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I just got done watching Dennis Kucinich introduce 35 Articles of Impeachment against President George W. Bush live on C-SPAN.  My take is that the Bush administration has run rampant, wielding Executive power as if it were a light saber, cutting and slicing through the Constitution, US Law, international law, valid treaties, common sense, human dignity, logic, reason, and morality.  That makes these Articles long, long overdue, and makes Dennis Kucinich a patriot and a hero (I never thought I’d say that about him!), in addition to being kind of a doink.

After 7 years of this administration, the US is despised around the world, and rightly so.  The good news is that if we act to show the world that this administration did not speak or act for our Republic, but instead acted against what we stand for, then we can take the first steps in the journey of a thousand miles to reclaiming our moral high ground.  We will also send a message to subsequent administrations that the US is not a monarchy, and the President is bound by the rule of law just like the rest of us.

I think the chances are slim that these Articles of Impeachment will result in the removal of Bush or any of his administration from office.  However, they need to be taken seriously by Congress.  Pelosi has stated repeatedly that the House will not attempt to impeach Bush, but I think she needs to rethink that position.  The ONLY way to heal the festering sore that is the Bush administration is to rip off the bandages, examine the wounds, scrub, clean, and disinfect.  Keeping them under wraps will simply turn it into political gangrene, slowly poisoning this great country.

Here is the full list of the Articles of Impeachment:

Article 1:  Creating a secret propaganda campaign to manufacture a false case for war against Iraq.

Article 2:  Falsely, Systematically, and with Criminal Intent Conflating the Attacks of September 11, 2001, With Misrepresentation of Iraq as a Security Threat as Part of Fraudulent Justification for a War of Aggression.

Article 3:  Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, to Manufacture a False Case for War.

Article 4:  Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Posed an Imminent Threat to the United States.

Article 5:  Illegally Misspending Funds to Secretly Begin a War of Aggression.

Article 6:  Invading Iraq in Violation of the Requirements of HJRes114.

Article 7:  Invading Iraq without a declaration of war.

Article 8:  Invading Iraq in violation of the U.N. charter and international law.

Article 9:  Failing to provide troops with body armor and vehicle armor.

Article 10:  Falsifying accounts of US troop deaths.

Article 11:  Establishment of permanent bases in Iraq.

Article 12:  Initiating a war against Iraq for control of that nation’s national resources.

Article 13:  Creating a secret task force to guide our nation’s energy and military policy.

Article 14:  Misuse and exposure of classified information and obstruction of justice regarding Valerie Plame.

Article 16:  Wasting public funds on contracts to close associates, people guilty of government fraud, and awarding of no-bid contracts.

Article 17:  Unlawful detainment of prisoners indefinitely and without charge.

Article 18:  Secretly authorizing and encouraging the use of torture on prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Article 19:  Rendition, or kidnapping people and extraditing them to other countries to perform torture.

Article 20:  Imprisoning Children.

Article 21:  Misleading Congress and the American People about threats from Iran with the goal of overthrowing the Iranian Government.

Article 22:  Creating “Secret Laws.”

Article 23:  Violation of the Posse Comitatus Act (using the military as a domestic police force).

Article 24:  Warrantless spying on US citizens.

Article 25:  Having telecom companies create illegal database of email addresses and phone numbers.

Article 26:  Announcing the intent to violate laws with signing statements and then violating those laws.

Article 27:  Failing to comply with Congressional subpoenas and instructing former employees not to comply.

Article 28:  Tampering with free and fair elections.

Article 29:  Conspiracy to violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Article 30:  Misleading Congress and the American people in an attempt to destroy Medicare.

Article 31:  Failure to adequately plan for Hurrican Katrina and failure to adequately respond to the civil emergency.

Article 32:  Misleading Congress and the American people and undermining efforts to address global climate change.

Article 33:  Repeatedly ignored and failed to respond to high-level intelligence warnings of planned terrorist attacks in the US prior to 9/11.

Article 34:  Obstruction of the investigation into the attacks of 9/11.

Article 35:  Endangering the health of 9/11 first responders.

[Update 6/10/2008 at 8:30am Central time]  Unbelievably, this story has still not hit the major news outlets (CNN, Fox News, NY Times, BBC, etc).  The wire services (Reuters, AP) have the story, some smaller/local news outlets are carrying it, and the blogosphere is on fire about it.  Even if one sees Kucinich as simply a flake, he’s still a US Representative and former Presidential candidate, and he’s introduced orders of impeachment against the sitting President and provided extensive details to back up each of the 35 Articles, so this should be breaking news everywhere, even if just to mock/dismiss it.  Surreal.

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First, a disclaimer:  I am not a true believer for any side, team, party, PAC, religion, or single-issue demographic.  My political and social views include both “Conservative” and “Liberal” policies, I’m not a registered Republican or Democrat, and I have no need for the President to be an older, white male.  I love America, I revere the Constitution, I think our three-branch system of government is the work of genius, and I’ve been around long enough to know that the pendulum always swings one way, then back the other way – all you have to do is wait long enough.

I also think that it’s time for a change, and that the current administration has been arguably the worst in the last 75 years.  Bush came from the oil bidness, Cheney came from the defense contracting world, and after 8 years of Bush/Cheney which two industries have had record, burgeoning profits as a direct result of the actions of this administration?  When these last two terms are studied by future generations they will scarcely believe that we, the people, stood idly by during these deadly, absurdly obvious shenanigans.

But now that era is over.  And while McCain is a reasonably competitive nominee, I don’t think there is any way the American people will put the Republicans back in charge.  So that means that the Democratic nominee will be our next president, barring a major scandal or some other Act of God/Rove.  And as of today, the Associated Press has called the Democratic race for Barack Obama.  This means that as long as he avoids mistakes, he is virtually assured of being the next President of the United States.

Yes, Hillary could continue to fight.  She could run as an Independent, which could put the election in McCain’s hands.  She could take the fight to the convention and end up poisoning the public on the Democrats altogether.  However, as much of a street fighter as she is, I don’t see her going so far as to risk putting the Republicans back in charge in order to win a Pyrrhic victory.

So, it’s going to be President Barack Obama.  And I’m scared.

Why am I scared?  Not because he’s black.  I don’t think he’s a secret Muslim.  I don’t care if he wore a lapel pin or put his hand on his heart.  My issue is that he’s an almost complete unknown, and the things that are known about him seem to be in conflict with the public persona he has created around his campaign, as follows:

 

• His message of “Hope” and “Change”.  Well, hope is what losers have right up until the final out, and change can be good or it can be bad.  It worries me both that he would choose such ephemeral slogans, and also that the American voting public fell for it.  I “hope” the “change” he brings is for the better.
• His portrayal as a political outsider.  A big part of Obama’s message is that McCain and Hillary represent the old guard, the political insiders, and that Obama represents a fresh, new wind that exists outside of politics-as-usual.  However, trace back the rise of Barack Obama, and if you’re like me (and not from Illinois) the first time you heard of him was when he was tapped to give the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention.  And when you’re a junior, one-term Senator and your party taps you to give the keynote address at the national convention, you are, by definition, a political insider.
• His lack of a proven track record.  I will freely acknowledge that Barack Obama could turn out to be a great president.  However, he could also turn out to be a horrible president.  The issue is that he is a blank slate, and voters are able to project their own hopes and dreams onto him, because he’s never had to really do anything or take any stands.  He’s like a new-found infatuation who has never disappointed us – it’s so easy to dream of the perfect relationship.  But all relationships must mature, bills have to be paid, children raised, daily challenges faced.  And while he is undeniably charming, handsome, and articulate, we simply don’t know enough about Obama to know if he can be a dependable head of the household when it comes time to deal with the day-to-day grind and the long-term strategic planning necessary to be a successful leader.
• His smoking.  Does smoking show the level of character and long-term decision-making ability we want in a national leader?  Do we want our children to be able to say to us, “Why shouldn’t I smoke, the President does!??”  Obama claims to have quit smoking during the primaries, but that just makes it worse, in my opinion.  So, he smoked up until the time that it could hurt him politically, then quit?  So does that mean that, as president, he will do things that are harmful in the long-term and will only quit when it threatens him politically in the short-term?
• His wacky church and preacher(s).  On the one hand, you can say that Barack Obama is not responsible for what the preacher says at his church.  On the other hand, you can say that when it worked to his advantage, Obama was very happy to have the support of Reverend Wright and the Trinity Church.  And then when Wright and the church became a liability, Obama quickly distanced himself and quit the church.  I’m not saying that makes Obama any worse than any other politician.  In fact, I’m saying it makes him exactly like most other politicians, and not some squeaky-clean, fresh-faced outsider riding into town to clean things up.  Also, if I were a betting man I’d have to say that I think Obama is an atheist, or at best an agnostic, but that he keeps up his church-going because there’s no way to advance politically in this country if you aren’t overtly Christian.  So, that makes him a hypocrite, in my opinion.  You may condemn me for calling him a hypocrite over something I can’t possibly know, but, c’mon, don’t you also think he’s a non-believer, or at least a doubter?
• His “no-lobbyists” bullshit.  Obama’s campaign makes a lot of noise about not taking money from lobbyists.  The funny thing is, that message is being delivered in part by his top strategist David Axelrod, who owns a political consulting firm in Chicago that specializes in “astroturfing”, which is double-speak for creating fake grass-roots movements to support big businesses.  For example, his firm launched Citizens Organized for Reliable Electricity (CORE) using money from Commonwealth Edision, an Ohio utility company.  CORE ran a scare campaign that warned that if a rate hike was not granted for ComEd then Ohio could face California-like electrical blackouts.  CORE was not grassroots and didn’t represent people, it represented ComEd trying to get higher revenues, but masqueraded as a grass-roots group of concerned citizens.  That, my friends, is lobbying.  Also, Obama accepts donations from the spouses of lobbyists, and from individual employees of lobbying firms who aren’t personally registered as lobbyists.  Also, any lobbyist can (and have, and do) join the Obama campaign or donate to the cause simply by de-registering as a lobbyist (and then simply re-registering later when it’s more politically expedient).  If you’re going to throw out the lobbyists, throw them out, don’t use sleight-of-hand to try to fool us.  Again, no different from any/all other politicians, but not really in keeping with Obama’s claim to be the clean and pure outsider.
• His annoying wife.  I don’t really know Michelle Obama, and she might be a great person, personally.  But so far she hasn’t figured out how to be the likely first lady.  How is she annoying?  Well, she’s very focused on minority issues and equal rights, which is great – but she has an all-female staff.  I guess men are fair game for discrimination?  She has also done a lot of work in the public sector, and comes across as a hybrid mom-slash-public-servant.  However, until very recently she was also a paid board member of TreeHouse Foods, a huge supplier for Wal-Mart, and she only resigned after her husband made some anti-Wal-Mart comments at a union rally.  Now, how well does it fit with Barack Obama’s public persona that his wife was a board member for a major supplier for a low-wage-paying, benefit-denying, small-town-destroying, union-busting, borg-ship-like retailer like Wal-Mart?  Again, I’m not saying that in-and-of-itself it is wrong to profit from supplying Wal-Mart.  However, I’m saying that it’s very annoying when you try to mold your public persona into that of a caring public servant focused on changing the world, when you were actually part of the status-quo machine until it became politically expedient to change your stripes.
• His connections to Zbigniew Brzezinski.  Brzezinski was Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, he helped arm the mujaheddin in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets (the mujaheddin later became the Taliban and sheltered al Qaeda), was a founding member of the Trilateral Commission (along with David Rockefeller, Alan Greenspan, and Paul Volcker), is/was part of the ultra-secretive Bilderberg Group, worked in the administrations of both Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr., has been a board member for Amnesty International and The Council on Foreign Relations, and has generally been involved in most major world affairs from the 1960’s until the present.  He is one of the ultimate insiders, definitely part of of the world political machine – a mover and shaker.  He’s “them”…he’s “they”…one of the men behind the screen that influence and control geopolitics like puppetmasters.  And guess what?  He was an instructor at Columbia University when Barack Obama was a student.  And now he’s Obama’s foreign policy advisor.  And Brzezinski’s son Mark is also an Obama advisor.  So, tell me again how Obama is an outsider who’s coming in to bring hope and change and a bright, shiny new America for us all?

There’s more, but they aren’t as important as the above list.  The bottom line is that Barack Obama is almost a complete unknown, and what is known about him is wildly at odds with his publicly crafted and marketed persona as a pure outsider.  He *could* be a good, or even great, President.  However, I think the Democratic Party has taken another swing at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, because they are making a very risky wager – that Barack Obama can come from nowhere and become the most powerful person on the face of the earth, based on a couple of years in the US Senate, good looks, great speech-writers, oratorical genius, and a shell-shocked American voting public looking for a savior.

Four years from now I will happily come back here and post a mea culpa if Barack Obama is able to deliver.  I don’t dislike him, and I don’t know that he won’t be a good President.  However, after eight years of Bush/Cheney/Rove I think the American voters should have chosen a more known, stable leader, and not rolled the dice on the sweet-talking stranger in town.  As always, America courts both greatness and failure – let’s hope we get lucky this time.

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Wall*E is the story of a little robot who does a big job – cleaning up the Earth and saving humanity.  He’s the last of his kind, left behind by the entire human race who have gone to live in the stars, at least for a while.  It seems that man had finally filled up the Earth with so much trash that it wasn’t fit to live on any more, so they built an army of Waste Allocation Load Lifters – Earth-class, or WALL*Es, and set them to gathering and stacking all the garbage.  Meanwhile, the humans blasted off to live in luxurious, automated, sterile, giant space stations while the robots put the Earth back into a livable state.

Unfortunately, the job was too big even for an army of robots, and over hundreds of years all the machines started breaking/dying/shutting down, until only one is left.  Wall*E spends his days gathering trash, compacting it into cubes in his belly, and stacking it in gigantic, skyscraper sized rows of refuse.  Wall*E is happy in his work, sentient, romantic, and a collector of stuff.  When he finds interesting things he takes them back to his house, and watches old movie musicals to pass the time.  Think “The Omega Man”, only with a plucky robot instead of Charlton Heston, and no mutants.  Oh, but there is at least one cockroach, and he and Wall*E share a symbiotic relationship.

Then, one day, out of the sky comes a huge rocket, which lands just long enough to leave behind a little egg-shaped robot to search for plant life.  She is Eve (Environmental Vegetation Evaluator, I think), and her sleek whiteness and technological advancement make Wall*E look like broken-down Tonka truck compared to the latest iPod/iPhone/iBot/iPhaser/iBrain.  She relentlessly combs the area for some sign of plant life, and blasts any perceived threats with what appears to be a phased-plasma flipper.  Wall*E is, of course, smitten, and manages to survive Eve’s defenses long enough for her to figure out that he’s not a threat.

And just as soon as Wall*E starts working his romantic mojo on Eve, she discovers a plant that he has been nurturing and then things get weird.  Eve goes into some kind of extended hibernation until the rocket returns and takes her away again.  Wall*E stows aboard and gets taken with Eve up to one of the human spacecraft, and that’s when the story really gets started.

Suffice it to say that both true love and the fate of humanity hang in the balance of the story, and the tale is funny, exciting, heartbreaking, and ultimately…well…happy.  What else would you expect from Pixar?

The animation of the film is flawless – not that it’s faking reality or anything.  You know that it’s animated, but it is achingly well done.  You don’t notice that it’s animated, and are quickly immersed in the reality of Wall*E.  It also takes quite a while to realize that Wall*E doesn’t really talk – he can sort of squeak and squeal in an electronic fashion, and kiiiind of form some simple words, but he sounds kind of like what I imagine R2D2 would sound like after a poorly taught crash course in English.  Coincidentally, Wall*E’s “voice” is done by Ben Burtt, who also did the beeping and booping for R2D2.

The story in the film is nearly epic – one pure soul’s quest for love, with the saving of an entire species as the mere backdrop.  My emotions ran the gamut, from happiness and laughter to awe and wonder to tension and excitement to…yes…even a sniffle or two.  And poor Mynagirl, about 15 minutes in I looked over at her and she was already sobbing at the mere anticipation of the perilous quest that Wall*E would surely soon be facing.  After the movie, Mynagirl chatted with her sister who had also just seen Wall*E and who had also sobbed through nearly the entire thing. 

It’s not that the film is maudlin, or anything, but it is emotionally powerful.  Wall*E is loveable and diligent, curious and intelligent, romantic and brave, and so pure of heart that he makes sure his pet cockroach gets a daily Twinkie (which you may never eat again after seeing this movie).  If you replaced the animated characters with human actors, Wall*E could easily be considered one of the greatest space operas ever filmed.  It probably should be considered as such, but the animated nature may make it so that the film establishment only sees this is a kid’s film, which would be a shame.  It could (and should) rank up there with Star Wars, Blade Runner, Galaxy Quest, Alien/Aliens, Idiocracy, and 2001: A Space Odyssey in the pantheon of great sci-fi.  Picture a stew of those films, with a dash of Charlie Chaplin and a pinch of E.T. and you’ll get the ingredients that Wall*E combines and even sometimes transcends.

But it will also still work for your kids, too.  The movie is hilarious and a sight to behold even if the young’uns don’t quite understand why the adults start laughing when “Thus Spake Zarathustra” plays during a key dramatic sequence, or when they figure out that the voice of the ship’s computer is none other than Sigourney Weaver.  Pixar has managed to walk the tightrope between the profound, witty, and poignant adult elements and the funny, loveable, scary kid elements, without doing a disservice to either.  However, know that if you were to change the right 30 seconds of this film, it would become one of the most tragic stories ever told. 

The bottom line is that Pixar has topped themselves yet again.  This is, by far, my new favorite Pixar film.  Take someone you love and I personally guarantee that by the end you’ll be smiling, you’ll be clapping, your eyes will not be dry…and you’ll be holding hands. 

Wallleeee!

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