I would appeal to you fair brethren of this great country, the benefits of which are the inalienable rights as so dictated in our earliest document, this country’s Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America (Declaration of Independence), which was “Influenced by” the Oath of Abjuration or Plakkaat van Verlatinghe of July 26, 1581, according to Wikipedia, wherein it states: “The Staten-Generaal (the General Estates, a sort of federal parliament) assert that a king is a servant of his people and should respect their laws and traditions. When he no longer does this, the people have the right to choose another ruler.” While marriage, war or sale allowed control by Charles V and Philip II of, the general region of Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, a good part of the North of France (Artois, Nord) and a small part of the West of Germany, there was revolt against this control by William I of Orange, who didn’t want modernization nor centralization of the decentralized medieval governmental structures, which implied “High taxes, and persecution of Protestants by the Catholic church.”
The Declaration also has as its influences: “Republic spirit (Liberty and rights as central values, makes the people as a whole sovereign, rejects aristocracy and inherited political power, expects citizens to be independent and calls on them to perform civic duties, and is strongly opposed to corruption); Enlightenment philosophy (empiricism, reason, science or rationality), whereby the world would progress from a long period of doubtful tradition, irrationality, superstition, and tyranny which they imputed to the Middle Ages, though not from religious belief; natural law, which means Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical universe, material world or material universe; self-determination/moral and legal right, is that every nation is entitled to a sovereign territorial state, and that every specifically identifiable population should choose which state it belongs to (for instance by plebiscite). It implies that all nations – usually meaning an ethnic group that self-identifies as a nation – have an equal entitlement to a sovereign state. It also implies that no other form of state is morally legitimate – certainly not if it includes an ethnic group who do not wish to be included in it, such that there are universal rights of individuals (political freedom, freedom of religion, freedom of speech); Deism — religious beliefs must be founded on human reason and observed features of the natural world, and that these sources reveal the existence of one God or supreme being; John Locke said a government could only be legitimate if it received the consent of the governed through a social contract and protected the natural rights of life, liberty, and property. If such consent was not given, argued Locke, citizens had a right of rebellion; Thomas Paine said in his pamphlet Common Sense that the preamble of the Declaration is influenced by the spirit of republicanism, which was used as the basic framework for liberty. In addition, it reflects Enlightenment philosophy, including the concepts of natural law, self-determination, and Deism. Ideas and even some of the phrasing were taken directly from the writings of English philosopher John Locke. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense had been widely read and provided a simple, clear case for independence that many found compelling. According to Jefferson, the purpose of the Declaration was “Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of . . . but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.”
Motivations for the declaration were simply to announce a severance from Great Britain’s rule.
At this time, another King George it appears is not interested in the preservation of our rights for whom our government’s purpose is to serve us and not the coffers of a taxing and a non-representative body, who would use our people to perpetuate the power of those corporate heads through acquisition of another country’s resources (take, for example, Iraq/Afghanistan).
According to a Washington Post report, “Iraq Blames Sanctions for [the] Deaths [of 350,000 Children-under-5],” December 18, 1991) with intent to enslave them to our privatization of what rightly belongs to them.
What I have seen and read in our declaration speaks of a time-past that now reflects time-present, wherein for example, “Future ages will scarcely believe that the hardiness of one man adventured, within the short compass of [six] years only, to lay a foundation so broad and so undisguised for tyranny over a people fostered and fixed in principles of freedom.”
I have also read in this document these words: “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death… This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of [America]. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one person, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another.
“He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy unworthy the head of a civilized nation.” (See: The Nuremberg Principles, wherein it states: “Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefore and [is] liable to punishment.” Such crimes according to Nuremberg law include: (a) Crimes against peace: (i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i); (b) War crimes: Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill treatment or deportation to slave-labour or for any other purpose of civilian population of, or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war, of persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity. (c) Crimes against humanity: Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of, or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.”
Do we not also agree that as Thomas Jefferson outlined our rights and as our government should be so run and our military to be so confined as to be beholden to the people who it has been reported that: “All men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness…. When a long train of abuses and usurpations, begun at a distinguished period and pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their security.”
Let these be among the discretions of our current king and his henchpersons and let these violations of our and international law serve to pass judgment on him as war criminal and as anti-American, who, in effect, acts as a traitor to our forefathers’ intentions.
Lying and exposing CIA operatives.
On Jan 31 2007, Jason Leopold and Marc Ash reporters for Truthout.org said that “Copies of handwritten notes by Vice President Dick Cheney, introduced at trial by attorneys prosecuting former White House staffer I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, would appear to implicate George W. Bush in the Plame CIA Leak case.”
According to the article “Cheney’s Handwritten Notes Implicate Bush in Plame Affair,” it states that Cheney’s notes reveals that he was “Not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy this Pres. asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others.”
Governmental malfeasance and torture.
On August 24, 2005, Marjorie Cohn said that the Army Reserve Brigadier General Janis Karpinski [who] was in charge of the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq when the now famous torture photographs were taken in fall of 2003, said that “Anybody who confronts this Administration or Rumsfeld or the Pentagon with a true assessment, they find themselves either out of a job, out of their positions, fired, relieved or chastised. Their career comes to an end.” (See: “Abu Ghraib General Lambastes Bush Administration” ).
Domestic Spying before 9/11.
On January 12, 2006, Truthout.org reporter Jason Leopold said that “The National Security Agency advised President Bush in early 2001 that it had been eavesdropping on Americans during the course of its work monitoring suspected terrorists and foreigners believed to have ties to terrorist groups, according to a declassified document.”
In the article, “Bush Authorized Domestic Spying Before 9/11,” Leopold said, “These activities were begun shortly after Bush was sworn in as president and contradict his assertion that 9/11 attacks prompted his taking the step of signing the secret executive order authorizing NSA to monitor selected Americans thought to have terrorist ties.”
Bush’s psychological state and ties to poor decision-making.
On January 18, 2007, John P. Briggs, MD, and J.P. Briggs II, PhD wrote that “Because of a psychological dynamic swirling around deeply hidden feelings of inadequacy, the president has been driven to make increasingly incompetent and risky decisions,” in the article “Bush and the Psychology of Incompetent Decisions.”
Presidential abuse of power.
The New Yorker columnist Sy Hersh said that “We are simply in a situation where this president is really taking his notion of executive privilege to the absolute limit here, running covert operations, using money that was not authorized by Congress, supporting groups indirectly that are involved with the same people that did 9/11, and we should be arresting these people rather than looking the other way…”
Hersh mentioned the presidential abuse of power in an interview with a CNN interviewer on February 25, 2007 as explained on ThinkProgress.com, in an article “Hersh: Bush Funneling Money to al Qaeda-Related Groups.”
Violating International law and the US Constitution.
Free-lance writer Sherwood Ross said “The Bush administration is spending more money (in inflation-adjusted dollars) to develop illegal, offensive germ warfare than the $2 billion spent in World War II on the Manhattan Project to make the atomic bomb.”
Ross, in a December 20, 2006 article entitled “Bush ‘Developing Illegal Bioterror Weapons’ for Offensive Use” said that “Francis Boyle, the professor of international law who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 enacted by Congress [said] the Pentagon ‘is now gearing up to fight and “win” biological warfare’ pursuant to two Bush national strategy directives adopted ‘without public knowledge and review’ in 2002.
Bush’s policy likeness to Hitler’s.
A reader (SL) from Wisconsin submitted content for the article “The Bush Hitler Thing.” He saw parallels with Bush’s policies and behavior with that of Hitler. – 09 January 2004.
On Bush’s smoke screen over the Effects of Global Warming.
Truthout.org UK correspondent Chris Floyd said “The good folks at AEI – whose members were instrumental in bringing us the ‘splendid little war’ in Iraq and are now agitating for an even more glorious bloodletting in Iran – are offering scientists and economists $10,000 each (plus extras) to tear down the IPCC report and snow job the hoi polloi into believing that the crack pipe of the Carbon Era will never be empty.”
Floyd’s statement comes from the article “Bush Backers Offer Payoffs to Undercut Global Warming.”
Bush’s selling out of the social security system to his stock market brethren.
Allan Sloan said “Last year, even though Bush talked endlessly about the supposed joys of private accounts, he never proposed a specific plan to Congress and never put privatization costs in the budget. But this year, with no fanfare whatsoever, Bush stuck a big Social Security privatization plan in the federal budget proposal, which he sent to Congress on Monday.”
In “Bush’s Social Security Sleight of Hand,” Sloan writes “His plan would let people set up private accounts starting in 2010 and would divert more than $700 billion of Social Security tax revenues to pay for them over the first seven years.”
Constitutional Role of the President, war in Iraq, manipulation of intelligence, torture, and retaliation for criticism.
John Nichols on December 9, 2006 said that Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney accused the president of failing “To preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States; he has failed to ensure that senior members of his administration do the same; and he has betrayed the trust of the American people.”
Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney’s rationale, according to Nichols in an article entitled “A Closing Call for Impeachment” in the Nation magazine was that President George W. Bush “Disregarded the rule of law and his Constitutionally-defined responsibilities.”
Bush’s Actions and Blowback.
Chalmers Johnson wrote that as “A domestic democracy and a foreign imperialist,” America has involved itself in does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to, and in, foreign countries. It refers specifically to retaliation for illegal operations carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public.”
Johnson, in his article Empire v. Democracy: Why Nemesis Is at Our Door, said that “Operations have included the clandestine overthrow of governments various administrations did not like, the training of foreign militaries in the techniques of state terrorism, the rigging of elections in foreign countries, interference with the economic viability of countries that seemed to threaten the interests of influential American corporations, as well as the torture or assassination of selected foreigners. The fact that these actions were, at least originally, secret meant that when retaliation does come – as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001 – the American public is incapable of putting the events in context.”
Bush’s Policies in Iraq and how it has advanced Terrorism Worldwide.
Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank said that the effect of Iraq is that “War Has Increased Terrorism Sevenfold Worldwide.”
In the article of the same name: “The Iraq Effect: War Has Increased Terrorism Sevenfold Worldwide,” Bergen and Cruickshank said “The president’s argument [that terrorists would be drawn to Iraq, where they would perish] conveyed two important assumptions: First, that the threat of jihadist terrorism to U.S. interests would have been greater without the war in Iraq, and second, that the war is reducing the overall global pool of terrorists.”
Bush as King and our military installations in Iraq.
According to Karen Kwiatkowski, “We are in Iraq, we have the finest military installations in the world, the newest military installations in the world, and we’re not leaving them. We’re not turning them over to a Shiite government, we’re not turning them over to a Sunni government, and we’re not turning them over to a Kurdish government. We’re not doing that. They are American bases. We’ve got our flag there. And this is kind of the way they used to do things, I guess back in the Middle Ages. Maybe the Dark Ages. A king decided he wanted to go do something, he went and did it. And this is George Bush. We call him an elected president. I mean, he’s operating much as kings have operated in the past.”
Bush and the effect of his economic policies on the poor.
“The number of Americans living in deep or severe poverty has reached nearly 16 million. A new analysis by the McClatchy Newspapers found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent since 2000. During this time period, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries.”
Bush and his admittance of guilt as to Geneva Convention Violations.
In an article entitled “Bush admits to CIA secret prisons” relays that “President Bush has acknowledged the existence of secret CIA prisons and said 14 key terrorist suspects have now been sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.”
On 7 September 2006, the BBC announced that “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: Alleged mastermind of 9/11; believed to be the Number 3 al-Qaeda leader before he was captured in Pakistan in 2003; Abu Zubaydah: Alleged link between Osama Bin Laden and many al-Qaeda cells before his capture in Pakistan in 2002; Ramzi Binalshibh: One of the alleged masterminds of 9/11; Hambali (Riduan Isamuddin): Alleged senior leader in Jemaah Islamiah (JI); wanted by Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines in connection with blasts” were incarcerated at Guantanamo.
Bush and the will of the people (free and open elections; free speech; and rule of law).
Edward M. Kennedy in his article “Demeaning Democracy,” Sunday 13 August 2006, said that Cheney had gone too far when he said that the Connecticut Democratic primary might encourage the al-Qaida types who want to “Break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task.”
The implication of Cheney’s words, according to Kennedy was to “Insinuate that anyone who votes against them is giving aid and comfort to the terrorists.”
Bush and Blaming Immigrants for Job Loss to U.S. Citizens.
San Francisco Chronicle reporter Tyche Hendricks, Tuesday, February 27, 2007 said that Californian immigrants do not hurt wages for U.S. workers. U.S.-born workers and immigrants do not compete for the same jobs, Hendricks said, nor do they depress the wages of the U.S.-born, according to a new study by the Public Policy Institute of California.
Bush and problems with the elections.
What is at stake for me is that we ensure that all get to vote and that votes cast are not manipulated in any way. There is no representation if this basic right is removed.
The thought that the Republicans would stoop so low as to deny a vote cast or to change it is to subvert the possibility for truth.
Whatever the outcome of a free and fair election it allows for all to participate. The milieu of a place where all have said their peace with that small all-important means is to ensure that our society is operating with all its capillaries and veins and that from every part of the body politic a sense of the health and welfare of the state is attended to. The aorta carries blood from the heart to all the organs and structures of the body. The vote is the blood coming back to the heart for an oxygenation of the needs and wants of a people. To deny that return is to stop the flow and a part of the heart dies. And no heart can run for long or with much vigor without all of its major systems and byways acting in full concert.
All of our voices, whether Republican, Democrat, Green, Libertarian, Constitution, Alaskan Independence Party, Aloha Aina Party, and the list goes on, almost as diverse as our individual representation of selves need to be heard. No one must go without a voice or access to the heart for its oxygenation, for its bestowal of life-sustaining information as to the health of the entire body.
And for this reason, the means to justify an end to our voting rights, as with the implementation of electronic voting machines that can be infiltrated digitally or by registering people to be Republican when they wanted to be Democrats , or any other means to a single party’s end, let that not be the end we seek. But let us allow for every man or woman citizen his/her voice, which is his/her vote.
1. Jeremy Wallace said that the loss of some $18,000 votes in Sarasota, Florida, where touch screen voting took place, is an impetus for lawmakers, such as Senator Diane Feinstein, who as chairwoman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, which has jurisdiction over federal election regulations will “Re-introduce legislation in the new year to require all voting systems to have verifiable paper trails.”
2. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said “Congress, always ready with funds for needy industries, swiftly authorized $3.9 billion to upgrade the nation’s election systems – with much of the money devoted to installing electronic voting machines in each of America’s 180,000 precincts. But as midterm elections approach this November, electronic voting machines are making things worse instead of better.”
3. In a November 1, 2006 report by Michael Janofsky entitled “Diebold Demands HBO Cancel Documentary on Voting Machines,” reveals the absurdity of Diebold’s demands in that they call the HBO film “unfair and inaccurate,” and yet the film proposes that “Diebold voting machines aren’t tamper-proof and can be manipulated to change voting results.”
4. Dan Balz and Zachary A. Goldfard said that during the Nov. 7th election, more than 80 percent of voters used electronic voting machines. They said, “Human blunders and technological glitches (in Maryland) caused long lines and delays in vote-counting.” This followed ones earlier this year in Ohio, Illinois and several other states, have contributed to doubts among some experts about whether the new systems are reliable and whether election officials are adequately prepared to use them, according to Balz and Goldfarb’s article “Major Problems at Polls Feared,” Washington Post, 17 September 2006.
5. Rob Hall said Ohio Voting Rights Activist and Attorney Bob Fitrakis believed that “Massive voter purges in Democratic precincts may have already won Ohio elections.” That was in October. As it turned out, Ted Strickland beat J. Kenneth Blackwell by approximately 24%, but only 4 million out of the 11 million inhabitants of Ohio voted.
6. Patrick Walters said that “Voter advocates filed a lawsuit Tuesday seeking to stop Pennsylvania counties from using ‘paperless’ electronic voting machines, saying that such systems leave no paper record that could be used in the event of a recount, audit or other problem.” Walters also said in the article titled “Pennsylvania Sued over Electronic Voting Machines” that “The lawsuit alleges that certifying paperless electronic voting machines violates the state’s election code and constitution.”
7. David Dill, Doug Jones and Barbara Simons said “Computer security expert Harri Hursti revealed serious security vulnerabilities in Diebold’s software. Computer Scientist and Voting System Examiner Michael Shamos in Pennsylvania said, “‘It’s the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system.'” Dill, Jones and Simons said that “Basically, Diebold included a ‘back door’ in its software, according to, allowing anyone to change or modify the software.
Bush and upsetting the balance of power in the region given Iraqi Intervention.
Associated Press reported on Wednesday, December 13, 2006, that “Saudi Arabia has expressed concern that once U.S. troops leave Iraq that the controlling Shiite majority could massacre the Sunni minority, believed to comprise a large faction of the deadly insurgency that has claimed thousands of Iraqi civilian and U.S. military lives.”
The report also revealed that the Saudis are not happy with proposed talks between the US and Iran. — Mario Savioni, June 20, 2007.
Musings 