It is 1976. The United States of America is celebrating its bicentennial year. The first stations of the Metro open, after seven years of construction. Patty Hearst is convicted of armed robbery. Olympic athletes head to Innsbruck, Austria, where the Soviet Union will dominate, winning 27 medals, 13 of them Gold — higher than the medal count of all but one other participating nation.

In the world of technology, personal computers are still nascent, and e-mail even more so. Steves Jobs and Wozniak found Apple, ironically on April Fools' Day.

In among the rest of the news is President Gerald R. Ford's rescinding of Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Executive Order 9066 resulted in the internment of 120,000 people during World War II.

Money.  First question:  What is it?  Well so to begin with, we traded STUFF, we had stuff, they had stuff, we wanted some of their stuff, they wanted some of our stuff.  So it was a barter deal--a little bit of monkey meat for some fish, a ceramic bowl for a bracelet, a shrunken head for some dessicated testicles of some champion opponent, a macho man who fell to the lances of somebody younger and stronger.

Well, there was a problem of exchange:  Is a shrunken head equal to a pair of testicles--what if you only had one testicle?  Where you gonna get half of a shrunken head?

You need a mode of exchange, some kind of money. Preferably, something that is infinitely divisible.  Like an ounce of gold or something else.

The Nobel prize-winning president of East Timor, Jose Ramos-Horta, is in critical condition, breathing on a ventilator.  Timorese Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao survived an attempted coup against him and Ramos-Horta. Ramos-Horta was shot in the back of the head and the stomach...  Now Gusmao has declared a 48 hour state of emergency.

Rebel leader Major Alfredo Reinado and another insurgent are dead.

The wire services are reporting that Sara Jane Moore - the woman who attempted to assassinate President Ford in September, 1975 - has been released from a federal prison in Dublin, California.

What few of the wire stories are saying - even today - is that the man who prevented that assassination was gay.

As it is generally understood, the "republic" established when the federal Constitution became effective in 1791, was intended to establish a government which reflected the will of the governed. Although the definition of "the governed" was fairly limited at the time, certainly through the establishment of women's suffrage in the twentieth century, the need of the people we elect to reflect that consensus, subject to the limits placed on majority rule by the protections established by the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment, has served this country very well and allowed us to remain politically stable for a very long time.

Nonetheless, we have often been tested in eras when government has spent too much time speaking to itself and not listening to the governed.  In the current version of this, this myopia and failure to consider the discontent that is everywhere, has been aided and abetted by a timid and cowardly "press" which has, in many respects, forgotten what their obligations are to maintain this republic as intended by the founders.

On Sunday's Meet the Press, New York Daily News Washington bureau chief Tom DeFrank made an extraordinary admission.

DeFrank said that four months before Richard Nixon's resignation, Vice President Gerald Ford told him that Nixon would soon leave office. It was a bombshell, directly contradicting Ford's public statements that Nixon was an innocent man and would remain in office.

According to DeFrank -- then a young journalist -- Ford was on-the-record. Nonetheless, DeFrank now admits he decided to cover-up Ford's stunning declaration.

Why? Why would a young, ambitious reporter with the scoop of a lifetime, choose to sit on it? It doesn't seem to make any sense.

Well, DeFrank's explanation will make your blood boil.

Choo Chooooo, all aboard the revisionism express! As a member of Generation Y, I love it when people like Alan Greenspan find their balls three years too late. It's like the Deadbeat Dad of political strategy!

    Hey! Where's Kos' long-announced book on libertarian Democrats? Huh??
    "Crashing the Gate" was fine (no Jerome Armstrong jokes please), but where's the next book? Where is it? Did it get kidnapped like some new Harry Potter manuscript held for ransom or something?
    So BRING IT ON!!!!

    I briefly mentioned the idea of the book at the George Lakoff/clammyc/thereisnohekebolos seminar "Where Do We Go from Here?: Progressive Strategies and the Overton Window" at YKos last week, but will spare you the verbiage for now.

    (I was gonna write a snark diary about Kos and YearlyKos, but seeing Kos' big victory over Gerald Ford, uh, Harold Stassen, uh, Harold Ford earlier today, I'll spare him for another week.)

I've been struggling for years now.  How can perfectly normal people (an unnamed Uncle for example) turn from a kind and rational, albeit somewhat conservative, human into a raving Bushite desiring the death of thousands or even millions of boogeyman "islamisists"?  How can a person who honestly believed that personal income taxes were at the wrong end of the rate vs. return curve become a talking point automaton that the Estate Tax was an irrational burden on the wealthy? How can a person who held Clinton to high moral standards yet understood the absurdity of the impeachment process suddenly believe that W and his unitary Presidency theories were "about time" and necessary?  There is only one theory I have at this point that consistently can explain these otherwise irrational metmorphoses.  And that is "Memory Corrupted"

from the top or the middle or the bottom of the power structure in this White House will find the courage to do the right thing.  When powerful politicians and conservative editors cover up the behavior of this administration, those in charge of informing the public who instead, state the administrations opinions as if they were fact, those who call this president brave because he sticks to his guns and will not be swayed.  Who will stop rationalizing this completely incompetent man who behavior is like that of a spoiled child, a man who should be led out of the Whitehouse and sent back to Texas or perhaps a jail cell, immediately, for the good of the country.  

As many of you know this is not the first Bush to pardon someone who may have been able to finger him in a lineup (and I'll ignore all Jeff Guckert jokes that rise from that image).

To quote from Lawrence Walsh's Iran Contra report:

"On December 24, 1992, twelve days before former Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger was to go to trial, Bush pardoned him.1 In issuing pardons to Weinberger and five other Iran/contra defendants, President Bush charged that Independent Counsel's prosecutions represented the ``criminalization of policy differences.''"

The coverage was significant even though it happened over the holdays.

Here is an example:

Chief among criticisms of both John Edwards and Barack Obama are that they are too inexperienced to be good presidents - that they're 'not ready for prome time,' as the saying goes.

Let me first of all say that while Obama and Edwards are two of my early favorites for the nod (along with Richardson), there is no guarantee that I'll actually support any of them when caucus time nears.

On that note, join me below the fold for a look at the current and possible 2008 candidates and how many years they will have spent in public office as of November 2008:

After watching 86 some odd episodes to get to this point I was hoping for some closure. Its sort of like waiting for Bush to get impeached and the war to end and everything to go back to the way it used to be, bad as that was.

Bottom Line I keep wishing for more Gore.

[Cross-posted at ProgressiveHistorians, MyDD, My Left Wing, and TalkLeft.]

For some time, there has been a meme in political discourse indicating that Republicans choose their Presidential candidates based on some notion of whose "turn" it is to win the nomination.  I have found evidence of this meme from both the right (William F. Buckley) and the left (a MyDD commenter).  Given the pervasiveness of this meme, I decided to test the historical evidence behind it by examining Republican presidential nominations from 1960 -- a full twelve years before the first election in which primaries played a deciding role in the delegate count -- through 2004.

So I get home and log onto my AOHell and what do I see on my Welcome Screen but the headline "Pick Best, Worst Vice Presidents." And underneath a sub-head "Cheney's had a rough year" and "compare him to past veeps."

Of course, I can't resist!

Just as Rumsfeld and the Reagan administration were buddies with Saddam in the 1980s, guess who helped Iran in the 1970’s with its nuclear program?

Yup, the Ford Administration – with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz responsible for nonproliferation issues at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and Chief of Staff Dick Cheney leading an aggressive push to provide nuclear equipment and materials to the Shah.

Sixty-five years ago today it was not Presidents Day. In fact, February 19, 1942 stands out as one of the low points for presidents in the twentieth century, if not one of the low points for presidents ever. On this day in 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which went on to make scapegoats and prisoners out of an entire group of citizens. Japanese Americans who lived on the west coast of the United States, as a result of the Executive Order, were rounded up with only what they could carry and forced into internment camps. They were eventually forced to prove their loyalty to a country that, up until that point, they loved unconditionally, and to a country that, at that particular time, didn't care much for them.

In the Japanese American community we call this the "Day of Remembrance." So, let us remember, and also let us learn.

I think we should consider impeaching Dick Cheney as a first step.  The recent revelations in the Libby trial show that a lot of the prosecution’s case pointed to Cheney as the leaker-in-chief, and that he directed Libby and others to put out information to discredit Wilson (who was sent to Niger to investigate whether Niger in fact had attempted to sell uranium material to Iraq).

As part of the campaign to discredit Wilson, Cheney directed Libby to expose the secret that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked undercover as a weapons of mass destruction analyst at the CIA.  Exposing an undercover agent is a serious felony.

In the PBS-Frontline documentary, "The Dark Side," you see Cheney playing the lead role in assembling the false information that led us into the Iraq war.  The viewer is reminded of the dirty tricks leading to Watergate.

The Watergate chain of events is instructive.