The President's words serve as a true call to arms. Whether or not we have the fortitude to do what is required remains to be seen.

AJCalhoun, I totally agree with you in principle. But what would you have us do? At the risk of sounding powerless and defeatist, what on earth can individuals do when the president goes mad? Dress up in white coats and come take him away (ha ha)? Storm the White House with torches and pitchforks?

The frustration I and many seem to feel is that there is very little if anything we can do to affect these events. Support Democrats? Rrrrrright! Write your Member of Congress? Sorry, I've got Feinstein, the West Coast's answer to Lieberman. Put a "Bush Sucks" bumper sticker on my car? I already did that, but somehow that didn't make him go away.

Seriously, we all need to do something. We need to do something for a range of reasons, not just to get rid of this shitbag president and save the country and the world, but also to channel all the frustration and indignation which is no doubt fueling cases of Adrenaline Fatigue among many. The question is, WHAT??

I sort of agree with AJCalhoun and others that promote a "general strike"/villagers storming the castle type approach to getting rid of an insane, incompetent president.

Folks, I don't know how many of you attended the protests in advance of the current Iraq disaster, but I was there for all of them (in SF). There were hundreds of thousands of people there all sharing the same view. Our efforts were being mirrored in many, many places across the world. It was the world's largest peace rally against a war that had not yet even begun. There was a very palatable feeling at those protests that yes, by gum, the individual can and will make a difference.

After those protests, Bush realized that the US electorate that he represents, as well as the vast majority of human beings, were against a war with Iraq, and so he changed his policy. War was averted! Peace prevailed!!!

Whoops. Sorry, got sucked into that parallel reality again, but now I'm back. In this reality, the Powers That Be have learned that they can effectively ignore massive protests. Just hire a few more contractors to stand guard at the gates, while directing the MSM to play a bunch of Hee Haw reruns.

Sorry for the cynicism, but I can't see any realistic protest in this country that would have any effect on the Unitary Executive. I invite any of you to convince me otherwise, as I would dearly love the shot of optimism.

I highly doubt that every step in the design and construction of a nuclear device is in the public domain. To separate knowledge and industrial capacity in the manner that Joe does is ignorant.

What's more ignorant? Making assumptions based on a solid understanding of nuclear development, as Joe did and as Senior Tilda supported here?

http://letters.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/10/19/bush_iran/permalink/be38239db4f4ad36a467862a345f58d7.html

Or making an assumption based on a deeply flawed understanding of nuclear development, supported by an overly simplistic "common sense", and pretending it is uncontested fact?

Joe wants to claim that the US has a big stick that it will swing if Iran even looks to be threatening, and that obviously Iran will cower. Therefore, we don’t need to get too worried about this.

Apparently Joe doesn’t read Salon, or his own columns. In those columns you will find arguments that the US should NOT engage in pre-emptive attacks, that they should NOT invade foreign countries, that they are the world’s bully.

Yet Joe still wants to believe that we can threaten Iran into submission. He is relying on a belief, a principle, that hundreds of salonistas condemn.

NOB (if I may call you that), what the US should do and what the US might do are entirely separate. The US should not have invaded Iraq, but whataya know, they did anyway. Believe it or not, Bush doesn't check in with the "salonistas" before he launches a policy. The fact that the US definitely should not bomb and/or regime-change Iran is no guarantee that they won't.

Furthermore, the US doesn't have to do it themselves. They can allow their 51st State (Israel) to do it. Israel has already preemptively struck at nuclear sites in their neighborhood in the past, and there is no reason whatsoever to believe they won't do it again.

So, your points are dead wrong.

The change isn't sitting well with Democrats. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy said the "bright line" Mukasey laid down Wednesday seemed to be fading away Thursday, and he wondered whether Mukasey had received some kind of course correction from the White House between the two sessions. Mukasey said he hadn't.

Let's recap.

We've had a series of Bush appointees who, in their confirmation hearings say one thing, and once they're in power, do almost exactly the opposite. That is the well-established precedent. The job of Congress (or, the subset of Congress who values the rule of law) is to make sure this Bush appointee doesn't follow the pattern of all the others.

So we've got Mukasey saying, well, maybe the president can in fact torture, and maybe he is actually above the law. Well, hello? Congress? This is your queue to say "Sorry, we need an appointee who is neither a criminal nor a crime enabler. You got any of those?"

However, what did they do? They just asked Mukasey, are you pulling our leg? Are you taking orders from the White House that compromises your ability to be honest with us? And Mukasey said no. Case closed.