStandard Staff
http://newstandardnews.net

Reports that President Bush has quietly dismissed or otherwise challenged statutes just after signing them led to obfuscating testimony on Capitol Hill in defense of the president’s actions.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, at the behest of its chairperson , Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania), held hearings yesterday concerning the president’s controversial use of “signing statements” to express disapproval or exceptions to newly inked statutes.

Proponents of Bush’s use of the statements characterized them before the full-committee panel as mere interpretations of the statute being signed into law, or at most as expressions of the president’s reservations about the constitutionality of a particular measure. Such is the accepted traditional use of the signing statement, since President James Monroe first wrote one in the early 19th Century.

Michelle Boardman, a deputy assistant attorney general, was the only administration official to testify at the hearing. She suggested the frequency with which Bush included signing statements along with bills he had signed was hardly unusual.

“President Bush’s signing statements are indistinguishable from those issued by past presidents,” Boardman’s written testimony said. “In addition, the number of such statements issued by President Bush is in keeping with the number issued by every president during the past quarter century.”

But in fact, Bush’s signing statements have far superseded traditional uses, and the number of statutes questioned or overridden have far exceeded those challenged by all past presidents. According to an analysis by the Boston Globe in April, the president’s father, in office for four years, challenged 232 statutes with signing statements; Bill Clinton challenged just 140 laws. Prior to the Reagan administration, when some 71 signing statements were used, the legally ambiguous documents were not employed as strategic instruments, according to a research paper by Christopher Kelley, a presidential scholar at Miami University in Oxford.

Over the first five years of his presidency, by contrast, George W. Bush had already used the statements to question, dismiss or contradict more than 750 statutes insofar as they pertain to his presidential powers, the Globe reported.

In many of his signing statements, Bush has gone farther than all but a few examples from previous presidencies by expressing his intention not to comply with major elements of newly signed legislative packages, rather than merely question or take exception to specific provisions of a bill on constitutional grounds.
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side note: more proof of how conservatives govern! People on the right want to label blogs like NT as crazy liberals, but we’re just reporting facts. Read, and see how they govern, and make your own mind up.

By Kate Zernike
The New York Times

Two Senate Democrats on Wednesday criticized a White House plan to cut money intended for food stamps, student loans and farmers to pay for credit monitoring for veterans whose personal and financial data was stolen last month.

“The Bush-Cheney administration has no qualms about coming up here and twisting our arms for funding for Iraq, but when it comes to needs here at home for veterans and other ordinary Americans, it’s rob Peter to pay Paul,” said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont.

Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, said, “It’s outrageous to first expose millions of Americans to credit fraud and identity theft, and then try to cut food stamps, student loans and youth programs to pay for it.”

“This is about taking responsibility when you mess up,” Ms. Murray added. “That’s something even little kids understand.”

Personal data on about 17.5 million veterans, including their birthdates and Social Security numbers, was stolen last month when a burglar took a laptop containing the information from the home of an analyst for the Department of Veterans Affairs. The analyst was not authorized to take the data home but had been doing so for several years.

The Veterans Affairs Department offered to pay for a year of free credit monitoring for the veterans, which it said would cost about $160.5 million. Last week, the department said it would cover most of that cost by taking money from accounts that pay health and other benefits for veterans.

The department withdrew that idea after Democrats protested. In a letter on Wednesday, Rob Portman, director of the White House Office of Management, recommended paying for the monitoring by taking about $130 million from a food stamp employment and training program, a farmers’ assistance program, student loans and a program for young people released from prison. (more…)

By Bob Deans
Cox News Service

Poll finds that more than 8 in 10 respondents blame the Iraq war.

Washington – The United States is losing its fight against terrorism and the Iraq war is the biggest reason why, more than eight of 10 American terrorism and national security experts concluded in a poll released Wednesday.

One participant in the survey, a former CIA official who described himself as a conservative Republican, said the war in Iraq has provided global terrorist groups with a recruiting bonanza, a valuable training ground and a strategic beachhead at the crossroads of the oil-rich Persian Gulf and Turkey, the traditional land bridge linking the Middle East to Europe.

“The war in Iraq broke our back in the war on terror,” said the former official, Michael Scheuer, the author of “Imperial Hubris,” a popular book highly critical of the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism efforts. “It has made everything more difficult and the threat more existential.”

Scheuer, a former counterterrorism expert with the CIA, is one of more than 100 national security and terrorism analysts who were surveyed this spring for the poll by Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for American Progress. (more…)

side note: the tour starts this weekend and this is just a huge story. Does the American Floyd Landis have what it takes to become the next Tour de France Champion? I think he does. OLN, as always will be covering the entire month long race. Here’s their website, so you can figure out which channel they are on. click here

By JAMEY KEATEN, Associated Press Writer
yahoo sports

A doping scandal knocked Tour de France favorites Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso out of the race Friday and threw the world’s most glamorous cycling event into chaos.

The decision to bar Ullrich, Basso and others implicated in a doping probe in Spain also sent a strong signal that cheating, or even suspicions of cheating, will not be tolerated.

Tour director Christian Prudhomme said organizers’ determination to fight doping was “total.”

“The enemy is not cycling, the enemy is doping,” he said the day before the start of the Tour.

Riders being excluded will not be replaced, meaning a smaller field than the 189 racers originally expected. And that’s not even counting the absence of Lance Armstrong, who retired after winning his seventh straight Tour last year.

It is the biggest doping crisis to the hit the sport since the Festina scandal in 1998 nearly derailed the Tour. The Festina team was ejected from the race after customs officers found a large stash of banned drugs in a team car.

Basso, winner of the Giro d’Italia, and Ullrich — the 1997 Tour winner and a five-time runner-up — were among more than 50 cyclists said to have been implicated in the probe that has rocked the sport for weeks. (more…)

By RYAN LENZ, Associated Press Writer
yahoo.com

Five U.S. Army soldiers are being investigated for allegedly raping a young woman, then killing her and three members of her family in Iraq, a U.S. military official told The Associated Press on Friday.

The soldiers also allegedly burned the body of the woman they are accused of raping.

Maj. Gen. James D. Thurman, commander of coalition troops in Baghdad, had ordered a criminal investigation into the alleged killing of a family of four in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad, the U.S. command said. It did not elaborate.

“The entire investigation will encompass everything that could have happened that evening. We’re not releasing any specifics of an ongoing investigation,” said military spokesman Maj. Todd Breasseale.

“There is no indication what led soldiers to this home. The investigation just cracked open. We’re just beginning to dig into the details.”

However, a U.S. official close to the investigation said at least one of the soldiers, all assigned to the 502nd Infantry Regiment, has admitted his role and has been arrested. Two soldiers from the same regiment were slain this month when they were kidnapped at a checkpoint near Youssifiyah.

At least four other soldiers have had their weapons taken away and are confined to Forward Operating Base Mahmoudiyah south of Baghdad. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.

The official said the killings appear to be unrelated to the kidnappings but that a soldier felt compelled to report the killings after his fellow soldiers’ bodies were found.

The killings appeared to have been a “crime of opportunity,” the official said. The soldiers had not been attacked by insurgents but had noticed the woman on previous patrols.
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side note: when you have an administration that openly defies the Supreme Court…..what’s next? but i guess most people really don’t give a shit…i mean, look at the NSA wiretapping program, bushie got on TV and said he was breaking the law, but he was going to continue to do it!

By TIM GOLDEN
The New York Times

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba, June 29 — As the Supreme Court prepared to rule on the Bush administration’s plan to try terror suspects before special military tribunals here, the commander of Guantánamo’s military detention center was asked what impact the court’s decision might have on its operations.

“If they rule against the government, I don’t see how that is going to affect us,” the commander, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris, said Tuesday evening as he sat in a conference room in his headquarters. “From my perspective, I think the direct impact will be negligible.”

The Defense Department repeated that view on Thursday, asserting that the court’s sweeping ruling against the tribunals did not undermine the government’s argument that it can hold foreign suspects indefinitely and without charge, as “enemy combatants” in its declared war on terror.
(more…)

Side note: I HATE their propaganda!!!!

By Brent Budowsky
Huffington Post, Eat The Press

There comes a point in the life of a nation, and a profession, where it is time to make a stand. This is Bush’s McCarthy moment; for Dan this could be his Murrow moment; where it airs is less important than what he says, the message will carry far and wide.

Charging treason is different. It is bad enough to demean a hero who came home from Vietnam in a wheelchair; bad enough for those who never wore the uniform to demean the service record of an authentic hero awarded the Bronze and Silver stars; bad enough to call a decorated Marine and lifetime brother of the troops a coward on the Floor of Congress; bad enough to demean hispanics who sing our anthem in Spanish, bad enough to treat gays as an enemy of Christ; bad enough to mock and slander the widows of 9-11.

It is bad enough for the President of the United States, the commander in chief of our military; the man who boasts of being a war president in a nation he believes is permanently at war, to host a National Political Convention, as George W. Bush did in 2004, handing out toys that make fun of the Purple Heart, a sickening spectacle of a partisan without conscience.

These things are bad; but accusations of treason are different. Let us understand exactly what is going on, with this charge of treason. It is more than whipping up a radical political base that long ago lost touch with the cardinal principles of Americanism.

Our President claims the inherent, unilateral and pre-emptive powers to abrogate the Bill of Rights and the Constitution claiming some authority as commander in chief; he claims the inherent, unilateral and pre-emptive power to violate Federal laws on his own decision. He claims the power to violate time honored international laws such as the Geneva Convention, which is supported almost unanimously by the military who’s advice he falsely claims to always follow.

Remember: the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon included the charge that he failed to faithfully execute the laws of the land, which had put his hand on a bible, and swore to uphold.

First a question, then an observation;

Does President Bush believe that he has the unilateral, presumptive power to violate or ignore the Constitutional provisions giving Congress a role in war making powers? Does the President believe he has the unilateral, presumptive powers to violate any version of a Congressionally enacted and Presidentially signed war powers act or authorization? Does the President believe he has the unilateral and pre-emptive power to violate the Nuremberg Rules?

Does the President claim the sole personal power to wage any war, any time, in any way, against any foe, using any tactic? The other powers he claims inevitably lead to this. These questions must be asked clearly and directly by Congress and the nation, now.

I would observe this, when considering this charge of treason or espionage violations levelled against the New York Times or any other institution of media: the public’s right to know, the purpose of the First Amendment, is to enable our democratic society to make decisions based on an informed public, but it is even more than that, and this critical and historic point must be fully understood.

Had the New York Times not published the two stories that led to this charge of treason and demand for criminal prosecution, it is not just the public that would not have been informed, it would have been the courts and the Congress who would not have been informed either.

I will repeat this for emphasis: what the President in fact wants is not merely the power to keep information from the public, but the power to keep information from the courts and the Congress. When the President in fact wants is to have secret, unilateral and pre-emptive power to determine for himself, without judicial review, without Congressional oversight, without regards to Constitutional, statutory or international law exactly what it means to faithfully execute the laws of the land.

What is at stake is this unprecedented grasp for unilateral power for one man, in one party, in one branch of government, alone, without knowledge or review by any other branch of government, to determine alone what it means for the leader of the free world to faithfully execute the laws. He presumes to put himself above Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Adams and more than two hundred years of American Presidents who never made claims so sweeping, secretive and contemptous of the first principles of our democracy.

The treason charge is different; shame on certain television personalities for treating this charge of treason as just another issue for distorted banners across the television screens.

This is about whether there is even minimal tolerance, good will and integrity among Americans of different points of view.

This is about whether the phrase “faithfully execute the laws of the land” is based on more than two hundred years of American history or the whims of one man, operating in secret, violating the cardinal rules of wartime Presidents to unite the country, to win the war, rather than divide the country, which hurts the war, to win an election, to maximize personal powers that conservative George Will among others has called monarchical.

The charge of treason is not merely to demean opponents or whip up an extremist political base; it is to prevent the Congress, the Courts and the country from even knowing what is happening on fundamental issues of war, peace and freedom. This is about one man seeking the inherent, pre-emptive power to not faithfully execute the laws, and not tell any branch of government of the American people that he is doing so.

Perhaps Mark Cuban, or some other man or woman of means, should simply buy two hours of television time, and give it to Dan Rather without fear or favor or strings attached, and let him do this his way, have his Murrow moment, and keep our constitution, now under hostile attack from within, a living document that no man, no party, no partisan has the inherent, pre-emptive power to treat with such contempt.

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side note: this is pretty sad. It’s not that we drive a lot, it’s the fact that we have POOR fuel economy standards and our fuel has more carbon in it. Why? Because the car and oil companies have bee pouring millions of dollars into Washington, so they don’t raise the fuel economy standards, so we don’t push for more efficient means.

By Janet Wilson
The Los Angeles Times

American cars and pickup trucks are responsible for nearly half of the greenhouse gases emitted by automobiles globally, even though the nation’s vehicles make up just 30% of the nearly 700 million cars in use, according to a new report by Environmental Defense.

Cars in the U.S. are driven more miles, face lower fuel economy standards and use fuel with more carbon than many of those driven in other countries, the authors found. According to the report by the environmental group, due out today, U.S. cars and light trucks were driven 2.6 trillion miles in 2004, equal to driving back and forth to Pluto more than 470 times.

The report’s authors hope their findings will bolster efforts in Congress to require federal regulators to raise fuel economy standards for vehicles and set a mandatory cap on greenhouse gases from all sources. Numerous studies have linked carbon dioxide emissions from burning of fossil fuels such as gasoline to global warming. (more…)

by Michelle Chen
http://newstandardnews.net

As the Republican leadership in the US House of Representatives works to gut the federal tax on dead millionaires’ estates, the hunt for tax breaks has moved from the coffers of the ultra-rich to the nation’s forests. An estate-tax reduction proposal passed by the House last Thursday contains a “sweetener” provision to cut taxes for timber companies, tacked on in hopes of greasing the bill for Senate approval.

But the move to ax taxes for big timber has riled environmental and taxpayer watchdog groups. They say that while lightening taxes for loggers might make estate-tax reform more palatable to industry-funded politicians, it will come at a bitter cost to the public.

The proposed timber-tax reform would benefit lumber and paper companies by exempting 60 percent of the profits generated from growing and logging trees. The legislation would effectively reduce the industry’s capital-gains tax rate from 35 percent to 14 percent. Based on congressional budget projections by the progressive think tank Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the tax break would sap some $940 million from federal funds over the first two years, before coming up for renewal at the end of 2008. (more…)

The Progress Report.
http://www.alternet.org

Yesterday, the Supreme Court agreed to consider Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, a case that “could be one of the court’s most important ever on the environment.” The case emerged in 2003 after the EPA rejected a petition calling for the federal government to restrict emissions of greenhouse gases — most notably, carbon dioxide.

The EPA’s general counsel argued in a memo that “[carbon dioxide] and other [greenhouse gases], as such, are not air pollutants,” and “substantial scientific uncertainty” still exists about the effects of carbon dioxide on the environment. The statement meant the Bush administration would not have to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act. The U.S. Court of Appeals upheld this view. (The Washington Post would later report that “two of the jurists who helped decide the case” had “attended a six-day global warming seminar … sponsored by a free-market foundation and featuring presentations from companies with a clear financial interest in limiting regulation.”)

Twelve states, three major cities, and several environmental groups appealed the decision, arguing the case “goes to the heart of the EPA’s statutory responsibilities to deal with the most pressing environmental problem of our time.”

Ultimately, the Supreme Court’s ruling “could determine how the nation addresses global warming.” Sen. Jim Jeffords (I-VT) is optimistic about the court’s decision. “It is encouraging that the high court feels this case needs to be reviewed,” said Jeffords, a supporter of carbon dioxide regulation. “It is high time to stop relying on technicalities and finger pointing to avoid action on climate change.”

Industry is polluting science

In 1999, President Bush called carbon dioxide “one of four main pollutants” that needed “mandatory reduction targets for emissions.” But he changed his position in a 2003 letter that claimed it “is not a ‘pollutant’ under the Clean Air Act.” (Not surprisingly, the American Petroleum Institute agrees: “Fundamentally, we don’t think carbon dioxide is a pollutant.”) (more…)