f the Tea Baggers, who are mainly funded by the Koch brothers, not to mention the Republican Party, do win in elections throughout the several states so that the GOP really does take back Congress, we will know for sure that the Supreme Court of the United States has truly destroyed Democracy in America.

And for all time.

We know that power once gained will not be willingly returned.  That is an axiom of the politics of power.

With its' disastrously partisan ruling on Citizen's United the Supreme Court has undone, literally hundreds of years of careful legislation which was designed to preserve freedom and Democracy in America.  

Their first treasonous action was to interfere with the presidential election in 2004.  That was, as any good citizen can tell you, a coup d'etat, and most definitely not a valid, nor even constitutional activity of the Supreme Court Of The United States.  They stopped the counting of the legitimate votes in Florida, thereby nullifying the votes of those citizens, but then had the affrontery to appoint George W. Bush. the most destructive president ever of the US Constitution.  He shredded the Constitution in such a way that we still have to repair.
Hidden in the fog of the Military Commissions Act was the cancellation of Posse Comitatus. Now the Citizen's United ruling.  And although President Obama has spoken out against this ruling, for my part I deeply believe that those judges who ruled for it must be impeached and disgraced in every way.  It was not merely a bad ruling, but it is treasonous to the entire spirit of Democracy in America.



Any rational American now knows that the wrong headed Republican ideas have single handedly led to the disaster in which we now find ourselves. The Banksters and Wall Street and the vast army of corporate lobbyists who bought the U.S. Congress. The ghost of Milton Friedman litters our country: Small or limited Government has been the cry of Republicans since Ronald Reagan and what they actually do is expand the government but they do it in ways that accomplish their goals. More military. And trickle down economics which turn out to be a patently invalid theory. Bush cut taxes of the rich and we now have fewer jobs than ever before. They lie outright when they claim that any smallest bit of this mess is President Obama's fault. It is all Bush, Bush, Cheney, and Bush.  This being true, one asks, how could any rational human being vote for a Republican again.

Answer:  Big money can do anything it wants.  We are seeing that played out  everywhere now.  On TV all the expensive attack ads, and on the Internet on the websites of most heretofore liberal forums and message boards such as Alternet.  Anything for a buck.

And for most of the elite, the U.S. Constitution is in their way.  They want it all.  And none for you.  You are nothing but a wage slave.  A serf!  Nevertheless, its as if nobody remembers such trivial details.  Many people are angry at President Obama, (because the GOP noise machine has been so active and so noisy decrying his every move.) and at the Democrats--- who deserve very harsh criticism for their lack of action in the past four years.  Which means these low-information voters will vote for--- you guessed it, any nearby Republican or Tea Bagger, no matter how insane the ideas they may spout.

Once again, I tremble for my country. ♦   

President Obama Springs to New Life

♣

reat news! I hate to seem spiteful but what it looks like to me is this: as Rahm Emanuel leaves the Whitehouse, Obama springs to life.  This is certainly a big, bold step he's taken appointing Elizabeth Warren to man the post, as it were,  of the agency she, herself, designed.  What a God Send she is!  And we know how much the right wingnuts hate her. the Right wingers in Congress  tried to pass a law to bar Elizabeth Warren from being put in charge of policing Wall Street!  And no wonder they hate her.

She is honest!

And they can't find any dirt on her.

And it kills them.

America Wins!

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When somebody in Washington DC starts talking Truth, the right wing goes into a tail spin!  We see it, but nobody says anything.  I wonder why.

So now Obama has appointed Elizabeth Warren to a somewhat lesser position to act on the fringe for the organization she designed.  It is a totally unsatisfactory arrangement, but it must be that the members of the Business Roundtable will assassinate the president, as they did JFK, if Obama doesn't fall in step with them.  So at best this appointment is a compromise.♦

9/11--- The Truth of the Lies

♣

ow did you know the Bush administration was lying to all of America in everything they said about 9/11 and the subsequent war of aggression in Iraq?  How did the liberal members of Congress know they were being lied to about the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction under Saddam Hussein?  Without even taking into account the fact that Saddam was subsequently condemned to death by a Court of puppet judges and puppet lawyers largely set up by the Bush Administration to give the appearance of legitimacy to the Death Sentence which was already a done deal.  Granted that Saddam Hussein was a monstrous tyrant.  But the people of Iraq expected nothing better; brutal, tyrannical government has been the history of that region for centuries.  And its' people tended to be faint hearted, indeed, downright listless, about the prospects of democratic elections.  Add to that, as we have seen, without the strong arm of a totalitarian government, the Middle Eastern countries, along with Asian and African emerging nations, tend to sink into utter chaos accompanied by, as much as brought on by  the rot of petty warlords and other attributes of total corruption.  Freedom, democracy--- too difficult. 

The time I spent in India and Nepal, opened my eyes to the corruption inherent in the poorer countries.  Nepal was, indeed a corrupt monarchy.  When government officials are not decently paid they tend to shakedown the citizens as well as the tourists.    

You'll have to include the entire corporate media in this riddle,  as they had all the details of the 9/11 attack at their fingertips mere minutes after the attack; not to forget that certain TV news anchors reported the collapse of the World Trade Center, and some well known anchors as much as 30 minutes before the actual event.  So back to the original question:  how do you know they were all lying?    

Easy:

Their lips were moving.

How I wish all Congressmen and women had the clear vision and moral fiber of Dennis Kucinich.  But, let's face it, certain parts of the American population--- I call them Korrupt Kristian Kocksuckers,--- would rather send their very own moral midgets to Washington to give voice to their treasonous values or lack thereof.  The people who elected Rand Paul would be better off dead.  Their backward values, and his, are not the way this country or any country on the planet, or even in the Universe, ought to go.

Their racist attitudes are an abomination.

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About the only real value to America of the war in Iraq was that it sent a lot of the Korrupt Kristian Kocksucker offspring to be killed in the Middle East.

The newspapers report that for every 3 men killed in battle, another 10 commit suicide.  The way I see it, those  are the men who awoke to find themselves fighting a corrupt war for a corrupt administration.  Add to that, the bottom feeder values of those who indulged in torture, and you have an army of fragile human beings who have lost all sense of meaning.  How could they find their lives anything but empty, given the circumstances of such moral vapidity.♦
    

Robert F. Kennedy challenges Gross Domestic Product

Speech More Relevant Than Ever

♣

t becomes more and more clear with time: Robert F Kennedy and his brother, John F Kennedy were assassinated because they both talked TRUTH.  I ask myself, "What large organization would kill to suppress truth?"

Answer: The GOP hates truth!  Listen to the lies of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Alan Simpson, as they distort facts and figures, and any information having to do with Social Security, Medicare, Health Care Reform, Credit Card reform, Wall Street reform.  I'll stop there, as those are enough contentious issues about which the Congressmen named above are known to equivocate, if not downright lie.

And lie they do.

Not just some of the time, either.

All the time.

Want more examples?  Look how long it took Ken Mehlman to come out as a gay man, after years of bald-faced lying about his own sexual orientation, as Chairman of the Republican National Committee.  Mehlman actively helped Republicans to pass virulent anti-gay legislation.  How much self-loathing is involved in that?  How about how the Republicans still lie about the fact that they work entirely for the benefit of the super rich and multi-national corporations while making loud protestations about being concerned about the poor and middle class.  Like my Political -Science professor said in class one day, "The most audacious and ruthless ripoff sales job in history was when the Republican Party sold poor people and minorities on the idea that it was to their benefit to switch their allegiance to the Republican Party."

GOP leadership was then, and they are now, plainly and simply, outrageous liars, defenders of Greed,  who conduct rituals of Satanic worship at their Bohemian Grove ceremonies, under the image of the Owl.  And if you saw the movie, Eyes Wide Shut, you saw Tom Cruise exposed in what looked suspiciously like a Republican Satanic revelry.  My immediate reaction to the scene was that it was a reference to what might happen if a liberal ever were to enter a Republican caucus, with or without disguise:  The man the gold mask, dressed in red ceremonial robes.  The basso chanting of Satanic verses.  It is a fact that the worship of worldly wealth and material goods is not an attribute of Christianity!  Jesus of Nazareth was very clear about that:

"Consider the lilies of the field." he said. "They spin not, neither do they toil."  

Stop me when I go wrong here, but I take that statement to mean that money is not a big part of Jesus' message to the world.  In fact, I would feel safe assuming that he meant just the opposite.  And yet so many Christians seem to equate Christianity with massive amounts of shekels.  Take for example, Eric Prince, the scion of an extremely wealthy, Christian family. Eric is the founder of Blackwater, the name now changed to something less meaningful.  Fascinating, how it has recently come to light how Prince created a plethora of false-front subsidiary companies in order to garner as many government no-bid contracts as possible and still maintain a low-profile.  Prince hired an army of mercenary soldiers who were paid princely sums compared to the paltry pittance of the US Army grunt.  Prince could well afford to pay his guns for hire hundreds of thousands in salary, as he himself was taking in billions in profit.  There was a first rate movie a year or so ago, with Ben Affleck, as an aggressively questioning Senator, Russel Crowe, as an investigative journalist, and Helen Mirren, as the owner/publisher of a paper very much like The Washington Post.  State of Play was the title. (2009) The movie strongly alluded to that very situation.  The point is that these Republican types who flourished during Bush 2, were not merely wretched liars, who cravenly hid in shadows, but corrupt beyond imagining.  And any truth tellers were dealt with either, as Valerie Plame--- outed by the Whitehouse, as a CIA agent, putting her life at risk, not to mention her associates; and smearing her husband, Joe Wilson, for telling truth about the buying and selling of yellow cake uranium; or Defense Strategist, Richard Clark, who was kicked out and then smeared by the Whitehouse.

But some were simply killed outright.

There were an awful lot of private airplane crashes during Bush 2, which just happened to be timed so that  certain key people who were scheduled to testify in court within days, sometimes hours of the hearings were killed. Oops! Dead.  And the local police usually had all the information within minutes after the crash, if not in some cases, beforehand.  Any voices of outrage were immediately silenced.  The video below puts into perspective the role of one Mike Connell, a super-partisan Bush supporter during the 2004 elections. Connell  was responsible for the publication of the Swift Boat fiasco which falsely accused John Kerry of so many fictitious acts, among other dirty GOP tricks.




Mike Connell was served with a subpoena, compelling him to appear in the federal courtroom in Ohio at the same College Park, MD airport where his single engine plane took off from, on his final solo flight...  Mike Connell's private jet crashed the day before he was to testify.  At the time, it was said that Karl Rove had warned Connell to keep his mouth shut.  Nor was this death an isolated event.  There were more than a few such perfectly timed crashes of private jets.  There was a Senator.  There was the Whitehouse computer guru, a devout Christian who was disgusted by what he had seen at the Whitehouse.  He left and volunteered to become a witness, and who, like Connell, was scheduled to testify in Federal Court, but was deplaned, shall we say? the night before.  It seemed that anyone who knew anything about the Bush administration and was deemed to be at risk of spilling their guts to a court, was beyond foolish to get into a private jet.  The timing of the crashes was such that, to anyone watching, the Bushies were blatantly telling the world that if you speak what you know, or even give the appearance that you might, there would be consequences.

Interestingly, these gangland-style assassinations, have, so far, tended not to occur under President Obama.  Funny, how those things work.  Suddenly, now that the Bushies are gone, airplanes seem to fly without falling down from the sky.

Back to the Kennedy brothers' assassinations.  Corporate Media likes to blame the Mafia; and perhaps the Mafia was involved, but it's far more likely that the Mafia collaborated with the Republican leadership of the time.

This speech by Robert Kennedy has become more relevant rather than less relevant as we have moved into the 21st. Century.  In fact, this speech was brought to my attention by Alan Grayson, the Democratic Congressman now running for his life in Florida.  The Koch's have taken careful aim at Grayson, to remove him from Congress.  Unfortunately of the four or five candidates the Republicans have, they all turn out to be flakes.  Too bad the GOP has no real candidates and yet---and this is really frightening--- The GOP is being touted as the big winner across the board.  Then the Koch brothers will have totally bought the United States Congress.

Yes, but that is illegal, you may say.

Well, the Supreme Court says otherwise!

Of course, the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizen's United is an outrageous, obscene even, partisan ruling which completely gives corporations the upper hand in all future elections in America.  And that includes foreign multi-national corporations.  We now know that money is even more important than name recognition in elections.  That is to say, that money buys television commercials and print ads, and public relations firms and all sorts of  carefully placed articles and letters placed in magazines and newspapers.

But after all, the Supreme Court has done worse.  Much, much worse!  In the 2000 presidential election,  they intervened in a national presidential election, selected their own man and declared him the winner.  That was not merely an oddity.

It was, in fact, a coup d'état!

The Supreme Court of the United States of America exceeded its Constitutional power, by a long shot, and abridged the electoral process, which they, each one without exception, were bound by oath to uphold.  So much for the effectiveness of an oath taken by a government official.  Any government official at all.  

For this they ought to have been shot for treason.

Every single Supreme Court Justice who participated in this appalling action at the very least should have been brought to trial and condemned as there was no defense of such a clear cut violation.  They could not have  claimed anything but Nolo Contendere.  No Contest.  Which is, obviously, an admission of guilt, made in hopes of mercy from the court.

After such a treasonous and criminal action, one would think the GOP is no longer entitled to criticize liberal judges whom they like to call Activist Judges...legislating from the bench. But that would not take into account one of the most difficult attributes of the Republican Party, namely, that they have no honor.  There is no lie, no act of corruption so low that, even when shown to be dead wrong, which would bring from their lips, an apology, or an admission of guilt or even responsibility.  This is the major downfall of the Republican Party.  This one defect is what places the GOP, generally, in the position of keeping close company with stupid people.  If not being entirely stupid themselves, individually, their collective actions follow precisely the behavior of stupid people. This behavior is named after the scientists who defined the behavior of stupid people who proclaim loudly their ignorance, such as the screamers at the rallies in the summer of '09. Known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect.  It seems that stupid, ill-informed, opinionated people, are incapable of understanding that, in fact, they are wrong and their position is based in unskilled ignorance.  They cannot be dissuaded from their position however much it conflicts with factual information.  It is axiomatic that unskilled people, especially of low IQ, exhibit such behavior.  Conversely, the skillful person, it has been found, in the same study, tends to underestimate his or her own skill and competence. ♦

Outlaw Tasers

Brutalization of the DOJ

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ately, it seems that if local police all across America are not shooting and killing innocent citizens, then they are tasering harmless old folks and pregnant women.   Then, when they are brought to court to account for their crime, they invariably claim to have been in fear for their lives. This alarming and relatively new trend points to poor training at the Police Academies. And this abusive stance is not confined to big cities.  I do not know what the trainers are saying to these men and women, but by the time they get out onto the streets they have become brutally aggressive, when they are not being brutally defensive, and at other times simply brutal.

This civilization is not about that.

We are not yet a Third World or Emerging Nation where civil servants work for pittance and consider themselves lucky to be working at all.  As far as I know, they are well paid, and given early retirement with good livable retirement pay packages.  Nevertheless, look at the types of people who are hired.  There is a famous case in Hartford Connecticut,  where a man was not hired because he was deemed too smart.  So the policy is to hire only the low mentals.  And that is why these guys are so quick on the draw.  They are ten times more likely to be emotionally and psychologically underdeveloped, and the complaint is not merely the much too quickness of trigger-happy and all too frequently, racist cops, too concerned about citizens obeying their every little command immediately and far too lax about dealing sensitively, with troubled people in complex situations. We have heard cops complain that we are asking too much of them, by asking them to be heroic and aggressive when necessary, and then sensitive, when needed, and to immediately know the difference.  Instead we have far too many instances of thugs in uniform beating up and shooting children, and tasering pregnant women.  And always, the local mayor must side with the officer in question or else invite the threat of rancor and insurrection among the ranks of the police themselves, and their union.  What we have here is a good argument for hiring more intelligent and well-adjusted men and women to urban police departments.  Send the low mentals who can't restrain themselves from tasering innocent old ladies and the very young.

In the video below, we see the extreme example of police officers invading a law abiding citizen's home, and brutalizing him because they were too frightened of a 64 year old man who was obviously unarmed, and merely rising out of his chair after asking the police officers to leave his property.

They tasered him for no good reason!

In fact, it appears that they tasered him because he didn't beg for a taste of their boot leather.

If these goons are not found guilty and fired from the department dishonorably--- and made an example of by imprisonment for the maximum sentence, it will be just another instance of corruption at City Hall.  The detective in Washington DC, whom you will see in the video, is obviously on the side of police brutality.  He dances all around the issue, all the while making excuses for the cops' cowardice.  Brutalizing an injured 64 year old, unarmed man in his own home!  This was all a matter of police arrogance. This is a serious issue which demands much more discussion by civilians in dialogue with the City Halls leadership of most cities and towns across America, and upper level police officials. ♦    

Ben Bernanke Translated

"Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but, disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort." : Marshall McLuhan - (1911-1980)

"...free enterprise, [is] a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich." : Noam Chomsky

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"I Was Wrong Again!" What Ben Bernanke meant to say

The Fed chairman delivers a big, but boring, speech on the economy at Jackson Hole. Here's a translation

By Andrew Leonard

August 30, 2010 "Salon" --

s a man, Ben Bernanke is prone to understatement, a tendency that was reinforced very early in his term as chairman of the Federal Reserve when a dinner-party comment he made to CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo sent financial markets into a tizzy the next day. Therefore, any speech he gives -- in particular, major speeches on the state of the economy at a time of high national anxiety -- must be read through a special filter. I call this filter the Bernanke-Hype-ometer, and I have applied it to the address he gave at Jackson Hole, Wyo., Friday morning. (Bernanke comments in bold, followed by Hype-ometer translations.)
The annual meeting at Jackson Hole always provides a valuable opportunity to reflect on the economic and financial developments of the preceding year, and recently we have had a great deal on which to reflect.
Hey, just this morning, the Bureau of Economic Analysis downgraded the second quarter GDP growth rate to a miserable 1.6 percent! So, even after juicing the economy every which way but loose the last two years, we're headed in completely the wrong direction. Congress won't do anything to help, so now everyone wants me to stop the bleeding.

However, although private final demand, output and employment have indeed been growing for more than a year, the pace of that growth recently appears somewhat less vigorous than we expected.
Remember how I was the wrongest person on the planet when I said the subprime mortgage bust was "contained" and wouldn't cause a worldwide financial crisis? Haha, man that was dumb. Well, guess what, I was wrong again earlier this year, when I decided the time was ripe for the Fed to stop bailing out the economy.
Incoming data on the labor market have remained disappointing.
The working class is unbelievably screwed. This is kind of bumming me out.

Overall, the incoming data suggest that the recovery of output and employment in the United States has slowed in recent months, to a pace somewhat weaker than most FOMC participants projected earlier this year.
Double-dip recession, here we come!

Despite the weaker data seen recently, the preconditions for a pickup in growth in 2011 appear to remain in place.
At this juncture, the risk of either an undesirable rise in inflation or of significant further disinflation seems low.
OK, sure, unemployment is in the toilet, but don't expect us to do too much about it, because the only thing we really care about is inflation, and as far as we are concerned, everything's fine on that front.


The FOMC has also acted to improve market functioning and to push longer-term interest rates lower through its large-scale purchases of agency debt, agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS), and longer-term Treasury securities, of which the Federal Reserve currently holds more than $2 trillion. The channels through which the Fed's purchases affect longer-term interest rates and financial conditions more generally have been subject to debate.

OK, let me lay it out for you. The one thing the Fed is really prepared to do to help the economy is to keep purchasing debt, such as Treasury securities. By keeping our unbelievably monster huge portfolio of debt high, we theoretically lower the cost of borrowing throughout the economy. That should spur faster growth. We stopped doing this a while back, but so many people started refinancing their mortgages that our holdings of mortgage-backed securities began to disappear, which, ironically, meant that by not acting, we were actually contributing to a tightening of the money supply. That's a big no-no when economic growth is flat-lining. So when the economy started to go downhill again, we changed our strategy -- but not until after a big fight with members of the conservative faction of the Federal Reserve Bank's Board of Governors who believe that even such a cautious step was far too aggressive. These guys just don't care about unemployment. Some of them even think it's time to start raising interest rates! Hahahahaha.

By agreeing to keep constant the size of the Federal Reserve's securities portfolio, the Committee avoided an undesirable passive tightening of policy that might otherwise have occurred. The decision also underscored the Committee's intent to maintain accommodative financial conditions as needed to support the recovery. We will continue to monitor economic developments closely and to evaluate whether additional monetary easing would be beneficial. In particular, the Committee is prepared to provide additional monetary accommodation through unconventional measures if it proves necessary, especially if the outlook were to deteriorate significantly.
I am not going to be responsible for yet another market crash. So I stomped all over the reactionaries, because even a blind man can see investor sentiment is as fragile as a 2-year-old on a sugar crash. I really don't want to be remembered as the Federal Reserve chairman who presided over TWO recessions. So let me tell you plainly: If the shit really hits the fan, we're going to open the taps wide open, buy every Treasury bond in sight, drop money from helicopters, and keep the U.S. economy on life support.

This is why, incidentally, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is back over 10,000 points. Yay me!

A rather different type of policy option, which has been proposed by a number of economists, would have the Committee increase its medium-term inflation goals above levels consistent with price stability. I see no support for this option on the FOMC.
Paul Krugman, who is one hell of a pain in the ass, believes that the Fed is far too concerned with keeping inflation low. He keeps whining about unemployment, and thinks that if we just did so much as announce that we are prepared to accept higher inflation, and then pursued monetary policy along those lines, the economy would get a steroid boost that would finally shake it out of its doldrums. Sorry, but that is completely nuts and it is NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN. Ever! Please shut up, Paul.

Inflation expectations appear reasonably well-anchored, and both inflation expectations and actual inflation remain within a range consistent with price stability.
I know, I know, the Federal Reserve is entrusted by Congress with two mandates -- promoting full employment and keeping inflation low. But everyone knows that we only really care about price stability, so never mind what I said before about the shit hitting the fan. As long as inflation is fine, we're only going to take baby steps.

Despite this recent slowing, however, it is reasonable to expect some pickup in growth in 2011 and in subsequent years.
Somewhere, over the rainbow, skies are blue. ◊

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon.  

Another Swing And A Miss for Congress

Congress Misses the Ball


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Photo/Wikimedia

federal grand jury last week indicted retired pitcher Roger Clemens on charges he lied to Congress.

In February 2008, Clemens, a seven time Cy Young winner, voluntarily met with a House committee and testified he didn’t knowingly use steroids or human growth hormones. The only evidence against Clemens appears to be the testimony of his former trainer, Brian McNamee, who claims to have injected Clemens with the drugs about 40 times between 1998 and 2001. Clemens says he was led to believe the injections were Vitamin B-12 and an anesthetic, Lidocaine, both legal under Major League Baseball guidelines. McNamee cut a deal with the Department of Justice to avoid prosecution. Clemens could be sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Probably half the country thinks Clemens took illegal drugs. Probably half the country thinks he didn’t take the drugs and was set up by his trainer. But that’s not the important issue.

First of all, does anyone know why the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform even held a hearing about steroid usage among baseball players? Was there a dry spell and the Committee couldn’t find anything in the government that needed to be reformed?

If the committee thought public figures taking illegal drugs was bad, why didn’t it look inside itself first? If it did, there would be a high probability it could easily have found members of Congress and their staffs who also took steroids, snorted coke, or mainlined harder drugs. Stoned and wasted Congressional staffers pose a greater danger to society than any athlete.

This is the same body of legislators who created the House Unamerican Activities Committee in the early 1950s to strip Americans of their First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and association. It also ordered contempt of Congress charges and perjury against witnesses who told the truth—but not what Congress wanted to hear.

This is the Congress that in 1994 didn’t ask for convictions for perjury for any of the seven CEOs of major tobacco companies who testified under oath that nicotine wasn’t addictive. But that, and much more, is history. The present 21st century Congress has much more to answer about its actions.

This is the Congress that ran in fearful circles, put its tail between its legs and in 2001 passed the PATRIOT Act, which stripped Americans of six Constitutional amendments and the constitutional right of habeas corpus. Four years later, Congress reauthorized the Act to prevent several sections from automatically expiring. The terrorists had done their job well—they put so much fear into Americans that the Americans created their own terrorism.

This is the Congress that failed to question the Bush–Cheney administration’s claims of why it needed to spend about a trillion dollars and invade Iraq.

This is a Congress that was slow to respond to well-documented evidence that the U.S. was committing torture—and which, against the professional advice of the CIA and FBI, housed large numbers of elected legislators who saw nothing wrong with torturing those who may or may not have been terrorists, the election year “buzzword.”

This is a Congress that had provided negligent oversight of companies that provided billions of dollars worth of service in the war zone—and fraudulently overbilled the taxpayers.

This is the same Congress that allowed the banking and investment industries to make billions by scamming Americans, gave multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses to its senior management, and helped bring about the greatest recession since the 1920s.

This is the Congress that by negligence allowed lax oversight of environmental regulations.

This is the same Congress that was blind to the Bush–Cheney administration’s failure to properly regulate the oil industry, and probably should be considered to be an unindicted co-conspirator in the BP oil spill.

This is the same Congress that has allowed a Republican minority to become the street bully and block needed legislation, including legislation to assist small business. But because of a weak Democratic response and archaic procedures, the entire Congress must suffer a black eye.

This is the same Congress that did pass health reform, but allowed itself to be sunk by the fear of a Republican filibuster that what was passed was a watered-down version of what was necessary.

There are so much more important issues than investigating steroid usage among millionaire athletes that it is easy to believe that Congress muffed its responsibility to the American people by its righteous political gesturing to make voters believe their elected officials actually cared about health.

If Congress is so upset that others lied to them and the American people, maybe it could ask the FBI to investigate and the Department of Justice to bring indictments against not only some of its own members but also some members of the Bush–Cheney administration.♦

Walter Brasch is a professor of journalism at Bloomsburg University. His most recent book is Sinking the Ship of State: The Presidency of George W. Bush. He can be reached at brasch@bloomu.edu.