thanks for the memories

Newt Gingrinch

Just thought I'd post this in the joint spirit of the holiday season and the final exam. Merry Christmas!
(original URL:
http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~mariedj/browse/funny/election94-gingrich)

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How the Gingrinch Stole Congress!
by Kris Rabberman & Scott Prevost


Every Who
Down in Whoville
Liked Elections a lot . . .

But Newt Gingrinch,
Who lived on Mount Gridlock,
Did NOT!

The Gingrinch loathed voting, the whole campaign season!
Now, please don't ask why. No one quite knows the reason.
It could be his head wasn't screwed on just right.
It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.
But I think that the most likely reason of all,
May have been that his brain was two sizes too small.

But whatever the reason,
His brain or his shoes,
He stood there Election Eve , hating the Whos,
Staring down from Mount Gridlock with a Gingrinchy frown,
At the candidates stumping below in their town.
For he knew every Who who was thinking that night,
Would cast their votes wisely--against the far right.

``And they're worried about issues!'' he snarled with a sneer,
``Tomorrow's the election! It's practically here!''
And the gears in his head began frantically spinning,
``I MUST find a way to keep liberals from winning!''

For tomorrow, he knew all the Whos in the know,
Would vote for the DemoWhos all in a row,
For Wofford and Foley, Feinstein and Cuomo.

Then the DemoWho Congress would do what he'd hate,
Come up with new programs, and then legislate!
Healthcare and gun bans they'd gladly create,
But such progress the Gingrinch would only berate.

And THEN they'd do something
He liked least of all!
Every DemoWho in Congress, the tall and the small,
Would stand close together, and say with one voice,
``We're for women's rights and we're also pro-choice!''

They'd work! And they'd work!
AND they'd WORK! WORK! WORK! WORK!
And the more that the Gingrinch thought, with a smirk,
The more that he thought, ``I must STOP their hard work!
``Why since Who-sevelt's years I've put up with it now!
``I MUST stop the liberals from winning!
. . . But HOW?''

Then he got an idea!
An AWFUL idea!
The Newt
got a HORRIBLE, AWFUL idea!

``I know just what to do!'' Gingrinch laughed in his throat.
``I'll make empty vows in return for their vote.''
And he chuckled, and clucked, ``I've got a great con.
``With these lies we'll pay homage to President Ron!''

``All I need is a gimmick . . .''
The Newt looked around.
But since ideas are scarce, there were none to be found.
Did that stop the old Gingrinch
>From finding a scheme . . . ?
Of course not, he had the Whopublican team.
So he called Mr. Dole, and he eagerly said,
``I need to make use of your sly, sneaky head.''

Then they made up a plan,
That was terribly Dole-y,
To unseat the speaker,
Congressman Foley.

And they wrote up a contract.
They did it that day,
And they chortled and laughed,
``All the liberals must pay.''

As the Gingrinch and Dole formulated their schemes,
Based on trickle down theories and far right extremes,
The DemoWhos, calmly, were dreaming their dreams.
First Gingrinch and Dole, with a gleam in their eyes,
About Clinton's record, told many lies.

Then they told of the programs they'd gleefully pinch,
Who better to do this than Mr. Gingrinch?
They got stuck only once, on the issue of ketchup,
So they got on the phone and they called Orrin Hatch up.
Then both of them sunk to a terrible low.
``Entitlements,'' they grinned, ``are the first things to go!''

Then they slithered and slunk, with smiles most unpleasant,
Obnoxiously trashing the left, past and present!
``With Huffington, Romney, North and Santorum,
``We're sure that the left cannot help but deplore 'em!''
With ads so misleading they're practically criminal,
``We'll use our PAC money for commercials subliminal!''

``We'll bombard them with TV, and a racist disc-jockey!
``Who supports Chuck Haytaian and dark-horse Pataki.
``We'll support Ollie North, and Dewine over Hyatt,
``And with all of his cash, we'll have Huffington buy it!''

``When we win, we'll control each and every committee,
``To be sure funds are sent to nary a city!
``And Alfonse D'amato,'' (the dork from New York),
``can continue to rant about Bill Clinton's pork!''

``Against Feinstein and Boxer's ardent protesting,
``Senator Packwood can keep on molesting!''
By the twisted up logic of Jesse and Strom,
``With gays in the army, we lost Vietnam!''

``A lineup like this is Clinton's worst fear,''
said Gingrinch to Dole, with a dastardly sneer.

``Taxes, the wealthy should not have to pay,''
the maniacal duo was eager to say.
``And when Congress is ours, we'll have prayer in the schools,''
Muttered Dole to the Newt, ``Disregard liberal fools!''

The plan was enacted,
The ballots were cast,
The sham made the voters return to the past.

The Gingrinch was gleeful, and Dole started gloating,
before all the Whos had completed their voting.
``We now have a mandate!'' they said with a laugh,
Even though, of the votes, they received only half.

With snickering Newt in the role of the Speaker,
The prospects for changes have never been bleaker.
``The plans that we've outlined, we won't be revising,''
said Gingrinch, ``We simply ABHOR compromising!''

____________________________________________

The day of this scary Whopublican showing,
We started to notice Newt's head slowly growing,
Though now we can say, as you may have inferred,
His brain starting SHRINKING that day, so we've heard.

Though the Whos may be worried and shaking in fear,
>From the dastardly changes that soon may be here,
The way Whos can solve this is really a cinch,
In '96 vote against cynic Gingrinch!




DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed here are not necessarily the
opinions of Dr. Seuss, or those with an interest in his estate, or
anyone related to him, or anyone he met only once on a crowded train
traveling from New York to Chicago, or his former next-door-neighbor's
dog Max. Some stanzas of the preceding work were directly stolen from
Dr. Seuss' classic work, "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," without the
permission, expressed or implied, of Theodor or Audrey Geisel, or
Random House, Inc. This work was created solely for the amusement of
the authors and should not be copied, distributed or otherwise
duplicated by any means (electronic or telepathic included) without
the expressed written consent of whoever owns the copyright to the
book the authors plagiarized to create this masterpiece. Any evidence
to the contrary should be construed as purely accidental and not the
intent of the authors (who, by the way, receive no monetary benefit
for having written the poem, but had to pay an overpriced lawyer for
this disclaimer) . The authors accept no responsibility for any
nightmares or other psychological problems caused by reading this work
to liberals already suffering from Post Election Stress Disorder.

Bono Pats Bush on Back

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2704889.stm

In recent years, many promoters of the fight against AIDS, primarily Bono and Elton John, have been critical of the aid given by the American Government to research, and help victoms. Its widely documented that Ronald Regan did very little during the 80s to help research, primarily because it would have been a socially funded program. George W. Bush however has continued to fund and expand funding for AIDS in africa, prompting massive response from those fighting the disease. The BBC article from 2003 reports a glowing Bono on the new AIDS funding.

'Deep Throat,' dead at 95

(CNN) -- W. Mark Felt, who leaked information to reporters under the moniker, "Deep Throat," about the Watergate break-in, died Thursday at the age of 95, sources told CNN.


W. Mark Felt, known as "Deep Throat," divulged information to reporters about the Watergate break-in.

Rob Jones, Felt's grandson, said his grandfather died at his home in Santa Rosa, California. According to published reports, Felt died of congestive heart failure.

Felt admitted in a 2005 Vanity Fair article he was the Washington Post's source for many of its 400 stories on the Watergate affair during the early 1970s. The Watergate break-in eventually led to the 1974 resignation of President Richard Nixon.

"I'm proud of everything that Deep Throat did," Felt, 92, told CNN's "Larry King Live" in 2006, his first public interview on the subject.

Felt's entanglement with history occurred in 1972 after the bungled break-in at the Democratic National Party offices in the Watergate hotel. Felt, an associate director at the FBI, said he was unhappy with the way the administration meddled with the investigation into the break-in, which led him to divulge information to the newspaper.

You can read the whole article here

New York Times Editorial, Dec. 18th 2008: Prosecute the Architects of Torture

December 18, 2008
Editorial
The Torture Report

Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.

Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons.

It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War. Until the Bush administration, their only use in the United States was to train soldiers to resist what might be done to them if they were captured by a lawless enemy.

The officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the “war on terror” — the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted the conventions.

•

That order set the stage for the infamous redefinition of torture at the Justice Department, and then Mr. Rumsfeld’s authorization of “aggressive” interrogation methods. Some of those methods were torture by any rational definition and many of them violate laws and treaties against abusive and degrading treatment.

These top officials ignored warnings from lawyers in every branch of the armed forces that they were breaking the law, subjecting uniformed soldiers to possible criminal charges and authorizing abuses that were not only considered by experts to be ineffective, but were actually counterproductive.

One page of the report lists the repeated objections that President Bush and his aides so blithely and arrogantly ignored: The Air Force had “serious concerns regarding the legality of many of the proposed techniques”; the chief legal adviser to the military’s criminal investigative task force said they were of dubious value and may subject soldiers to prosecution; one of the Army’s top lawyers said some techniques that stopped well short of the horrifying practice of waterboarding “may violate the torture statute.” The Marines said they “arguably violate federal law.” The Navy pleaded for a real review.

The legal counsel to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time started that review but told the Senate committee that her boss, Gen. Richard Myers, ordered her to stop on the instructions of Mr. Rumsfeld’s legal counsel, Mr. Haynes.

The report indicates that Mr. Haynes was an early proponent of the idea of using the agency that trains soldiers to withstand torture to devise plans for the interrogation of prisoners held by the American military. These trainers — who are not interrogators but experts only on how physical and mental pain is inflicted and may be endured — were sent to work with interrogators in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo and in Iraq.

On Dec. 2, 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld authorized the interrogators at Guantánamo to use a range of abusive techniques that were already widespread in Afghanistan, enshrining them as official policy. Instead of a painstaking legal review, Mr. Rumsfeld based that authorization on a one-page memo from Mr. Haynes. The Senate panel noted that senior military lawyers considered the memo “ ‘legally insufficient’ and ‘woefully inadequate.’ ”

Mr. Rumsfeld rescinded his order a month later, and narrowed the number of “aggressive techniques” that could be used at Guantánamo. But he did so only after the Navy’s chief lawyer threatened to formally protest the illegal treatment of prisoners. By then, at least one prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, had been threatened with military dogs, deprived of sleep for weeks, stripped naked and made to wear a leash and perform dog tricks. This year, a military tribunal at Guantánamo dismissed the charges against Mr. Qahtani.

The abuse and torture of prisoners continued at prisons run by the C.I.A. and specialists from the torture-resistance program remained involved in the military detention system until 2004. Some of the practices Mr. Rumsfeld left in place seem illegal, like prolonged sleep deprivation.

•

These policies have deeply harmed America’s image as a nation of laws and may make it impossible to bring dangerous men to real justice. The report said the interrogation techniques were ineffective, despite the administration’s repeated claims to the contrary.

Alberto Mora, the former Navy general counsel who protested the abuses, told the Senate committee that “there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq — as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat — are, respectively, the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.”

We can understand that Americans may be eager to put these dark chapters behind them, but it would be irresponsible for the nation and a new administration to ignore what has happened — and may still be happening in secret C.I.A. prisons that are not covered by the military’s current ban on activities like waterboarding.

A prosecutor should be appointed to consider criminal charges against top officials at the Pentagon and others involved in planning the abuse.

•

Given his other problems — and how far he has moved from the powerful stands he took on these issues early in the campaign — we do not hold out real hope that Barack Obama, as president, will take such a politically fraught step.

At the least, Mr. Obama should, as the organization Human Rights First suggested, order his attorney general to review more than two dozen prisoner-abuse cases that reportedly were referred to the Justice Department by the Pentagon and the C.I.A. — and declined by Mr. Bush’s lawyers.

Mr. Obama should consider proposals from groups like Human Rights Watch and the Brennan Center for Justice to appoint an independent panel to look into these and other egregious violations of the law. Like the 9/11 commission, it would examine in depth the decisions on prisoner treatment, as well as warrantless wiretapping, that eroded the rule of law and violated Americans’ most basic rights. Unless the nation and its leaders know precisely what went wrong in the last seven years, it will be impossible to fix it and make sure those terrible mistakes are not repeated.

We expect Mr. Obama to keep the promise he made over and over in the campaign — to cheering crowds at campaign rallies and in other places, including our office in New York. He said one of his first acts as president would be to order a review of all of Mr. Bush’s executive orders and reverse those that eroded civil liberties and the rule of law.

That job will fall to Eric Holder, a veteran prosecutor who has been chosen as attorney general, and Gregory Craig, a lawyer with extensive national security experience who has been selected as Mr. Obama’s White House counsel.

A good place for them to start would be to reverse Mr. Bush’s disastrous order of Feb. 7, 2002, declaring that the United States was no longer legally committed to comply with the Geneva Conventions.




Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Cheney on Torture

...Yeah.

On that uplifting note, good luck with finals & papers, everyone!

More Commentary that "No child Left Behind" is Working

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/08/31/gop.paige.transcript/index.html?iref=newssearch

This article argues that Bush's policy is benifiting society. The author argues that "This bipartisan law raises the bar for all students, no matter their race or income level. It challenges what the president calls the "soft bigotry of low expectations." Its goal is simple: All students read and do math at grade level." Raising the bar for students was forcing them to do better in school. In fact "All across America, test scores are rising; students are learning; the achievement gap is closing; teachers and principals are beaming with pride." The author of this article argues that Bush's policy is working because tests scores are showing improved results.