{"id":682,"date":"2007-07-30T05:00:36","date_gmt":"2007-07-30T09:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/morningseditionists.com\/msblog\/?p=682"},"modified":"2007-07-30T08:10:14","modified_gmt":"2007-07-30T12:10:14","slug":"monday-open-thread-63","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/2007\/07\/30\/monday-open-thread-63\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday Open Thread"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Oh boy, another Monday.  And a special one at that, as everybody&#8217;s favorite Governor Ahnuld Schwarzenegger hits the big six-oh today.  It also happens to be the day on which Jimmy Hoffa went away, never to be seen again, in 1975.  Perhaps more significantly, however, was what happened a year earlier.  The House of Representatives recommended three articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon, ushering in the beginning of the end of Nixon&#8217;s presidency.  He officially resigned just ten days later, on August 9<sup>th<\/sup>, ending one of the darker eras in our history.  <\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, Nixon&#8217;s reign looks pretty tame in comparison with the current group of liars, murderers, and thieves.  I followed the Watergate hearings pretty closely back then, and would like nothing better than to have a new set of hearings in the House and Senate to occupy my days.  Of course, those were different times, back then.  The WaPost wasn&#8217;t a fascist propaganda outlet, for one thing (and David Broder wasn&#8217;t yet a senile, Republican water-carrier).  And there was still at least some semblance of decency amongst the politicians of the day.  Or so it seemed to me, anyway (I admit, I was still a bit young and naive).  It&#8217;s sad that the closest thing we have to a Lowell Weicker on the Republican side is the all-talk, no action Arlen Specter, and while he initially opposed Brown v. Board of Education, and continued to oppose forced school desegregation (on &#8220;states&#8217; rights issues), I don&#8217;t know of anybody that would be as much fun to watch chair a committee as Sam Ervin was, back then (he also had a hand in bringing down Tailgunner Joe McCarthy, back in the day).<\/p>\n<p>But, we&#8217;ll see what happens.  It might just be that the Abu Gonzalez will force the Democrats to do the right thing, in spite of themselves.  They need a good kick in the ass, and I can&#8217;t say as I blame them, to be honest.  We know they&#8217;ll be trashed in the traditional media if they try to bring dear leader to justice, and if they aren&#8217;t really, really certain that the people will have their backs when they vote to impeach and convict &#8211; the &#8220;convict&#8221; part is the important thing that an awful lot of people seem to forget about &#8211; and that they&#8217;ll be given the boot (not in favor of Republicans or third-party ego maniacal loser candidates, but in their primaries) if they fail to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America, then they&#8217;ll take the easy way out.  Who can blame them?  I tend to take the easy way out of things, myself.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oh boy, another Monday. And a special one at that, as everybody&#8217;s favorite Governor Ahnuld Schwarzenegger hits the big six-oh today. It also happens to be the day on which Jimmy Hoffa went away, never to be seen again, in 1975. Perhaps more significantly, however, was what happened a year earlier. The House of Representatives [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}