Rep. Kucinich introduces 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush

Ohio democrat Rep. Dennis Kucinich introduced yesterday 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush.

Please read these and call your representative. It is imperative that you call and not email.

These are presented herein with references to further examination by ImpeachBush.tv.

Resolved, that President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate:

Articles of impeachment exhibited by the House of Representatives of the United States of America in the name of itself and of the people of the United States of America, in maintenance and support of its impeachment against President George W. Bush for high crimes and misdemeanors.

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has committed the following abuses of power.

1. Article I - Creating a Secret Propaganda Campaign to Manufacture a False Case for War Against Iraq.
2. Article II - 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.
3. Article III - Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, to Manufacture a False Case for War.
4. Article IV - Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Posed an Imminent Threat to the United States.
5. Article V - Illegally Misspending Funds to Secretly Begin a War of Aggression.
6. Article VI - Invading Iraq in Violation of the Requirements of HJRes114.
7. Article VII - Invading Iraq Absent a Declaration of War.
8. Article VIII - Invading Iraq, A Sovereign Nation, in Violation of the UN Charter.
9. Article IX - Failing to Provide Troops With Body Armor and Vehicle Armor
10. Article X - Falsifying Accounts of US Troop Deaths and Injuries for Political Purposes
11. Article XI - Establishment of Permanent U.S. Military Bases in Iraq
12. Article XII - Initiating a War Against Iraq for Control of That Nation’s Natural Resources
13. Article XIII - Creating a Secret Task Force to Develop Energy and Military Policies With Respect to Iraq and Other Countries
14. Article XIV - Misprision of a Felony, Misuse and Exposure of Classified Information And Obstruction of Justice in the Matter of Valerie Plame Wilson, Clandestine Agent of the Central Intelligence Agency
15. Article XV - Providing Immunity from Prosecution for Criminal Contractors in Iraq
16. Article XVI - Reckless Misspending and Waste of U.S. Tax Dollars in Connection With Iraq and US Contractors
17. Article XVII - Illegal Detention: Detaining Indefinitely And Without Charge Persons Both U.S. Citizens and Foreign Captives
18. Article XVIII - Torture: Secretly Authorizing, and Encouraging the Use of Torture Against Captives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Other Places, as a Matter of Official Policy
19. Article XIX - Rendition: Kidnapping People and Taking Them Against Their Will to ‘Black Sites’ Located in Other Nations, Including Nations Known to Practice Torture
20. Article XX - Imprisoning Children
21. Article XXI - Misleading Congress and the American People About Threats from Iran, and Supporting Terrorist Organizations Within Iran, With the Goal of Overthrowing the Iranian Government
22. Article XXII - Creating Secret Laws
23. Article XXIII - Violation of the Posse Comitatus Act
24. Article XXIV - Spying on American Citizens, Without a Court-Ordered Warrant, in Violation of the Law and the Fourth Amendment
25. Article XXV - Directing Telecommunications Companies to Create an Illegal and Unconstitutional Database of the Private Telephone Numbers and Emails of American Citizens
26. Article XXVI - Announcing the Intent to Violate Laws with Signing Statements
27. Article XXVII - Failing to Comply with Congressional Subpoenas and Instructing Former Employees Not to Comply
28. Article XXVIII - Tampering with Free and Fair Elections, Corruption of the Administration of Justice
29. Article XXIX - Conspiracy to Violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965
30. Article XXX - Misleading Congress and the American People in an Attempt to Destroy Medicare
31. Article XXXI - Katrina: Failure to Plan for the Predicted Disaster of Hurricane Katrina, Failure to Respond to a Civil Emergency
32. Article XXXII - Misleading Congress and the American People, Systematically Undermining Efforts to Address Global Climate Change
33. Article XXXIII - Repeatedly Ignored and Failed to Respond to High Level Intelligence Warnings of Planned Terrorist Attacks in the US, Prior to 911.
34. Article XXXIV - Obstruction of the Investigation into the Attacks of September 11, 2001
35. Article XXXV - Endangering the Health of 911 First Responders

Are these articles of impeachment likely to succeed? No, but at least those who vote in favor of it can say they tried, just as Rep. McKinney tried to impeach Bush in January 2007.

Govt and open source

Warning: this article gets a little ranty, but please, bear with me and help improve my thoughts by commenting.

Doc Searls of Linux Journal linked recently in his article Is government open source code we can patch? to an article by Britt Blasser entitled “Oh, if only government went in for an open source make-over…”. The article indirectly cites through a reference to Phil Hughes’ own Our Internet article two articles, FCC: Moving Beyond Network Neutrality and Our Internet!, by Bob Frankston, who Doc Searls recently interviewed for Linux Journal in Beyond Telecom (non-free registration required, subscribers can get it free).

In his article, Searls says:

Democracy is by nature “our government”. The open source twist on that we put it together and can hack improvements to it. Think of elected officials as committers and maintainers and you start go get the idea.

The analogy isn’t perfect, because by nature open source code is purely practical: it has to work. While government often does not. All government is buggy. In the worst cases it crashes outright and is replaced or supplemented by corrupt alternatives.

This analogy is fairly strong. However, commenter Frymaster supplies an addendum which strengthens it:

The US Constitution itself is open source, if you will, and editable. “The Framers” intended that Americans would change it to meet changing times, hence the series of amendments covering key rights like voting, and, most importantly, consuming alcohol. But they set the bar high, requiring super-majorities in both houses of Congress PLUS each of the states.

The Constitution certainly is open source. We’re free to change it, and other countries, fledgling or long-established, are welcome to take our code—our elemental specification of government—and adapt, implement, and utilize it. We’d like to receive contributions back, because they might be worthwhile enough to include in the trunk code. Even if these modifications aren’t strong enough for trunk, they might be strong enough for that government to maintain as a branch.

The Constitution is inherently good. Some might argue that it is outdated, but these folks are in error and their sentiments should be dismissed if they believe that it is irrelevant and should not be followed. The Constitution establishes a rule of law, wherein all citizens of the land give rights to a union of states, called the United States of America. It establishes procedures for updating it through amendments, which require a majority vote not only by two small bodies of people, but a majority vote of the several states, as Frymaster reminds us. This amendment process keeps those two smaller bodies of 535 people from legislating away the rights of their constituents.

Esperanto as the browser’s main language

A few days ago, I wrote at work a script which collected information useful to the developers when troubleshooting a customer’s experience on one of our sites. This script checked things such as browser version, operating system, Java existence and version, Flash existence and version, Javascript support, and CSS support. All of this information is either sent via the HTTP request headers or is determinable through interaction with the customer, asking if they can see any No items which should show Yes if the item is installed, enabled, and working.

One item I decided to include for the hell of it was language, through the HTTP request Accept-Language header. Tired of seeing the standard en-us displayed every time I loaded it, I decided to add Esperanto to the fore of the header. I did this by adding it in Firefox’s language options chooser in the Content option panel.

Lo and behold, the language code eo appeared before en-us on my script and I was happy. It was the end of the day, though, so I shutdown shortly thereafter and went home.

The next day, I was startled when the two sites I almost always open first, Google and Meebo, displayed text to me in Esperanto! I had totally forgotten that I had altered my Accept-Language header.

I haven’t changed it back. “Why?” a perplexed reader may ask. I continue to use Esperanto as my main browser language for a few reasons.

1. Immersion. When a site appears in Esperanto, I’m forced to translate. I don’t let myself change it unless I am in a rush. So far, I have not changed it.
2. Internationalization. I fancy myself a proponent of software i18n and l10n, so it is educational to me to see how other sites have performed their i18n. I assume that most use either gettext or defines, wherein every string is set in a file with a series of global constants.
3. Obscurity. It keeps people off of my computer

So, in there interests of determining the penetration of Esperanto as an internationalized and automatically-detected language for the web, I’ve compiled a list of sites which I often visit that have Esperanto strings shown when visiting with a browser which specifies that Esperanto is the preferred language.

• Google (just search, from what I’ve seen)
• Meebo (still missing a few strings, though)
• Twitter (largely untranslated, though)

Some sites surprisingly lacked Esperanto internalization, but it’s not a problem: Esperanto was never meant to be anyone’s first language!

• Yahoo!
• Flickr
• Zooomr
• YouTube
• MySpace
• Facebook
• Digg
• Twerq
• Wordpress
• Revver, Livejournal, Blogspot, and most others I visited

Some readers may be surprised that Wikipedia is omitted from these lists. Wikipedia does not internationalize its main page because all of the languages are listed as a links to the main page (cxefpagxo) of the language’s subdomain itself.

I’m neither surprised nor miffed that there number of sites that do have it are so few. As I stated previously, Esperanto isn’t meant to be anyone’s first language. It’s a quick, intermediary language. I assume that the aforementioned sites with Esperanto internationalization have someone one staff who speaks it fluently, and the translation process for it was effortless.

I hope to integrate i18n into a few projects I’m developing currently. By “hope”, I mean “will.”

Esperanto as the browser’s main language

A few days ago, I wrote at work a script which collected information useful to the developers when troubleshooting a customer’s experience on one of our sites. This script checked things such as browser version, operating system, Java existence and version, Flash existence and version, Javascript support, and CSS support. All of this information is either sent via the HTTP request headers or is determinable through interaction with the customer, asking if they can see any No items which should show Yes if the item is installed, enabled, and working.

One item I decided to include for the hell of it was language, through the HTTP request Accept-Language header. Tired of seeing the standard en-us displayed every time I loaded it, I decided to add Esperanto to the fore of the header. I did this by adding it in Firefox’s language options chooser in the Content option panel.

Lo and behold, the language code eo appeared before en-us on my script and I was happy. It was the end of the day, though, so I shutdown shortly thereafter and went home.

The next day, I was startled when the two sites I almost always open first, Google and Meebo, displayed text to me in Esperanto! I had totally forgotten that I had altered my Accept-Language header.

I haven’t changed it back. “Why?” a perplexed reader may ask. I continue to use Esperanto as my main browser language for a few reasons.

1. Immersion. When a site appears in Esperanto, I’m forced to translate. I don’t let myself change it unless I am in a rush. So far, I have not changed it.
2. Internationalization. I fancy myself a proponent of software i18n and l10n, so it is educational to me to see how other sites have performed their i18n. I assume that most use either gettext or defines, wherein every string is set in a file with a series of global constants.
3. Obscurity. It keeps people off of my computer

So, in there interests of determining the penetration of Esperanto as an internationalized and automatically-detected language for the web, I’ve compiled a list of sites which I often visit that have Esperanto strings shown when visiting with a browser which specifies that Esperanto is the preferred language.

• Google (just search, from what I’ve seen)
• Meebo (still missing a few strings, though)
• Twitter (largely untranslated, though)

Some sites surprisingly lacked Esperanto internalization, but it’s not a problem: Esperanto was never meant to be anyone’s first language!

• Yahoo!
• Flickr
• Zooomr
• YouTube
• MySpace
• Facebook
• Digg
• Twerq
• Wordpress
• Revver, Livejournal, Blogspot, and most others I visited

Some readers may be surprised that Wikipedia is omitted from these lists. Wikipedia does not internationalize its main page because all of the languages are listed as a links to the main page (cxefpagxo) of the language’s subdomain itself.

I’m neither surprised nor miffed that there number of sites that do have it are so few. As I stated previously, Esperanto isn’t meant to be anyone’s first language. It’s a quick, intermediary language. I assume that the aforementioned sites with Esperanto internationalization have someone one staff who speaks it fluently, and the translation process for it was effortless.

I hope to integrate i18n into a few projects I’m developing currently. By “hope”, I mean “will.”