The candidates agree on a debate, set the format, name topics, and have a member of their party run the operation.  The format is then executed. You can always put it out on the internet if networks will not take it.

To simplify negotiations, each candidate names some number of topics, say, twelve.  All topics that both candidates list are included in the debate.  Each candidate may then reject topics that only the other candidate named, and give a reason.

The entire naming and rejecting process is public.  

More below the fold

At the South Carolina debate, Republican candidates were asked if they would use torture to interrogate prisoners.  We can be delighted to learn that torturing people hurts us with world opinion, or that calling torture an 'enhanced interrogation technique', but those answers are hardly a ringing denunciation of torture.

What is the answer to the torture question?  It's the American answer, the answer the American people have already given.

Let's take it from the top.

First. There is nothing for a President to decide.

An option that he has used many times before.

Bush can appear on television with his signing pen, and sign into law the special appropriation funding the troops in Iraq.

Having done this, he has the option of smiling, picking up the next sheet of paper, and reading his signing statement.

That's the signing statement that says he is going to ignore the Congressional restriction on the War On Iraq, and continue to fight it for as long as he wants, because after all he is the decider and he has decided.

And the response is?  

A fundamental feature of legislative systems is that you get to propose amendments, even to legislation you oppose.  It might be better not to spend money at all.  It is still legitimate to amend bills that you oppose in order to improve them.  I hereby propose some improvements.

I fear that some Republicans, lacking the spirit of cooperation, may be almost ungrateful.  That's  [continued beyond the fold]

according to the total reported by

http://www.globalsecurity.org/...

Peace with Iraq

For three thousand Americans, their relatives, and their families, peace with Iraq is now too late.  Those three thousand Americans made the ultimate sacrifice for their country: They died fighting a war in a foreign land.  We cannot undo the sacrifice that they made.  We should seek to ensure that more Americans do not go forth, courageously, only to make the same sacrifice in the distant desert sands of Iraq.

Our soldiers in Iraq face hazards unknown in past wars.  They are under constant attack.  No matter how often George Bush claims that we are winning, the number of effective attacks against us continues to climb, in the past year from 70 to 180 per day.  Worse, that count of attacks does not include vastly more "violent acts" committed against us.  By report, those violent acts number more than one thousand per day.   Over the course of a year, that's two violent acts for each serviceman and each servicewoman we have in the country.

And while Americans are justly primarily thankful to the Democratic party candidates who won, it remains also true:

Having gone on at considerable length about the Republican Party War on America, we now reach the momentary denouement: The Republicans have lost.  They lost the House.  They lost the Senate. With the Senate, they lost the ability to install far-right judges.  With Congress, they lost the ability to field ultraright legislation.  In the next two years, there will be no more Patriot Acts.  There will be no more Military Commission Acts.  There will be no more Real ID acts.

I turn to three Senate elections:

Montana:
Tester (D)     198,302 49%
Burns R        195,455 48%
Jones (L)       10,324  3%

Mr. Jones, who gained some publicity a few years ago through contracting argyrosis and turning himself blue, has now done one better: He turned his state blue.  MORE BEYOND THE FOLD

The Constitution provides that Congress may provide protections involving copyrights and trademarks for limited times.

For many decades, copyright lasted 17 or 34 years or other similar times.  Suddenly, Copyright is out to infinity, almost. Cynics proposed that ABC/Disney had lobbied vigorously, in essence to give themselves ownership of the rodent in perpetuity.

Some member of Congress would need to submit a bill, restoring the Constitution's intent of protection for limited times.

The rest is left up to the reader.

The United States War On Iraq was based on lies from stem to stern.  Contrary to George Bush and his lying cabinet secretaries:

There were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. There were no Iraqi cruise missiles able to reach the United States.  There was no nuclear weapons program.  There was no new yellowcake buying operation. Iraq did not aid Al Qaida.  There was no Iraqi involvement in 9-11.  Indeed, as the FBI recently noted, there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in it, as opposed to grabbing credit for another's deeds.  There were no mobile bioweapons labs.  There were no shipments of CBW devices into Syria.  We did not know where the weapons of mass destruction were stored.  In fact, they did not exist.

Furthermore, it is clear that an intelligence fabrication system was established to leave George Bush and his Cabinet of Liars with plausible deniability that they did not know all these things.  OK, Now I've finished saying good things about Bush.  More below the fold.

Anti-war.com headlines the MSNBC report that our death toll in Iraq has passed 2500.  This does not include a far larger number of Americans crippled for life.   It does not include the coalition of the purchased whose leaders sold us cannon fodder.  It does not include honest-to-goodness patriotic Iraqis who decided that for all our faults we were on the right side and volunteered to join their police and army.  

It also does not include any of the American mercenaries.  Francis Scott Key, in writing The Star Spangled Banner, made clear the REAL AMERICAN perspective that mercenaries of their nature pollute the ground where they walk, and only blood sacrifice of the mercenaries can cleanse that earth.

That count does not include 100,000 (see the Lancet for justification of this number) Iraqi civilians caught in the crossfire.  Nor does it include some large number of Iraqi freedom fighters who died in action against a foreign Army of occupation that disgracefully was American.  Furthermore below fold

I propose an alternative resolution to the Bush Republican wiretapping scheme, one based on people who will be far harder to ignore than private persons with lawsuits, people against whom invocations of 'state secrets' are not significant.  These are the officers and directors of major corporations.  It's even a capitalist scheme, based on the stock market.

The objective is to persuade the major telephone companies now cooperating with Republican warrantless wiretapping that they need to stop.  Note, by the way, that the telephone companies have stated that their local calls are generally not even logged, and as the recent technical reports have explained the Republicans are listening to your telephone calls by putting a beam splitter--half-silvered mirror--in the optical cables.  The numbers you are calling are then sent to Washington while you are dialing.
MORE BELOW THE FOLD  

The excellent Lawyer Blogasm post--on the front page, you can't miss it--on corporate liabilities does skip over one quetiton, namely whether the record worth $1000 is the record of one customer, or the record of one telephone call.  Many of us make more than one telephone call before changing numbers.  In the latter case, all of the telemarketing firms are about to become so wealthy that they can retire.

More seriously, I will be checking --and urge you to do the same for your own pension funds etc--whether I was a stockholder in one of these firms, perhaps indirectly through a 401k or 403B or mutual fund.  These firms appear in my opinion not to have disclosed potential risks that would affect their profits, starting with 'the situation is leaked, and we lose large numbers of customers to qwest.'  

The virtue of starting with 'loss of customers'  is in my opinion it does not matter whether the corporate actions were legal.  MORE BELOW FOLD

In http://www.dailykos.com/... , McJoan describes how the Bush Adminstration will try to claim that there is a State Secrets privilege that lets it block the EFFs lawsuit against AT&T.

The underlying issue arises from the illegal and unconstitutional warrantless wiretaps that the Bush administration has allegedly placed on a wide variety of telecommunications equipment, allegedly with the possible cooperation of AT&T.  McJoan reports the evidence as "An inside source at AT&T provided documentation including "affidavits, lists of equipment and technical specifications related to tapping fiber-optic network links," and the administration has pulled out the big gun of executive privilege, but of course that's no admission of guilt."

There is an alternative path to skinning this cat, should the EFF suit fail.

The Massachusetts School of Law at Andover has a review journal "The Long Term View". Their latest issue, available in full as a pdf at http://mslmedia.com/...
and at book stores in more portable paper form or http://mslmedia.com/... treats

Are Our Highest Officials Guilty of Torture?

with considerable references.  I view myself as privileged to be in this company.

Table of Contents follows:

I come to another reason why the American political structure is not doing very well, namely hereditary political office.  Here I am referring not to candidates winning because their daddy was President, but hereditary through adoption:

From Taegan Goddard's http://www.politicalwire.com:  "Despite Rep. NAME DELETED's sudden retirement announcement a few days ago, HIS PARTY'S MEMBERS have already found a replacement. According to CQ Politics, NAME, whose surprise retirement announcement rocked the HIS STATE political world this week, is endorsing ANOTHER NAME, a longtime aide, to succeed him in HIS District."

I deleted the names and party, because they do not matter here.  More below the fold

Today's New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/...

reports that the January 2006 trade deficit was 68.5 billion dollars.  By contrast, the January 2005 trade deficit was a mere 58.3 billion dollars, a sixth lower.

The 2005 trade deficit was 725 billion dollars.

When matters cannot continue, they often don't.  However, until that limit is reached, it is straightforward to estimate the trade deficit to be expected for 2006, namely

below the fold

The Deputy Head of the NSA, and his boss, should be impeached and given a fair chance to defend themselves, for attacking America, namely its Constitution.

Courtesy of hammeroftruth.com a transcript of his interview
follows below the fold

I propose, and I am not a dramaturge, that the Bush White flag ad should be turned on its head.  With ads from folks with money.

A strong man is prepared to admit his mistakes.  A brave man is prepared to say he was wrong.

George Bush is neither. advertising scheme below the fold.

The proposal is for a bipartisan national unity government, sort of, as carried at ANTIWAR.COM with a full story at the Hartford Courant

Less below the fold