Memnison Journal

At various times, I get into research projects; some simmer on for decades in various forms, and some break off and pick up speed because I happen to run into something that really fuels the fire, so to speak.

My library here is largely one that I use for reference. I have a huge amount of material that isn’t in book form, and I’m going through that all the time and hacking away at it to be able to organize and marshal the stuff. At present, the idea is to digitize everything, and use various management utilities to be able to find and figure out what’s what.

Here’s a *short* list of the topics I’m still digging for:

There was a revelation in the TODAY show interview of Scott McClellan that had Bush admitting to McClellan that he was the person who started the whole Plame leak fiasco going.  And so various people are now saying that ooh, caught Dubya in a impeachable offence, either the leak thingy or the pardon resulting from it.

Legally, sure.  But as the only person here who sat in person at the 1974 House Judiciary Committee hearings on impeachment of Richard Nixon (well, probably), I gotta remind you that the impeachment process (House impeaches / indicts for a Senate trial that requires a 2/3ds vote to remove from office) that even if you could get this through the House and into a Senate trial before Bush / Cheney left office, you would never get 66 or 67 votes for removing Bush from office.  I don’t care how guilty the man is, you’d have to motivate a lot of Republicans to vote that way.

Impeachment and Removal from Office is a political event, not a legal one.

I’m not kidding about this, you know.

Nixon first proposed national health insurance as a conservative California congressman in 1947. He grew up poor and lost two brothers to tuberculosis, which marked him for life. He frequently pointed to the cure for tuberculosis as a medical marvel that underscored the need for a public-private partnership on health care.

“It was something personal for him,” Price said of Nixon’s health-care push.

Despite the heated politics of Watergate, national health-care legislation was proceeding in Congress thanks to a compromise brokered by a young Democratic senator from Massachusetts, Edward Kennedy, a Nixon nemesis.

But then, according to a 1974 political almanac published by Congressional Quarterly, the AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers lobbied successfully to kill the plan. Unions hoped to get a better deal after the next elections.

The rest was, as they say, history.