Talk me down! How can the U.S. spread democracy when we're compromising our own principles?

We dump "Bush Democracy" every where we go.... like an elephant eating EX-LAX.

Grab a shovel folks, we're ALL going to need to help clean up after this guy!

We certainly compromised...everything we held dear as a nation.

In short, we can't. This nation sprouted from principles that are quite Lockean in that they are enlightened and egalitarian. If we compromise those, we compromise our own souls, and the lipservice we thenceforth pay to democracy becomes mere vanity. God help us if we have already become such an empty shell.

I am hoping that, this new administration, since they are comprised of mostly lawyers, are just trying not to tip their hand too much until Jan. 20, lest Bush&Co get busy with more obstructions of justice.

 Is it true, that a President, can't pardon himself or others for an illegal act, he has authorized, in person?

I hope this goes straight to the Justice Dept. and not a bunch of show hearings. I mean, we have case law, on the books, where we have procecuted for waterboarding and other violations of the sort after WWII?.

It must start with the Top,and not end up like the Iran,Contra show trial debacle, where the people were tossed a lower level fall guy, like Ollie North.  I have to have hope.

Meanwhile, I have been emailing the Obama site and I know others are too. We the people need to make a lot of noise, and keep making noise.

Thanks for fighting the good fight, Rachel.

Thanks for mentioning this, Rachel. Somehow it fell through the cracks. I'm a big fan of you...used to listen to you on Air America four years ago when we lived in North central Mass and picked up a station carrying you. Your wit got me through many a long day driving through wintry Vermont & New Hampshire. I'm more conservative than you are, but you challenge my thinking. You're one of my favorite progressive thinkers. Keep up the good work!

Well...............if I were Obama, and about to step into the @!$%#tiest job since FDR (depression and all) I would not be considering holding the previous president accountable without a complete faith in the people who want him held accountable............and to tell you the truth?

If I were him, I wouldn't be counting on any of us to have "my back"...........no way.

He will try to work at what our principals demand.......but he isn't a hero, he lives and works in the lions den. He wants to survive more then he wants to "be" a governing saint. 

It does make one realize that Kennedy was a damn rock or he was as nieve as a babe.......you figure it out.

this is a nod to the rest of the world, the sane sober countries...

the other houses on the block that is our world, that daddy's home

and the annoyingly out of control block party's winding down already

fear not, we will pick up the garbage asap

but we also hafta re-sod our own lawn...

sorry about Butch n pals... he's crazy...

and there's more fun to be had with this metaphor

like i've personally been hiding under the doghouse

but whatever

the first amendment's about accountability

that's why it's first

if we don't do something, soon enough

we're hypocrites, in the eyes of the world

and someone else will, and they won't be wrong to

we've got til the weekend

(about a year, in real time)

(like i know, or something)

to quit bein rowdy

to make restitution

and set thingies right

before the block comes a knockin

we forget about the world sometimes

and it seems like wishful thinking

to those of us who're used to

being casually dismissed, or

having the subject changed

...global warming... exists...

productive nations... produce

denial is not a respectable trait

the subject can be changed back

it's not an entirely reactionist fear that

some of those prisoners are maybe swarthy characters

and will not be particularly impressed with a change o guardians

but when the lawyer shows up, and says,

"charge my clients with something or release them"

from that point on, yer either good cop or bad cop

and that may be more about

what kinda neighborhood you live in

or want to

Ordinarily, I would argue that we can't. There's too much of the "do as I say, not as I do." But since I'm writing to talk the lovely Ms. Maddow down, I'll give it a shot. As terrible as it sounds, I wonder whether we can still spread democracy because of who we are. I wonder whether it's worth it enough for some developing democracies to be on our good side that they are willing to ignore our blacker sides. That, clearly, won't work everywhere. And in some places, even if the state itself was willing to work towards a democracy, neighbors (devils on the shoulder) or other influential states might wave the US's transgressions in front of them in attempt to get them sidetracked. I suppose in an ideal world, an emerging democracy might be willing to ignore our transgressions to get on our good side. But as France, Germany, the UK (the EU)--and maybe even India and Japan--come into a place where they can be the ones exporting democracies and serving as golden examples. And when that happens, we're in trouble.

This probably doesn't talk you down all the way to the ground, but maybe a couple of stories?

As it is right now, I can't really talk you down of this one since, under Bush, we have said one thing and then done quite another.

However, if President-Elect Obama does go through with what he stated(and I think that he will), then it's a step in the right direction.

The objectives of the Bush Administration and the people weren't the same from the beginning. I've had a lot of friends, coworkers and family try to sell me on the Iraq war on the basis that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant and he did a lot of bad things to his own people. And I agree with all that. But if that was not the reason the Administration wanted to go to war, then there's no reason to believe they would carry out the war in a way that reflects democratic ideals.

The first clue an Administration doesn't have the same objectives as the people is when the Administration keeps changing the reasons. The whole story of this war has been one big Retcon.

If our goal is to spread democracy, then we need to state that from the beginning. Because if we'd done that we probably would've found a totally different way to do it.

I think most Americans do have good intentions for America. But most of us have to work 50, 60 hours a week or more and we don't have the energy or time to pay attention to all complexities and details of what we're doing in other countries.

It's an extension of the logic behind the "It's OK if you're a Republican" double standard blindness (IOKIYAR for short).

For those of the Republican or neocon persuasion, with exteme identification with nationalism/patriotism (If the U.S. does it, it is automatically right, a variant of "my country right or wrong"), IOKIYAR easily extends to It's OK if you're an American, but NOT OK for any other nation (except Israel, 51st state, in their view), and ESPECIALLY not OK for other nations where skin color is something other than Northern European-descent white.

You may wonder to yourself, how does one paint oneself into such a logically-deficient corner?

I mean, I am a fairly empathetic person, so I spend time trying to imagine how reasonable people might get themselves into such an unconsciously impossible and inconsistent line of thinking (ruling out unreasonable people, of course). I know people who will spout such views with a straight face, and I know them to be regular folks in most other senses of the word: they go to their kids' ball games, they do OK on their annual review at work, etc. Some of them are my own relation.

Without being unkind, the conclusion I draw is that somehow they have been pulled into an authoritarian world view or style of thinking. According to a guy named William Perry, who did a study on it in the 1950s, authoritarianism is right/wrong, black/white thinking, and all logic used within that framework necessarily proceeds from a sense that an external authority (God, President, Parent, Teacher) TELLS YOU what is right, and thus anything that person/entity does = and defines rightness, by its very circular reasoning definition. It is literally impossible for the constructed authority to ever be wrong.

This is clearly child-like thinking, manifesting in adults, and often in adults who are capable of more sophisticated thinking and analysis in other areas, such as math reasoning, or spatial thinking, etc. Perry found such thinking is what one reverts to or "retreats to" intellectually, when one feels threatened or overwhelmed or just out of one's league.

So it isn't an indictment of an entire person, but it is an argument for more attention paid to critical thinking skill sets in writing and thinking courses, both at the high school and college level, so that reasonable human beings, when stressed or out of their comfort zones, don't retreat to logically untenable positions, but instead, feel they have enough tools in their mental toolboxes to approach any problem or issue with rationality and a cool head.

"How can the U.S. spread democracy when we're comprimising our own principles?"

Rachel-We can't but we can explain it to them and give them candy.

We need to stop "spreading" democracy and start living it here at home.

If democracy means, in part, the right to self determination, then the only way you can spread it is by example - anything else is forcing people to do something, which violates self-determination and thus, by definition, is undemocratic.  So if we're not able to provide an example of a working democracy (and clearly we haven't been able to except in the most superficial sense over the past 8 years), then by definition we can't spread it.  Kinda cool, actually.

Rachel,

Your points about the Bill of Rights being ruined here is well taken.  The erosion started long before Bush II.  It goes back as far as Nixon, who appointed William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court.  I recommend "We Dissent: Talking Back to the Rehnquist Court" to illustrate what I'm talking about.  Rehnquist was a Tory patrician who, among his many "accomplishments" before he was appointed to the Court by Nixon, led the fight against school integration in Phoenix, while in private practice.  Rehnquist and his cohorts did everything in there power to destroy concepts of equal protection and due process and send us back to the 19th Century when things were the way they were meant to be.

The FISA court, a secret court and police force that have no place in a democracy, was created in 1978 during Jimmy Carter's administration.  FISA prescribes procedures for the physical and electronic surveillance and collection of "foreign intelligence information" between "foreign powers" and "agents of foreign powers" , which may include American citizens and permanent residents suspected of being engaged in espionage and violating U.S. law on territory under United States control.

So, our domestic mess has lots of antecedents and can be seen as a slide toward totalitarianism that began after we faced the horrors of WWII. Domestically, the 60s were an anomaly. Outside the US, things have not changed much. The same people and resources are driving us downhill--fast.

Iraq is a horrible mess that was more orderly but still horrible before we got there.  We are not there to spread anything, nor should we be.  If the rest of the world wants support for social democracy, Europe, the Commonwealth, the US and the UN ought to help with whatever support makes sense.  But forcing our values on the rest of the world is exactly what you're complaining about.  Assuming in the first instance that national identity means something, we ought not to impress ours elsewhere if we are to give meaning to the concept of self-determination which is at the core of concept of civil rights.  Otherwise, we'd be doing what you suggest--violating our values in the name of advancing them.

We should not be in Iraq or anywhere else unless we are there to stop suffering that has reached a critical state, e.g. WWII, Bosnia, Rwanda (too busy impeaching Billy Drop Drawers), Somalia (their skin's too dark and no oil).  Otherwise, we have plenty to do to advance the course of civil liberties here at home, which, as you point out, are evaporating faster than TARP money.

We are in a war in Iraq thate is wrong.  We have killed and caused immeasurable suffering. We have taken Iraqi prisoners.  We release them to Iraqi authorities.   Are we able to teach lessons in civil liberties to the Iraqi's?   We better learn some. The constitution is just a piece of paper until we take it to heart and use it to inform our thoughts and activities.

Muntadhir Al-Zaidi did more with his shoes than any words our thugs might say to the Iraqi thugs about how to deal with prisoner.  I think the lesson in civil liberties he taught us should be taken to heart by everyone here.  Until we do, I'm not sure we're in a position to teach anyone in Iraq a lesson in civil liberties.

 Yankeedoodle

The difference between Newsvine and the other blogs you may prefer, is that NEWSVINE has a Code of Honor. The way you speak to OTHER VINERS is rather disrespectful and in violation of the CoH.

 " Never seen so much liberal bull corn in my life...talk about being sheep!!  You guys are such sheep it's mindboggling!!   "

 Your comments may be marked by the community as "no value" or "inflamitory". Please remember that we ALL are entitled to opinions without attacking each other. I hope you will stay and contribute intellectual opinions to the conversations here on the Vine

Happy New Year.

Please talk me down!!

  
 
Congress Calendar

 
(January 9,2009)
 Text From the Congressional Record

Coburn, Tom [R-OK]
 
Begin 2009-01-09 12:20:59
End  13:11:59
Length 00:51:00
 Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, let me give some praise to my chairman of one of my committees. He hit right on the nose. Confidence is what the American people need to see. We have great resources in this country, and I am not talking materially. The resource we have that is the most bountiful and most productive and strongest and made of steel is the American people. When we get together, united as a nation, there is not anything we cannot accomplish.

I appreciate his words very much. I also appreciate some of his wisdom and foresight we heard today. I am hopeful that in the months and years to come, we can continue to work and we can draw on that American spirit which he so directly outlined, which is what makes us unique and allows us to come from behind and accomplish the things in front of us. I thank him for his words.

I wish to spend a few minutes--we are going to have several votes between now and next week over the Bingaman lands bill. I thought we ought to spend some time today to do that since I know we won't want to come in early on Sunday. I wish to talk about procedure for a moment so we can understand.

We are going to be here on Sunday not because we have to but because the majority leader has decided that we will.

There are other things we can be accomplishing. And goodness knows, the problems in front of this country require extra effort on our part. We are going to have a $10 billion to $12 billion bill in front of us again that will have no amendments available to it and very limited discussion. As a matter of fact, I think I am the only one who has discussed anything on this bill thus far, and we probably will not see a lot of discussion.

There are a lot of issues we need to address, and my colleague, Senator Dorgan, just outlined the most important of them; that is, confidence, how do we reestablish confidence in this country. It is my position that we are not going to reestablish confidence in the country until we reestablish confidence in this institution.

Since July 16, the Republicans have had one amendment allowed on the floor of the Senate. In the last 6 months, one amendment--that was September 10. In 6 months of legislation, we have had one amendment allowed to the minority side to express the views for greater than 50 percent of the American people.

If the Senate is about anything, it is about the ability to debate and amend the interests of the American people. What we have seen over the past 6 months is that the rights of Americans have been taken away in terms of discussion, debate, and amendment of the very large issues that are in front of us.

My position on this bill--which the American people should know is a hodgepodge of a ton of bills; it is not just all lands bills--is about priority. It is about reestablishing confidence. It is about doing the most important things that are of the highest priority for our country and not doing the things that are of the lowest priority even though it may make us look extremely good back home.

Some will contend this is just an authorization bill, that it doesn't spend any money whatsoever, that it will have to be appropriated. I remind them there is mandatory spending in this bill, so there is actual spending involved.

Also--and I won't do this, but I am prepared to do so if I need to--I will [Page: S245]
offer into the Record the press releases of everybody talking about all the money that is going to be spent because of this bill. You cannot be on the Senate floor saying this does not spend any money and at the same time send a press release out telling your constituency that you just passed a bill that will spend money that will do something because you are actually
creating a false expectation if you don't expect to appropriate the money.

So let's be clear about why we cannot afford to pass this bill. It has to do with a whole lot of things. One is we cannot continue to operate the Senate where there are no amendments for the minority because what it does is it cuts off the voice of over half the American public, by populations that are represented by the minority. But there are other greater reasons.

We have a $10.6 trillion debt at this point. We are going to have a $1.8 trillion deficit next year. That is $1.2 trillion as a minimum estimate by CBO, which does not include the $160 billion we will steal from Social Security and will not include half of the money that is coming in a stimulus package. If you take 300 million Americans and divide them by $1.8 trillion, what you get is $6,000 per man, woman, and child that we are going to run in the red next year, real dollars, real loss in the
future, and we are going to have to pay that back sometime. The people in this room, the Members of the Senate are not ever going to be attached the cost of the price to pay that back.

Last year, we paid $230 billion in interest alone. That is about $900 per man, woman, and child in this country--$860, actually--that we are paying in interest, which is going to double over the next 4 years. So not only are we going to run a $6,000 deficit, we are going to run another $800 in interest costs that are going to take away the potential of families across this country who are struggling, and that is what we are going to put into their future.

So when my colleague talks about confidence, what I want the American people to see is us working on the real problems that are at hand, not problems that are not real or are not a priority.

We offered several amendments. We were told we were getting no amendments to this bill. I am going to spend some time going through those amendments because I think a lot of them make sense. I am also going to spend the majority of my time talking about the main reason I oppose this bill.

If you will recall, back in the summer we were paying $4 for gasoline. We saw oil at $146 a barrel, which is now around $40. And the assumption of this bill is we will never see high oil and gas prices again. The very time to be fixing our future energy needs is now, not when there is a crisis again.

What this bill does is essentially take 1.3 trillion barrels of oil in this country and say: You can never touch it. That is 1.3 trillion barrels that we will never, ever--regardless of our technology, regardless of whether we can do it totally without any impact whatsoever on the environment, we will never be able to touch it under the auspices of this bill. It takes 9.3 trillion cubic feet of known natural gas that is in proven reserves right now, enough to fuel this country for 2 1/2 years,
and it says: You cannot touch that; you can never touch it. And then another couple hundred trillion cubic feet that are known to exist, with the technology that is here today.

Why would we do that? We just went through a big problem, and because we are in an economic cycle, we are seeing the only benefit of that is lower energy costs. Yet through this bill, we are going to tie the hands of our children for available energy.

This is not about whether you believe in global warming or CO

2 as an anthropogenic gas because even if I agreed with that 100 percent, and everybody would agree with it, we are going to take 20 years to transition away from hydrocarbons.
Every dollar we send out of this country for the purchase of energy is part of that $700 billion my colleague, Senator Dorgan, just noted as one of our big structural financial problems. So why would we pass a bill that is going to eliminate our ability to achieve some greater level of energy independence?

Another area of why I oppose this bill: property rights are--should be--pristine in this country, and this bill adds 15 new heritage areas, and the Federal Park Service will then fund those who are against the development of the land around it or in it, against the homeowners, the landowners who are actually part of it, through zoning. Even though several of the individual bills in this bill put a prohibition on eminent domain, the vast majority of the bill has no prohibition on eminent domain.

One of the rights fought for, one of the foundational principles of this country, is property, the right to have and hold property and be free, as long as you are not endangering somebody else with that property. Yet we are going to step all over that with this bill. Five separate property rights groups who recognize this is a protected guarantee under the Constitution have come out supporting the defeat of this bill because it tramples on property rights.

Finally, one of the reasons I am opposing the bill is the fiscal nature of what it does. It sets in motion $12 billion ad infinitum over the next 5 years--year by year by year by year--that we are going to spend, and it is going to go into the mix of priorities that are not a priority. Now, there are some things in this bill, I will admit, 20 or 30 items, that should go through here. But the vast majority of the bills in this mega bill are not a priority for this country. They are not a priority
whatsoever right now considering the condition in which we find ourselves. So as we contemplate this bill, I believe it demonstrates that we are more interested in looking good at home than fixing the real problems that are facing the country.

So let me for a moment summarize the bill and highlight some of the things that are in it, and then ask the American people to answer this question: Should we add four new National Parks at a time when we have a $9 billion backlog in maintaining the parks we have today? We can't even take care of the parks we have today. We have 10 million gallons of raw sewage in Yellowstone, in the Grand Tetons, which seeped out because we didn't maintain the pipelines. We have a $700 million backlog on The
National Mall; in Lake Mead, NV, a $258 million backlog.

We are not addressing any of the backlogs whatsoever. Yet we are creating greater responsibilities for the National Park Service and the resources they have today. In a declining discretionary budget, because of the fiscal nature in which we find ourselves, we are going to make worse and worse this situation. We are going to create 10 new heritage areas and study 15 others.

Now, remember what happens when we create a new heritage area. We create the inability to ever extract minerals, oil, gas, timber, and other resources. We are saying: Off limits and, by the way, if you like to enjoy the outdoors--maybe you want to go hunting or maybe you want to ride a three-wheeler or four-wheeler or a motorcycle--that may not be available to you. It may be limited.

There are 19 separate provisions in this bill that directly withdraw Federal land from mineral leases, such as oil and gas and geothermal. Nineteen specific. That doesn't have anything to do with the undergirding statutes in terms of the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and heritage areas that will eliminate the opportunity for exploration of energy and make us more energy independent.

There are 130-plus bills in this legislation, 1,300 pages, that was introduced two nights ago. I will tell you, other than my staff and probably the committee staff, nobody in this body has looked at it--1,300 pages. It is going to get passed out through the body next week, and the vast majority of the Senators and their staffs will have never taken a look at it, at a time when we should be about building confidence not undermining it.

We have 1.2 million acres in one small area of Wyoming that in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s contained the greatest and largest and most powerful pressurized source of natural gas the country had ever seen. As a matter of fact, we didn't have the technology to handle it, so we capped it. It eliminates any additional leasing. It sets it up so those people who have a lease will have a lawsuit filed against them. It will never be developed. It will never be developed because the cost of fighting the
[Page: S246]
lawsuits will be greater than the benefit of developing the natural gas. The companies that developed that came from Oklahoma. We now have the technology to handle that. It is a proven reserve.

We have 92 new scenic rivers in this bill. Now, I am all for scenic rivers, but we should understand the consequences of a scenic river designation. What does it mean? There will be no power lines across it, there will be no transmission lines, there will be no natural gas pipelines, water pipelines, or slurry lines that can cross a scenic river. What we know, with our desire to use alternative energy, especially in terms of the Southwest for solar and in my part of the country on up through
the wind corridor, is that we are going to have to develop transmission lines, probably up to 40,000 miles of transmission lines, and we are going to double the cost of developing those lines because we would not be able to cross a scenic river. There is a prohibition in this bill.

We will eliminate the ability to take the natural gas that is available in abundance in Alaska today, in proven known quantities, and the pipeline that is scheduled to come down to the greater 48 will be tripped up by these designations. Again, another way to shoot ourselves in the foot when energy independence ought to be part of our goal.

The people who want to do the things in these bills are highly motivated for good reasons, but the judgment is suspect at the time in which we find ourselves. We find ourselves dependent on energy and in a financial mess. Yet we are going to make both of those problems worse with this bill.

Today, in this country, we have 108 million acres of developed land. Now, that is cities, that is manufacturing sites, that is towns, and that is highways. That is all of it. We have 109 million acres right now of wilderness designation already, which is twice what was ever thought about being accomplished when the wilderness designation was first started in the 1950s and early 1960s. Then the Government owns another 656 million acres of land. So we

are not only robbing the future from our children because we have been fiscally irresponsible, we are robbing their future potential to make decisions about independence and freedom in the future because we are going to be totally indebted in the 20 years that we transition from a carbon-based economy to a noncarbon-based economy. We are going to make that extremely painful, much more difficult, and extremely more expensive.

Let me talk about why the National Park Service is overburdened for a minute and the things we ought to be doing. We have in Hawaii the USS Arizona Memorial. Now, 1,117 Americans died on that ship. The visitors' center--and if you have ever been there, you go out on a boat to the visitors' center--is sinking. The maintenance backlog is about $33 million. What are we going to do? What should we be doing? Creating these new ones or should we take care of the memorial for the USS Arizona?
Which one is a priority? Should we maintain what we have or should we do something and say we did it through a press release, even though we are probably not going to have the money to do much of this, and create a false sense of expectation with the American people?

The Gettysburg National Battlefield has a $29 million backlog; the Statue of Liberty Park, a $197 million backlog right now. Remember when Lee Iacocca helped to raise funds for the Statue of Liberty in 1976, and we did all that. That is the last time we have done any regular maintenance. So we have let it fall down. We haven't been responsible. We haven't put the money there. As a matter of fact, today President-elect Obama, in a press conference, asked for ideas as to how to spend money that
will actually create jobs and create an investment. Well, I can tell you how I would spend the money. Let's fix up our parks, let's fix up The Mall, let's take care of the $29 million backlog we have on some of the greatest treasures we have in this country before we add to the maintenance headaches of the National Park Service by creating new National Parks. That is a way we could actually create some jobs and invest our money; things we are going to have to invest in someday anyway.

The Grand Canyon National Park has a $299 million backlog. These aren't my numbers, these are National Park Service numbers. And there is the National Mall, as I talked about earlier.

What is in this bill that doesn't make sense just from a commonsense standpoint, maybe something we should do at the right time? How about spending $5 million to compensate ranchers for losses from gray wolves that we reintroduced into the wild? We put them back in there, and now we are going to pay ranchers for the cattle they lost to them. We repopulated a species that is now overgrowing its habitat and coming onto private lands, and our answer to that is, well, we will just pay the losses.

Do we have the money to waste $5 million paying for cattle losses from wild wolves? We might at some point in time. I hardly think we have the money to do that right now. The ranchers aren't going broke. There is no question it is an irritation and a cost to them, but I am not sure the Federal Government ought to be responsible for the cost.

What about the coyotes in Oklahoma that kill our sheep and our chickens? Should we compensate the chicken farmers and the sheep farmers for the coyotes that kill their livestock?

How about $1 billion and counting on the San Joaqin River project to make sure we restore 500 salmon? You heard me right--$1 billion is going to be spent over the next 10 years, and then money after that, to make sure we restore at least 500 salmon. How does that fit with our priorities? It may be something that we ultimately ought to do. How is it that we should do that now? Why should we even be thinking about doing that? How does that fit with any air of common sense?

How about building a road to 800 residents, after we provided a hovercraft to get there? One hundred environmental groups are against building this road through a very pristine area. We do have access another way. Yet we are going to do that, and we are going to spend $2 million per mile over 17 miles, building a one-lane road that many times is not going to be accessible in the winter, through some of the greatest pristine areas that we have. Therefore, 100 environmental groups are adamantly
opposed to including this in this bill. You can understand why they think that might not make sense for protecting such pristine land.

This is my favorite: $3.5 million to the city of St. Augustine, FL, to plan--just to plan--for a birthday party 16 years from now for the 450th birthday of St. Augustine, FL. Does that restore confidence in the Senate, that we would say we are going to spend $3.5 million on a city that has been having a birthday party every year? Yet we are going to put another $3.5 million into the kitty to plan for a big one? There is no doubt we should recognize the historic significance of the longest lived
settlement in this country at 450 years. But the question is, in today's economic climate, is that something we should be doing? Who out there without a job today would agree that we should do such a thing?

How about spending a quarter of a million dollars to go down to the Virgin Islands to study whether Alexander Hamilton's old home down there ought to be made into a park? Is that a priority now? What would a quarter of a million dollars do for somebody who is unemployed right now? How many mortgages would it get people out from behind who are in arrears? How many people would not default if we could leverage $250,000 to them? We have our priorities messed up.

The reason there is a lack of confidence in the Congress, with an approval rating of 9 percent, is because it is deserved.

There is also $12 million for us to build a new greenhouse for orchids for the Arboretum. We may need to do that. There is no question we should preserve the things that mark our heritage. But is now the time to build a new greenhouse in Maryland to grow orchids? Is it the time? What can we do with that $12 million? Who could we help with that $12 million? Could we use it in a better, more efficient way so that the American people would benefit? If we are going to spend $12 million, couldn't
we spend it in a better way?

My State has Route 66 all through it. We have all these tourism things that are in this bill. Now is not the time for [Page: S247]
us to be working with grants to promote Route 66 in Oklahoma. Now is the time to be putting that money to work on something that is going to create a job or save a foreclosure or absolutely make a difference in somebody's life, not an aesthetic benefit of the past. We need to start thinking about the benefits of the future.

I talked about the Wyoming range. It will be disputed by the Wyoming Senators, but the fact that the Bureau of Land Management used the latest geologic data and their study uses one that is 2 years old and makes the assumption that all land in Wyoming is the same would refute some of my statistics. But all of the geological engineers in this country and all the oil and gas exploration would remind us of the tremendous loss we are going to achieve by cordoning all that off and not making it available.

I talked about the wilderness designations. I am not against, necessarily, new wilderness designations as long as we limit their impact on property rights. But we do not. As a matter of fact, they directly impact property rights. They directly limit individual property rights. So as we add wilderness areas and zoning requirements within them, we take away the right of the landowner because we fund a specialized group through the National Park Service to change the property rights to the disadvantage
of the property owner. People who have no ownership in it will decide what the property's zoning rules will be because they will be funded by the Federal Government. If you are opposed to that, you are disadvantaged because the Government is going to send dollars to your opponent, so we attack property rights at the very basic level. Not only do we challenge them, we take your own money and support your opponent on what you can and cannot do with your own property.

I love scenic rivers. We have the Illinois River in Oklahoma. It is a beautiful, pristine river. It has had some tributary problems, but we actively worked and cleaned it up and it is markedly improving every day. It is a real pleasure.

Should every river in America be a scenic river? And, if it is, how are we going to cross them with utility lines, power transmission lines, natural gas lines, coal slurry lines, bridges, roads? How are we going to do that? We can't. Yet the goal of some is to make everything, every river, a scenic river. Now is not the time for us to do that because it will limit our ability to achieve greater energy independence.

Those are not just threats. A 2001 lawsuit was filed against the U.S. Forest Service for failure to protect wild and scenic rivers in Arizona because a transmission line was coming across a 30-yard segment of it. Guess what happened. We didn't build the transmission line, so power was not made available.

As we think about wind energy and solar energy, especially in the Southwest in the wind corridor, it will do us no good to put windmills out there if we do not have a way to send that energy somewhere else. Yet with this bill there are multiple instances, over 50 instances, where we are going to block our ability to send transmitted power to other areas of the country.

In 2002, on scenic rivers, the lawsuit was won that said within the collection territory of the Los Padres National Forest in California we will not ever permit oil, gas, or mineral development within the river corridor. What happens if we can drill from outside? What if we can send a line 20 miles from the outside? What we are doing is we are saying no matter what the technology you ever develop, no matter how you ever attempt to make us energy independent, it is never going to be OK; we are
never going to allow it.

If you look at what this bill does in terms of geothermal--this is the potential geothermal source of energy. It is clean, renewable in this country. We markedly go after some of the most potent areas of geothermal availability in this bill. We say you can't use them. We can use geothermal--clean, alternative energy. But because we want to look good, because we want to say we did something, we changed that.

Just so we might all be informed about how much land the Government actually owns, as you can see in the Western States, in Alaska, the vast majority of the land is owned by the Government. But that is not nearly as significant as what is happening with this bill because large portions of what is not owned by the Government now is very difficult to develop because when we try to get a permit for extraction of minerals, geothermal, gas, coal, or oil, it is hit with lawsuit after lawsuit.

Now, in addition to these high percentages, nearly 50 percent, we are adding all these other things on top of it, the vast majority of which are moving to the west. It makes no common sense, no matter whether you are an avid global warming enthusiast or you are an energy explorer, if we want to stay warm in the winter, it doesn't make sense to anybody.

Mr. President, 29 percent of all the land in this country is owned by the Federal Government. We are markedly increasing that by 2.2 million acres in this bill. We are going to threaten property rights. We are going to use eminent domain. We are

going to use very sophisticated and poised sleight-of-hand zoning requirements to change land that is not owned by the Federal Government--to change the ability of the owner of that land to use that land if we pass this bill.

There are about 40 of the bills in this bill that we don't have any problem with. They make sense; they don't cost a lot of money; they accomplish some of the things that are a priority. Let me spend a minute, if I might, just talking about the amendments we were going to offer had we had the ability to offer them. I note again, since July 16 the minority has had the opportunity to offer one amendment in this body, one amendment. In the greatest deliberative body in the world, the minority has
had the opportunity to offer one amendment.

One amendment we wanted to offer that I thought made sense: ``No funds can be made available ..... to establish a new unit of the National Park System or National Wilderness Preservation System, a new National Heritage Area ..... new Wild and Scenic Rivers, new wilderness areas ..... until the Secretary of the Interior certifies that the maintenance backlog at the Statue of Liberty National Monument, Grand Canyon National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Glacier National Park, Gettysburg National
Park, Antietam National Battlefield, the National Mall'' in Washington, are up to date.

Why wouldn't we want to take care of what we have now before we add to it?

The Grand Canyon cannot even keep its trails open right now, or employees, due to lack of funding. There are 10 million gallons of raw sewage in Yellowstone. The Pearl Harbor USS Arizona Memorial is sinking. The manager of the Glacier National Park declared his park bankrupt--the manager. His words: ``We are bankrupt.''

At Gettysburg the number of employees has gone down. Their ability to maintain that significant monument to the history of us coming back together through war, through the results of ending that war and the tremendous number of lives that were lost on that day, General Pickett's charge--the fact is, we are ignoring them. According to some, the National Mall has now become a national disgrace because it is not maintained. We are going to see some of the great difficulties with that when we swear
in our next President, with the tremendous burden being placed on it.

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, the delegate from DC, said we should be ashamed of what the average Mall visitor sees. It is not a priority. We made it politically expedient. We made looking good at home a priority. We have not taken care of our national treasures.

The second amendment we offered, having been through this crush of energy price escalation, what we did was to prohibit new restrictions on American exploration and production--new restrictions; have not changed any of the old ones; we just said: Let's not put any more roadblocks in the way right now until we have a cogent energy policy that does not put us at the mercy of the nations that would like to see us destroyed. That is all we said: Let's not hurt ourselves any worse.

But let me show you what occurs in this bill 19 times. Here is what it says:

Subject to valid existing rights, all Federal land within this proposed area is withdrawn from all forms of entry, appropriation or disposal under the public land laws (in other words, we can never sell it) location, entry [Page: S248]
and patent under the mining laws, or disposition under all laws relating to mineral or geothermal leasing.

It says that 19 times. What we have done is we have completely excluded any ability to get any energy. The ability for us to solve our energy problems over the next 20 years is being tremendously hampered by this bill. That does not include the 2.2 million acres that are added to the wilderness area.

Amendment 3 to strike the Wyoming Range leasing withdrawal provision--if we can extract natural gas and oil and do it in a totally clean, environmentally friendly way and we know we have 300 million barrels of oil and 8.8 trillion cubic feet, probably closer to 15 trillion cubic feet of proven reserves now, why would we take that away? Why would we do that? Tell me how it makes sense to tell OPEC: Keep doing what you have been doing through the years because we know we have some oil, but we are
never going to touch it. In the fields around this Wyoming Range, we know there are another 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Locking the resources away is not a partisan issue. My colleague from Louisiana, Senator Landrieu, claims this bill is moving us backward, not forward.

Amendment 4 was to strike the $1 billion and counting for 500 salmon.

Amendment 5 was to not spend $3.5 million on a birthday party for St. Augustine, FL, even though it is not directed at--Florida beat Oklahoma last night. It is kind of hard for me to offer that today thinking that is just revenge, but I wrote this long before we lost that game.

Cut the $200,000 for a tropical botanical garden in Hawaii. Should we be spending $200,000 on a tropical botanical garden right now? I mean, does it make sense to anybody in America, when we are going to have a $1.8 trillion deficit, that we just throw $200,000 out there for a botanical garden? Is that a priority? I am not suggesting that we abandon everything, but what I am suggesting is that we ought to be about priorities, and I cannot see that as a priority at this time.

How about a cave institute in New Mexico to receive unlimited Federal funding, an authorization that puts no limits on this funding. What happened is this used to be a Federal program, but it could not take private money. So they took it and made it to where it was a private program, hoping to get matching money from Federal grants. Well, they were not successful in getting matching money for Federal grants, so now we are going back and saying it is going to be a Federal program and it gets all
the Federal money it wants. Is it a priority for us to have a cave institute right now? I do not think it is a priority.

An amendment to limit Federal employees from using eminent domain to take away the private property rights of American citizens. We either have a right or we do not. But the more we take away property rights, it is not going to be long before we lose other rights. Simple, straightforward amendment, vote it up or down, but at least let the American people see where you stand on property rights for them.

How about an amendment, very straightforward--the Federal Government does not know what it has and what it does not have. How about an annual report detailing the amount of Federal property the Federal Government owns and the cost of Government land ownership to taxpayers. As an aside, we do know the Federal Government is currently holding about $20 billion worth of property that is costing them about $4 billion a year to maintain that they do not want but we can't sell. And last year, property
disposal legislation failed to go through this body, even though it costs us $4 billion a year. Common sense.

How about to make sure we can always have a hunting preserve in this country, to limit the restriction on hunting activities as far as the land use on Federal lands with reason, control. We have lots of Federal lands that are overpopulated with species that need to be thinned. Yet we limit the ability of sportsmen to address that.

There were several others. We do not expect to get all of those amendments or the rights for those. As a matter of fact, if the record is right, if you look at what the last 6 months have been, the minority will get one amendment over the next 6 months. We represent over half the population of this country in the greatest deliberative body in the world.

So how are we to rebuild confidence in this country? Is it by packaging 134 bills together and ramming them through because everybody has something in it? Even though some of them may be very much a priority, the rest of them do not have and do not pass the priority test. Is that what we are about? Is that going to build confidence in this country? Is that going to restore the American people's confidence that we are up to the task of attending to the very real and practical, severe needs of
this country at this time? Is this something President-elect Obama would say: This is the first thing I want you to pass out of the Senate in terms of a priority. It would not even pass his smell test.

My hope is that we go forward, but that as we go forward, we do it in a way that the American people would like to see us do. The goal is not to delay, the goal is to make the point that we ought to have an option to amend and debate bills. These bills got here because they were trying to be passed without any debate, with no amendment, passed by a procedure called unanimous consent.

It is important that the American people know what that is. Unanimous consent is where a bill comes to both cloakrooms, whether it has gone through committee or not, and it is said, can we pass this bill? Well, the problem is, I read the bills and I put a test on them: Are they a priority? Are they a necessity? Are they something that lessens our debt? Are they within the role that has been granted to us under the enumerated powers of the Constitution as something we ought to be doing? If they
are not, I am not trying to stop the bill; all I am saying is, bring it to the floor and let's

have some debate and amendments on it. And what we have seen is that there is something wrong if you won't, in the dark of night, let bills go through that the American people never hear anything about. Well, the American people need to hear about it all. This stuff all needs to be online.

There needs to be 30 Senators here today debating this. Instead, we are not. And we are going to let status quo, poor priority, lead us down the path to where we do not have the courage to do what is necessary to fix what is wrong in our country. And this is symbolic of what is wrong, is that we do what is politically expedient rather than what is in the best long-term interests of our country.

I have already readily admitted there are several, maybe 60 bills I have no problem with; I think they are a priority. But when they are packaged together, that takes away property rights, that eliminates our ability to be independent in terms of energy in the future, and that blocks the ability to take alternative forms of energy and create transmission lines so that we can use it somewhere after we produce it. I am going to stand up every time--every time. As a Senator representing 3.8 million
people from Oklahoma, that voice is going to be heard; it is not going to be stifled. It may not have an amendment, but it is going to be heard. This country is worth us fighting for. And this is not worth our priority at this time. At the dilatory state we find ourselves in, we ought to be about bigger and better things that really impact people both in the long run and short run and get us out of the problems we are in.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
 
 

Congressional Chronicle software (C) National Cable Satellite Company 2009. The video and text of the congressional proceedings are in the public domain.

Hope The Rachel Maddow Show scores an interview with Bob Fertik...

bla bla bla, what is legal anyway?  "It's legal when the president does it." 

America is Bushed!  The Bushies have rolled up the Constitution and measured it for grip against their right-hand and ceremoniously wiped their ass with it after a half-@!$%#.  It's all been a half-@!$%#. It never ends with these guys!  Christ, I remember a span of months when crime after crime after crime against us and the Constitution was happening with this party, and it just kept coming.  Too many to report.  Too many to investigate with a skeleton crew.

What's worse is that they have attributed 'Spreading Democracy' with the Constitution.  The Constitution can only spread democracy when it is followed and not by the barrel of a gun.

This was the Republican Blitz.  The full throtle effort of hubris and egotistical certainty that they could inflict mortal damage to the Constitution.

But, we spoke up.  A little too late, but @!$%# I thought it would never happen.  We spoke up, and with people like Maddow, Hartman, Goodman and Olbermann we were given creadance.  So, let's hold this new administration accountable for the job of restoring our Constitution.  Let's reward ourselves and this new administration with our loud and clear voice.  We want it back and we want the criminals against it in jail.

Rachel ~ Fresh program from the 8 of propaganda the country has suffered.  Our country has been in the throws of a cout d’état since election fraud first occurred in 2001 and in Bush’s second scam where Kerry and Bush were Skull and Bones so either way the country was hosed again.  I won’t mention the relation to the Council on Foreign Relations as it might make morning Joe, Mika and her pops psst off. 

OK – to learn the truth of why the cout was necessary, the Bush administrations dirty little secret that propelled them to the top, visit where you will see an inventor’s car bombed in Boynton Beach and learn of the attempt to rob the United States Patent and Trademark Office by law firms Proskauer Rose and Foley & Lardner (Michael Grebe former senior RNC legal counsel and Bush’s moneybag).  You will find there a One Trillion Dollar Iviewit Federal lawsuit now in the United States District Court in the Southern District which is now legally related by Judge Shira Scheindlin to an inside WHISTLEBLOWER case, Christine C. Anderson v. The State of NY, a NY Supreme Court lawyer who was physically assaulted by her superiors to suppress evidence and whitewash files to protect lawyers who were complained about. 

The New York cases are as follows:
CASES SEEKING ASSOCIATION WITH ANDERSON CASE
(07cv09599# Anderson v The State of New York, et al., WHISTLEBLOWER CASE

#07cv11196# Bernstein, et al. v Appellate Division First Department Disciplinary Committee, et al., TRILLION DOLLAR FEDERAL COMPLAINT RELATED TO WHISTLEBLOWER CASE

#07cv11612# Esposito v The State of New York, et al.,
#08cv00526# Capogrosso v New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct, et al.,
#08cv02391# McKeown v The State of New York, et al.,
#08cv02852# Galison v The State of New York, et al.,
#08cv03305# Carvel v The State of New York, et al., and,
#08cv4053# Gizella Weisshaus v The State of New York, et al.
#08cv4438) Suzanne McCormick v The State of New York, et al.

The Iviewit case is now on appeal at the Court of Appeals in NY.

Best ~ Eliot Bernstein
iviewit@iviewit.tv

sorry for missing link above, to view the car bombing and learn the whole truth about the country's spiral down, visit

to learn how to stop it visit where we are trying to get legislation passed to force our public officials to disclose any secret societies they belong to which may or may not have subversive goals to the Constitution of the United States.

sorry for missing link above, to view the car bombing and learn the whole truth about the country's spiral down, visit the iviewit website at iviewit.tv, this blog tool strikes links.

to learn how to stop it visit where we are trying to get legislation passed to force our public officials to disclose any secret societies they belong to which may or may not have subversive goals to the Constitution of the United States

I can't imagine that anything else we could do, will do, or don't do to and in Iraq will help that poor country very much after what we allowed this country to do to that country over the last eight years. 

I can't imagine that based on how messed up we are, anyone anywhere would want our ways to be spread upon them.

It is going to take a long time for our principles to be redefined into actions and attitudes.  It is going to take a long time to purge our government and our economic systems of selfishness, yes (as we mentioned) hubris, and impatience. 

It is going to take a long time to reverse the global warming and the gloabal anger and the global injustice and replace it with the fruits of something built more of trust and love and brotherhood. 

But as the old proverb says, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, so lets keep walking, and practice walking in unity and forgiveness tempered with justice.  No scapegoats, but consequences...

Lame duck watchers:  watch passenger lists to Paraguay after Jan 20