"Greed is a fat demon with a small mouth and whatever you feed it is never enough." - Janwillem van de Wetering
"Hell has three gates: lust, anger, and greed." - Bhagavad Gita
"It's time for greatness -- not for greed. It's a time for idealism -- not ideology. It is a time not just for compassionate words, but compassionate action." - Marian Wright Edelman
[b]George W. Bush is a greedy man ... There is nothing particularly [i]unusual [/i]in that fact ... The problem we face is that this vile, greedy man is our President, and moreover, Dubya has committed Treason, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity-- in order to further his own power & wealth for himself; his corrupt corporate cronies; and, the Bush Crime Family ... "We the People" should call upon Congress http://www.congress.org to impeach the gluttonous Bush and Cheney gang for they are [i]all [/i]unfit to hold public office ...[/b]
There has been much throwing about of brains on the subject of George W. Bush's further lurch to the Right since he limped over the election finish line with his tiny, 1 percent, fraud-marred majority. And to be sure, the wholesale purges he has instituted throughout his regime -- replacing a slew of merely cringing sycophants with cringing, drooling, groveling sycophants -- will indeed hasten the United States' degeneration into corpo-religious authoritarianism along the lines of Franco's Spain.
But all the earnest disquisitions about Bush's Franco-U.S. "ideology" entirely miss the point -- and increase the fog that the Regime deliberately spreads over its true interests. For the heart of this slouching beast is neither left-wing nor right-wing; it's strictly Bush-wing. Anyone even slightly acquainted with the history of the Bush dynasty knows what makes these preppy puppies run -- and it has nothing to do with conservative principles or moral values or national security or world freedom. It's not ideology, but investments -- the gobbling up of unearned, risk-free lucre on the grandest scale imaginable.
Naturally, the pursuit of this kind of piratical wealth leads to certain kinds of policies that can at times be mistaken for a political philosophy. For example, the Bush Regime's devotion to Big Oil, the military, tax cuts, corporate deregulation and unbridled executive power could be seen as the expression of a coherent, if repellent, worldview: Social Darwinism -- survival of the fittest, might makes right, winner takes all. Likewise, the Regime's embrace of religious and cultural fundamentalism resembles an ideological stance of unbending zeal and moral certitude, encompassing the whole of reality.
Taken together, these traits present a formidable picture of a thoroughgoing ideological juggernaut, well-plated with philosophical, academic, legal and theological armor. But underneath all this bristling array there is nothing but a tiny white maggot of greed, wriggling and gorging on scraps of rotting meat. No deep beliefs or high ideals inform the Bushist ethos, which can be boiled down to one sentence: Grab your pile and screw anybody who gets in the way. War, energy and corporate finance just happen to be where the money is at. And raw, secretive political power -- unfettered by courts, laws, legislators or public scrutiny -- is the most effective way to safeguard and augment these investments.
That is not to say that the Bushist credo lacks all nuance. There is in fact a very important refinement to their wormy greed: Loot should always be obtained without the slightest risk to your own financial position. The "free market" must be shunned at all costs -- and manipulated by string-pulling, deceit and intimidation when competition is unavoidable. Thus the Bush model is to cozy up to governments -- preferably strongman regimes free to ladle out public money to their favorites with no questions asked.
That's why Bush patriarch Prescott, pa and grandpa to presidents, invested heavily in Nazi war industries throughout the 1930s -- and kept on investing even after the German war machine was grinding through Europe. That's why George I made his mogul bones by pumping oil with repressive royals in Kuwait. Later, when he had a government of his own to play with, George sent U.S. troops to bail out his Kuwaiti partners after another of his business clients, Saddam Hussein, got too frisky in a border dispute. George I would end his career as a corporate bagman, roaming the Earth in search of insider deals and choice "privatizations" from Saudi princes, Asian dictators, African tyrants, South American sleaze merchants and Europork peddlers.
George II's murky road to fortune was likewise paved with insider trading, no-risk loans and mysterious infusions of foreign cash, including a bailout from a firm embedded in the octopus of BCCI -- the renegade banking cartel that the U.S. Senate called the "largest criminal organization in world history," which cloaked drug deals, gun-running, nuke trafficking and "black ops" by the CIA and other intelligence services behind a protective wall of bribes that reached into nearly every government on Earth.
Of course, the best of all possible worlds is controlling the government yourself -- and Dubya has certainly raised crony capitalism to dizzy heights, tearing down whole countries just so his investor pals (and his family) can reap the profits of "reconstruction." But again, it is the maggoty hankering for easy money that truly drives Bushist militarism, not any kind of ideological or religious vision. For such crude minds, the surest way to guarantee that floods of public boodle keep pouring into your private pocket is to scare the hell out of people and keep them scared with war and rumors of war.
The decidedly un-butch Bushes are not really bloodthirsty. They don't sit in dark corners and cackle over the idea of children being chewed to pieces by American bombs. Nor do their nostrils flare with righteous rage at the thought of homosexuality or abortion or nipples on national television. It's just that war profiteering, corporate rapine and cynical pandering to the public's worst instincts are the easiest way to get the unearned riches they crave -- and the perks and power they feel are their birthright as an ancient branch of the American aristocracy.
Perhaps if they could obtain these same privileges as easily by other, less horrific means, they would. As it is, they take the world as they find it, and go about their business without fretting over the consequences -- the dead, the ruined, the spreading hate, the poisoned planet. Why should they care? As the maggot cannot see beyond the meat, so too these men of greed-stunted understanding can see nothing of worth outside their own bottomless appetites.
"When we have the courage to speak out – to break our silence – we inspire the rest of the "moderates" in our communities to speak up and voice their views." - Sharon Schuster
[b]What better way to stifle our ability to obtain timely information, organize & express our dissent (involving efficient and effective communications) than to put a stop to the "capitalistic" notion that entrepreneurs can provide low-cost internet services to American citizens??? ... Oh, no-- the corrupt, hypocritical Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] will certainly not permit [i]this[/i] open communications to continue; for there are massive profits to be made by corporate robber-barons and the dumbing-down of America must continue onwards and upwards [[i]sic[/i]] ... The internet represents a [i]real threat [/i]to the brain-washing of America ... "We the People" must fight this tyrannical downwards spiral towards un-American fascism being imposed upon us by the insane whorish Bushies & their neo-con cabal of corporate pimps ... Write to your representatives in Congress http://www.congress.org today and demand that Verizon and other such corporate fascists be stopped immediately in their ugly attempt to gain an immoral (and anti-"capitalistic") monopoly upon the internet ...[/b]
[b][u]CORPORATE POWER[/u]
Verizon's Villainy[/b]
In an attempt to bridge the digital divide and enhance their economic prospects, cities across the nation, including Milwaukee, Cleveland, St. Louis and Philadelphia, are planning to deploy universal low-cost wireless Internet access. Meanwhile, moneyed telecommunications corporations and their army of lobbyists are doing everything in their power to ensure it doesn't happen. In Pennsylvania, for example, the legislature passed a bill with a deeply buried provision – inserted after intensive lobbying by Verizon Communications – which would make it illegal for any city or other "political subdivision" in the state to provide low-cost Internet access to its citizens unless a corporation like Verizon gave them permission. Gov. Ed Rendell has until midnight tonight to sign or veto the legislation. Email Gov. Rendell http://www.americanprogressac... and tell him he should stand up to corporate lobbyists and veto the bill.
[b]VERIZON'S OFFENSIVE PUBLIC RELATIONS OFFENSIVE:[/b] Eager to squelch what is quickly becoming a public relations disaster, Verizon said yesterday that it is considering allowing Philadelphia to deploy its wireless network even if the bill is signed into law. This is a transparent effort to tamp down the controversy while still enabling the company to "handcuff other cities and towns in Pennsylvania." For example, a Verizon representative refused to say whether the company would allow the town of Kutztown, PA to go ahead with plans to offer broadband Internet access over wires. More broadly, the citizens of Pennsylvania – not multinational corporations – should be in charge of their government.
[b]THE $3 BILLION CORPORATE GIVEAWAY:[/b] The language restricting cities from providing low-cost Internet access was a just a small provision in "a 30-page bill drafted by industry lobbyists." While restricting competition, the bill provides massive giveaways for telecommunication companies to roll out broadband networks. These provisions are worth as much as $3 billion to Verizon alone.
[b]THE BROAD EFFORT TO KILL LOW-COST INTERNET ACCESS:[/b] The movement to restrict low-cost broadband Internet access are not limited to Verizon's efforts in Pennsylvania. Earlier this year, BellSouth and Qwest Communications pushed for "severe restrictions on municipal broadband service in Louisiana and Utah." (For more on these corporations' cynical efforts to limit low-cost wireless internet access, check out freepress.net http://www.freepress.net/wifi... .)
[b]CORPORATE BROADBAND ACCESS LEAVES MIDDLE CLASS BEHIND:[/b] Broadband Internet access is "destined to become this century's basic infrastructure – what highways, water systems and power grids were to the last century's development." But corporate control of broadband development has excluded most of the middle class. Among those living in households earning $150,000 and above, nearly 60 percent have broadband Internet access. But among those living in households earning between $25,000 and $34,999, just 13.4 percent have broadband access. Barbara Grant, a spokeswoman for Philadelphia Mayor John F. Street, said the city's efforts were intended "to bridge the digital divide for residents who wouldn't have access to the Internet, particularly school children."
[b]MUNICIPAL INTERNET ACCESS IS COST EFFECTIVE:[/b] In Philadelphia, planners estimate that offering city-wide wireless Internet access will cost taxpayers $10 million to set up and $1.5 million a year to operate. Commercial broadband access provided by companies like Verizon typically costs from $35 to $60 a month. That means if Verizon were to provide broadband access to all 590,000 Philly households, it would charge at least $247 million a year.
"Half of the modern drugs could well be thrown out of the window, except that the birds might eat them." - Dr. Martin Henry Fischer
[b]Years ago a very good friend of mine was diagnosed with a deadly cancer that took her life ... She was an old-fashioned, conservative woman who loved and was beloved by her devoted family and loyal friends alike ... She had been married for over 50 years, and took great joy in her grand-children, nature, her religious faith and her artistic projects ... Towards the end of her illness, she stopped taking kemotherapy because it made her so nauseated, sick and tired that she could no longer take any pleasure in being around people ... Her doctor advised her to take medical marijuana to ease her misery... She declined because it [i]was and still is [/i]an illegal substance ...
The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]seems to want to control every aspect of our private lives ([i]except[/i] when it comes to letting gluttonous corporations & greedy plutocrats exploit, abuse and steal from us ...) ... What business is it of the federal government ([i]Big Brother[/i]) to involve itself in medical decision-making? ... Or could it be that the pharmaceutical industry doesn't want patients to obtain relief if they don't make a massive profit? ... "We the People" should insist that medical marijuana be made available to those in pain and who are suffering ... Not to do so is truly cruel and[i] very, very [/i]un-Christian ...[/b]
[b]The Supreme Court is set to rule on whether the feds have the right to arrest medical marijuana patients. But will the justices have all the facts?[/b]
The end of November marks the beginning of what could be the final act for the medical marijuana movement. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to take from Nov. 29 until late spring to decide, in the case of Ashcroft vs. Raich, whether federal agents can arrest medical cannabis patients, even in states that authorize medical cannabis use.
It is an epic states' rights battle, although few in the national media portray it that way. Major media outlets also continue to ignore a growing body of evidence that suggests that cannabinoids, the active ingredients in cannabis, show more healing potential for a variety of illnesses than practically any natural substance known to medical science.
Why is the federal government bent on suppressing cannabis when solid research suggests it can be so beneficial? Ask the members of the U.S. House and Senate, who blindly demonize marijuana while accepting millions of dollars in donations from the same pharmaceutical giants who back cannabis prohibition.
If the Supreme Court also turns a blind eye to the research and rules, as it did in 2001, that cannabis has no medical use unless Congress says it has a medical use, then it hardly matters if cannabinoids turn out to be the cure for cancer, as some European cannabis researchers are suggesting.
In May 2000 I reported that Spanish researchers had shrunk or destroyed deadly brain tumors in rats using THC, a cannabinoid. The Spaniards' study was reportedly the first time that cannabinoids had been administered to tumor-bearing animals. With information provided by Manuel Guzman, the lead researcher in the Madrid study, I uncovered a 1974 study done in the United States in which THC had shrunk breast and lung tumors in rats. The federal government had suppressed the study's results and subsequently shut down all cannabis research at public institutions.
One year later, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its first ruling on medical cannabis, a negative decision against the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Club.
The intervening years have seen substantial research on cannabinoids by Guzman and a handful of dedicated European scientists. In 2003 the First European Workshop on Cannabinoid Research produced more than 50 pages of investigative abstracts from the U.K., Italy, Spain, Germany and France that provide the scientific basis for researchers' claims that cannabinoids hold promise for Alzheimer's, cancer, Parkinson's, alcoholism, depression and other illnesses.
In October 2003 Guzman published a review of cannabis research in Nature Cancer that described in detail the anti-cancer properties of cannabinoids. Last August, Guzman reported in Cancer Research how cannabinoids deprive cancerous tumors of the blood they need to survive. The article mentioned the first known trials of cannabis tincture on humans with brain cancer, which reportedly showed positive results.
The research findings of European cannabis researchers receive substantial coverage in Spain, Latin America, the U.K., France and Germany. The U.S. media have been largely silent, until recently. The American Association for Cannabis Research, a 15,000-member group of U.S. cancer researchers, issued a press release in August about Guzman's latest findings, prompting coverage in Scientific American and a smattering of other mainstream outlets.
It is impossible to know whether Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the negative decision in the 2001 Oakland Cannabis Buyers Club case, will be aware that cannabinoids shrink tumors when he makes his decision in Ashcroft vs. Raich. The Supreme Court justices and their legal staff would appear to have a moral, if not a legal responsibility to acquire at least a rudimentary knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the great national issues they decide. In the case of medical marijuana, there is so much evidence about the healing potential of cannabinoids, even on the government's own web sites, that it suggests negligence to ignore it.
If the Supreme Court rules against patients in Ashcroft vs. Raich, it will give the U.S. Justice Department all the justification it needs to resume its persecution of medical pot users and effectively destroy the medical marijuana movement in California and nine other states. Then cannabis clubs will become part of our collective memory, and valuable research on cannabinoids will continue to be ignored.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Raymond Cushing is a writer based in Sacramento, Calif. His article on cannabis research was included in the 2000 Project Censored collection. AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
"Nothing in the world is more haughty than a man of moderate capacity when once raised to power." - Baron Wessenberg
[b]"We the People" have before us a haughty, arrogant and incompetent President Bush:-- an immoral mediocrity-- a disgrace to our nation-- and a disaster for the world ... Both at home and around the world, Bush policies are the moral equivilant to seceding from the rest of the world ... We have a moral obligation to stop this secession from taking place ...[/b]
By continuing to withdraw his administration from the spirit and letter of human rights and global law, President Bush is seceding from the rest of the world. Through a moral equivalent of Civil War, we must prevent this secession from taking place.
If we agree with the terse thesis of Francis A. Boyle – that the Bush movement constitutes "a comprehensive and malicious assault upon the integrity of the international legal order" – then the muscle of the Bush grip at home is connected through sinews of illegality to the trigger finger in Falluja. The bad news about Bushist secessionism is that principles of law are under attack at home and abroad. The good news is that principles of resistance can be welded together. From every node of resistance, we can forge ladders of international law, the better to scale collectively the walls of fortress Bush.
Bush has appropriated enormous power from the government of the U.S. as he belittles "focus groups" at home and "international tests" abroad. When millions of Americans hit the streets pleading with Bush not to pursue a literal war on terrorism, Bush called the protesters nothing but "focus groups." When his campaign opponent said that presidents should respect international law, Bush scoffed at the concept of an international test, saying quizzically, "I'm not exactly sure what you mean ..."
In a moral equivalent of Civil War, Bush's belligerence toward international law is cultural heir to secessionist governors in the American South who once scoffed at federal authority as stridently as they cherished their own authority over others. (No wonder, then, that black voters in America today are 88 percent likely to vote against Bushism. Why Jewish voters also refuse to be drawn into BushWorld speaks to longstanding filiations, I think, between Dixie and Nazi ideologies.) At home and abroad, we can speak with converging voices if we demand reconciliation between the Bush movement and obligations of international law.
At home, Bushist secessionism attacks Constitutional rights and liberties that have won international standing as human rights and liberties. Respecting women's reproductive rights, or the rights of people to form their own families, plain-speaking Bush refuses to speak up. Regarding rights to due process, open records, and free speech, the warm-faced president works with bone-cold hands.
As for Iraq, argues Professor Boyle, laws of war compel definition of U.S. soldiers as "belligerent occupants." So long as these soldiers remain in Iraq, they should take no actions that would contravene Articles 42-56 of the Laws of War as adopted at Hague II.
Yet, Globelaw editor Duncan Currie notes with concern that, "incidents have been reported to have been initiated by the coalition forces involving civilian casualties, including the bombing of a Syrian bus, use of cluster bombs, destruction of electricity supplies leading to disruption of civilian water supplies, attacks on Iraqi television stations, on Al-Jazeera and on the Palestine hotel, on markets at Al-Shaab and Shula, on civilians at Nasiriya and Hilla, on a van at Najaf, shooting at ambulances, and shooting of protesters."
"In addition," continues Currie, "there have been reports of a failure to restore water, electricity and other humanitarian needs and encouragement, toleration and failure to avoid looting, including of nuclear installations. State responsibility and individual criminal liability for these and other actions has yet to be determined. Any responsibility or liability assistance after the fact of other States or individuals or the adoption of these acts by other States, or the actions of States as belligerent occupants in Iraq, could be determined by the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice or an ad hoc or arbitral tribunal."
Currie's allegations were made in May 2003, within weeks of the invasion. During that same month, Leah Wells of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation questioned U.S. intentions for Iraq's water. She worried about water privatization. More recently, Daniel O'Huiginn in behalf of Cambridge Solidarity with Iraq (CASI) has documented allegations that water cutoff has been used as a weapon. Yet, people have rights to water. Here is another area where Bushist secession from international law must be stopped.
Naomi Klein also appeals to international law in her muckraking review of the Bremer administration, published in Harpers. When international law declares that belligerent occupiers are supposed to treat occupied properties as "private" – that means treat the properties as if they belong to the people who live there. But in sinister misappropriations of legal spirit, the Bremer occupation "privatizes" Iraq and puts it out for bid. The legal obligation to "usufruct" is replaced with a license to usurp. As a result, writes Klein, "where economic reforms were introduced at their most shocking and most perfect, they created, instead of a model free market, a failed state no right-thinking investor would touch." International law (go figure) may offer a better structure for doing business than Bushist secessionism.
Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) brings news that one American innovation in Iraq involves "a system of monopoly rights over seed." The FPIF discussion paper appeals to international rights of "food sovereignty" – the right of a nation, "to define their own food and agriculture policies, to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade, to decide the way food should be produced, and to determine what should be grown locally and what should be imported."
Since Americans have been told very little about the privatization of Iraq, the population of the U.S. is little prepared to empathize with righteous indignations that Iraqis feel as they witness their own country sold out from under their feet. Neither can the average American understand the aggravation that must be provoked among Iraqis watching Bush play to global cameras with his schtick about American gifts of freedom and democracy. For Iraqis, a big schtick, indeed.
At least 56 million Americans, however, are open to suggestion that something about the Bush agenda is headed in the wrong direction. Bushist secessionism declares a civil war that we have no choice but to stop. Both at home and abroad, a unifying theme of struggle may be found in a call to restore BushWorld to a global sovereignty of rights and laws.
"We must protect the forests for our children, grandchildren and children yet to be born. We must protect the forests for those who can't speak for themselves such as the birds, animals, fish and trees." - Qwatsinas [Hereditary Chief Edward Moody], Nuxalk Nation
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]is greedy, arrogant and short-sighted-- with cynical disregard for the dire consequences of its' criminal actions upon others ... Bush and his ugly cabal of neo-con thugs and neo-fascist goons care nothing about life: neither the lives of human-beings (i.e. Americans, Iraqis, etc.) that they are responsible for slaughtering wholesale in Iraq, nor for the life of our planet ... "We the People" have an obligation to protect the environment and safeguard the natural world for the well-being of all,[i] as well as [/i]for the sake of future generations ...[/b]
George W. Bush accepted http://www.opensecrets.org/in... $2.9 million from the energy and natural-resources sector in 2000 and then made drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge a centerpiece of his closed-door energy policy http://www.disinfopedia.org/w...'s_Energy_Task_Force .
The House narrowly passed http://www.wilderness.org/Our... Bush's energy bill last year while the Senate tried and failed on two occasions. Last March Democrats and moderate Republicans succeeded in blocking http://capwiz.com/awc/issues/... a pro-drilling amendment to a budget bill by a slim 52 to 48 margin. This past election the energy sector gave http://www.opensecrets.org/in... an added $4.4 million to Bush and seven new conservative Republicans joined the Senate http://www.thenation.com/blog... , signaling even larger payoffs for the energy industry.
Democrats can still filibuster most drilling attempts--requiring 60 votes to override. Yet Republicans say they plan http://abcnews.go.com/Politic... on attaching the drilling provision to a comprehensive budget bill in 2005, needing only a simple majority vote to pass. That would likely result in a 51 to 49 victory for drilling advocates. The fate of ANWR is once again in jeopardy.
"The arguments against drilling are as strong as they were before the election," says Elliott Negin of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Drilling in "America's Serengeti"--as conservationists dub the wildlife refuge--would increase world oil reserves by only 0.3 percent http://www.nrdc.org/land/wild... , a margin too miniscule to significantly lower US oil imports or reduce the world price. It will take ten years for that oil to reach http://www.nrdc.org/land/wild... the US market. At peak projection levels in 2027, ANWR would satisfy less than 2 percent of America's expected oil consumption http://www.nrdc.org/land/wild... . Americans consistently oppose http://www.defenders.org/wild... more drilling in poll after poll.
Meanwhile, raising fuel efficiency standards in cars to forty miles per gallon over the next decade would save ten to fifteen times more oil http://www.nrdc.org/land/wild... than the Refuge could yield, according to government data. A clean energy policy would create 1.4 million new US jobs and save the average household $1,275 in annual energy savings by 2025, a recent report http://www.sierraclub.org/glo... by a coalition of union leaders and environmental groups found.
With oil now hovering near $50 per barrel, the Republicans--while annointing themselves "the party of ideas"--are still proposing tired 19th century drilling solutions to critical 21st century energy problems.
"A bad man is worse when he pretends to be a saint." - Francis Bacon
"Clean your finger before you point at my spots." - Benjamin Franklin
"How inexpressible is the meanness of being a hypocrite! How horrible is it to be a mischievous and malignant hypocrite." - Voltaire
[b]Isn't it about time for "We the People" to clearly see and denounce the false prophets, hypocrites and blithering idiots for the ruthless opportunists, blood-sucking money-grubbing gluttons and cynical con-men that they[i] really [/i]are??? ...[/b]
"I don't believe God loves war…everybody hates war." - Rev. Jerry Falwell, 11/28/04
[i]VERSUS[/i]
"God is Pro-War." – Falwell commentary, 1/31/04
Yesterday on [i]Meet the Press[/i], http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1... Reverend Jerry Falwell reaffirmed the Christian Right's narrow focus on two issues: gay marriage and abortion. Asked by progressive religious leader Jim Wallis to engage in a "broader and deeper" conversation about values, Falwell and fellow conservative preacher Dr. Richard Land resorted to bigotry and misdirection, lashing out against gays, women and religious progressives. Falwell's priorities fly in the face of the "moral values" most often cited (though not most often reported) on Nov. 2, where polls showed voters were more concerned with "greed and materialism" (33 percent) and "poverty and economic justice" (31 percent) than they were with issues like gay marriage (12 percent). Nevertheless, Christian conservatives around the country are following Falwell's lead, dismissing concerns about separation of church and state and setting out to refashion the federal courts around a narrow agenda which conflicts with the values of most Americans.
[b]FALWELL DEMEANS RELIGIOUS PROGRESSIVES:[/b] Falwell went out of his way on Sunday to divide America, saying those who voted for John Kerry did not "take the bible seriously." Wallis shot back, saying, "Jerry, there are millions and millions of Christians who want the nation to know that you don't speak for them...that Jesus, our Jesus isn't pro-rich, pro-war and only pro-American. We don't find that Jesus anywhere in the Bible."
[b]FALWELL REAFFIRMS BLAME FOR 9/11 ON GAYS, FEMINISTS:[/b] Falwell refused to back down from his comment that 9/11 had been caused by "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians [and] all of them who have tried to secularize America." He reiterated that, "when we defy the Lord, I think we pay a price for it."
[b]FALWELL FLIP-FLOPS ON GOD, WAR:[/b] Falwell contradicted himself on the war in Iraq, cited by 42 percent of respondents as the moral issue which most influenced their vote on Nov. 2. When Rev. Wallis asked him why he had said God was "pro-war," Falwell said, "I don't believe God loves war…everybody hates war." The name of Falwell's 1/31/04 commentary? "God is Pro-War."
[b]SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT ON CIVIL RIGHTS:[/b] Falwell and Land tried to cast their anti-abortion crusade as similar to the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. But Al Sharpton reminded Land it was his own church that fought against King. "What [King] did was fought against the Southern conservative values of those days," said Sharpton. "He fought the Southern Convention that you represent. Dr. King fought that convention. Let's not rewrite history." Wallis added that King had served as a model of how religion and values could play a part in political life: "He reminded us of this wonderful vision of a beloved community where no one gets left out and those who are always left out have a front-row seat."
[b]RELIGIOUS RIGHT SETS AFTER COURTS:[/b] The Palm Beach Post's George McEvoy reports Congressmen pandering to the Christian right wing are planning ways to strip federal courts of "their right to hear cases involving the separation of church and state." Rep. John Hostettler (R-IN), addressing a special legislative briefing of the Christian Coalition last month in Washington, said he planned to introduce a bill that would "deny federal courts the right to hear cases challenging the Defense of Marriage Act, which bans same-sex marriage." Unimpressed by America's system of checks and balances, Hostettler inveighed, "When the courts make unconstitutional decisions, we should not enforce them. Federal courts have no army or navy...At the end of the day, we're saying the court can't enforce its opinions." Rep. Robert Aderholdt (R-AL), recently advocated "court stripping as a means to protect state-sponsored Ten Commandment displays."
[b]KENNEDY WARNS BUSH:[/b] Another conservative religious leader, Dr. James Kennedy, whose sermons are broadcast in 3 million homes, has warned that God will "be angry" if President Bush does not act soon on abortion and gay marriage. "He said he knows of no timetable for God's wrath, but wants results fast." Asked about the millions of Americans who are not Christian, or have a different interpretation of Christianity, Kennedy recommended they "repent" and said he "couldn't care less" about their views.
"The failure to ensure that the nation's classrooms, especially those in disadvantaged schools, are all staffed with qualified teachers is one of the most important problems in contemporary American education." - Why Do High-Poverty Schools Have Difficulty Staffing Their Classrooms with Qualified Teachers?, http://www.americanprogress.o...
Nothing is more important than investing in the education of our children and young people in order that they may participate in our democracy as well-educated, responsible and properly informed citizens ... Tragically, "We the People" are failing miserably in funding and supporting this top priority: Education should come [i]BEFORE[/i] Insane Warmongering ... Unhappily, the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] has put enriching their corporate cronies (Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc.) via illegal and immoral warfare, before education and before our nation's well-being ...
[b]"[i]What's the Matter With Kansas[/i]?" http://www.powells.com/cgi-bi... is a great book and a fascinating socio-political question. But a more visceral "what the bleeding hell is the matter with Alabama?!?" was the cry of many a Kossack when we learned that Alabama voters had narrowly rejected a constitutional amendment http://www.washingtonpost.com... that would have "erased segregation-era wording requiring separate schools for 'white and colored children' and eliminated references to the poll taxes once imposed to disenfranchise blacks." To repeat: a majority of Alabama voters freely chose to keep segregationist language (long since unenforceable due to its federal unconstitutionality) in their state constitution.[/b]
[b]Now, you might have thought -- as I did -- that this stunning rejection of basic 1950's civil rights achievements was -- perhaps -- somewhat indicative of a teeny eensy bit of racism in Alabama. That's why I was glad to learn from today's [i]Washington Post[/i] http://www.washingtonpost.com... that the real reason Alabamans voted in favor of state-enforced segregation and poll taxes was because . . . well . . . here -- read it yourself:[/b]
... "Some say it was not about race but about taxes. The amendment had two main parts: the removal of the separate-schools language and the removal of a passage -- inserted in the 1950s in an attempt to counter the Brown v. Board of Education ruling against segregated public schools -- that said Alabama's constitution does not guarantee a right to a public education. Leading opponents, such as Alabama Christian Coalition President John Giles, said they did not object to removing the passage about separate schools for "white and colored children." But, employing an argument that was ridiculed by most of the state's newspapers and by legions of legal experts, Giles and others said guaranteeing a right to a public education would have opened a door for "rogue" federal judges to order the state to raise taxes to pay for improvements in its public school system." ...
[b]So there you go. I feel much better now, knowing that Alabama's vote for segregation had nothing to do with race, and everything to do with denying children the right to public education. That's fantastic. [/b]
"In the pregame highlights for the next two years of Republican one-party rule, rightwing radicals dropped their towels and exposed themselves in all their naked ambition last week. It wasn't a pretty sight." - Desperate Republicans, http://www.thenation.com/edcu...
The [i]New York Times/CBS [/i]poll released this week finds that Americans are "at best ambivalent" about Bush's plans to privatize Social Security, rewrite the tax code, cut taxes and appoint conservative judges to the bench. Read more here http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1... , including an interactive poll feature.
[b]"We the People" must make our voices heard and write to our representatives in Congress http://www.congress.org , demanding greater accountability for decision-making by our governmental institutions; immediate repeal of Bush's immoral tax cuts for the hyper-rich, greedy plutocrats and gluttonous corporations (while the[i] rest of us [/i]bear the brunt of record-level deficits/debts); a stop for Bush's neo-fascist plans to privatize Social Security (i.e. embezzlement scheme for corporate rapists); and, other outrages perpetrated by the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] in our name ...[/b]
"INFLATION is one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation." - Milton Friedman
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]has all but bankrupted our nation, as these neo-con thieves and neo-fascist embezzlers have wrecked our economy ... The dollar is in free-fall and the world banks are abandoning it in favor of the Euro and other currencies ... This spells the beginning of horrendous I N F L A T I O N inflicted upon "We the People" ... Inflation hurts Middle Class Families; and, hits working people, the poor-and-vulnerable, and fixed income retirees the hardest ... Meanwhile, Bush has greedily given himself, his Crime Family, and his hyper-wealthy gluttonous corporate cronies massive tax cuts for the rich (inflation won't hurt [i]them[/i]) ... This spells T R E A S O N ... Please call upon Congress http://www.congress.org to impeach Bush/Cheney for reckless malfeasance in mismanaging our economy (for their own profit), in addition to wanton criminal activities related to taking our nation to war based upon false pretences (also, for their own profit) ...[/b]
"The deficit certainly remains a concern, but it's one that is manageable and it's one that we are addressing."
President Bush's reckless fiscal policies, combined with a dollar edging towards a dangerous "free fall," are imperiling America's economy. The weak dollar would be little cause for alarm had President Bush's first term tax cuts not "driven the government's budget deficit to record levels." But if foreign bankers, who finance most of America's debt, continue to lose confidence in the Bush administration's ability to pay down that deficit, they could stop investing in our economy. Once that happens, the market for U.S. dollars would dry up, causing the dollar's value to fall further and faster. At that point, to attract investment, America would be forced to raise interest rates, slowing America's economy and making it even harder to pay down the debt. (Put the dollar's decline in perspective http://www.americanprogress.o... with this new column from American Progress's Christian Weller.)
[b]FOREIGN LEADERS SKEPTICAL OF BUSH:[/b] To minimize the risk of an abrupt crash in the dollar, President Bush needs to convince the world he is serious about reducing the debt. But the world is skeptical. Last week, as Congress finalized plans to raise America's debt ceiling for the third time in three years, Bush told a summit of CEO's in Chile that he was committed to reducing the deficit. The remarks were not well-received. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder "openly criticized the U.S." for its inability to trim its "twin deficit…the current account deficit and the budget deficit." London currency specialist Monica Fan said Bush's pledge didn't "amount to anything more than political posturing." Another European economist said the dollar's accelerated decline since the Nov. 2 election reflected concern that Bush's "emphasis on tax cuts" would prevent him from reining in deficits.
[b]GREENSPAN WARNS DEFICIT COULD DESTABILIZE ECONOMY:[/b] The complaints haven't all come from foreign economists. The administration's own Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, warned this week that "The persistence of bloated U.S. trade deficits over time can pose a risk to the U.S. economy." So far, Greenspan said, foreigners have been willing to lend the U.S. money to finance the current account imbalances, but "at some point foreigners might suddenly lose interest in holding dollar-denominated investments. That could cause foreigners to unload investments in U.S. stocks and bonds, sending their prices plunging and interest rates soaring."
[b]MADE IN CHINA:[/b] The Bush administration's inability to pay down the deficit is subjecting America's economy to the whims of foreign leaders. "Right now, our whole country's on life-support from Beijing and Tokyo," said Euro Pacific Capital CEO Peter Schiff. As the dollar continues to weaken, Schiff said, "China might decide it's best to cut us off this welfare scheme and start spending the money on their own citizens." Morgan Stanley economist Stephen Roach adds, "The day will come when foreign investors simply say 'no' to this arrangement. That's when the dollar collapses, US interest rates soar, and the stock market plunges. Under such a crisis scenario, a US recession would be all but inevitable." The Guardian reports the Chinese – the number one financer of American debt – are already "losing their appetite for US holdings."
[b]BACK TO THE FUTURE:[/b] Some experts insist the current decline of the dollar is "eerily similar to a decline in the 1970s that touched off the worst period of growth the United States experienced since World War II." Then, as now, the dollar declined at a time of "high budget and trade deficits, low interest rates, high oil prices and ever-increasing military spending." By the end of that decade, "the nation was suffering double-digit rates in inflation, mortgages and unemployment."
"As an experienced war correspondent, who was aware of possible mitigating circumstances, it appeared to me very plainly that something was not right. I was not watching from a hundred feet away. I was in the same room. Aside from breathing, I did not observe any movement." - 'Something was not right': Cameraman goes public on video footage of marines, http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
While both the main-stream media and the Bush administration do their best to present Americans with an air-brushed picture of war, a site http://fallujapictures.blogsp... called "Fallujah in Pictures" reminds us of the high price of an occupation gone wrong. Though contrary to the title, the images are from different parts of Iraq, including Ramadi and Mosul.
You can read reactions http://www.dailygrail.com/nod... to these pictures over at a blog authored by Cernig, who also sent AlterNet the link.
[b]To Devil Dogs of the 3.1:[/b]
Since the shooting in the Mosque, I've been haunted that I have not been able to tell you directly what I saw or explain the process by which the world came to see it as well. As you know, I'm not some war zone tourist with a camera who doesn't understand that ugly things happen in combat. I've spent most of the last five years covering global conflict. But I have never in my career been a 'gotcha' reporter -- hoping for people to commit wrongdoings so I can catch them at it.
I interviewed your Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Willy Buhl, before the battle for Falluja began. He said something very powerful at the time-something that now seems prophetic. It was this:
"We're the good guys. We are Americans. We are fighting a gentleman's war here -- because we don't behead people, we don't come down to the same level of the people we're combating. That's a very difficult thing for a young 18-year-old Marine who's been trained to locate, close with and destroy the enemy with fire and close combat. That's a very difficult thing for a 42-year-old lieutenant colonel with 23 years experience in the service who was trained to do the same thing once upon a time, and who now has a thousand-plus men to lead, guide, coach, mentor -- and ensure we remain the good guys and keep the moral high ground."
I listened carefully when he said those words. I believed them.
So here, ultimately, is how it all plays out: when the Iraqi man in the mosque posed a threat, he was your enemy; when he was subdued he was your responsibility; when he was killed in front of my eyes and my camera -- the story of his death became my responsibility.
The burdens of war, as you so well know, are unforgiving for all of us.
[b]War brutalizes people, [i]all people[/i]: those fighting the war, the innocent victims of war, and those civilians who support the war ... "We the People" should in good conscience, demand the truth about the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta's [/i]insane, illegal and immoral neo-con war in Iraq waged in order to profit their neo-fascist corporate pimps (Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc.) ...[/b]
"Consenting to slavery is a sacrilegious breach of trust, as offensive in the sight of God as it is derogatory from our own honor or interest of happiness." - John Adams
"Life without the courage for death is slavery." - Seneca
[b]"Freedom" is a word that requires qualification-- for civilized peoples around the world recognize that there is no such thing ([i]nor should there be[/i]) as absolute freedom without restraints, constraints, and/or regulations to ensure that one man's "freedom" does not destroy another man's "freedom" ... For example, enshrined in our laws: "We the People" [i]do not permit [/i]our fellow men the "freedom" to kill other men with impunity (... Bush is the [i]exception[/i] to the rule of law, as we seem to permit [i]him [/i]to commit mass-murder ...) ... Nor [i]do[/i] "We the People" permit ([i]in principle[/i]) the rich to have the "freedom" to cast other human beings down into slavery ... Nor [i]should [/i]"We the People" permit corporations the "freedom" of exploitation, abuse and defrauding of working people ...[/b]
[b]Big business is seeking the freedom to kill its workers
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 16th November 2004[/b]
It was the most impressive exercise in democracy the world has ever seen. Hundreds of millions came out to vote. The dollars queued for hours in the rain and sun. The result was indisputable: the candidates with the most money won.
No constituency gained more from the US election than the dollars belonging to a company called WR Grace. On November 3rd, its shares rose by 14%. By November 5th they were up 26%: the highest they had ever been. ( 1 ) It wasn’t Bush’s victory the stockbrokers were celebrating as much as the defeat of Tom Daschle, the leader of the Democrats in the US Senate.
One of the few courageous things Daschle did was to oppose a law restricting the amount of compensation companies will have to pay to the victims of asbestos. Daschle believed that firms like WR Grace, which used to manufacture asbestos insulation, should have to pay the full cost of the deaths and injuries they caused. Big business exercised its democratic rights to the tune of $14m, and the Republican John Thune was duly elected. Now the law will almost certainly be passed, and sufferers from one of the modern world’s nastiest diseases – mesothelioma – will be paid roughly half the compensation they were due. ( 2 )
This is universally recognised as a Good Thing. Over the past few years, the press in the United States has presented us with the heart-wringing spectacle of bed-ridden multinationals gasping for money. On this side of the Atlantic, where companies which used asbestos are facing a new round of lawsuits, the result was greeted as a defeat for something we call “compensation culture”.
Compensation culture has usurped political correctness, welfare cheats, single mothers and new age travellers as the right’s new bogeyman-in-chief. According to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the Conservative Party and just about every newspaper columnist in Britain, it threatens very soon to bankrupt the country.
That there is no evidence to support such a claim, is, as always, irrelevant. Despite the legalisation in 2000 of “no win, no fee” lawsuits, the total cost of compensation cases in Britain has remained, in real terms, static since 1989. ( 3 ) The two biggest claims marketing companies – the great beneficiaries of compensation culture – have both gone bust. ( 4 ) Last year the number of accident claims fell by 9.5%. ( 5 ) The government’s Better Regulation Task Force, which at other times has taken the part of big business, bluntly reports that “the compensation culture is a myth”. ( 6 )
None of this should surprise us. It is no easier to win a case brought under the no win, no fee system than it was to win a case brought with the help of legal aid. You still have to convince the judge that the other person had a duty of care towards you, that they were at fault, and that they should have foreseen the risk. Because awards are made by judges, not juries, there’s very little chance of winning one of the vast settlements people seem to secure in the US for bumping into a lamp post or setting fire to their own hair. Under the new system, the claimant’s lawyers get stung for all the bills racked up by both sides if he loses. They are not going to take his case to court unless it’s pretty certain to succeed.
Of course, there are malingerers who try to play the system, and of course private companies and public services have to respond to the frivolous suits they bring. But while the newspapers delight in telling us about people who sue the Church for acts of God, they don’t report that in the United Kingdom such cases almost always fail.
But compensation culture is a convenient bogeyman, because it allows big business to associate its victims – such as the 3500 people who die every year in Britain as a result of exposure to asbestos ( 7 ) – with scroungers and conmen. It also opens a new front in their perpetual war against regulation.
Last week John Sunderland, the president of the CBI, thundered that “Britain’s greatness was built on risk-taking.” Today, thanks to the compensation culture, we suffer from a “reduction in personal responsibility” and a “collective aversion to risk.” We need to learn from China, whose businesses enjoy the same “fearlessness about risk” as Britain’s did during the Industrial Revolution. ( 8 )
What Sunderland has done is deliberately to conflate two kinds of risk: the risk to which we expose ourselves, and the risk to which we expose other people. In the heroic age of industrial accidents, the “risk-taking entrepreneurs” might have lost their money if their products did not find a market, but their profits were dependent upon the risks of losing limbs, eyes, lungs and lives they imposed on their workforce. China’s “fearlessness about risk” means that Chinese bosses are allowed to kill their workers. Sunderland is calling for precisely the “reduction in personal responsibility” he affects to despise. The entrepreneur shall not be held responsible for any of the risks he dumps on other people.
The shadow chancellor, Oliver Letwin, gave an almost identical speech to the Centre for Policy Studies in September. ( 9 ) “The call to minimise risk is a call for a cowardly society”, he said. “If we are to have a courageous society rather than a cowardly society, we need to abandon the rhetoric of risk minimisation”. Letwin failed to explain why it is courageous to expose your workers to asbestos. Or why it is courageous meekly to lie down and die when your lungs have been trashed by your brave employer.
In opposing our mythical compensation culture, Sunderland and Letwin are creating something much uglier: a risk culture. They are glorifying the risks which the powerful impose on the weak.
The government, to its credit, has refused to join in. On Wednesday, Charles Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, warned that “schools, hospitals, local authorities are beginning to feel they are more at risk from litigation than they really are … we can’t afford to leave this impression unchecked. ... As strongly as we resist spurious claims, we should also robustly defend the rights of people to make genuine claims. Rights and responsibilities would be meaningless if they could not ultimately be enforced.” ( 10 )
This seems odd: the government seldom misses a chance to butter up big business and assist the tabloids in their witch hunts. But there are two interest groups at play here. Falconer is a lawyer. So is the Prime Minister. And his wife. And the foreign secretary, and the defence secretary, and the transport secretary, and the chief secretary to the Treasury. Had the Democrats taken power in the US, the world would have been run by these people: both Kerry and Edwards are known lawyers. It’s unfortunate that our best hope of redress against one set of greedy bastards is to enlist the help of another.
Of course there is another way, and that is to stop big business exposing people to risk in the first place. But the state enforcement of health and safety laws is in the interests of neither businessmen nor lawyers: the money won’t vote for it. Without regulation, compensation is often the only protection we have.
1. Jerry Knight, 8th November 2004. Asbestos, Defense Firms Win Lottery. The Washington Post.
2. The asbestos companies, under the bill, would contribute to a $140bn fund, rather than face lawsuits of $275bn. See Jerry Knight, ibid.; and Clare Dyer, 5th November 2004. Firms Challenge Asbestos Claims. The Guardian.
"Begun as an ideological crusade, the war has now settled into something bloody, murderous and crude, with no "exit strategy" in sight. The war's beginning, built on the threat of weapons that did not exist, and its ending, which flickered to life so temptingly on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Lincoln 18 months ago, have disappeared, leaving American troops fighting and dying in a kind of lost, existential desert of the present. We may not have yet reached Colin Powell's vision of "half-hearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand." But we are well on the way." - A Doctrine Left Behind, Mark Danner, http://nytimes.com/2004/11/21...
[b]"We the People" have been betrayed by the traitorous Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]with their insane neo-con hubris and neo-fascist deceptions leading to corruption; warmongerings; and, a heinous embezzlement of our treasury and the lives of our fellow citizens to enrich the few hyper-wealthy plutocrats ...[/b]
They're fragile and frazzled, depressed and self-doubting.
Trapped in their blue bell jar, drowning in unfulfilled dreams, Democrats are the "Desperate Housewives" of politics.
The image of Republicans as the Daddy party and Democrats as the Mommy party came roaring back in 2004, with a chesty President Bush and Dick Cheney prevailing by making the case that they could protect America from vicious terrorists and uxorious gays better than the Brahmin they painted as a sissy. In politics, as on TV, political correctness is out and retro is in. Hillary's bid to be president suddenly appears more wobbly, and the class of new senators looks like a throwback - with half a dozen white male conservative Republicans front and center.
At the Republican governors' conference in New Orleans, Ken Mehlman, the Bush campaign manager, answered the question, Who's your daddy party? "If you drive a Volvo and you do yoga, you are pretty much a Democrat," he said. "If you drive a Lincoln or a BMW and you own a gun, you're voting for George Bush."
Of course, W. was swaddled by three strong women - Laura Bush, Karen Hughes and Condi Rice - who cleaned up after his political messes.
Yet Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney boldly projected the image of confident - if overbearing - husbands who would guard the family home from intruders, while casting John Kerry as the feminized guy who couldn't get his sports references straight, the sort who would sashay about in Yves St. Laurent pajamas, dithering, whither-ing, and fetching bottled water for Teresa while the burglar alarm rang.
Democrats were furious to learn last week that Mr. Kerry had squirreled away $15 million in primary donations that he could have spent turning out the vote in Florida and Ohio. Once more trying to have it both ways, Mr. Kerry wanted a nest egg in case of a recount or legal challenges - not exactly the killer mentality that Democrats need.
Having gutted their opponents, Republicans are pretending to patch up divisions as they ruthlessly consolidate their gains. Democrats are turning the other cheek. At the opening of his presidential library, Bill Clinton assured the audience that Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry were "good people" who "just see the world differently."
The Republican Visigoths are crushing checks and balances and driving Democrats (and moderate Republicans) into subservient, obedient roles, sticking antiabortion provisions into major spending bills. Even the suggestion that Congress has an advise-and-consent role on judges caused the Visigoths to slap Arlen Specter into stocks, until he whimpered he would do their bidding.
The party of moral values deemed that crime pays, shielding Tom DeLay with a rule that someone facing a felony charge can still be a leader.
The ultracreepy Mr. DeLay de-pantsed Democrats on Friday, sneering: "I understand the Democrat Party's adjustment to their national minority status is frustrating, but their crushing defeat ... should show them that the American people are tired of the politics of personal destruction."
Well, yeah. Watching Bush supporters shred a war hero into a war criminal was tiring.
This most secretive administration wants to stop the public from getting any facts that might challenge its story line.
The Department of Homeland Security is making employees and contractors sign pledges barring them from telling the public about sensitive but unclassified information.
Porter Goss has warned C.I.A. employees that they should support the administration and "scrupulously honor our secrecy oath" by letting only the agency's public affairs office and Congressional relations branch talk to the media and Congress.
Senate Republicans have voted to allow Bill Frist, the majority leader, to fill vacancies on powerful committees, rather than abiding by the seniority system - a sword over moderates and mavericks.
The White House says it wants greater harmony, but it's acting like the thought police. Having run into resistance in their bid for global domination, the president and vice president are going for federal domination, pushing out anyone with independent judgment who puts democracy above ideology.
It's a paradoxical game plan: imposing democracy abroad while impeding it here.
"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty." - John Adams
[b]Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is a dangerous demagogue who is now consolidating tremendous power for himself, and who has demonstrated extraordinary corruption, incompetence, arrogance, disdain for the rule of law, and contempt for the American people ... Cheney used to work for Rumsfeld, and perhaps [i]still [/i]does ... Bush is [i]too stupid[/i] to comprehend the power-grab going on in his own corrupt regime by the neo-con, neo-fascists led by Rumsfeld who [i]pulls-his-strings [/i]... "We the People" should be very, very concerned ...[/b]
Consider that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this week won his fight to install his man, Francis J. Harvey, as secretary of the Army.
In the midst of two and a half wars, at a time when the Army is struggling to transform itself and must use extraordinary methods to find enough soldiers to fill the rotations to Iraq, Rumsfeld selected a man who's never served in the military or in government to be the Army's CEO.
Rumsfeld told the man he's passing over for the job - acting Army secretary Les Brownlee, a retired Army infantry colonel and a highly decorated combat veteran - that he ''wanted a businessman'' to run the Army. Harvey, a longtime Westinghouse executive, was Rumsfeld's second choice in 18 months of bitter wrangling with some powerful senators.
... "[i]In a defeat for President Bush, rebellious House Republicans on Saturday derailed legislation to overhaul the nation's intelligence agencies along lines recommended by the Sept. 11 commission.
"It's hard to reform. It's hard to make changes,'' said Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., who sought unsuccessfully to persuade critics among the GOP rank and file to swing behind the measure.
Hastert's decision to send lawmakers home without a vote drew attacks from Democrats, and capped an unpredictable day in which prospects for enactment of the measure seemed to grow, then diminish, almost by the hour. He left open the possibility of summoning lawmakers back in session early next month[/i]." ...
This is Pentagon/Rumsfeld foot-dragging. Their centralized power was questioned and thus the bill had to go.
... "[i]But Reps. Duncan Hunter and Jim Sensenbrenner, chairmen of the Armed Services and Judiciary committees, raised objections. Officials said Hunter, R-Calif., expressed concerns that provisions of the bill could interfere with the military chain of command and endanger troops in the field. Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., wanted additional provisions dealing with immigration, these officials said.
``I am very disappointed that these objections have been raised at the 11th hour and temporarily derailed this bill,'' said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the primary negotiator on the measure for Senate Republicans[/i]." ...
Not clear enough? Let's make it clearer:
... "[i]Harman, D-Calif., said the Pentagon has worked to scuttle the bill.
``The forces in favor of the status quo are protecting their turf, whether it is in Congress or in the bureaucracy. And at a time when we are in a war we can't allow turf concerns'' to triumph, Collins said[/i]." ...
Do you feel safer now? And do contact your Reps and Sens (especially Hunter and Sensenbrenner) http://www.congress.org and tell them how pleased you are about how and why they screwed America.
"Truth springs from argument amongst friends." - David Hume
[b]"We the People" would do well to remember that France ([i]not [/i]Great Britain) was our ally in our own War for Independence ... France has been our great friend and ally throughout history; and, indeed their own Republican Constitution is [i]more [/i]akin to our own than [i]any[/i] other nation on earth ... France is trying to warn us not to be dupes for the same Marches of Folly that Europe fell prey to, by virtue of having installed insane fascist dictators in the 20th Century ... Tragically, instead of listening to our best-friend, many neo-con, neo-fascists calling themselves "Americans" are demonizing them ... Interestingly, the following article is published by Le Figaro, a leading pro-conservative French newpaper:[/b]
From the nation that through its own force and the force of circumstances enjoys a quasi-planetary hegemony, we could expect that particularly wise and sensible geo-strategists be its leaders. Alas! Alas!
Geo-strategy, which must not be confused with geo-politics, is undoubtedly the most difficult and formidable of all the human sciences. It must allow its practitioners to provide simple answers immediately translatable into action to infinitely various and complex questions. Apart from the possession of both global and detailed knowledge of geography, it rests on the twin pillars of history and information. It is quite obvious from any observation that Americans are gifted in neither of these two areas.
Their history is much too short for them to really know and understand peoples with millennia under their feet. Their past begins with the Mayflower. To them, Cyrus's Persia, Confucius' China, Pericles' Athens, Caesar's Rome, and even Charlemagne's Europe, Charles V's Spain, Suleiman's Turkey and Richelieu's France all seem buried in the same abysmal antiquity, the same archeological dust. I remember the stupefaction of American tourists at Stratford-on-Avon, when they learned from the inscription on Shakespeare's tomb that he was born in 1564.
For Americans, civilizations anterior to their own are subjects for often remarkable university studies, but never elements that must be taken into consideration for political reflection. In consequence, the characters and behavior of old world countries, including "Old Europe", generally escape their understanding.
As for information...It has been reported that the United States has fifteen military or civilian information agencies. Not a single one seems to have ever deserved the title of "intelligence" which the British confer on their secret services.
I have also read that the American government had only four agents in Iraq before they started the war there, and that on top of that, these four were all double agents. It's too immense to be believed. However, it must be acknowledged that the information it had over there was particularly weak to have caught a glimpse of weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist, and to have asserted that the American Army would be received as a liberator with open arms and bouquets of flowers. Who could have presumed that ten years after the first devastating Gulf War - that one approved by the UN in response to a flagrant violation of international law -, a new, unilaterally-decided invasion would provoke enthusiasm among the trampled populations?
American leaders have demonstrated the most perseverance in their magnificent blindness in the Near and Middle East. By preventing France and Great Britain in 1956from bringing down Nasser, whose advent they had supported, they put an end to the cosmopolitan, multi-confessional, tolerant, and Westernized society that was Egypt's. At the same time, they contributed to making the Nasser regime a too frequently copied model among African countries, where power was often seized by senior officers, and even sergeants.
It was CIA agents who assisted the government of the colonels, the stupidest Greece has ever known, to mount the operation against Cyprus in 1974, resulting in the brutal and spoliatory occupation of half the island by the Turkish army, an occupation that still persists thirty years later.
One must read the Secret Notebooks of Houchang Nahavandi (1), former rector of Teheran University and a particularly well-informed Iranian minister, to learn how American authorities, starting in 1974-75, for reasons to do with oil, had planned the overthrow of the Shah. In this at once precise, moving, and pitiless book, you will discover the maneuvers of American and British diplomats, the pressures they exerted on the sick monarch, and the support they supplied for the 1978 Islamic revolution, which they believed to be liberal and republican. You will also learn how the CIA occupied the house next door to the one in Neauphle-le-Château where the personage of Ayatollah Khomeini was being constructed, his sermons and his cassettes transported in diplomatic bags. This is not the most glorious page in French history. It's difficult to understand why President Giscard d'Estaing accorded such kindness and so many resources to this false prophet. The Pahlavis' Iran was certainly not perfect, but it was right in the middle of full modernization and expansion. Was it necessary to push for its replacement by a backward regime animated by a bloody fanaticism? The surge in radical Islam dates from that.
The only monarchy that the United States has supported was Saudi Arabia's, without noticing that behind the oil barrels, colossal fortunes were being built up, fortunes that distributed handfuls of gold to everywhere construct mosques that invite hatred of the West.
Let's not forget the support given to Israel's "hawks", who push back indefinitely the creation of a Palestinian state, the only way to extinguish this hearth of misfortune which has ignited so many others. Yasser Arafat's incredible obsequies have just proven how unquestionable and urgent the Palestinian nation's gratitude was.
A short term perspective and a lack of information led the Americans to find it a good idea to rally the Taliban to combat the Soviet advance and to enroll, or to believe they had enrolled, Osama Bin Laden, whose sinister organization they largely helped to establish. The September 11 attacks are, in a certain sense, an abominable return of the boomerang.
Are so many failures punishment for dark designs, perverse plots, or appetites for conquest? Not at all! And that's what makes things so difficult when one tries to enlighten American decision makers or when one refuses to go along with them down their wrong roads. They are persuaded they are doing good. They believe that what works for them must work for all of humanity and that it is their duty, their mission, to use their economic and military power to give all these peoples the compulsory gift of the principles, systems, and procedures that have brought them their own grandeur. In this regard, their leadership teams demonstrate a naiveté that could seem touching were naiveté in geo-strategy not a mortal sin.
This disposition is not brand new. Already at the end of the nineteenth century, President Theodore Roosevelt asserted: "Americanization of the world is our destiny." Donald Rumsfeld's recent declaration, which I have already cited elsewhere: "Freedom is on our side and we will impose it," answers Roosevelt like a long echo. George W. Bush's reelection proves that the majority of the American people share this scheme.
So there is little doubt that Mr. Bush wants to put back on track the project he talked about so much: creating a democratic and unified Greater Middle East, stretching from Mauritania to Afghanistan. If ever we've seen a monument to naiveté surface, that's it. First of all, you might wonder: if the Middle East begins at Nouakchott, where does the Near East begin. In the Azores, perhaps.
But above all, does Mr. Bush take himself for Trajan or Marcus Aurelius and does he imagine he'll succeed in doing in four years what the Romans didn't achieve in three centuries? Is he aware that his greater Middle East is an immense crescent that stretches over five meridians, soon to be inhabited by a billion people, of very different origins, customs, morals, and temperaments, divided between rival religious tendencies, whose only common problems are misery and illiteracy? Empty bellies and empty heads are the recruits for aggressive emigration and terrorism. Before "imposing freedom", it would be better to feed and instruct.
It would also be appropriate to remind ourselves that in Islamic countries, in spite of their particularisms and their divergences, civil law is controlled by religious law. The primary aspiration of all these peoples is not to don the laws that apply in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Trying to force them to will effectively unite them, but against the West. I am very afraid that we are advancing into that dark night.
( 1 ) Editions Osmondes, Paris, 2004.
[b]Source:[/b]
Maurice Druon is a Member of the Academie Francaise. Translation: [i]t r u t h o u t [/i]French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher, http://www.truthout.org/docs_...
"You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind." - Mahatma Gandhi
[b]The barbaric Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]is guilty of Crimes Against Humanity ... Bush is a War Criminal responsible for the massacre, torture, and brutal atrocities committed against innocent Iraqi and Afghan civilians ... The US is employing the use of torture in contravention of international law and in violation of human decency ... Please write to Congress http://www.congress.org and demand that impeachment hearings be called for Bush and Cheney, and that we demonstrate to the world that we will stop all such inhumane treatment of human beings ...[/b]
More than 10,000 activists from across the US--including actors Martin Sheen and Susan Sarandon and musicians Amy Ray and Utah Phillips http://www.thenation.com/doc.... --will gather at the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia, this Saturday and Sunday to call for the closure http://www.soaw.org/new/index... of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the School of the Americas.
A combat training facility for Latin American soldiers, the school has served as a de-stabilizing force in Central and South America since its formation in 1946-- having trained more than 60,000 soldiers in courses such as counter-insurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. Graduates of the facility return to their countries to utilize their training domestically and are consistently cited for human rights violations throughout Latin America on behalf of repressive rightwing, US-supported governments.
From the slayings of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador in 1989 to the continued human rights abuses in Colombia, many of the most atrocious crimes of the past 50 years have their roots in the US-operated School of the Americas. The inhumane--and in some cases illegal--tactics taught at the institute have repeatedly been used against union organizers, educators, and religious workers.
Many American eyes were opened this past year with the Abu Ghraib revelations to the fact that the US does indeed use torture http://www.thenation.com/doc.... . The activists at SOA Watch have been in the vanguard of trying to halt the United States's role in propagating torture globally since the organization's founding in 1990. A grassroots group working in solidarity with the people of Latin America to close the military institute, SOA Watch stages an annual demonstration and rally and organizes lobbying, letter-writing and public awareness campaigns all year long.
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]is comprised of traitors who live [i]in the bulging pockets [/i]of gluttonous corporations, special interests, and greedy plutocrats, [i]who get their way[/i], irrespective of the death, sickness, misery and damage caused to Americans ([i]and[/i] other peoples around the world) ... The regulatory standards so vital to ensure that consumers are not harmed have been systematically undermined by the traitorous Bushies in order to deliver massive profits to top-dogs & fat-cats in the pharmaceutical ([i]and[/i] other) industries ... It is [i]past time[/i] to [i]put a stop [/i]to their treason ... Please write to Congress http://www.americanprogress.o... demanding that tighter regulations be put back in place and that an independent investigation commence immediately into the White House abuses to pressure the FDA to betray Americans in favor of corporate interests, [i]and[/i] to hide information from "We the People" vital to our health ...[/b]
Yesterday, additional evidence emerged that, in the Bush administration, the Food and Drug Administration is more concerned about its relationship with the drug industry than the safety of the American people. Dr. David Graham, who has worked at the FDA for more than 20 years, told the Senate Finance Committee that the agency had become "feckless and far too likely to surrender to demands of drug makers." The hearing's primary focus was the recent withdrawal of the pain reliever Vioxx, produced by Merck. Graham estimated that – based on Merck's own studies – 139,000 Americans suffered from a heart attack or stroke as a result of taking the drug. Of that group, "30 percent to 40 percent probably died. For the survivors, their lives were changed forever," according to Graham. He called the Vioxx scandal "the single greatest drug safety catastrophe in the history of this country or the history of the world." (For more details on the Vioxx scandal, see last week's Progress Report http://www.americanprogressac... .)
[b]TOP ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS ATTACK THE MESSENGER:[/b] Not surprisingly, the Bush administration attacked Dr. Graham for speaking honestly. Before his testimony yesterday, FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford called Dr. Graham "a maverick who did not follow Agency protocols." But Graham's supervisor at the FDA said the paper that formed the basis of his testimony was "an excellent study and analysis of a complex topic." Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) said Crawford's comments were "intended [to] intimidate a witness on the eve of a hearing." Grassley recommended Crawford spend time "on the problem rather than going after congressional witnesses who helped identify the problem in the first place."
[b]MERCK CEO'S DISHONEST DEFENSE:[/b] Raymond V. Gilmartin, the CEO of Merck, also appeared before the Finance Committee. Gilmartin adamantly defended the company's conduct. He claimed that "Merck has promptly disclosed the results of Merck-sponsored studies of Vioxx to the FDA, physicians, the scientific community and the media." Gilmartin cited the fact that, after a study it conducted in March 2000, the company "immediately issued a press release providing its conclusions." But that press release didn't include the conclusions of Merck doctors who believed the data indicated that an increased risk of cardiovascular events among those taking the drug was "clearly there." The following month, Merck issued another release titled, "Merck confirms favorable cardiovascular safety profile of Vioxx" and claiming the data shows "NO DIFFERENCE in the incidence of cardiovascular events." Merck didn't release the data to the FDA until June 2000.
[b]MERCK'S SHAMEFUL ADVERTISING BLITZ:[/b] Long after it was aware of the dangers associated with the drug, Merck continued one of the largest direct-to-consumer advertising campaigns ever, spending $160 million dollars. Millions more was spent marketing Vioxx to doctors. Last year, Vioxx sales totaled $2.5 billion.
[b]VIOXX IS A SYMPTOM OF A LARGER PROBLEM:[/b] According to Graham, "it is important...the American people understand that what happened with Vioxx is really a symptom of something far more dangerous to the safety of the American people." Graham named five major medications already on the market – "the anti-cholesterol drug Crestor, the pain pill Bextra, the obesity pill Meridia, the asthma drug Serevent and the acne drug Accutane" – whose safety needs to be "seriously looked at."
[b]BEXTRA – THE NEXT VIOXX?:[/b] Bextra, produced by Pfizer, is a painkiller similar to Vioxx that is still on the market. Studies have shown that Bextra "increase the risks of heart attacking patients undergoing cardiac surgery [and] in rare cases...can also cause a fatal skin reaction." Moreover, it "has never proved to be any more effective at reducing pain or protecting the stomach than older medicines like ibuprofen that are a fraction of the price and pose none of these suggested or proven risks."
[b]THE PRICE OF SAFETY:[/b] How can the pharmaceutical companies get away with it? Over the past four years the industry has contributed over $68 million to federal candidates – including almost $1.5 million to President Bush. Pfizer, the manufacturer of Bextra – a drug still on the market but singled out by Graham as potentially unsafe – contributed over $120,000 to President Bush.
"Hundreds of President Bush's 2000 campaign Pioneer fundraisers http://www.whitehouseforsale.... were rewarded with parties, overnight stays at the White House and Camp David, and trips on U.S. delegations during his first term; fully one third received ambassadorships or appointments to agency positions or advisory committees http://www.kentucky.com/mld/h... ." - Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
[b]When Bush first ran for the office of President of the United States of America, he promised to restore dignity, honesty and integrity to the White House ... Bush broke his promise, as he has broken so many promises, cynically made with no intention of keeping his "word" to the American people ... Now, we find that Bush is awarding key positions in government that require honest, competent and bright people, with dishonest, incompetent and dangerously ideologically, short-sighted people ...
"We the People" should remind ourselves of Thomas Jefferson's wise admonition regarding the dangers of patronage: "We are endeavoring, too, to reduce the government to the practice of a rigorous economy, to avoid burdening the people, and arming the magistrate with patronage of money, which might be used to corrupt and undermine the principles of our government." ... Bush has betrayed us, [i]yet again [/i]...
The following thought-provoking article entitled "The Bush Foreign Policy Stratagem" by Randall Risener, The Washington Dispatch, http://www.washingtondispatch... , elucidates the dangers of corrupt patronage:--[/b]
It is almost an article of faith in many foreign capitols that American presidents spend their first term trying to get reelected but in the second are aimed at securing their place in history and, therefore, often change or modify their course including at times alienating parts of their electoral base.
President Ronald Reagan is one example cited. In his second term, he pushed the Neocons aside and pursued a course of multilateral cooperation with European allies and reaching out to the Soviet leadership. End result: He secured his place in history as having made a significant contribution by helping end the Soviet empire and all without firing a shot.
Today’s Neocons are bound and determined to not let anything like that happen again.
The real story regarding the naming of Condoleezza Rice as the next Secretary of State may not be as much about her – important as that is – as two other collateral and directly related appointments.
But first, a few words about the man she is to replace – Secretary of State Colin Powell.
"These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Those 16 unfortunate words spoken before the UN Security Council in February of last year regarding alleged WMD’s in Iraq and ties to al-Queda will probably follow and haunt Powell the remainder of his days.
And there are many who feel that he had an obligation to resign a long time ago rather than continue serving policy directions he fundamentally disagreed with.
But there is a flip side of the coin. Namely, that things probably would be worse today had he not stuck it out.
According to Professor Juan Cole, an expert on Middle East history and politics, Powell along with British Prime Minister Tony Blair were instrumental in derailing administration plans to install Ahmed Chalabi as a “soft dictator” at the beginning. Cole also says, citing Washington sources, that they convinced the administration to go after al-Queda in Afghanistan first before attacking Iraq.
Now, think about that last one. If true and if the administration had proceeded with its plan we would still be bogged down in Iraq as we are today but there would be 40 or so al-Queda training camps running full blast of it.
The point here, of course, is that many battles were waged outside the public limelight. Obviously, Powell lost the larger war but I suspect he may have won more tactical clashes than we realize.
In any event, the Neocons wanted him out. And so he is out.
And Condi Rice is in.
Rice is the wrong person, at the wrong time for the wrong job. That’s my take for several reasons but here is the opinion of an old hand at both State and Defense who ended a very distinguished career as Secretary of State in the first Bush administration -- Lawrence Eagleburger.
"I do not believe that you should have in the secretary of state someone who has spent their last four years in the White House next to the president," Eagleburger said on CNN’s “Paula Zahn Now.”
He went on to say, "I do believe you need tension between the State Department, the Defense Department and the National Security Council” and "if the rumors prove correct and her deputy becomes national security adviser, everybody is going to speak the same language.”
What Eagleburger is saying is that presidents need diverse input. They need to hear varying and different voices.
Unfortunately, this president is making it very clear that he does not want to hear those diverse voices whether they be from State, the CIA or anywhere else.
What he wants is personal loyalty.
But the problem goes even deeper which gets back to my earlier comment that a couple of collateral appointments might even be of more import than Rice’s.
Eagleburger referred to Rice’s deputy at the National Security Council (NSC) assuming Rice’s present position as head of NSC.
Here he is referring to Stephen J. Hadley, a staunch Neocon and loyalist to Vice-President Dick Cheney who will be succeeding Rice as National Security Advisor.
Back at State, in case Rice should ever be inclined to think for herself and veer from the straight and narrow, another Cheney loyalist and staunch Neocon, John Bolton who is presently under-secretary for arms control, is slotted for deputy secretary under Rice.
Rice has always been a question mark ideologically. Originally, more in the vein of an Eagleburger or Powell and an acknowledged academic expert on Russia, she is weak on the Middle East and terrorism and even management. It has always been somewhat problematic as to whether she was won over by the Neocons or ran over by them.
Regardless, the latter are firmly entrenched. The dots are easy to connect. Cheney to NSC. Cheney to State. Cheney to Defense (already established). And Porter Goss trying to straightjacket the CIA politically.
Even if President Bush wanted to change directions it is very difficult to see how he could. The Neocons now control the highest echelons of State, Defense, CIA and the NSC.
... Dollar Dump Accelerates ... Inflation Rolls Forward ...
"Inflation: Everyone's illusion of wealth." - Anon
"Inflation is the senility of democracies." - Sylvia Townsend Warner
"By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens." - John Maynard Keynes
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] has put in motion the dangerously destructive wheels of an [i]inflation train[/i] that rolls forward, pushing "We the People" [i]off of a precipitous cliff [/i] towards impoverishment ... Inflation happens when the value of a currency drops and it takes more-and-more money to buy less-and-less goods ... Inflation hits working people and fixed-income retirees the hardest ... But, not to worry, the Bush Crime Family has awarded itself, gluttonous corporations and greedy plutocrats (the richest-of-the-rich) massive tax cuts-- so they are living the [i]Belle Epoque[/i], while the rest of us will suffer, and suffer harshly ...[/b]
[b]A full page of comment and analysis http://news.ft.com/cms/s/7795... in the Financial Times this morning on the accelerating flight from the US dollar.[/b]
The US currency came under renewed selling pressure the moment it became clear George W. Bush had been re-elected president. In the two and a half weeks since then, the alue of the dollar has fallen 2.5 percent against the euro and 1.9 percent against the yen. The falls represent an acceleration of the dollar's steady decline since 2002. Since the start of that year, the greenback has fallen 32 percent against the euro and 21 percent against the yen. . . .
Darek Halpenny, currency analyst at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, points to a "very grim" outlook for the dollar in the near term. "With the foreign exchange market now focused entirely on the problem of the US budget deficit and current account deficits, there is a real risk that dollar selling becomes a crisis of confidence," he says. . . .
[b]There is a fear in the currency markets that the dollar's decline, which has been gradual and orderly so far, will turn into a rout[/b].
"Consider the following. We humans are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others' actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others' activities. For this reason it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others." - The Dalai Lama on Ethics, http://www.wisdomquotes.com/0...
"And I think, frankly, we should adopt the rule the Democrats have prospectively, which I think is a sound rule that once indicted you step down."
– Newt Gingrich, 7/26/93
[i]VERSUS[/i]
"House Republicans voted Wednesday to abandon an 11-year-old party rule that required a member of their leadership to step aside temporarily if indicted."
[b]House conservatives met behind closed doors yesterday to abandon their own ethical rules in an effort to protect Majority Leader Tom DeLay[/b]. With DeLay facing possible criminal proceedings in Texas connected to allegations of campaign finance abuses, his congressional cronies jettisoned an 11-year-old party rule requiring leaders to step aside temporarily if indicted.
[b]1. With problems mounting in Iraq and a weakened economy, the first order of business for congressional conservatives is to abandon their own ethical standards[/b]. Congress has been back in town for less than a week and already conservatives have managed to blow the debt ceiling and weaken ethical standards so an indicted leader can remain in charge of the peoples' business.
[b]2. Three top associates of DeLay have already been indicted on charges of illegally using corporate money in state legislative races[/b]. Given the new rule change, if Mr. DeLay is indicted in connection with these cases, members will have to explain to Americans why their leader should be allowed to continue in his job under a cloud of criminal scrutiny.
[b]3. Find out whether your representative supports the "DeLay" ethical ruling[/b]. Americans have a right to know if their representatives in Congress support efforts to weaken ethical requirements for congressional leaders. Call or write your representative and find out whether they support these closed-door efforts to protect the Majority Leader from ethical scrutiny.
[b]If you don't like the rules, change them—that's the philosophy of House Republicans. [/b]This week, they voted to change an ethics rule[i] they [/i]put in place back in 1993 to fight corruption in Congress. The rule prohibited anyone indicted on a felony charge from holding a leadership position. Well, it's likely that Majority Leader Tom DeLay will be indicted on charges relating to a fundraising scandal, but now he won't lose his seat. This rule change goes beyond hypocritical—it's an affront to all the politicians who play by the rules and all the taxpayers who respect integrity in government. Join Campaign For America's Future http://www.ourfuture.org/ and spread the word beyond Washington. Tell your local media about the GOP's playing fast and loose with the rules.
"The most common cause of fear of old age is associated with the possibility of poverty." - Napoleon Hill
[b]Caring for our elderly is a moral issue ... Civilized societies do not allow their elderly human beings to live in poverty, misery, pain and sickness without assistance ... In the aftermath of the Great Depression, Social Security was created in order to ensure that as people got older, they would have a minimum income that would keep them from miserable impoverishment that had previously afflicted so many in old age ... For the richest nation on the face of the earth to permit the corrupt neo-con Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]to swindle our elderly out of this safety-net is immoral, unconscionable and sinful ... "We the People" should hang our heads in shame and be outraged by the traitorous and greedy Bushies' neo-fascist scam... Write to your Congressmen http://www.congress.org and insist that Social Security remain a safety-net that is protected and [i]not, I repeat not[/i] privatized for the wealthy fat-cats and gluttonous robber-barons to loot, plunder and steal ...[/b]
[b][u]Let Us Count the Ways: The Costs of Social Security Privatization are in the Details (Executive Summary)[/u]
Social Security privatization is once again on the front burner of the public policy discussion. President Bush has indicated that he wants to make it a top priority of his second term to replace part of the existing social insurance with a system of individual accounts.
Privatization not only exposes workers to additional risks, it also substantially raises the costs of saving for retirement. A number of these costs have been well-documented. Workers would have to pay management fees for their accounts. In addition, they would have to pay insurance premiums to private insurance companies if they want the same level of protection that Social Security offers for themselves and their families. Further, they would have to bear an enormous burden to pay for the transition from one system to the other.
Another cost of individual accounts – so-called labor market risks – has often been ignored in the public debate. Typically, workers’ earnings are below average in a recession, when it would be most opportune to purchase stocks because of a concurrent stock market decline. This risk affects all workers to some degree.
The exposure to labor market risks is greater for women and minorities than for others. In essence, they accumulate fewer savings for each dollar they invest in their individual accounts compared to men and whites. This is especially pronounced for women, who consequently face costs that are comparable to the costs of turning their savings into lifetime monthly benefits – annuities.
The link between the labor market and individual accounts essentially punishes women and minorities twice. For one, they have lower lifetime earnings than men and whites and thus proportionately lower savings. Second, they accumulate fewer savings for each dollar they put away because of greater fluctuations in employment and wages.
Social Security is the only way to reduce the labor market risks. In the current setup, benefits do not depend on the performance of the stock market. Furthermore, Social Security pays proportionately higher benefits to low lifetime earners than to high lifetime ones.
[b]For more on social security, read our September report, "Alan Greenspan Should Read His Speeches More Carefully" http://www.americanprogress.o... .[/b]
Let Us Count the Ways: The Costs of Social Security Privatization are in the Details (PDF), http://www.americanprogress.o...{E9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A521- 5D6FF2E06E03}/socialsecur ityreport.pdf
"In America sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it is a fact." - Marlene Dietrich
[b]George W. Bush is like many sex-obsessed neo-con, neo-fascists who hypocritically [i]"get their kicks" [/i]by groping, fondling and abusing women http://www.tblog.com/template... (and then, cynically pretending that they "like" [i]and/or [/i]"love" women) ... However, when it comes to taking positive action regarding women's health, they ignore, neglect [i]and/or [/i]downright undermine initiatives that empower [i]and/or [/i]help women to survive ... "We the People" should be appalled by the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta's[/i] disgraceful war against women ...[/b]
The latest in a long line of anti-woman decisions by the Bush administration is, for once, getting some attention -- in part because of the sheer cheapness of the move.
President Bush has decided not to send the $34 million approved by both houses of Congress for the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA).
The fund provides contraception, family planning and safe births, and works against the spread of HIV and against female genital mutilation in the poorest countries of the world. Thirty-four million dollars goes a long way in the parts of the world where more than 600,000 women die every year from pregnancy and childbirth, many of them children themselves.
Of course, our poor government is so broke that it can't afford to waste $34 million on women in poor countries. It has more important things to do, like spending $100 million on "promoting marriage."
Two women -- Jane Roberts, a retired teacher in California, and Lois Abraham, a lawyer in New Mexico -- have started a splendid symbolic protest, and it is spreading by e-mail, fax, newsletters and all kinds of women's groups. The organizers are looking for "34 million Friends of UNFPA" to send $1 each to the United Nations (FPA) at 220 E. 42nd St., New York, NY 10017.
Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, director of the UNFPA, said the $34 million U.S. contribution would have helped prevent 2 million unwanted pregnancies, 800,000 induced abortions, 4,700 maternal deaths and 77,000 infant and child deaths.
We don't have $34 million to save the lives of poor women, but Bush wants to spend $135 million on abstinence education, which doesn't work. According to that fountain of misinformation, the Rev. Jerry Falwell: "This announcement angered school sex educators, who concentrate on teaching our nation's students that they should explore their sexuality and ignore the consequences. But Mr. Bush said government can teach children how to exhibit sexual control."
Actually, sex education is entirely about the consequences of "exploring sexuality," and it works. The Guttmacher Institute published a report last week showing that the abortion rate is down by 11 percent precisely because young people are getting more education about sex. One would think the anti-abortion forces would be grateful.
Instead, there is every indication that in addition to taking away a woman's right to choose whether to have an abortion, the Bush administration is going after contraception.
Bush now wants to make W. David Hager chairman of the Food and Drug Administration's Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. Hager is an ob-gyn from Kentucky who wants the FDA to reverse its approval of RU-486, the "abortion pill."
Although Hager is the editor of a book that includes the essay "Using the Birth Control Pill is Ethically Unacceptable," he told Maureen Dowd of The New York Times that he does not agree with the essay. Then why include it? He does not prescribe contraceptives for single women, does not do abortions, will not prescribe RU-486 and will not insert IUDs. Hager believes that headaches, PMS and eating disorders can be cured by reading Scripture. I do not want this man in charge of my health policy.
It took almost all of human history for the population of the globe to reach 1 billion people in 1800. It took only from 1987 to 1999 for world population to grow from 5 billion to 6 billion. At current rates, we will reach 13 billion by the middle of the 21st century. Ninety-five percent of this growth will be in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Studies estimate that by 2025, two out of every three people on Earth will live in water-stressed conditions. The stress on global resources is already apparent.
While we spend trillions of dollars on weapons, the military and homeland security, the real threats -- water scarcity, climate change and population growth -- advance unchecked.
"Prefer a loss to a dishonest gain; the one brings pain at the moment, the other for all time." - Chilton
[b]"We the People" must work hard, very hard, to take our nation back from the neo-con thugs and neo-fascist goons in the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]who have hijacked our nation and are leading us down a path to chaos, misery and destruction ...[/b]
If you want some straight talk in these days of the Democratic Leadership Council's calls to retreat to a monastery or move to the center, check out Howard Dean's feisty comments http://www.truthout.org/docs_... about his vision for the Democratic Party and what he thinks went down in this election.
In a speech to students http://www.truthout.org/docs_... at Northwestern University last week, Dean fired back at the Right; he called Reverend Jerry Falwell a hate-monger, and described Justice Antonin Scalia as "sarcastic and mean-spirited." And in a jab at the conservative Club for Growth's ad attacks on him as a "latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, body- piercing, left-wing freak show" who should head back to Vermont, Dean http://www.thenation.com/dire... explained, "I don't drink coffee. I have three cars--all of them are American. " "No part of me is pierced that I'm willing to discuss publicly," he added. "And if you want to see a freak show, go look at the people who wrote that ad..."
Dean ended by calling on the students to run for office. In a playful twist on his now infamous "Dean Scream," he shouted, "You need to run for office--not just in Illinois and Ohio and South Carolina! You need to run for office in Mississippi, and Alabama, and Idaho and Texas and..."
"A man in debt is so far a slave." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Debt is a prolific mother of folly and of crime." - Benjamin Disraeli
"Debts and lies are generally mixed together." - Francois Rabelais
[b]"We the People" are saddled with a ruthless and reckless neo-con, neo-fascist Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]that is running our economy [i]into the ground [/i]... The value of the dollar is dropping against every other major currency ... The corrupt Bush regime has run-up historical record-level deficits to fund their insane warmongerings (based upon lies) and immoral tax cuts for the rich & corporations (based upon lies[i] too[/i]) ... Write to your congressional representatives in the House & Senate http://www.congress.org and demand that the debt ceiling remain unchanged, and that the wantonly irresponsible tax cuts for the wealthiest among us and corporate boondoggles (e.g. Halliburton) be over-turned immediately ... [/b]
"Our budget will run a deficit that will be small and short term."
During the last four years, President Bush and his allies in Congress have charged a multi-trillion dollar spending spree of tax cuts for the wealthy and preemptive war to the national credit card, saddling future generations with the crippling debt. Now the country has hit its credit limit – $7.38 trillion. But right-wing ideologues have no plans to change their policies. Instead, they want to grant themselves a $650 billion increase in their credit limit.
[b]"CONSERVATIVES" TRY TO HIDE RECKLESS SPENDING FROM THE PEOPLE:[/b] The country actually reached its $7.38 billion credit limit in early October. Since that time, Treasury Secretary John Snow has employed a series of extraordinary accounting tricks to avoid technically breaching the limit. Why? Conservatives in Congress wanted to avoid "increasing the borrowing limit before the Nov. 2 election as leaders did not want to have the politically sensitive vote." This strategy is not without consequences. Snow's most recent "trick" – announced yesterday – was suspending investments in the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund.
[b]IT'S DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN:[/b] This isn't the first time the Bush administration has blown through its credit line. In 2002, the Bush administration received a debt limit increase of $450 billion dollars. The next year the Treasury requested, and Congress delivered, a $984 billion dollar credit line, the largest in history. That amount exceeded "all of the debt inherited by President Ronald Reagan, which was all of the debt accumulated from Bunker Hill [1776] to 1981." The Bush administration and its conservative allies have blown through nearly a trillion dollars in just 18 months.
[b]BUSH PLANS WILL MAKE BUDGET DEFICIT MUCH, MUCH WORSE:[/b] If you think our nation's fiscal situation couldn't get worse, just wait. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cf... if President Bush succeeds in passing his 2005 budget – which includes an extension of expiring tax cuts – the government will rack up about $6.2 trillion in additional debt between now and 2014, nearly doubling our current debt ($7.38 trillion) for a total of $14.5 trillion.
[b]THE CONSEQUENCES OF MASSIVE BUDGET DEFICIT:[/b] Why should everyone care about budget deficits? When the government borrows huge sums of money, there is less money to go around when average Americans want to buy a home or a car, or pay for college tuition. A smaller pool of money available for loans leads to higher interest rates – which not only puts a squeeze on individual consumers but also slows the rate of economic growth. That means, in the long run, fewer jobs, low wage growth and less money coming into the federal Treasury. And the cycle continues. (If you want to feed your inner wonk on this topic, check out this detailed analysis http://www.brook.edu/views/pa... ). Interest payments on the mounting debt, which exceeded $321 billion in fiscal year 2004, also squeezes out funding for other priorities like education and health care.
[b]WILL THE REAL FISCAL CONSERVATIVES PLEASE STAND UP?: [/b]Supposedly, there are "fiscal conservatives" in Congress who strongly oppose expanding deficit spending. What do they have to say about the reckless fiscal policy being pursued Bush administration? Write a newspaper in the home states of self-described fiscal conservatives Judd Gregg (R-NH) and Mike DeWine (R-OH) and ask them to speak out. (Be sure to send a copy of your letter to pr@americanprogress.org - mailto:pr@americanprogres s.org ).
"It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power." - David Brin
[b]Alberto 'Gitmo' Gonzales (Bush's loyal lap-dog & corrupt toady, proposed for the position of Attorney General) apparently was instrumental in helping Bush hide his Maine DUI http://www.editorandpublisher... :[/b]
... "One interesting item the report found from Gonzales' time in Texas: "Gonzales was instrumental in getting Bush excused from jury duty in 1996 -- a move that allowed the governor to avoid having to disclose that he had been arrested for drunken driving in Maine in 1976, the Houston Chronicle reported. Bush was able to keep it a secret until the final days of his 2000 presidential campaign."" ...
[b]You've got to reward such resourcefulness with a Supreme Court nomination!
But more substantively, Gonzales has been on the front lines of this administration's efforts to hide the inner workings of their government from the people[/b].
... "A new report from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press paints a picture of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales -- who has been nominated to replace U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft -- as someone who has worked tirelessly to keep information from the press and public if he believes it could hurt the president, and does not appear ready to change ...
Gonzales has "played a key role in keeping presidential records out of the public eye and asked for several extensions to deadlines for turning over papers of past presidents," the report says. "Earlier this year, Gonzales also pressured the nation's archivist, John Carlin, to resign, according to Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.). Carlin's departure -- he resigned without giving a reason -- sparked speculation that he was forced out in order to protect the records of the first President Bush."
The report also cited Bush's efforts to protect his advisors from being forced to testify, saying, "Gonzales picked one battle in particular to doggedly fight: that the president and those working closely with him must be able to receive counsel from advisers without public inquiry. Gonzales argued throughout the summer of 2002 that Vice President Cheney and the records of his energy policy task force should not be subject to open-government laws."" ...
[b]That's your new Attorney General. "We the People" have been betrayed, [i]yet again [/i]...[/b]
"The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plain." - George McGovern
[b]Unhappily ([i]but predictably[/i]) Bush is ridding himself of those who disagreed with his insane neo-con doctrine of pre-emptive warfare based upon lies, deceptions & falsehoods, [i]as well as [/i]his immoral neo-fascist doctrine of the rich-take-all while the rest of us make [i]all[/i] of the sacrifices in blood and treasure ... Bush has appointed Condi Rice to replace Colin Powell as Secretary of State ... Condi Rice is untrustworthy, incompetent and a traitor to American values including the rule of law ... Rice's[i] only [/i]qualification is her blind loyalty to Bush ([i]not[/i] to the United States of America)-- she has proved she is willing to lie, cheat, steal and condone mass-murder to [i]climb-the-ladder[/i] of power and wealth ... [i]Pathetic[/i] ... "We the People" deserve better than this neo-con toady: Please write Congress http://www.congress.org and insist that Rice be rejected by their upcoming confirmation hearings ...[/b]
Foreign policy in the next Bush administration threatens to be more of the same. As early as today, the president is expected to name Condoleezza Rice as his replacement for Colin Powell as the United States secretary of state. Rice was a seriously flawed national security advisor; the Washington Post points out that "many experts consider her one of the weakest national security advisers in recent history in terms of managing interagency conflicts." She is, however, a constant, loyal, dedicated Bush devotee, ready to work on "behalf of a boss whose sentences she can finish, and who trusts her totally to carry out his wishes." As the New York Times reports, "Ms. Rice seems unlikely to have any agenda but Mr. Bush's. She would be closer to her president …probably than any cabinet officer since Robert F. Kennedy served as his brother's attorney general." For his second term, President Bush is swiftly replacing many members of his cabinet with members of his close inner circle. Ivo Daalder, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1... a special advisor for the Center for American Progress, states, "Her appointment means that the president wants to surround himself with the people he's most comfortable with, and who are most loyal to his view of what foreign policy's all about." Here's a look at Rice's record:
[b]INATTENTION TO TERRORISM:[/b] According to the 9/11 Commission report, chief White House expert on terrorism Richard Clarke sent Rice an urgent memo just days after she took office, stressing the severity of the terrorist threat. She did not respond, and although the national security leadership "met formally nearly 100 times in the months prior to the Sept. 11 attacks…terrorism was the topic during only two of those sessions." The first meeting on al Qaeda did not occur until 9/4/01.
[b]MISLEADING STATEMENTS PRE-WAR:[/b] Rice was one of the primary perpetrators of misinformation in the push for war with Iraq. In September 2002, she claimed, "We do know that [Saddam] is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon." Weapons inspector David Kay and his successor, Charles Duelfer, debunked that outright, saying Saddam had no nuclear program. Rice also pushed the phantom nuclear threat by charging that certain aluminum tubes Saddam sought were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." A 10/3/04 New York Times article exposed that as false.
[b]RICE GIVEN LEADERSHIP ROLE IN IRAQ, FIZZLES:[/b] In October 2003, President Bush announced he was "giving his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, the authority to manage postwar Iraq." With great fanfare, Rice was put in charge of the "Iraq Stabilization Group." Seven months later, the Washington Post reported "the four original leaders of the Stabilization Group have taken on new roles, and only one remains concerned primarily with Iraq." Even within the White House, "the destabilized Stabilization Group is a metaphor for an Iraq policy that is adrift." According to the White House website, the Iraq stabilization group hasn't been publicly mentioned for more than a year.
[b]MISLEADING STATEMENTS POST-WAR:[/b] Even after the invasion of Iraq failed to turn up any evidence of weapons of mass destruction, Rice continued a calculated effort to keep the nonexistent threat in the public eye. On 9/7/03, she ominously warned, "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." On 3/18/04, Rice said that "It's not as if anybody believes that Saddam Hussein was without weapons of mass destruction." In fact, the administration's handpicked weapons inspector, David Kay, had publicly said – two months earlier – that he didn't believe Saddam had WMD before the March 2003 invasion. When Kay resigned in January he said "he did not believe banned stockpiles existed before the invasion" and that pre-war intelligence that said Iraq possessed WMD was probably "all wrong."
[b]RICE UNDER OATH:[/b] Rice initially refused to appear before the 9/11 Commission. When she finally agreed to testify, she refused to play it straight. Called before the Commission to examine potential White House inattention to the al Qaeda threat before the attacks, Rice was asked about a Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) the president received on 8/6/01. In front of the Commission, Rice testified there was "nothing about the threat of attack in the U.S." in the PDB. Under further questioning, she admitted that, in fact, "the title [of the PDB] was, 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.'"
[b]POLITICIZING NATIONAL SECURITY:[/b] Breaking with the precedent that dictates the director of national security should remain above the political fray and away from the campaign trail, during the 2004 campaign National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice took time out from her busy national security duties to stump for the president across key battleground states. She was roundly criticized by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter, who "said the national security adviser is the 'custodian' of the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and should be seen as an objective adviser to the president."
"Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other." - Carl Jung
[b]"We the People" should wake-up to the cold, hard reality that the Bush Crime Family doesn't give a damn about us ... They are only interested in furthering their own wealth and power, irrespective of how many of us they must kill, impoverish and make miserable to do so ...[/b]
Daddy ran the CIA, and W. is president, so why not let Jeb Bush run the CIA now? Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration. But the Porter Goss-led regime change at the CIA is working its magic, and the Bush family mafia seems to be pushing it.
... "The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources.
"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."" ...
Goss, the former CIA official who ran a newspaper in Florida and then got himself elected to Congress where (of course) he ended up overseeing the CIA, now heads it. His team of “Hill pukes”—as [i]New York Times [/i]columnist David Brooks says http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1... they are being called at Langley—are running amok, angering CIA veterans. Resignations are piling up, with John McLaughlin, the deputy director, and Stephen Kappes, head of the clandestine service, jumping ship in the last few days, joining Mike Scheuer, the CIA’s Osama bin Laden expert, and James Pavitt, the deputy director of operations, in exile. More departures are expected.
According to the [i]Post[/i] , four senior retired CIA officials tried to meet with Goss to help smooth the transition, but Goss—apparently seeking the kind of chaos now unfolding—rebuffed them.
It’s exactly what the neocons want—a wholesale purging of the agency that was the main source of opposition in the Bush administration to its obsessive Iraq strategy. A lot of heads will roll, and then the CIA will be a Stepford Agency, like the rest.
David Brooks, in the [i]Times[/i] , added this charming comment:
... "If we lived in a primitive age, the ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes. As it is, the answer to the C.I.A. insubordination is not just to move a few boxes on the office flow chart." ...
So what’s the Jeb Bush connection? Not only was Goss close to Gov. Bush when Goss was a Florida representative, but a candidate being rumored to replace Kappes—or at least to get a senior CIA post—is Richard P. Lawless, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific affairs. The [i]Post[/i] says http://www.washingtonpost.com... that Lawless “was described as having ‘long-term ties to President Bush’s brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.’” But what the [i]Post[/i] doesn’t say is that in 1987, Lawless—then in private business—founded a company called U.S-Asia Commercial Development with Therese Shaheen, a former Taiwan-based businesswoman and Bush contributor who was named last year to head up the American Institute in Taiwan, the quasi-U.S. “embassy.” Between 1989 and 1993, Lawless, Shaheen and Jeb Bush did millions of dollars of business together. Shaheen is also well connected: Her husband is Larry di Rita, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld’s chief of staff. You can read the reports about all this in the[i] Taipei Times [/i]here.
... "Shaheen comes to AIT well connected with the Bush administration. Her husband, Lawrence Di Rita, is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's chief of staff, and her former partner in US-Asia Commercial Development, Richard Lawless, was recently appointed the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asia and Pacific affairs.
Lawless, who founded US-Asia Commercial Development with Shaheen in 1987, was previously a close confidant and business partner of President Bush's brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, with whom he conducted millions of dollars in real-estate and import-export business between 1989 and 1993." ...
The CIA has been at war with the White House for two years. They’ve been leaking anti-Bush stuff for all that time, including reports about how the CIA knew that Iraq was going to be a tar baby. Bush, of course, incredibly blamed the CIA for the intelligence reports on Iraq’s WMDs, even though it was the Pentagon and the White House (i.e., Cheney), who demanded that the intelligence fit the policy. But Bush won re-election. And so he can push the CIA around.
At a time when the threat of terrorism has placed a premium on accurate intelligence, the White House is creating chaos at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The White House has ordered Bush's new CIA director, Porter Goss, "to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush." According to a senior CIA official, the agency is planning to get rid of "liberals" and others who are perceived as "obstructing the president's agenda." Among career CIA officials, Goss's partisan agenda has created "an atmosphere of ill will and apprehension [that] could distract the agency from its work in the fight against terrorism."
[b]GOSS INSTALLS POLITICAL CRONIES IN TOP CIA POSITIONS:[/b] Goss has installed inexperienced political operatives from Capitol Hill in powerful positions and "given [them] wide latitude in running the agency." A staffer from the House Intelligence Committee, Patrick Murray, is Goss's chief of staff, and two other House Republican aides have been installed "as senior advisors with broad but unspecified authority." Rep. Jane Harman attributed low morale at the CIA to the "inexperienced" House Intelligence Committee staff members Goss has placed in top positions. Harmon described the group as "highly partisan," saying, "many of us worked with that staff in the House...on both sides of the aisle in committee, we were happy to see them go." Goss initially named another aide, Michael J. Kostiw, as the CIA's No. 3 official. But Kostiw "quickly withdrew from considerations after former intelligence officials mentioned that he had resigned from the C.I.A. in the early 1980's after an administrative leave in connection with a shoplifting case."
[b]BUSH DROPS THE BALL ON INTELLIGENCE REFORM:[/b] The intelligence structure that missed 9/11 and was dead wrong about WMD in Iraq is still in place today. President Bush doesn't seem to be too concerned. Last week Scott McClellan said, "The president is very much committed to getting intelligence reform done this year." But although legislation to reform the intelligence community has stalled in a dispute between the House and Senate, most analysts believe the White House is "unlikely to pressure Republican leaders for a deal during the lame-duck session of Congress that starts this week." There is also no guarantee that the White House will push for reform when Congress reconvenes. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), who has asked National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to get the White House "more fully involved," says by January "other priorities will displace this one."
[b]BUSH CAVES TO RUMSFELD'S POWER PLAY:[/b] According to Norman Ornstein, political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, "The question we really have now is, 'How serious is the president?' If he told the Republicans he wanted it done, or if he gave a talk or a press briefing and said ... 'I don't like this gridlock,' it would happen. But I think there's no strong eagerness on the part of the White House to do that." Bush appears to be caving to pressure from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who opposes reform because "he does not want to diminish the Pentagon's overwhelming control over intelligence budgets."
"The great proof of madness is the disproportion of one's designs to one's means." - Napoleon Bonaparte
[b]The United States has indeed gone mad ... The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] has committed mass-murder in Iraq http://www.ips-dc.org/iraq/co... , an insane neo-con, neo-fascist aggression waged based upon heinous lies, deceptions and falsehoods; and instead of outrage, the American public seems to be cowered into a pathological disinterest and immoral acceptance of the traitorous Bushies' Crimes Against Humanity ...[/b]
[b]World Views: The United States has gone mad[/b]
[[b]Pakistan Daily Times, John le Carré, 11/04/04:[/b] "...the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear." http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/... ] America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
Conservatives Richard Viguerie and David Franke accuse Democrats of "banishing" God http://www.latimes.com/news/o...,0,7465717.story from their party. A new poll shows "progressive religious issues http://www.myrtlebeachonline.... mattered more to voters than socially conservative ones."
[b]"We the People" must reject the hypocritical and false form of self-righteous so-called "religion" (i.e. fanatical extremist evangelical "christianity" in a vile, twisted form of bigotted hate-worship) that the insane neo-con, neo-fascist right-wing is trying to shove down our throats ... There is not a single reference by Jesus Christ in the New Testament condemning abortion, gay marriage, etc. ... However, Jesus Christ frequently condemned poverty, hatred and warfare ... The right-wing zealots aren't "religious", but instead are akin to the extreme Islamic terrorists and fanatics that they condemn ... The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] refuses to follow the rule of law [i]and/or [/i]the teachings of Jesus Christ (by the way); and instead are hell-bent on transforming the United States of America into a Global Corporate Empire designed to enslave working people and enrich themselves ... The traitorous Bushies are greedy, gluttonous and hate-filled false prophets ...[/b]
Conservatives have seized on the notion that the "moral values" of the religious right determined the recent election. As Frank Rich of the New York Times points out, however, "There's only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004…it is fiction. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1... "According to a new poll co-sponsored by the Center for American Progress, Res Publica and Pax Christi, there actually is a new silent majority in America: a coalition of religious moderates, progressives and other non-traditional religious voters. "This bloc of religious voters constitutes 54 percent of the electorate and holds very similar moderate-to-progressive views on domestic and national security issues" such as economic justice and the war in Iraq. By comparison, religious conservatives make up less than a quarter of the national electorate. (For more on the changing focus of the new "silent majority," read the new op-ed http://www.myrtlebeachonline.... by American Progress's John Podesta and John Halpin.)
[b]THE MORALITY OF WAR:[/b] The American Progress poll showed more voters felt progressive issues were more important than socially conservative ones in this election. Forty-two percent of voters said the war in Iraq was the most important moral issue in the election; only 13 percent said abortion and fewer than 10 percent said same-sex marriage were the most important moral issues. The moral criticism of the war in Iraq is growing. Columnist Leonard Pitts writes, "one is hard pressed to find much evidence of morality in Bush's ineptly prosecuted war, his erosion of civil rights, and the loss of international credibility that his policies have caused." BeliefNet's Steve Waldman agrees, saying progressives "believe that launching any war unless absolutely justified is profoundly immoral…Liberals also believe that a morally indefensible policy was sold dishonestly – a gross moral breach compounded by another."
[b]SEPARATING CHURCH AND STATE:[/b] Americans support the clear division between church and state. According to the American Progress poll, 52 percent of voters surveyed "say they want a president who is informed by faith but does not impose these views on others through public policy decisions." Only 13 percent of voters want a president who uses his or her faith to determine policy positions and another 31 percent want faith and policy completely separate. Waldman explains most progressives advocate a strict demarcation between church and state because "they want to protect the free expression of religious views."
[b]GAY MARRIAGE:[/b] Exit polls on Nov. 2 showed 22 percent of voters claimed their votes were influenced by "moral values." The same survey, however, showed "nearly three times as many Americans approve of some form of legal status for gay couples."
[b]CONSERVATIVES DISPARAGED BELIEF BEFORE THE ELECTION:[/b] Republicans spent a lot of effort before the election trying to paint Democrats as the anti-God party by disparaging their religious beliefs. During the 2004 campaign, the New York Times reported that mailings by Republicans warned voters that liberals wanted to ban the Bible. The GOP also distributed flyers in church parking lots saying John Kerry favored "'anti-Christian, anti-God, antifamily' judges, same-sex marriage and abortion." Jerry Falwell told CNN Democrats were on an "anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-religion kick."
[b]CONSERVATIVES STILL AT IT AFTER THE ELECTION:[/b] After the election, gloating Republicans continued to attack the religious beliefs of many Americans. Right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh charged Democrats "don't like God." Evangelical leader Bob Jones charged the reelection of George Bush was a "reprieve from the agenda of paganism," stating, "You owe liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ." And conservative television host Joe Scarborough accused Democrats of "taking solace" in "bigoted anti-Christian screeds."
"Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict [slavery] might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes." - Abraham Lincoln
[b]Our election is established upon electoral votes calculated based upon the votes of the American people, and not based upon square miles ... The following mapping provides an alternative perspective in order that "We the People" can see that the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta's[/i] insane neo-con, neo-fascist agenda is not supported by a vast majority of Americans ...[/b]
Mad mapping Thursday continues, via Ben Werschkul of the NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/packag... , comes this proportional Electoral College map of the United States.
Each square equals one electoral vote (changes your perspective a bit, huh?)
The map http://bigpicture.typepad.com... at the Times site is interactive, so as you roll your mouse over each state, the actual total votes show up . . .
"On Wednesday, President Bush nominated his long-time friend and current White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to be attorney general. Gonzales "has been a Bush confidant for nearly a decade." http://www.latimes.com/news/p...,1,414256.story But it's not enough for President Bush to have confidence in Gonzales. As Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI) said during Ashcroft's nomination hearings, "not only must the president trust his attorney general, the nation must also trust him, for, after all, the attorney general is America's lawyer." http://www.senate.gov/~kohl/press/013001.html The nation can't trust Gonzales if they don't know where he stands on important issues. To find out his positions, the Senate Judiciary Committee must ask him some tough questions. Here are our suggestions: http://www.americanprogressac... ... The Center for American Progress
[b]Alberto 'Gitmo' Gonzales has an abysmal track-record as a corrupt toady for the Bush Crime Family ... He is unfit to be Attorney General for the United States of America ... "We the People" have [i]both [/i]the right and the ability to demand that Congress http://www.congress.org reject his nomination for this important governmental post ... Please refer to "Alberto Gonzales: A Record of Injustice" on http://www.tblog.com/template... ... Then write to your representatives in the House and Senate to insist upon another choice for Attorney General with competence and integrity ...[/b]
The selection of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General is a declaration that this is to be, once again, the most divisive and partisan administration in modern history.
It is not just a declaration that the president and his party are at war with the Democrats. It is a declaration that they are at war with our liberal democratic past and it is a re-declaration that America considers itself to be above the law and beyond the law and will answer to nothing and nobody.
Alberto Gonzales is the man who advised the White House that they should build a defense in advance against someday being charged with war crimes. He advised that we should declare the Geneva conventions as inapplicable, so as to be free to commit actions that would otherwise be considered war crimes. He was the man that advised the White House that the president’s orders, as commander-in-chief, superseded all other law, specifically our own war crimes act, and therefore anybody who committed a war crime in the belief that he was following orders would have a valid defense.
If Alberto Gonzales had been a defense attorney for the Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, he would not have even been allowed to offer that argument as a defense. The tribunal at Nuremburg, created by Americans and run primarily by Americans, was about responsibility. Individual responsibility. That if an officer said, “shoot those women and children,” an enlisted man had a right, more than a right, a duty, to say “No.” Because it was a criminal act. If an officer said “torture these prisoners,” and the enlisted man tortured the prisoners, both the officer and the enlisted man could be prosecuted and “I was only following orders” was an inadmissible defense.
In those days Americans took the position that individuals were responsible.
In those days, America was leading the world into a future of ideals, where there would a set of civilized standards to avoid war and, if war somehow was necessary, to conduct war with as much decency and respect for humanity and the ideal of a rule of law, as was humanly possible. We set that standard and much of the world followed.
Now we have declared that is a new world and the as we have all the force we might as well believe that the rule of force should supersede that world of rules and the rule of law.
If Democrats had any shred of any foolish delusion that there would be reaching across the aisle or sweet sharing bi-partisanship, they should be over it by now.
What the Democrats, and any of their allies who believe in law and civilization and the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremburg Laws against War Crimes, should do, is seize this opportunity to be the idealistic opposition.
It may be impossible to block the appointment of Gonzales. It may actually not be important. Whoever the administration would replace him with would be no better.
The administration will play him the way the Bush the First played Clarence Thomas, using the race card and the up from poverty card and trying to make any opposition out to be anti-Hispanic and anti-Catholic. There’s no stopping them either.
But it’s not to hard for a Senator opposing him to say that “I love Hispanic Catholics but I would not want to a Hispanic Catholic who would have argued that Adolf Eichmann should have gotten off because the orders of the commander-in-chief supersede any other rules, should be the attorney general of the United States.”
As the idealistic opposition the Democrats should seize this opportunity to question Gonzales closely about war crimes. About who he talked to about war crimes. About his understanding of war crimes. About whether he advised the president that he would be authorizing actions that could be considered war crimes under US and international law and if the president said, that’s fine, I want to do them anyway. They should also ask Gonzales about holding people without trial. About defining people so that they have no rights. About whether he sees any connection between his legal theories and the torture of prisoners. Not just those at Abu Ghraib, but in Guantanamo and in Afghanistan and in co-operation with other regimes.
The Democrats should turn this into a circus. And they would be right to do so. Because it would not be a circus about embarrassing sexual practices or secret personal issues. It would be a circus of ideals and ideas. About whether the top law enforcement officer in the land believes that power should triumph over laws. That if the laws get in the way they should be evaded and subverted.
When they’re done with that, they should ask him about Enron.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Larry Beinhart is the author of [i]The Librarian[/i], a novel about a conspiracy to steal a presidential election and of[i] American Hero [/i]which became [i]Wag the Dog[/i].
"Well, look at it this way: You cannot keep a dog that kills chickens, no matter how fine a dog it is otherwise.
My friend John Henry Faulk always said the way to break a dog of that habit is to take one of the chickens the dog has killed and wire the thing around the dog's neck, good and strong. And leave it there until that dead chicken stinks so bad the dog won't be able to stand himself. You leave it on there until the last little bit of flesh rots and falls off, and that dog won't kill chickens again.
The Bush Administration is going to be wired around the neck of the American people for four more years, long enough for the stench to sicken everybody. It should cure the country of electing Republicans.
I can think of nothing more likely to convince the people not to vote for Republicans again for a long, long time than four more years of George W. Bush." - A Rotting, Dead Chicken, Molly Ivins, http://www.commondreams.org/v...
[b]"We the People" should be outraged by the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta's [/i]bloodbath in Iraq ... This insane neo-con slaughter in Fallujah http://www.commondreams.org/v... is unjustifiable and will not stop the insurgency in Iraq ... Unhappily our corporate-owned media comprised of neo-fascist Bush toadies is not reporting the events on the ground and we must turn to the BBC and the foreign press to discover the truth ...[/b]
[b]Independent UK - This pool copy dispatch was compiled under Ministry of Defense restrictions[/b].
Civilians trapped in Fallujah face a humanitarian disaster unless Iraqi and American authorities allow food, water and medicine into the besieged city, aid agencies warned last night.
Fardous al-Ubaidi, head of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, said her organization had asked permission from the Iraqi government to deliver aid supplies to people in the city but the request was turned down.
"There is no water, no food, no medicine, no electricity and no fuel and when we asked for permission, we were only allowed to approach the Fallujah outskirts but had no access to Fallujah itself," Ms al-Ubaidi said. A convoy of three ambulances and one truck carrying food accompanied by 15 volunteers will make the first attempt to enter the city today, she added.
Ahmed al-Rawi, of the Red Cross, said: "Movement is impossible inside the city. The residents fear the snipers and therefore the wounded find no help and bleed to death." On the eve of the assault, the interim Prime Minister, Ayad Allawi, imposed a 24-hour curfew on Fallujah and ordered roads in the area closed.
Meanwhile, British soldiers from the Black Watch were involved in a series of running battles with insurgents yesterday after going to the support of American forces in the city.
The fighting began after US Marines in the outer ring of the assault force asked the Black Watch to intercept militants retreating after a heavy exchange of fire. British Warrior armored cars answering the call came under sustained attack from automatic rifle fire and rocket-propelled grenades.
The militants withdrew after the Warriors fired back with their cannons and machine-guns and British helicopters gave chase. A car was eventually halted and the occupants fled after booby-trapping a cache of mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and explosives. Following further gun battles a second car was seized in a village on the banks of the Euphrates. It contained devices used for suicide bombings including detonators, circuit boards and explosives.
Two men were arrested at the village after being pointed out by a cleric, but two other cars driven by insurgents escaped.
Major Alastair Aitken, of the Black Watch, said: "This was a difficult operation at an increasingly busy time, and it was a successful outcome. But we have to be ready for more situations like this."
An audiotape purportedly by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaida-linked terror suspect, urged on his fighters in Fallujah and said victory was near. The link to the tape surfaced yesterday on an internet site known as a clearinghouse for militant Muslim comment, although its authenticity has yet to be confirmed.
"As for you heroes of Islam in Fallujah, praise to your Jihad, praise to your nation, praise to your religion. [Have] one hour's patience, and then you will be see the consequences," said the speaker after identifying himself as Zarqawi.
Inside Fallujah, intense fighting erupted in the north-west of the city, just as US commanders were declaring that they had trapped resistance fighters in the southern end and were about to launch a final assault to take control.
The American forces insisted that attacks by rebels on a narrow strip of south Fallujah were isolated. Roy Meek, a Marines spokesman, said: "They can't go north because that's where we are. They can't go west because of the Euphrates river and they can't go east because we have a huge presence there. So they are cornered in the south."
A little later the American headquarters inside Fallujah came under repeated fire, leading to US tanks and armored cars heading back into areas which US forces had claimed to be firmly under control.
Rasoul Ibrahim, a father of three, fled Fallujah on foot, arriving with his wife and children yesterday in Habbaniya, 12 miles to the west. He said families left inside Fallujah were in desperate need. "There's no water," he said. "People are drinking dirty water. Children are dying. People are eating flour because there's no food." Around 10,000 people have taken shelter in Habbaniya.
US forces say they have found Mohammed al-Joundi, the Syrian driver of two abducted French journalists, Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, in Fallujah. The driver said he was being held captive by militants after being separated from the journalists, who were abducted with him in August.
Meanwhile, violence continued to spread, with US aircraft carrying out air strikes in Mosul and militants attacking US patrols near the center of Baghdad with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. The interim government extended the curfew imposed on the capital to the Shia holy city of Najaf.
An American airport worker, Dean Sadek, who is of Lebanese origin, was kidnapped in Baghdad yesterday by a group called the 1920 Revolution Brigades.
"The AARP will no longer describe the president's Social Security proposals as "privatization." According to an e-mail by the editor of the AARP magazine, "There is a new forbidden word at AARP http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1... : Social Security privatization.''" -- The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
[b]"Privatization" of Social Security is a monstrously corrupt notion that will hand-over one of the very few American safety-nets protecting the elderly from dire poverty and misery in their old age, to swindlers, embezzlers and corporate criminals like Bush, Cheney and their neo-fascist crooked buddy Kenny-boy (Enron) Lay, to ruthlessly loot and plunder ... Do you really fail to see that Wall Street neo-cons will wantonly steal the Social Security funds? ... Social Security was [i]not intended [/i]to be a financial investment to make people rich (which it could [i]never[/i] do by definition), but[i] was intended [/i]to be our society's commitment to care for elderly people ... The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]are betraying "We the People" yet again, and you are strongly urged to contact Congress http://www.congress.org to oppose this neo-con Crime Against the Elderly ...[/b]
[i][b]AARP is against replacing federal program with private accounts[/b][/i].
[b]Washington[/b] - Gearing up for battle over the future of Social Security, AARP, the influential lobby for older Americans, said Thursday that it opposed President Bush's plan to divert some payroll taxes into private retirement accounts.
But it supports new incentives for private accounts that supplement Social Security.
Working closely with Congress and the White House, AARP helped shape legislation adding drug benefits to Medicare last year.
Social Security is an even bigger issue, politically and financially, and lawmakers said Congress was unlikely to make major changes in Social Security over the objections of AARP.
Marie Smith, president of the organization, said, "AARP adamantly opposes replacing any part of Social Security with individual accounts."
But Smith added that the group supported incentives for people to establish personal retirement accounts in addition to Social Security.
John Rother, policy director of AARP, said, "We favor private accounts when they are in addition to Social Security, but not as a substitute."
The fight over Social Security, pitting Bush's vision of an "ownership society" against the Democrats' determination to preserve a cornerstone of the New Deal, is reflected in a battle over the proper terminology.
The White House dislikes the word "privatization," which it sees as a misleading and imprecise way to describe Bush's ideas for Social Security.
Democrats insist that the term is accurate.
E-mail messages circulated within AARP in recent weeks indicated that the group would avoid the word whenever possible. David Certner, director of federal affairs at AARP, said "privatization" had no fixed meaning or definition.
Martis Davis, a spokesman for AARP, said the organization was sensitive to the views of younger workers and retirees.
"Younger people think private accounts make sense," Davis said.
"Polls by some organizations suggest that young people believe in flying saucers more than in Social Security."
"We have a problem with that. We don't want to end up being perceived as dinosaurs, and we don't want to be labeled as greedy geezers, because we are not."
"President Bush set out a broad economic agenda for his second term after winning re-election last week, putting an overhaul of the nation's tax code and reform of Social Security at the top of his to-do list. But some private economists say he should have a different top priority. ... "The bottom line here is, if we don't get a significant narrowing of the budget deficit, you're going to have increasing upward pressure on interest rates. That will increase private savings in the economy, but it will also slow the rate of the growth of the economy," said Peter Hooper, chief U.S. economist with Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. and a former staff economist with the Federal Reserve Board. He put the deficit as the biggest challenge and the top priority." - Economists Put Budget Gap At Top of Bush's To-Do List, Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/article...,,SB110008966354470035,00 .html?mod=home_whats_news_ us
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] is comprised of reckless big-spenders (on the richest-of-the-rich; plutocrats; and corporations); greedy money-grubbers; and, gluttonous embezzlers (Cheney-Gate / Halliburton http://www.tblog.com/template... ) ... "We the People" must reflect deeply upon our extremist "consumer culture" and what it is doing to our soul, our culture and our nation ...[/b]
The biggest moral value of all was on display in a parking lot in Hershey, Pa. Five cars, four of them SUVs, were clustered together. All of them had the yellow ribbon magnet in support of our troops in Iraq. The ribbons glowed against the grayness of a drizzly fall day. Circled by fallen leaves, the hulks were an impenetrable metallic forest resting on asphalt soil.
This forest spoke as powerfully about our moral values as the debate over gay marriage and Iraq. Americans are still voting for denial. The SUV forest thickens. The real forest thins. America voted for the asphalt jungle.
That is the moral value that most threatens America. It is consuming itself with consumption. This is not a Democratic or Republican issue, even though Republican President Bush is a stunningly convenient symbol. This is the president who, when faced with telling Americans what their responsibilities were in the days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, went to Chicago's O'Hare Airport and urged Americans to fly to Disney World.
Three thousand Americans were killed by terrorists, we were about to send soldiers off to die, eventually by the hundreds, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and all a president could ask of civilians was to have a photo taken with Mickey Mouse. You cannot be more escapist than that. Had Democrat Al Gore been presented with the same Wall Street pressure to get commercial aircraft up in the air, there is a good chance that he would have done something just as Goofy.
The return of Bush to the White House and the failure of challenger John Kerry to offer a bold, clear alternative is the culmination of a half century in which the early 1960s presidential rhetoric of equality at home and ending poverty abroad faded into an escape from those challenges with Richard Nixon's "law and order" campaign in 1968. Pretty much ever since, Americans have sought out leaders who made them feel good about walling themselves off from those left behind or being global gluttons.
The only one who arguably tried, Jimmy Carter during the oil crisis, was drummed out of office. His chagrined successors have charted a steady course away from individual responsibility for consumption, no matter how much they preach it to attack mothers on welfare and black prisoners. America has come to be seen as the nation of me, my SUV and eye-popping portions of greasy French fries.
Since the 1970s, our cars, homes, and stomachs have become the biggest in the world. The mayor of Washington, D.C., wants a publicly funded $530-million baseball stadium a half year after the city slashed 285 teachers. Little about daily life in America has changed after 9/11 except for long lines at airports and allowing fear to become an excuse to cling even more desperately to cash. That must be why Americans cheer for a few hundred dollars out of a trillion-dollar tax cut while public education becomes a fossil.
We went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq saying we're promoting freedom, democracy, and the American way of life. It is a lie to promote the American way of life as it is at this moment. The great Harvard biologist, E.O. Wilson, said in his 2002 book "The Future of Life" that if the rest of the world were to actually live like we do, it would take four planet Earths. Our promise is a recipe for mass extinction of animals and plants, massive wars by humans over scare resources. Do we not invite more terrorism against the United States by entities who will increasingly say we are stealing their energy, food, air, and water?
We all participate in this lie, Republican, Democrat, and independent, rich, middle class, and even a fair number of the poor. Somewhere on the checklist of big car, huge house, thundering television, wasted food, lights left on, packrat possessions, and paper thrown away, we can pencil in our share of the madness.
Forty-three years ago, John F. Kennedy said, "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." Today, we returned to office a president who tells us our burden is to go to Disney World.
That is an unsustainable vision for an unsustainable society. The biggest test of America's moral values is whether we and our leaders find the courage to say that liberty for all means liberating ourselves from materialism before it drives us mad and makes us a target for the world's next madman.
"In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter," the blackmail note that the police are looking for is in plain sight. It isn't hidden, just crumpled as though it were trash. The police don't bother to examine it for that reason.
Why was Dick Cheney so eager to invade Iraq? Why did he repeatedly link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda after September 11, and why did he maintain that not only did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction but that he, Cheney, knew exactly where they were?
Not all corporations make money on war. Some actually lose money. But Halliburton, Bechtel and a few other components of the Military Industrial Complex do benefit from war. Strengthening that sector of the American economy strengthens the political Right. Turning the Republic into a praetorian state would permanently yield profits for the military industrial complex in such a way as to create a permanent Republican dominance of all the branches of the US government." - Cheney, Halliburton and Iraq - The Purloined Letter, Juan Cole, http://progressivetrail.org/a...
[b]The entire Halliburton (i.e. Cheney-Gate) affair should be subject to a criminal investigation ... Playing CEO, Cheney was given massives amounts of money (over $40 million) by Halliburton ... While Veep, Cheney's office ensured that Halliburton got nice, fat, juicy, no-bid, no-audit US government contracts ... Halliburton has wantonly over-charged (i.e. price-gouged) the American taxpayer by many hundreds of millions of dollars ... It is time for the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]to be held accountable for defrauding "We the People" ... Please write to Congress http://www.congress.org and demand that Congressional hearings be conducted to report back to the American people the steps that will be taken to convict wrong-doers within the neo-con Bush regime of their neo-fascist criminal activities ...[/b]
According to newly released State Department documents, "top U.S. officials exerted pressure" on Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), a Halliburton subsidiary in Iraq, to buy overpriced fuel from a Kuwaiti company despite knowing cheaper and more effective options existed. In December 2003, U.S. Ambassador to Kuwait Richard H. Jones ordered KBR to contract with Altanmia, a firm "favored by Kuwait's government," but with "no prior experience of transporting oil." Later that month, Defense Department auditors announced that KBR, in collusion with Altanmia, "may have overcharged the government by $61 million," a matter now under joint investigation by the Pentagon and the Justice Department. Spurred by that and other revelations of corruption – including one official demanding his Kuwaiti hotel buy his wife a new, "diamond-encrusted" watch – Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) called for further congressional hearings on the government's "special treatment" of Halliburton and Altanmia.
[b]OFFICIALS UNFAIRLY INFLUENCE CONTRACTS: [/b]E-mails included in the new documents suggest Jones and other U.S. officials "unfairly influenced the contracting process, which is supposed to be free from bias to protect taxpayer dollars." Administration officials "repeatedly have asserted that only career government contracting officers got involved in contracting matters" involving Halliburton, but the new documents show U.S. officials not only intervened, but did so "to pressure U.S. contracting officials to drop efforts to find cheaper fuel" and work exclusively with a Altanmia. Evidence? On 12/6/03, Jones wrote to an unnamed official: "Tell [KBR] we want a deal done with Altanmia within 24 hours and don't take any excuses." The work became part of Halliburton's existing $2.5 billion no-bid work to restore Iraq's oil industry.
[b]THERE WERE CHEAPER OPTIONS:[/b] Waxman points out the government pressured Halliburton to work with Altanmia despite knowing that "importing fuel from Halliburton's subcontractors in Turkey could be done at less than half the cost." In one e-mail dated Dec. 6, a career civil servant with the Army Corps of Engineers complains she is being politically pressured "to go against my integrity and pay a higher price for the fuel than necessary…My ethics will not allow me to direct KBR to go sole source to a contractor when I know there are other potential sources that can provide the fuel to the people of Iraq," she wrote. Her efforts to stop the contract from going through were thwarted.
[b]KICKBACKS AND BRIBES:[/b] Ironically, even as Jones was pushing KBR to contract with Altanmia, the officials at the Kuwaiti firm were complaining that KBR "repeatedly tried to extract bribes in exchange for fuel contracts." In the summer of 2003, Altanmia officials approached the U.S. embassy and "complained that Halliburton was planning to exclude it from a competition for a follow-up contract because it had refused to pay Halliburton executives kickbacks and bribes." Altanmia General Manager Waleed Al-Humaidhi told State Department officials it was "'common knowledge' that Halliburton officials 'solicit bribes openly.'"
[b]MORE ALLEGATIONS OF CORRUPTION:[/b] The documents are a veritable laundry list of complaints about Halliburton's corrupt behavior in Iraq. Among the more egregious complaints: "that anyone visiting [KBR's] seaside villas at the Kuwaiti Hilton who offers to provide services will be asked for a bribe"; that KBR trucks were used to "backhaul" stolen crude oil out of Iraq for personal gain; and that Tom Crum, KBR's Middle East chief, demanded the Kuwaiti Hilton staff buy his wife a diamond-encrusted Cartier watch after she lost her own in the middle of the night. Another document alleges a senior level Iraqi employee of KBR was fired in August 2003 for complaining to company managers about corruption.
"Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within." - Hannah Arendt
[b]The neoconservatives are comprised of a dangerously insane lunatic group of ideologues devoted to transforming our Republic into a Global Corporate Empire http://www.pnac.info/ ... Tragically, our nation is led by a President too stupid to comprehend the dire consequences of their neo-fascist motives and a Vice-President too corrupt to care so long as he enriches himself ... "We the People" must use every legal means at our disposal to fight the neoconservatives, for they [i]are [/i]the enemy within ...[/b]
[b]The architects of Bush's foreign policy have a new 'checklist' of tasks for the Bush second term. It includes taking on not only the 'axis of evil,' but also 'Old Europe' and China[/b].
An influential foreign-policy neoconservative with close and long-standing ties to top hawks in the George W. Bush administration has laid out what he calls ''a checklist of the work the world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second term.''
The list, which begins with the destruction of Falluja in Iraq and ends with the development of ''appropriate strategies'' for dealing with threats posed by China, Russia and ''the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America,'' calls for ''regime change'' in Iran and North Korea.
The list's author, Frank Gaffney, the founder and president of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), also warns that the Bush administration should resist any pressure arising from the anticipated demise of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to resume peace talks that could result in Israel's giving up ''defensible boundaries.''
While all seven steps Gaffney listed in an article published Friday morning in the National Review Online have long been favoured by prominent neocons, the article itself, entitled 'Worldwide Value', is the first comprehensive compilation to emerge since Bush's re-election Tuesday.
His article opens by trying to pre-empt an argument that is already being heard on the right against expanding Bush's ''war on terrorism;'' namely that, since a plurality of Bush voters identified ''moral values'' as their chief concern, the president should stick to his social conservative agenda rather than expand the war.
''The reality is that the same moral principles that underpinned the Bush appeal on 'values' issues like gay marriage, stem-cell research, and the right to life were central to his vision of U.S. war aims and foreign policy,'' Gaffney wrote. ''Indeed, the president laid claim square to the ultimate moral value – freedom – as the cornerstone of his strategy for defeating our Islamofascist enemies and their state sponsors, for whom that concept is utterly (sic) anathema.''
To be true to that commitment, policy in the second administration must be directed toward seven priorities, Gaffney says, beginning with the ''reduction in detail of Fallujah and other safe havens utilized by freedom's enemies in Iraq;'' followed by ''(r)egime change – one way or another – in Iran and North Korea, the only hope for preventing these remaining 'Axis of Evil' states from fully realizing their terrorist and nuclear ambitions.''
Third, the administration must provide ''the substantially increased resources need to re-equip a transforming military and rebuild human-intelligence capabilities (minus, if at all possible, the sorts of intelligence 'reforms' contemplated pre-election that would make matters worse on this and other scores) while we fight World War IV, followed by enhancing ''protection of our homeland,'' including deploying effective missile defenses at sea and in space, as well as ashore.''
Fifth, Washington must keep ''faith with Israel, whose destruction remains a priority for the same people who want to destroy us (and...for our shared 'moral values) especially in the face of Yasser Arafat's demise and the inevitable, post-election pressure to 'solve' the Middle East problem by forcing the Israelis to abandon defensible boundaries.''
Sixth, the administration must deal with France and Germany and the dynamic that made them ''so problematic in the first term: namely, their willingness to make common cause with our enemies for profit and their desire to employ a united Europe and its new constitution – as well as other international institutions and mechanisms – to thwart the expansion and application of American power where deemed necessary by Washington.''
Finally, Bush must adapt ''appropriate strategies for contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, (Russian President) Vladimir Putin's accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America,'' – which Gaffney does not further identify.
It is also sure to be contested – not just by Democrats who, with the election behind them, are poised to take a more anti-war position on Iraq – but by many conservative Republicans in Congress as well. They blame the neoconservatives for failing to anticipate the quagmire in Iraq and worry that their grander ambitions, such as those set forth by Gaffney, will bankrupt the treasury and break an already-overextended military.
Yet its importance as a road map of where neoconservatives – who, with the critical help of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, dominated Bush's foreign policy after the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon – want U.S. policy to go was underlined by Gaffney's listing of the names of his friends in the administration who, in his words, ''helped the president imprint moral values on American security policy in a way and to an extent not seen since Ronald Reagan's first term.''
In addition to Cheney and Rumsfeld, he cited the most clearly identified – and controversial – neoconservatives serving in the administration: Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis ''Scooter'' Libby; his top Middle East advisors, John Hannah and David Wurmser; weapons proliferation specialist Robert Joseph and top Mideast aide Elliott Abrams on the National Security Council; Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith; and Feith's top Mideast aide, William Luti in the Pentagon; and Undersecretaries for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton and for Global Issues Paula Dobriansky at the State Department.
Virtually all of the same individuals have been cited by critics of the Iraq war, including Democratic lawmakers and retired senior foreign service and military officials, as responsible for hijacking the policy and intelligence process that led to the U.S. invasion.
Indeed, in a lengthy interview about the war last May on 60 Minutes, the former head of the U.S. Central Command and Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief Middle East envoy until 2003, ret. Gen. Anthony Zinni called for the resignation of Libby, Abrams, Wolfowitz and Feith, as well as Rumsfeld, for their roles.
Zinni also cited former Defense Policy Board (DPB) chairman Richard Perle, who has been close to Gaffney since both of them served, with Abrams, in the office of Washington State Sen. Henry M. Jackson in the early 1970s. When Perle became an assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, he brought Gaffney along as his deputy. When Perle left in 1987, Gaffney succeeded him before setting up CSP in 1989.
As Perle's long-time protegé and associate, Gaffney sits at the center of a network of interlocking think tanks, foundations, lobby groups, arms manufacturers and individuals that constitute the coalition of neoconservatives, aggressive nationalists like Cheney and Rumsfeld, and Christian Right activists responsible for the unilateralist trajectory of U.S. foreign policy since 9/11.
Included among CSP's board of advisors over the years have been Rumsfeld, Perle, Feith, Christian moralist William Bennett, Abrams, Feith, Joseph, former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, former Navy Undersecretary John Lehman, and former CIA director James Woolsey, who also co-chairs the new Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), another prominent neoconservative-led lobby group that argues that Washington is now engaged in ''World War IV'' against ''Islamo-fascism.''
Also serving on its advisory council are executives from some of the country's largest military contractors, which finance CSP's work, along with contributions from wealthy pro-Likud individuals, such as prominent New York investor Lawrence Kadish and California casino king Irving Moskowitz, and right-wing foundations, such as the Bradley, Sarah Scaife and Olin Foundations.
Gaffney, a ubiquitous ''talking head'' on television in the run-up to the war in Iraq, himself sits on the boards of CPD's parent organisations, the Foundation for the Defense Democracies (FDD) and Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT), and also was a charter associate, along with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz and Abrams, of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), another prominent neoconservative-led group that offered up a similar checklist of what Bush should do in the ''war on terrorism'' just nine days after the 9/11 attacks.
''These items do not represent some sort of neocon 'imperialist' game plan,'' Gaffney stressed in his article. ''Rather, they constitute a checklist of the work the world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second term."
[b]Source:[/b]
Jim Lobe writes on international affairs for Inter Press Service, Oneworld.net, Foreign Policy in Focus and AlterNet.org. http://www.alternet.org
"I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter." - Winston Churchill
"In the world to come, I shall not be asked, "Why were you not Moses?" I shall be asked, "Why were you not Zusya?"" - Rabbi Zusya
"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference." - Elie Wiesel
[b]Yasser Arafat was a revolutionary, without whom the dream of Palestine would not exist ... Like many (but [i]not all[/i]) leaders, he was a complex man ... Arafat may not have done his people justice because he did not take the opportunity afforded him, when U.S. President Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Barak proposed a peaceful settlement, to push forward & work out an equitable Israeli-Palestinian Peace Accord when he had the chance http://www.aaiusa.org/news/mu... ... There are disparate views on the 'fairness' of this deal ... However, some eminent historians agree that Yasser Arafat missed an historic opportunity to become a great statesman and instead remained an revolutionary to the detriment of Mideast Peace http://www.thenation.com/doc.... ... However, "We the People" should learn a lesson from Arafat's life-long struggle and fight: No peace will exist in the Middle East without a Palestinian homeland ...[/b]
Yasser Arafat is the ultimate political Rorschach test. But it’s impossible to deny that he not only personified but virtually created the idea of Palestine, beginning in the mid 1960s. It was a time when Israel officially denied the existence of the Palestinians, when Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan refused to utter the word “Palestinians.” At the time, too, King Hussein of Jordan, on the CIA payroll, owned the West Bank and saw its Arab residents as a mortal threat to his regime.
To call Arafat a terrorist mixes up the world of the 1960s and 70s with the post-9/11 world, which, of course, is exactly what Israel has been doing for the past three years with glee. From 1948 to 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon and expelled the PLO, the violence perpetrated by the PLO was relatively minor, and for the most part it was carried out by splinter groups of one sort or another. A case can be made that Israel’s unchecked violence against the Palestinians, including the infamous Unit 101 massacres carried out by Ariel Sharon in the 1950s, were more bloody-minded than anything Arafat ever did.
Since the late 1970s, when the Likud of Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir won control of Israel, the Israeli right has been on a 25-year campaign to destroy the PLO and the idea of Palestine. Begin and Shamir, of course, knew a lot about terrorism, having been terrorists themselves, officially. Not only did they expel Arafat from Lebanon, but they fostered the growth of Islamism in the West Bank and Gaza and helped create the Hamas organization, explicitly designed as a counterforce to the PLO. And it worked.
It’s hard to think of another leader who is more of a survivor than Arafat. He has weathered assassination attempts, a plane crash, the Black September civil war in Jordan in 1970, the civil war in Lebanon, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the rise of Hamas and more. Perhaps he was tactically wrong not to have accepted the Clinton-Barak deal in January 2001, even though he was being offered a Bantustan-style patchwork of territory on the West Bank, but it’s a close call. The fact is, while Bush claims that under Arafat the Palestinians haven’t been a partner for peace, the reverse is true: Israel under Sharon had no interest in peace with Arafat. Under any circumstances. Perhaps now Arafat has found peace.
As for the Palestinians, they can’t be encouraged that after Arafat’s death none other than Elliott Abrams is in change of designing the Bush administration’s approach to post-Arafat diplomacy. Hopefully, Saudi Arabia’s Abdullah, Egypt’s Mubarak and King Hussein’s little son will join with the PLO’s collective leadership to offer a peace deal that even Bush will find hard to refuse. If that happens, count on Sharon launching some provocation to stir up Hamas.
"I believe we must pursue every lead which raises questions about the integrity of the electoral process. Our work may not change the outcome, but it will demonstrate that beyond our commitment to our candidates, we have a higher commitment to our democracy." - Denis Kucinich, A Note On The Presidential Election in Ohio, http://www.commondreams.org/v...
[b]"We the People" must demand major election reform since it is clear that we can have no confidence in the current broken system ... No paper receipts; no independent reconciliation; no audit trails; etc. ... Please visit BlackBoxVoting.com on http://www.blackboxvoting.com... ...[/b]
Though we may have avoided the “major mishaps and controversies that tainted the 2000 election,” preliminary analysis of last week's vote underscores the fact that “substantial problems remain in the nation's electoral system.” Election experts pointed to machine glitches, long lines, confusion over provisional and absentee ballots and the lack of paper trails for lost votes as proof of major structural deficiencies in the way America votes. Computerized voter databases and upgraded technology, both mandated by the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), but so far under-funded and inconsistently enforced, should help resolve some of the problems by 2006. Other solutions, however, could come from a careful analysis of exactly what went wrong in this year's election.
[b]EXTRA VOTES:[/b] Ever since election night, the evidence has mounted that computer glitches in electronic voting machines caused substantial errors. In a suburban Columbus precinct in Ohio, “An electronic voting machine added 3,893 votes to President Bush's tally…even though there are just 800 voters there.” MSNBC's Keith Olbermann reported that “in Cuyahoga County, that is greater Cleveland, the official records of 29 different voting precincts show more votes than registered voters to a total of 93,000 extra votes in that county alone.” Similar glitches were discovered in e-voting machines across the country. In Broward County, FL, “software subtracted votes rather than added them.” There were as many as 10,000 extra e-votes cast in Nebraska and 19,000 mysterious “extra ballots” were added on electronic machines elsewhere in Florida.
[b]CODE AUDIT:[/b] Machine miscounts could have been caused by fraud or hacking, but the problems were most likely the result of voting software code errors. So far, none of the major e-voting vendors has agreed to release its code to the public “for fear of competitors stealing trade secrets.” But unofficial audits of some of the codes revealed security weaknesses and potentially dangerous glitches. The quixotic behavior of the machines in the 2004 election underscores the need for the federal government to audit the machines before they are used in elections.
[b]PAPER TRAIL:[/b] In North Carolina's Carteret County, “more than 4,000 early votes were lost because the electronic voting system could not store the volume of votes it received.” The mishap was a perfect argument for a verifiable paper trail. With a voter-verified paper-trail system, says e-voting software expert Avi Rubin, "If the electronic votes were lost due to a computer malfunction, the paper votes would still be there and could be counted." As it stands, the votes cannot be recovered. In Nevada, the “only state with a large number of electronic-voting systems with voter-verified paper-trail capabilities, only a handful of problems were reported.”
[b]PROVISIONAL BALLOTS:[/b] Had President Bush's margin of victory in Ohio been any slimmer, there would have been a fierce legal battle over the 155,337 provisional ballots cast in the state. Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell had ordered election officials to “only issue provisional ballots to voters in the right polling places,” prompting two federal lawsuits and possibly disenfranchising crucial votes. His edict would seem to violate HAVA, which mandated that provisional ballots be offered to any voter whose name is not on the rolls. But a federal clarification of the law's standard for counting the votes is clearly needed. “If Ohio's votes had been challenged by Democrats, legal experts said, the election overhaul law would have left plenty of other unanswered questions, particularly about provisional ballots.” The ballots created confusion in other states as well: in Colorado, Secretary of State Donetta Davidson inexplicably decided she would count provisional votes for president, but not for the state's tight U.S. Senate race.
[b]LONG LINES:[/b] The most common problem of all in this year's election was long lines. The large voter turnout “caused hours-long waits throughout the country and prompted judges to order voting hours extended in some polling places long past scheduled closing times.” In Ohio, “lines were horrendously long,” even though turnout was below what Secretary of State Blackwell had predicted. And there “appeared to be disproportionately long lines in some low-income areas,” stemming from an inadequate number of voting machines. "There is a feeling here that the long-line problem was a problem of disparity that fell along socioeconomic lines," said Ohio election law professor Edward Foley. "There were isolated instances of long lines here in the seven- to nine-hour range.” For future elections, the nation should commit itself “to providing enough voting machines and election workers to make waiting times reasonable.”
"Iraq has left more than 8,000 soldiers disabled, according to the Pentagon. Lois Pope of the Disabled Veterans LIFE Memorial Foundation says President Bush's 2006 budget reportedly calls for cutting the Department of Veterans Affairs staff that handles disability benefits for American troops returning from war. And this at a time when the system is already overloaded. We don't second Pope's call for a memorial, but can't underscore enough the imperative that government make life for returning soldiers as painless as possible." - Lois Pope, Our Obligation to Veterans, http://www.tompaine.com/artic...
[b]One of the best ways of honoring America's Veterans is to stand against those tyrannical regimes like the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] who have betrayed "We the People" by sending our young men and women in uniform to die in an insane, illegal and immoral neo-con war in Iraq to enrich neo-fascist war-profiteers including the Bush Crime Family; Halliburton; Bechtel; Unocal; Big Oil; the Military Industrial Complex; etc. ... No human being should be asked to give their precious life in vain for a lie ...[/b]
At the Center for American Progress http://www.americanprogress.o... , we honor the millions of Americans who have served our nation to defend our freedom and liberty. Today, our nation is engaged in conflicts in which American service men and women continue to make the ultimate sacrifice. Please join us in recognizing the U.S. and Coalition troops who have died during the war in Iraq and Afghanistan http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2... . You can support our nation's veterans by donating to the Veterans of Foreign Wars http://www.vfw.org/index.cfm?... .
[u][b]Remarks of President George W. Bush at the dedication of the National WWII Memorial[/b][/u], http://www.wwiimemorial.com/d... May 29, 2004
The years of World War II were a hard, heroic and gallant time in the life of our country. When it mattered most, an entire generation of Americans showed the finest qualities of our nation and of humanity. On this day, in their honor, we will raise the American flag over a monument that will stand as long as America itself.
[u][b]Remarks of President Bill Clinton at the dedication of the Korean War Memorial[/b][/u], http://www.americanprogress.o... July 27, 1995
Today we are surrounded by monuments to some of the greatest figures in our history, while we gather at this our newest national memorial to remember and honor the Americans who fought for freedom in Korea. In 1950, our nation was weary of war, but 1.5 million Americans left their family and friends and their homes to help to defend freedom for a determined ally halfway around the world - or, as the monument says, a place they had never been and a people they had never met.
One evening, I was here many years ago at sunset. And I saw two Vietnam veterans standing by the wall. Both of them, obviously, didn't know each other; both of them, wearing parts of the uniform. And they were going over the names as we see them, and to make a long story short, in a few moments, they were embracing and crying.
[u][b]Remarks of President Ronald Reagan at the dedication of the Vietnam War Memorial[/b][/u], http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/... November 11, 1984
The fighting men depicted in the statue we dedicate today, the three young American servicemen, are individual only in terms of their battle dress; all are as one, with eyes fixed upon the memorial bearing the names of their brothers in arms. On their youthful faces, faces too young to have experienced war, we see expressions of loneliness and profound love and a fierce determination never to forget.
[u][b]Hidden Toll of the War In Iraq: Mental Health and the Military[/b][/u], http://www.americanprogress.o... by Stephen L. Robinson, September 14, 2004
The alarming number of suicides earlier this year among U.S. troops serving in Iraq has raised a red flag about the mental strain on our service men and women as they face grueling battles and a conflict with no clear end in sight.
[b]"We the People" must simply ponder the corrupt neo-fascist age that we've permitted the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]to usher in ... and we can but turn to Thomas Jefferson for his wise counsel to provide some solace:--[/b]
"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt. But If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake."
--Thomas Jefferson, June 4, 1798, in a letter to John Taylor after passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts http://earlyamerica.com/early... .
"I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice." - Abraham Lincoln
[b]Please write to your representatives in the House & Senate of Congress http://www.congress.org to reject Alberto Gonzales, President Bush's pick to succeed John Ashcroft, who might become the nation's first latino attorney general, but with an appalling record on civil rights that doesn't seem high on his agenda. "We the People" deserve better than this mean, petty and twisted lawless toady for the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]who disdains our U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights ...[/b]
The three things that should have civil libertarians most worried:
1) Gonzales fought intensely with Congress to keep Dick Cheney's energy comission meeting secret. He was also a partner in the Houston law firm that represented Enron.
2) Gonzales was one of the key White House advocates of detaining terrorism suspects indefinitely without formal charges. He strongly opposed allowing detainees access to counsel or the court system, repudating the Supreme Court.
3) Gonzales is the author of the White House memo that argued that the Geneva Convention and other international treaties that protect prisoners of war wasn't applicable to Iraq. The memo has been cited as one of the key factors in an atmosphere that allowed the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
[u][b]Alberto Gonzales: A Record of Injustice:[/b][/u]
[b][u]As White House Counsel[/u][/b]
[b]GONZALES APPROVED MEMO AUTHORIZING TORTURE:[/b] An August 2002 Justice Department memo "was vetted by a larger number of officials, including...the White House counsel's office and Vice President Cheney's office." According to Newsweek, the memo "was drafted after White House meetings convened by George W. Bush's chief counsel, Alberto Gonzales, along with Defense Department general counsel William Haynes and [Cheney counsel] David Addington." The memo included the opinion that laws prohibiting torture do "not apply to the President's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants." Further, the memo puts forth the opinion that the pain caused by an interrogation must include "injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions—in order to constitute torture." The methods outlined in the memo "provoked concerns within the CIA about possible violation of the federal torture law [and] also raised concerns at the FBI, where some agents knew of the techniques being used" overseas on high-level al Qaeda officials. [Gonzales 8/1/02 memo http://www.washingtonpost.com... ; WP, 6/27/04 http://www.washingtonpost.com... ; Newsweek, 6/21/04 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5... ; NYT, 6/27/04 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/... ]
[b]GONZALES BELIEVES MANY GENEVA CONVENTIONS PROVISIONS ARE OBSOLETE:[/b] A 1/25/02 memo written by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales said "the war against terrorism is a new kind of war" and "this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." The memo pushes to make al Qaeda and Taliban detainees exempt from the Geneva Conventions' provisions on the proper, legal treatment of prisoners. The administration has been adamant that prisoners at Guantanamo are not protected by the Geneva Conventions. [Gonzales 1/25/02 memo http://msnbc.com/modules/news... ; Newsweek, 5/24/04 http://msnbc.msn.com/id/49894... ]
[b]GONZALES ADMITTED HIS VIEWS 'COULD UNDERMINE U.S. MILITARY CULTURE': [/b]The 1/25/02 memo shows Alberto Gonzales was aware of the risk that ignoring the Geneva Conventions could create for the military. One concern expressed is that failing to apply the Geneva Conventions "could undermine U.S. military culture which emphasizes maintaining the highest standards of conduct in combat, and could introduce an element of uncertainty in the status of adversaries," which is what happened at Abu Ghraib. Secretary of State Colin Powell strongly warned against taking this decision, as did lawyers from the Judge Advocate General's Corps, or JAG. This week, a federal judge ruled that "President Bush had both overstepped his constitutional bounds and improperly brushed aside the Geneva Conventions" when he established military tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to try detainees as war criminals. [Gonzales 1/25/02 memo http://msnbc.com/modules/news... ; Bloomberg, 6/14/04 http://quote.bloomberg.com/ap... ; New York Times, 11/9/04 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1... ]
[b]GONZALES BLOCKS INFORMATION FROM CONGRESS:[/b] Historically, senators have been allowed to review some memoranda by judicial nominees. But, in a letter [about nominee Miguel Estrada], Gonzales told the Democrats that the administration would not produce the memos, because to do so would chill free expression among administration lawyers and violate the principle of executive privilege, which protects the internal deliberations of the president's aides. [New Yorker, 5/19/03 http://www.newyorker.com/fact... ]
[u][b]As Texas Chief Legal Counsel[/b][/u]
[b]DEATH PENALTY MEMOS: GONZALES'S NEGLIGENT COUNSEL:[/b] As chief legal counsel for then-Gov. Bush in Texas, Gonzales was responsible for writing a memo on the facts of each death penalty case – Bush decided whether a defendant should live or die based on the memos. An examination of the Gonzales memoranda by the Atlantic Monthly concluded, "Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence." His memos caused Bush frequently to approve executions based on "only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute." Rather than informing the governor of the conflicting circumstances in a case, "The memoranda seem attuned to a radically different posture, assumed by Bush from the earliest days of his administration—one in which he sought to minimize his sense of legal and moral responsibility for executions." [Atlantic Monthly, July/August, 2003 http://www.fdp.dk/act/030928_... ]
[b]MEMORANDUM ON TERRY WASHINGTON: A CASE STUDY IN INCOMPETENCE:[/b] In his briefing on death-row defendant Terry Washington – a mentally retarded 33-year-old man with the communication skills of a seven-year-old – Gonzales devoted nearly a third of his three-page report to the gruesome details of the crime, but referred "only fleetingly to the central issue in Washington's clemency appeal—his limited mental capacity, which was never disputed by the State of Texas—and present[ed] it as part of a discussion of 'conflicting information' about the condemned man's childhood." In addition, Gonzales "failed to mention that Washington's mental limitations, and the fact that he and his ten siblings were regularly beaten with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts, were never made known to the jury, although both the district attorney and Washington's trial lawyer knew of this potentially mitigating evidence." Nor did he mention that Washington's lawyer had "failed to enlist a mental-health expert" to testify on Washington's behalf, even though "ineffective counsel and mental retardation were in fact the central issues raised in the thirty-page clemency petition" it was Gonzales's job to review. This all came at a time when "demand was growing nationwide to ban executions of the retarded." [Atlantic Monthly, July/August, 2003 http://www.fdp.dk/act/030928_... ]
[b]GONZALES TOLD GOV. BUSH HE COULD IGNORE INTERNATIONAL LAW:[/b] In 1997, Alberto Gonzales wrote a memo for then Gov. Bush to justify non-compliance with the Vienna Convention. The Vienna Convention, ratified by the Senate in 1969, was "designed to ensure that foreign nationals accused of a crime are given access to legal counsel by a representative from their home country." Gonzales sent a letter to the U.S. State Department in which he argued that the treaty didn't apply to the State of Texas, as Texas was not a signatory to the Vienna Convention. Two days later, Texas executed Mexican citizen Irineo Tristan Montoya, despite Mexico's protestations that Texas had violated Tristan's rights under the Vienna Convention by failing to inform the Mexican consulate at the time of his arrest. [Slate, 6/15/04 http://slate.msn.com/id/21024... ]
[b]GONZALES GETS BUSH OUT OF JURY DUTY TO KEEP DUI SECRET:[/b] In 1996, as counsel to Gov. Bush, Gonzales helped to get him excused from jury duty, "a situation that could have required the governor to disclose his then-secret 1976 conviction for drunken driving in Maine." Gonzales argued "that if Bush served, he would not, as governor, be able to pardon the defendant in the future." [USA Today, 3/18/02 http://www.usatoday.com/usato... ]
[u][b]As Texas Supreme Court Justice[/b][/u]
[b]GONZALES DOES ENRON'S BIDDING:[/b] As an elected member of the Texas Supreme Court, "Enron and Enron's law firm were Gonzales's biggest contributors," giving him $35,450 in 2000. Overall, Gonzales raked in $100,000 from the energy industry. In May 2000, "Gonzales was author of a state Supreme Court opinion that handed the energy industry one of its biggest Texas legal victories in recent history." Since Bush brought him into the White House, Gonzales has worked doggedly to keep secret the details of energy task force meetings held by Vice President Cheney. [New York Daily News, 2/2/02]
[b]ACCEPTING DONATIONS FROM LITIGANTS:[/b] In the weeks between hearing oral arguments and making a decision in[i] Henson v. Texas Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance[/i], Justice Alberto Gonzales collected a $2,000 contribution premium from the Texas Farm Bureau (which runs the defendant insurance company in this case). In another case, Gonzales pocketed a $2,500 contribution from a law firm defending the Royal Insurance company just before hearing oral arguments in Embrey v. Royal Insurance. [Texas for Public Justice: http://www.tpj.org/page_view.... ]
"When you listen to tax-cut rhetoric, remember that giving one class of taxpayer a "break" requires -- now or down the line -- that an equivalent burden be imposed on other parties. In other words, if I get a break, someone else pays. Government can't deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch. And last week the Senate handed the bill to the wrong party.
Supporters of making dividends tax-free like to paint critics as promoters of class warfare. The fact is, however, that their proposal promotes class welfare. For my class." - Warren Buffett, Dividend Voodoo, http://www.commondreams.org/v...
[b]Last night, Bill Moyers interviewed Grover Norquist on [i]NOW with Bill Moyers[/i], http://www.pbs.org/now/politi... ... Norquist is an extreme right-wing neo-con lunatic who was gloating over Bush's "victory" and barking that Bush will give 4 more tax cuts to the rich during the next 4 years ... "We the People" must not give up in despair ... Instead we must fight the impoverishment of our nation and our working people by the corrupt neo-fascist Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] who are forcing the highest deficits; inflation; joblessness; and, tax burden upon Middle Class and working people, in our nation's history ...[/b]
President Bush said yesterday, "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it." Translation: President Bush and congressional conservatives plan to drive the country into severe economic distress by permanently extending supply-side tax cuts for the wealthy, privatizing Social Security, and giving more handouts to corporations with no means to pay for these schemes. All of this domestic spending will come on top of potentially hundreds of billions of dollars that will be spent in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[b]1. President Bush and congressional conservatives have promised trillions of dollars in corporate kickbacks and tax cuts for the wealthy[/b]. Over the past four years, conservatives spent lavishly on a faulty Medicare drug program, corporate tax subsidies, a bloated farm bill, and multiple rounds of tax handouts to the rich. Now they want to gut Social Security by opening a $2 trillion hole in the retirement program and ensuring billions in handouts to the financial services sector.
[b]2. They have no intention of paying for these schemes. The days of conservative fiscal hawks are long gone[/b]. The current crop of conservative leaders believes it's their duty to capture government resources to dole out as they see fit. They care little if the government falls into bankruptcy or the American economy grinds to a halt. The current situation makes it impossible to properly prepare for the retirement of the baby boom retirement, yet the president has offered no viable solutions to our longer-term fiscal challenges.
[b]3. The president's corporate backers will be laughing all the way to the bank while American taxpayers will be forced to clean up the mess[/b]. Who wins in this scheme? Energy companies, the pharmaceutical industry, health insurers, and the financial services sector all paid lavishly to elect Bush and his cohorts and now expect a return on their investment. But generations of American taxpayers will have to pay to clean up this fiscal disaster long after the president has retired to the ranch.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act.” - George Orwell
[b]"We the People" should be very alarmed by the neo-fascist direction that the corrupt neo-con Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]is taking our nation ... We must now prepare ourselves for the fight of our lives ...[/b]
The childish charade of this so-called ‘free’ election in the US has finally come to an end. This ‘free’ election was in fact not ‘free’ at all, when you consider that it offered a limited ‘choice’ of only two candidates. This fact alone shows that the US is already very close to a dictatorship. More importantly, both candidates had identical agendas that differed only in style but not in substance, which is not surprising since both were supported and handled by the same corporate Capitalism and Zionist lobbies that American democracy has become known for. In reality, this is a dictatorship that has entered through the back door under the illusion of a ‘free’ election.
For the rest of the world, the global audience was naturally focused on the issue of the US foreign policy. On this point, the difference between the two candidates was even more subtle and fundamental; the US-Lebensraum will surely continue, irrespective of who won the election.
It is time for those with a genuine free mind to reflect on the real implication of this election. What has resulted is another generation of obscure American foreign policy - a child born out of wedlock, this next illegitimate generation of US policy rises. The fact is that almost half the US population opposed George Bush and his war agenda but are now considered to be his legal guardian but now the masses are obliged to look after him for another four years by giving total obedience to his commands, one way or the other.
So, pseudo democracy ends and the American people must sit back now and be dictated to. They can of course voice their opinions through the mirage of free demonstrations but those with intelligence realize that vocal chords will have long worn out long these bastard policy children of party donors will relinquish their control.
Genuine change largely comes through aggressive and forceful confrontation; history has proven this time and time again. Demonstrations must escalate to have any impact on those sitting cushy at the top. If one can only travel back in time and talk with those Americans who fought against British imperialism in 1776, they would surely have laughed at these demonstrators who exercise their ‘freedom’.
British imperialism has been gradually replaced with homegrown corporate imperialism. The Afro-Americans, Hispanics and Asians find themselves in a similar situation. The free people of the world hope and look forward to the day when they revolt inside the US and gain real liberation and states like Texas are returned to the motherland, just as Kuwait was returned to Iraq for a short period of time back in 1991. For those hardnosed Republicans, moronic Bible Bashers speaking in tongues, KKK affiliates and those millions of Americans who have never ventured outside of their villages and towns, they ought to read a little into the history of the region that their nation is pillaging in the name of ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘oil’ and Jesus, the so-called god of ‘love’.
Let’s look at some of the attributes of this illegitimate foreign policy child and its implications.
It is not Usamah Bin Laden, but George Bush that claims to be in direct communication with the Creator. Bush, with his permanent smirk on his face, has convinced himself and his flock that the carnage in Iraq is part of a divine scheme. By implication, this must also include the conduct of his upright ‘Christian’ soldiers in Abu-Ghraib! It must also include the pilots and soldiers that deliberately shoot into the unarmed crowds in Fallujah and elsewhere despite being told that they pose no threat.
According to ‘Prophet’ (or you may pronounce as profit) Bush, God Almighty must have inspired those Christian US soldiers to eliminate the helpless enemy but then, where is this so-called God that your missionaries preach about? Where is their god that commands them to turn the other cheek and love their enemies? Is it the same god that has become a landlord over the area of Palestine, giving permission to any Jew around world to evict those who have lived there for centuries by any means? Is it the same god that inspired the US to tax (or steal) from the millions in poor countries through the dirty trade policies and international institutions and to lighten their guilt, raise money by holding annual charity events and pop concerts? Is it this so-called god of ‘love’ that propels god’s ‘chosen’ nation to build the most lethal and indiscriminate weapons?
This is the real religious fanaticism. Bush and his flocks are the prime examples of it -not the brave human bombers who defend their lands who are merely desperate people forced to take desperate measures.
If the secular West really despised religious fanaticism they would have picked up on the fact that the religious fanaticism of George Bush and his administration is politically motivated. The term religious fanaticism is only employed in condemning the heroic Mujahideen resisting the revolting Goliath. Like most hypocrites, the secular brigades are selective. They even wittingly or unwittingly endorse Biblical arguments as a basis for justifying the ethnic cleansing of Palestine; fulfilling God’s promise whilst condemning the Arabs/Muslims for referring to the religious dimension of the conflict! Are the Muslims obliged to accept the verdict of a Judeo-Christian god?
In contrast, if Usamah Bin Laden were ever to claim direct communication with God Almighty it would contradict Islamic teachings, for only Prophets of God have direct communication with God Almighty through divine revelation. Many take it for granted that Usamah Bin laden is a religious fanatic but anyone examining the facts can see the real fanatic is clearly Bush. Similarly, it is the speeches and sentences of George Bush that are far closer to that of a mad man or an imbecile rather than the well-composed message with a poetic touch of Usamah Bin Laden.
The recent revelation of the actual horrors of the civilian casualties, a war conducted in violation of the UN charter according to the General Secretary of the UN Mr. Kofi Annan, clearly makes these war crimes by any standards. George Bush is a terrorist and a mass murderer. But the world does not revolve around true justice but rather around “might is right”.
Will Bush continue on his current track and if so, what then is the implication of his election?
If the Iraqi’s can be punished for the actions of its dictator then by the same reasoning, a democratic nation can be punished for the actions of its leadership. This is especially the case when the population has approved the conduct of their leadership pro-actively thorough an election. Now, the entire US population is responsible for the carnage in Iraq and elsewhere unless they take immediate measures to distance themselves by taking further practical steps to remove George Bush.
In the same vein, the US is now preparing to implement the final solution for the women and children of Fallujah, creating more mass graves in the post Saddam era. Yet, we will keep hearing about the innocent US civilians of 9/11, but not the millions of innocents that has perished since 1948 or 1924 or even since 9/11. Moderates will be raised up high to selectively condemn those who are resisting whilst their deceitful lips will be sealed in the mounting civilian casualties in this phony war. There are no innocent US civilians now that they have endorsed Bush’s actions, past, present and future.
I may have offended those diehard liberals, freedom-fanatics, militant-secularists, democracy maniacs, republicans, conservatives, belligerent-moderates, confused-moderates, migrant-coolies, self-hating coolies. But you know people may dislike the taste of medicine although it can heal the body. Remember truth does not inherently lie in numerical majority but objectively assessing the merit of the arguments presented ...
"Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony." - Noam Chomsky
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] is traitorously reckless[i] and [/i]has damaged our economy in a very dangerous way ... Inflation is looming as the dollar falls and the highest deficit in our nation's history must be[i] paid-off [/i]by America's working people who will face the day of reckoning, while the richest-of-the-rich and corporations get massive tax cuts and boondoggles ... "We the People" must fulfill our obligation to future generations and fight the insane Bushies' neo-fascist policies that will place our nation in dire peril ...[/b]
One thing the election didn't change: our moral obligation not to saddle future generations with crippling debt. At a press conference yesterday, President Bush made clear that, in his second term, he'll spend more than just political capital. Bush will push for "a potentially multitrillion-dollar smorgasbord" of expensive schemes from the right-wing wish list and tax cuts. Moderates and fiscal conservatives in Congress face a clear choice. They can either capitulate to President Bush based on false claims of an electoral mandate or stand up for their principles – and future generations – by insisting we begin the process of putting our fiscal house in order.
[b]BUSH REFUSES TO MAKE TOUGH CHOICES TO BALANCE THE BOOKS:[/b] Bush claimed he could meet his deficit-reduction goals by imposing "spending discipline" on Congress. At the same time, Bush made clear that "he would not cut defense or homeland security spending, and he has promised more spending for education." The remaining programs that Congress has control over – transportation, law enforcement, veterans, agriculture, housing, health research, space exploration and national parks – "totaled $346.5 billion in 2004, not much less than the budget deficit." Even if Congress eliminated all of those programs it still wouldn't be enough to cover the cost of the deficit plus Bush's Social Security schemes.
[b]BUSH'S BUDGET PROMISES 'MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE':[/b] President Bush promised yesterday "he would add personal investment accounts to the Social Security system, simplify the tax code without raising taxes and cut the budget deficit in half, all before he leaves office in 2009." According to budget and policy analysts interviewed by the Washington Post, Bush's plans and not only unrealistic but, in all likelihood "mathematically impossible." Bush suggested that deficit hawks "look at our budget that we've submitted to Congress, which does, in fact, get the deficit down, cut in half in five years." But according an analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Bush's budget "would not fulfill that promise."
[b]BUSH'S BUDGET DOESN'T INCLUDE MONEY FOR WAR, OTHER PRIORITIES:[/b] For starters, Bush's budget "does not include any additional costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." The bill for those two operations this year alone "may approach $100 billion." Bush's budget also "does not include the cost of a Social Security reform plan that includes the personal investment accounts Bush is demanding." That plan, even in the short run, would cost between $100 billion and $150 billion per year.
[b]DEFICIT A THREAT TO AMERICANS' STANDARD OF LIVING:[/b] Economists are worried that the growing budget deficit could "send the U.S. currency into a tailspin." If that occurred, it "would erode U.S. living standards below what they would be by making imported goods more expensive."
[b]REACH OUT TO RED AMERICA:[/b] Rep. Mike Pence (R-ID), a leader of House conservatives, said "restoring luster to our reputation as fiscal conservatives will be a very high priority for the Republican majority," which includes "moving toward a balanced budget." E-mail Mike Pence's hometown newspaper mailto:letters@thestarpre ss.com in Muncie, Ind., and urge Pence, for the sake of future generations, to keep his promise – even if it means standing up to the Bush administration. (Send a copy of your e-mail to pr@americanprogress.org mailto:pr@americanprogres s.org )
"His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be." - Oscar Wilde
[b]"We the People" should be asking the "morally" [[i]sic[/i]] self-righteous Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] and their neo-con supporters what they mean by "morality" ... For the Bible also condemns poverty, warfare and doing nothing while our fellow men suffer ... [/b]
On Election Day 2004, 18 million Americans reportedly voted for President Bush because of "moral values," which "edged terrorism and the economy as the top issue" of the election. But on a number of issues that should be critical to voters who care about morality, the president needs to do better in his second term. "Regardless of who leads this country," said National Council of Churches General Secretary Robert Edgar, "the agenda of the church must always respond faithfully to the Bible's timeless mandate to minister to the poor, the marginalized and the outcast; and to be seekers and makers of peace." To that end, progressive religious groups such as Hadassah, Interfaith Alliance and the Protestants for the Common Good (PCG) are encouraging people of faith to work toward reforms on moral issues such as economic justice, poverty, affordable housing and the environment. These are some of the areas in which the president can improve in his second term.
[b]RELIGIOUS ISSUES:[/b] Evangelical Pastor Jim Wallis – editor of Sojourners – writes that the 2004 election has begun "a real debate in this country over what the most important 'religious issues' are in politics." The religious right "fought to keep the focus on gay marriage and abortion…But many moderate and progressive Christians disagreed. We insisted that poverty is also a religious issue, pointing to thousands of verses in the Bible on the poor. The environment – protection of God's creation – is also one of our religious concerns." The Rev. Jeff Schutz, until recently a pastor at "a fast-growing evangelical congregation," urged Americans to think past personal moral issues like abortion and gay marriage. "How about talking about adoption, special-needs children, reforming the insurance industry, [and] the homeless?" Schutz said. (For more, check out American Progress's Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative http://www.americanprogress.o... .)
[b]POVERTY:[/b] The president let millions of kids slide into poverty while cutting taxes for the richest Americans. In his first term, President Bush enacted tax cuts skewed overwhelmingly towards the wealthy even as poverty, especially for children, rose for three straight years. The president has pushed to make those tax cuts permanent. A national network of churches and faith-based organizations, Call to Renewal, http://www.calltorenewal.com/... has been formed to combat poverty in America.
[b]HEALTH CARE:[/b] The president pandered to special interests instead of providing affordable health care for America's seniors. Under President Bush, five million Americans have lost their health insurance and millions more have seen their premiums rise. The Bush administration backed a Medicare bill which put drug and insurance companies ahead of seniors. According to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI), President Bush's second-term health care plan would insure just 6.7 million new Americans, still leaving 38.3 million Americans uninsured.
[b]ENVIRONMENT:[/b] President Bush rolled back environmental safeguards, putting the interests of polluters ahead of public health. In Bush's first term, the environment "has stalled or gone into reverse in several areas," in large part because of the president's reliance on industry insiders (like Halliburton) to write new pollution laws.
[b]DEFICIT:[/b] President Bush saddled future generations with debt. The president promised not to pass problems on "to future generations," but if President Bush cannot successfully pay down the $422 billion deficit – created in large part by his tax schemes – he will pass the biggest debt in American history from one generation to another. So far, he has "revealed no details" as to how he plans to pay the debt down.
[b]HOUSING:[/b] The president tried to dismantle Section 8, the "most successful public-and-private housing partnership in the history of the United States." The president has repeatedly endorsed programs and policies that are hostile to the program, endangering housing for more than two million poor families nationwide.
Bush's victory was "the narrowest win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916." – Wall Street Journal, 11/4/04, http://online.wsj.com/article...,,SB109953484618964519,00 .html?mod=opinion%5Fmain%5 Ffeatured%5Fstories%5Fhs
[b]"We the People" will [i]never [/i]stop fighting against fascism, tyranny and injustice ... Those neo-cons on the right who order us to shut-up and who tell us to blindly accept the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta's[/i] insane neo-con doctrine of pre-emptive warfare (based on lies) [i]and/or [/i]their callous neo-fascist doctrine of corporate-take-all exploitation of working people; consumers and investors-- simply[i] fail to comprehend the spirit [/i]of the American people ... We [i]refuse[/i] to be silenced ...[/b]
In the wake of Tuesday's election, the Progress Report http://www.americanprogress.o... is more motivated than ever to find new ways to advance the progressive agenda. Please send us your ideas on how to go forward in the coming years to pr@americanprogress.org – we'll publish a few of our favorites in a coming edition.
"We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them." - Abigail Adams (1744 - 1818), letter to John Adams, 1774
[b]"We the People" must watch closely the [i]actions[/i] of the corrupt neo-con Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]over the next few weeks, for their directives, appointments, decisions and acts[i] will matter far more [/i]than their habitual lies, deceptions and falsehoods couched in phony, hypocritical "religious-and-moral" sounding [[i]sic[/i]] rhetoric and neo-fascist propaganda ...[/b]
The next few weeks will provide at least[b] three [/b]important clues about the power of the neocons in Bush II.
[b]First[/b], watch Fallujah. If the offensive unfolds, and spreads to Ramadi and other Sunni centers as expected, then it means that Bush has decided on an all-out push for military victory there. I don’t agree with those who say it’s impossible. Overwhelming military force usually wins, and Bush can win—but at the price of countless unnecessary dead. A pre-Iraq election offensive can stabilize the country in the short term, over the dead bodies of thousands, but it will create an unstable Iraqi government that will depend on U.S. military propping up for decades. That, of course, is just what Bush & Co. want—to squat indefinitely at the heart of the world’s oil supply.
[b]Second[/b], watch Iran. Neocons are already making noises that Iran will require the utilization of force to back up a disarmament move against Iran’s alleged nukes. The deadline is Nov. 25 there. That’s when Bush insists that the Iran issue go to the UN Security Council. The entire deadline issue is silly: Iran isn’t going to war against anyone anytime soon, and it will take many years for them to develop nukes, if they indeed decide to plunge ahead. But it could push Iran to the head of the neocon agenda early in 2005.
[b]Third[/b], watch the Nov. 22 Cairo conference on Iraq. If the Bush people, as expected, blow off France, Egypt and other moderate voices seeking to solve Iraq’s political crisis in favor of a U.S.-first policy of control and a military solution, then it’s clear that the neocons are in the driver's seat.
As a novelist, historian, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, politician and raconteur, Gore Vidal has been a voice of reason and dissent since the publication of his first novel, The City and the Pillar, in 1948. The author of Lincoln and Julian recently spoke with [i]In These Times [/i]and its affiliated radio show, “[u]Fire on the Prairie[/u]”, http://www.fireontheprairie.c... about his latest book, [i]Imperial America[/i]: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia.
[b]The following interview by Emily Udell with Gore Vidal was conducted on election day before the outcome of the U.S. election was concluded ... "We the People" should take note and reflect upon Gore Vidal's sage counsel because he has so accurately predicted the direction that America has tragically taken for decades now ...[/b]
[b]Does a victory by either George W. Bush or John Kerry make a difference for the future of what you call the American empire?[/b]
I think everything is going to make a difference, because the empire’s collapsing. We’ve run out of money. So there are going to be dramatic changes no matter who is president. I think that with Kerry you’re not apt to have an invasion of Iran, which seems to be in the cards now, and of course Syria. You won’t have an extensive imperial adventure as you’re bound to have with a “war-time president.”
And so I think we’re a bit safer with Kerry. Unfortunately, Kerry is also an imperialist who follows Woodrow Wilson and a bit of FDR, but not FDR enough. FDR knew what he was doing; he was thinking ahead. I think the empire will quietly dwindle, but it might go rather [less] quickly under Kerry. The other one will start wars like brushfires just to distract attention. Kerry won’t.
[b]In [i]Imperial America [/i]you call the war on terrorism a “nonsensical war like a war on dandruff.” In your estimation, is the war on terrorism just a new version of the war on communism or are there differences?[/b]
For a country to turn itself into an imperial kind of despotism, you need an outside enemy. This was the brilliance of Adolf Hitler and his team. In fact, Goering gave a fascinating interview at Nuremberg. He said that the only way that you can organize an intelligent and well-educated people like the Germans into going to war, a war of conquest, was to frighten them. And you frighten them with, “We have great enemies everywhere, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, all over the place, and they have their eye on us,” and you go from there.
Well, it’s the same techniques in a very crude way that we’re seeing today. You cannot have a war on an abstract noun. “Terrorism” is that. It’s like a war on bad temper. “Oh yes, I really want to join that battle. Where do we start?” It is semantically stupid, and actually in practice it’s diabolical. We knocked down two countries who had done us no harm and intended us no harm. God knows what they intend now. And certainly after 9/11, they were innocent of any of that. But it happened through sheer reiteration and just telling lies, ferocious lies between Cheney and Bush about the connections of al Qaeda and Saddam and so on.
I think we’re a bit tired of that story, but the story never registers. Sixty percent of the American people think that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. When you’ve got people as hypnotized by that, you can only do it two ways, and it can only be done with a lot of premeditation. One is you have a terrible educational system for the general public, where they’re taught nothing when it comes to American history. I think they erase whatever it is they might have in their head.
So you have that, and then you have a totally corrupt media, which will tell any lie that the state wants it to. That’s how you can keep confusing them about who did strike us. Well, Osama bin Laden--I’m perfectly willing to accept he did it. But Afghanistan and Iraq were two countries that we smashed preemptively because one day they might actually do something to us. I imagine these people think everybody’s like themselves. Sometimes they think Americans are like themselves. After all, we developed atomic weapons and then we used them when we didn’t need to use them. I was in the Second World War, and Japan was finished by August ‘45 and was trying to make peace. Truman wanted to drop the bombs to scare Stalin.
[b]What is your assessment of how the American media has covered the Iraq war and the presidential campaign?[/b]
The American media is almost by definition a creature of corporate America, which owns it. You can’t expect them to be otherwise. After all, Rupert Murdoch is now an Americanized Australian, so he has to be included in that. Corporate America knows what it wants.
The real battle here, which nobody has brought out in the campaign and I would have thought it was obvious, is that in 2001 Cheney came to Washington as vice president and more importantly as the great power in Halliburton, the oil and gas people. Interested in making money for his firm and himself, he called in a meeting of leading geologists and people who know about oil reserves and natural gas, and he asked a question which is quite sensible, “How much longer do we, the world, have for fossil fuels?” And they did their experiments and said, “Well, it looks like it’s all over in 2020.” That is when the Iraq and Afghanistan wars began. 9/11 was just a lucky trigger for somebody who had already decided to attack Iraq and get a hold of their oil fields, position himself and his buddies for a war on Iran which has, I think, even greater oil resources, or rather the Caspian Sea has, and those little republics that end in “stan.” Those are the greatest oil reserves in the world, greater than Saudi Arabia.
So by taking out Iraq and making it an American base, which hasn’t worked terribly well, ditto Afghanistan, we are now on top of the world’s oil supply, which is what these people came into office to do. And when they talk about freedom and liberty and democracy, you just want to ... I’m not going to use any strong verbs, but it’s the hypocrisy and the viciousness and the fact that the media covered for them and never questioned them, never took anything beyond what were the parameters that they had set up.
[b]As you write in [i]Imperial America[/i], the military-industrial complex is such an entrenched part of America’s system of governance it is hard to imagine extracting ourselves from it. How can we break the vicious cycle?[/b]
By losing a war and by going broke. We’ve lost the Iraq war, no matter how long we stay in there. And secondly, we have no money. They were proposing about a year ago, merrily, that they, Rumsfeld etc., needed another 1-million-man army. Well there is not enough money in the entire country to pay for that. On the other hand, they do have a plus. There are 2 million jobs forever lost in the last four years, and that gives you at least 1 million men that you could put under arms by restoring the draft. It will probably come to that, because the ones that are in the field are getting irritable, perhaps even mutinous, and they know that they have been used and thrown away. There are hard days coming should the Bush regime continue. There are also hard days coming if Kerry’s in.
[b]Do you think the outcome of the election will determine whether or not a draft is reinstated?[/b]
I think Kerry is smart enough not to bring on a revolution. After all, I was in the army at the time of the draft, and I know how extremely unpopular it was, and that was a real war we were involved in. This is not a war. That’s why I make fun of the war on terror and compare it to bad temper or dandruff, whatever. Terrorism is a fact of life. In any country that you live there are always disgruntled elements that are going to attack the status quo. The Brits lived with the IRA for generations. The Spanish live with the Basques. The Italians have the Red Brigades. There are all kinds of minorities that turn to terrorism from time to time. Why should we be exempt, since we’ve done so many dreadful things to so many minorities, starting with Native Americans?
[b]In one of your essays you write, “As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not illuminate, action.” The idea that the conservatives have mastered the art of manipulating political rhetoric (and consequently the opinions of Americans) is a hot topic on the left. Does the far right have the upper hand in terms of manipulating language, or is using language to obfuscate issues an equal problem across the political spectrum?[/b]
Well the far right wins in most of this because they’ve got the money. They own the newspapers and the FOX network. They own everything. They don’t even have to use much artifice to twist language in their own propagandistic direction. They have to work less hard to get their message across. I use a Confucius quote in that piece. If he became emperor, what was the first thing he would do? He said: “I’d rectify the language so the people don’t know what the emperor’s talking about. There could be no harmony.”
[b]How do you predict the war in Iraq will play out? A $1 billion embassy and permanent military bases are being built.[/b]
None of that’s going to happen. They will try and make it happen, let’s say if the Bush people continue in office. They’ve invested too much time and our blood and our money, but it isn’t going to work. No invader from outside has ever made it in the Middle East. This goes back to the Crusaders and the Kingdom of Acre, which lasted about 200 years and that was the longest time, but things go much faster now. We aren’t going to be there. It’s very simple. How do you pay for it? Are the American people really to be put on short rations? And, meanwhile, we’re running out of oil in the world. There goes the world economy as well as ours. It isn’t going to happen; it’s going to fall apart. The idea is you just whistle and you have an army. They just don’t seem to have any idea of what armies are like and how much they cost, how hard it is to raise one and how hard it is to use one.
"After a decent interval of licking our wounds and pondering what might have been and where we went wrong, we need to spit out our despair and return - united - to battling those who have for the moment outmaneuvered us. Otherwise, we might just as well lie down in the street and let them flatten us with their schemes." - Don't Mourn, Organize, http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
[b]The results of Election 2004 are a major disappointment to many citizens throughout our nation ... "We the People" have a long road ahead of us and the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] will take their perceived "mandate" forward to wage more pre-emptive wars based upon lies, deceptions and falsehoods-- continue to give corporations a free-reign to exploit working people, consumers and investors-- destroy our environment for corporate profit-- and diminish our civil rights as they continue to dismantle the U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights ... We must not allow these heinous acts of treason to continue to occur ... We must put a stop to the neo-con ideology of terror and fear, as well as the neo-fascist ideology of corporate-take-all for the rich leaving millions of citizens in poverty, without health care, without jobs, etc. ... We must continue to fight the good fight ... We must[i] not [/i]give-up!!! ...[/b]
As we move past the election, it’s useful to remember the words of John Gardner: "History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable." He wrote those words in 1968. It was a time when millions of young Americans stood up to challenge a senseless war and the leaders who backed it.
Our nation today is far different from the America of 1968, yet the similarities are unmistakable. Now, as then, we are a deeply divided society. Faced with upheaval abroad, suffering at home and an uncertain future, it often seems that all of us are struggling to simply find our footing.
The shrill voices of the right have made no secret of their vision of a nation that is wealthy, but not inclusive; powerful, but not respected. In our America, opportunity is not rationed, it is shared. For us, America's standing in the world is guaranteed not only by the fearsome power of our military, but also by the awesome strength of our ideals.
The outcome of this election guarantees that the far right will continue its fight to impose its radical agenda on America. At the Center for American Progress, we intend to keep fighting, too: for solutions grounded in the progressive values we share.
As progressives we're not content to simply live through American history; we intend to make it. We hope you’ll continue to join us, and to contribute to the dialogue that will help us build toward a better future.
"If you join with me on Tuesday, we will both defend our country and fight for America's families. We will unite Democrats and Republicans to succeed in Iraq and restore America's leadership in the world. We will once again stand up for the middle class and all those struggling to join it. We will never again allow the politics of fear to obscure our hope for the future. And together, we will lift up this nation with the confidence that our best days are still ahead." - John Kerry, A Fresh Start for America, http://www.truthout.org/docs_...
[b]"We the People" are voting in[i] record [/i]numbers ... This is a[i] great [/i]result ... However, we cannot afford to take[i] anything [/i]for granted ... If you haven't voted [i]already[/i], please get out and vote for John Kerry ... After the polls close this evening, we must then ensure that[i] all [/i]of the votes are counted and counted[i] correctly [/i]...[/b]
[b]Zogby calls it for Kerry as exit poll numbers keep rolling in; great turnout numbers for minority voters; harrassing MoveOn members in Minnesota.[/b]
[b]3 p.m.: Zogby Predicts Kerry Landslide[/b]
John Zogby is now predicting http://www.zogby.com/ that John Kerry will sweep the election with 311 to 213 electoral votes. The only states he see as too close to call are Nevada and Colorado. And yet as Salon points out, http://www.salon.com/politics... "Zogby's final-final poll has Bush winning the popular vote, but just barely, 49.4 to 49.1 percent, and not really, when you consider the margin of error, +/- 3.2 percent."
[b]2:40 p.m.: Reading Between the Lines[/b]
Sure the early numbers coming out of various sources may not mean a thing, but the last public statements from the two candidates are revealing.
On the one hand, there was George Bush: "I've given it my all." In other words, don't nobody be blamin' me if I lose. And then there was John Kerry sounding distinctly like a president-elect:
I'm confident that we made the case for change, the case for trust in new leadership, a new direction, a fresh start. But what's really important is that both the president and I love this country. It's really important that people go out and vote and express their love for our country, no matter who they vote for. We want people to participate.
From a source at the Democratic National Committee, numbers that are two hours old (but that contradict in some respects the numbers earlier from Daily Kos and Drudge):
Colorado - Kerry 48.7 - Bush 50.8 Florida - Kerry 51.7 - Bush 48.1 Iowa - Kerry 50 - Bush 50 Maine - Kerry 55 - Bush 44.4 Michigan - Kerry 51.5 - Bush 47.7 Minnesota - Kerry 58.5 - Bush 40.2 New Hampshire - Kerry 57.9 - Bush 41.4 New Mexico - Kerry 50.2 - Bush 48.8 Ohio - Kerry 52.2 - Bush 47.8 Pennsylvania - Kerry 59 - Bush 40
Wisconsin - Kerry 52.6 - Bush 47.3 Arkansas - Kerry 44.5 - Bush 55 New Jersey - Kerry 56.4 - Bush 43.2
New Jersey is what analysts like to call a "bubble" state. The harder it is for Kerry to take the Garden State (a state that should traditionally be blue), the better that George Bush is doing in the polls.
So another good sign for Kerry.
In addition, that excellent Wisconsinite John Stauber (whose books you should read) reports within the hour that Wisconsin Democratic headquarters tells him Kerry is up by 5 points in the state, which comports with the above DNC Wisconsin number...
[b]1:45 p.m.: New Poll Numbers[/b]
These are from In These Times contributor Doug Ireland's blog http://direland.typepad.com/d... . Ireland is skeptical of the numbers posted on Daily Kos but offers these from a senior Kerry campaign staffer:
National : KERRY 50 percent, BUSH 49 percent Florida: KERRY 51.7, BUSH 48.1 Michigan: KERRY 51.1, BUSH 47.7 Ohio: KERRY 52.2, BUSH 47.3
Ireland also has less happy numbers: Kerry down by 1 point in Virginia and Nevada, and down by 5 against Bush in North Carolina.
[b]1 p.m., Turnout Numbers[/b]
Huge numbers are the name of the game. The best news yet for Kerry: people of color are coming out in droves to the polling booth.
From MyDD.com:
[i]Ohio[/i] - African American precincts are performing at 106 percent what we expected, based on historical numbers. Hispanic precincts are at 144 percent what we expected. Precincts that went for Gore are turning out 8 percent higher then those that went Bush in 2000. Democratic base precincts are performing 15 percent higher than GOP base precincts.
[i]Florida[/i] - Dem base precincts are performing 14 percent better than Bush base precincts. In precincts that went for Gore, they are doing 6 percent better than those that went for Bush. African American precincts at 109 percent, Hispanic precincts at 106 percent.
[i]Pennsylvania[/i] - African American precincts at 102 percent of expectations, Hispanics at 136 percent of expectations. The Gore precincts are doing 4 percent better than Bush precincts.
[i]Michigan[/i] - Democratic base precincts are 8 percent better than GOP base states. Gore precincts are 5 percent better than Bush.
[b]Exit Polls Favor Kerry in the Big Three[/b]
Yes, these are very, very early results from Daily Kos – and the source is unknown. But that said, the news looks darn good for the Democrats. Kerry is up by 20 points in Pennsylvania (yes, you read that right), four points in Ohio and three points in Florida.
[b]GOP Goes After MoveOn[/b]
It shouldn't be surprising that the Republicans are continuing to target MoveOn.org, even on Election Day. Some of them accused the organization of violating Minnesota's law barring partisan activists from operating with 100 feet of a polling place. But according http://www.startribune.com/st... to the Star Tribune, "Several of those precincts were in St. Paul, but police spokesman Paul Schnell said officers determined that nobody was doing anything 'illegal or unacceptable.' He said all the calls had come from citizens, not election judges."
MoveOn's Eli Pariser responded with the following statement:
A record turnout is bad news for the Republican Party, so they are trying to suppress it by spreading false charges of illegal activity at the polls. Their hope is that the broadcast of these charges today will keep voters away by depicting the polls as full of chaotic and illegal activity.
The other purpose of the false charges that Republican officials have made against MoveOn volunteers is to create a false and distorted record to assist them in any legal challenge they may mount in states with narrow margins of victory for John Kerry.
[b]... Electoral Vote Predictor 2004: Kerry 262 vs. Bush 261 ...[/b]
[b]Nov. 2 New polls:[/b] AR CA CO FL GA IL IA MI MN MO NV NH NJ NM NC OH PA SC WA WI
[b]Legend:[/b]
Blue - Strong Kerry (146) Light Blue - Weak Kerry (79) Blue Outline - Barely Kerry (37) White - Exactly tied (15) Red Outline - Barely Bush (56) Light Red - Weak Bush (48) Red - Strong Bush (157)
[b]Needed to win:[/b] 270
[u][b]News from the Votemaster[/b][/u]
Version 3.0. The main site has been upgraded with a very high-performance dual-processor server in addition to all the others. Nevertheless, if you are having trouble, try www.electoral-vote3,com, electoral-vote4.com, etc.
There was another attack this morning and that took some time to deal with. Remember that if the site is unreachable, try the backup sites: www.electoral-vote3.com through www.electoral-vote8.com. I will also update the site tonight as the actual results come in.
Furthermore I will also do a post-mortem on the election in the coming days, so check back later in the week. My special interest is how well the pollsters did. To see the current predictions broken down by pollster, see the Pollsters page and the pages for the battleground states, many of which have separate graphs per pollster. Now let's start with the pre-mortem.
Another bumper crop of polls, 47 in all. Five states changed since yesterday. A University of New Hampshire poll breaks the tie there and gives Kerry a 1% edge in New Hampshire 49% to 48%. According to Zogby, Kerry is also edging ahead in New Mexico, 51% to 48%.
Now come some controversial polls. Yesterday we had Kerry ahead in Ohio on the strength of a Gallup poll showing him 7% ahead there. Today we have a new Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll showing Kerry 3% ahead there Please don't send e-mail telling me what you think of Fox news. I'm pretty good at guessing, but I am trying very hard to be impartial. Tomorrow we'll know. Similarly, in Wisconsin a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll shows Kerry's 7% lead has vanished overnight and been replaced by Bush's 3% lead. Again, PLEASE no e-mail about this. Instead, come back tomorrow for the post-mortem. If you don't buy these numbers, add 30 to Kerry and subtract 30 from Bush to get Kerry 292, Bush 231.
Finally, Strategic Visionn (R) says New Jersey is a tie. Yesterday I had an Eagleton-Rutgers poll showing Kerry up by 8% and today there was a Quinnipiac University poll showing Kerry ahead by 5% in New Jersey. But the rule still holds: most recent poll wins, and that is Strategic Vision. If you don't like this result, award Kerry another 15 electoral.
Zogby has polled Bush's job approval/disapproval rating in several states. This is often a key indicator of how an incumbent will do in his reelection campaign. An approval score substantially below 50% is indicates trouble ahead. Here are the approval/disapproval scores in some key states. Colorado 46%/54%, Florida 46%/53%, Iowa 45%/55%, Minnesota 43%/56%, New Mexico 47%/53%, Nevada 49%/51%, Ohio 43%/49%, Pennsylvania 445/55% and Wisconsin 45%/55%.
[b]This forecast should make anybody[i] see [/i]the importance of their vote ... The outcome of the election will depend upon voter turn-out ... "We the People" must exercise our moral obligation and civic duty to cast our vote today ... Please encourage your family members, friends and neighbors to vote for John Kerry for President of the United States of America ...[/b]
"We want people to think 'terrorism' for the last four days," said a Bush-Cheney campaign official. "And anything that raises the issue in people's minds is good for us."
A senior GOP strategist added, "anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps Bush."
He called it "a little gift," saying it helps the President but doesn't guarantee his reelection.
Which has to remind one of this passage from Emmanuel Goldstein's [i]Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism[/i]:
George Orwell - 1984 (full text, online, free) - Part 2, Chapter 9: http://www.mondopolitico.com/... So long as they remain in conflict they prop one another up, like... sheaves of corn.... It is necessary that the war should continue everlastingly and without victory.... In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat.... But when war becomes literally continuous.... The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture.... But though it is unreal it is not meaningless...
[b]Bush Team Mixes Its Message On Bin Laden[/b]
On Friday – the same day Senate negotiators acknowledged an Intelligence Reform Bill based on the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission has been scuttled by the "Pentagon and its supporters" – al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden resurfaced with a new tape on American television. Within hours, Bush strategists and surrogates had flooded the airwaves, simultaneously denouncing any efforts to "politicize" the tape, even as they insisted bin Laden "obviously" wanted to defeat President Bush. So much for not sending "mixed messages." The Bush campaign's politically manipulative response to the tape may remind Americans of the Bush administration's own stumbling hunt for bin Laden, marred by inconsistency, political calculation and – as the tape illustrated – failure.
[b]STRATEGISTS SAY TAPE IS "LITTLE GIFT" FOR PRESIDENT:[/b] Privately, Bush strategists admitted they were elated by the tape. "We want people to think 'terrorism' for the last four days," a campaign official told the New York Daily News. A senior conservative strategist added, "anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps Bush. And anything that raises the issue in people's minds is good for us." He called the tape a "little gift" for the president. Read more about the GOP's politicization of National Security.
[b]GIULIANI SPINS BOTH WAYS:[/b] On this week's Meet the Press, Bush surrogate Rudolph Giuliani embodied the campaign's schizophrenic approach to the new tape. Just moments after opining the tape "should not be a partisan political issue," Giuliani pointed out that "that fact is, and if you want to be clear about the rest of the statement, bin Laden…certainly wants George Bush out of the White House." He went on to claim bin Laden "very much opposes George Bush." In fact, the tape said it didn't matter who won.
[b]PUNDITS STUMP FOR BUSH:[/b] Despite polls showing the airing of the tape has not helped President Bush, Media Matters catalogued 23 different media pundits and analysts on CNN and Fox, all of whom subscribed to the theory the tape aided the incumbent. Seven of those pundits, all – surprise! – on Fox News, implied bin Laden was actually campaigning for Kerry. On Friday, Fox host Neil Cavuto joked bin Laden might as well have been wearing a Kerry-Edwards "button" in the cave, while Peggy Noonan told Hannity & Colmes, "Do you think he wants George Bush to have a nice day on Tuesday? I don't think so."
[b]PLAYING POLITICS WITH OSAMA:[/b] Like his surrogates, President Bush has tailored his rhetoric on the threat posed by bin Laden depending on the political points he wants to score. Just weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Bush claimed he wanted Osama, "dead or alive." A few months later, when it became apparent Osama would prove an elusive target, the president sang a different tune, saying, "I don't know where [Osama] is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him... I truly am not that concerned about him." Osama became a hot issue again in the debates two weeks ago, causing Bush to deny his focus had slipped: "Gosh, I just don't think I ever said I'm not worried about Osama bin Laden."
[b]CHENEY'S EMPTY BOAST:[/b] Just last week Vice President Cheney got into the act, boasting about Osama bin Laden's recent low profile. "We haven't seen much of him," Cheney told Meet the Press. "You'll notice there haven't been any Bin Laden tapes running on the air where he's out broadcasting messages, frankly, because we think he's probably in a deep hole someplace, in hiding."
[b]AMERICA WASN'T THE PRIMARY AUDIENCE:[/b] In this morning's Slate, former National Security Council Director for Counterterrorism Daniel Benjamin provides insight into bin Laden's real target audience: Muslim viewers. First, no matter who wins on Nov. 2, bin Laden now will take credit for affecting the outcome. Second, it was a public relations maneuver: Osama used the video to link the United States to the plight of the Palestinians in the minds of the Muslim community, and to "justify his brand of terror and win over more Muslims to the jihadist cause." (For more on understanding the jihadist threat, read Defeating the Jihadists: A Blueprint for Action, http://www.tcf.org/4L/4LMain.... a new publication from The Century Foundation.)
[b]Surely "We the People" deserve better than [i]this[/i] ... Tomorrow we've got the opportunity to hold the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] accountable ... PLEASE VOTE!!! ...[/b]
Elected offices are not the only things up for grabs on Nov. 2. This year, 163 statewide measures qualified for the ballot and are helping to frame policy debates for the progressive community, distinguish candidates, increase voter turnout and, of course, reform state law. Essential issues are at stake – from minimum wage increases in Florida http://www.americanprogressac... and Nevada http://www.givenevadaaraise.c... to medical malpractice caps in Oregon http://www.ballot.org/states/... , Wyoming, Florida and Nevada, from renewable energy in Colorado http://www.renewableenergyyes... to employer provided health care and stem cell research in California.
[b]WHAT[i] YOU [/i]CAN DO???:[/b] Go to the [b]Ballot Initiative Strategy Center's Initiative and Referendum 2004 Election Preview[/b] http://www.ballot.org/pressro... for a comprehensive look at this year's initiative landscape. It provides a breakdown of all qualified measures by state, in-depth analysis of major initiative issues and trends, states to watch in this election, and an analysis of how this election compares to past years. And check out BISC's [b]In Your State Page[/b] http://www.ballot.org/states/... to find out what's on the ballot in your state. Another great resource is the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' special report http://www.cbpp.org/10-12-04s... on the fiscal implications of the state-level ballot measures. Also, if you're from Maine or Florida, go to the [b]American Progress Action Fund[/b] http://www.americanprogressac... to take immediate action in these states.
[b]"We the People" have a moral obligation and a civic duty to VOTE ... Please take the time to VOTE tomorrow, for the future of our country is at stake ... I urge you to VOTE for John Kerry for President of the United States of America ...[i] Every VOTE Counts!!! [/i]... It is[i] only [/i]if enough VOTERS VOTE [i]enmasse[/i] that we can [i]stop[/i] the neo-con, neo-fascists in the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] from stealing the election [i]again[/i]...[/b]
It's not even Election Day yet, and the Kerry-Edwards campaign is already down by a almost a million votes. That's because, in important states like Ohio, Florida and New Mexico, voter names have been systematically removed from the rolls and absentee ballots have been overlooked—overwhelming ly in minority areas, like Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, where Hispanic voters have a 500 percent greater chance of their vote being "spoiled." Investigative journalist Greg Palast reports on the trashing of the election.
[b]Greg Palast, contributing editor to [i]Harper's[/i] magazine, investigated the manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's [i]Newsnight[/i]. The documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his[i] New York Times [/i]bestseller, [u]The Best Democracy Money Can Buy[/u], has been released this month on DVD http://www.gregpalast.com/bff... .[/b]
John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been counted. He's also losing big time in Colorado and Ohio; and he's way down in Florida, though the votes won't be totaled until Tuesday night.
Through a combination of sophisticated vote rustling—ethnic cleansing of voter rolls, absentee ballots gone AWOL, machines that "spoil" votes—John Kerry begins with a nationwide deficit that could easily exceed one million votes.
[b]The Urge To Purge[/b]
Colorado Secretary of State Donetta Davidson just weeks ago removed several thousand voters from the state's voter rolls. She tagged felons as barred from voting. What makes this particularly noteworthy is that, unlike like Florida and a handful of other Deep South states, Colorado does not bar ex-cons from voting. Only those actually serving their sentence lose their rights.
There's no known, verified case of a Colorado convict voting illegally from the big house. Because previous purges have wiped away the rights of innocents, federal law now bars purges within 90 days of a presidential election to allow a voter to challenge their loss of civil rights.
To exempt her action from the federal rule, Secretary Davidson declared an "emergency." However, the only "emergency" in Colorado seems to be President Bush's running dead, even with John Kerry in the polls.
Why the sudden urge to purge? Davidson's chief of voting law enforcement is Drew Durham, who previously worked for the attorney general of Texas. This is what the Lone Star State's current attorney general says of Mr. Durham: He is, "unfit for public office... a man with a history of racism and ideological zealotry." Sounds just right for a purge that affects, in the majority, non-white voters.
From my own and government investigations of such purge lists, it is unlikely that this one contains many, if any, illegal voters.
But it does contain Democrats. The Dems may not like to shout about this, but studies indicate that 90-some percent of people who have served time for felonies will, after prison, vote Democratic. One suspects Colorado's Republican secretary of state knows that.
[b]Ethnic Cleansing Of The Voter Rolls[/b]
We can't leave the topic of ethnically cleansing the voter rolls without a stop in Ohio, where a Republican secretary of state appears to be running to replace Katherine Harris.
In Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), some citizens have been caught Registering While Black. A statistical analysis of would-be voters in Southern states by the watchdog group Democracy South indicates that black voters are three times as likely as white voters to have their registration requests "returned" (i.e., subject to rejection).
And to give a boost to this whitening of the voter rolls, for the first time since the days of Jim Crow, the Republicans are planning mass challenges of voters on Election Day. The GOP's announced plan to block 35,000 voters in Ohio ran up against the wrath of federal judges; so, in Florida, what appear to be similar plans had been kept under wraps until the discovery of documents called "caging" lists. The voters on the “caging” lists, disclosed last week by BBC Television London, are, almost exclusively, residents of African-American neighborhoods.
Such racial profiling as part of a plan to block voters is, under the Voting Rights Act, illegal. Nevertheless, neither the Act nor federal judges have persuaded the party of Lincoln to join the Democratic Party in pledging not to distribute blacklists to block voters on Tuesday.
[b]Absentee Ballots Go AWOL[/b]
It's 10pm: Do you know where your absentee ballot is? Voters wary about computer balloting are going postal: in some states, mail-in ballot requests are up 500 percent. The probability that all those votes—up to 15 million—will be counted is zip.
Those who mail in ballots are very trusting souls. Here's how your trust is used. In the August 31 primaries in Florida, Palm Beach Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore (a.k.a. Madame Butterfly Ballot) counted 37,839 absentee votes. But days before, her office told me only 29,000 ballots had been received. When this loaves-and-fishes miracle was disclosed, she was forced to recount, cutting the tally to 31,138.
Had she worked it the other way, disappearing a few thousand votes instead of adding additional ones, there would be almost no way to figure out the fix (or was it a mistake?). Mail-in voter registration forms are protected by federal law. Local government must acknowledge receiving your registration and must let you know if there's a problem (say, with signature or address) that invalidates your registration. But your mail-in vote is an unprotected crapshoot. How do you know if your ballot was received? Was it tossed behind a file cabinet—or tossed out because you did not include your middle initial? In many counties, you won't know.
And not every official is happy to have your vote. It is well-reported that Broward County, Fla., failed to send out nearly 60,000 absentee ballots. What has not been nationally reported is that Broward's elections supervisor is a Jeb Bush appointee who took the post only after the governor took the unprecedented step of removing the prior elected supervisor who happened be a Democrat.
[b]A Million Votes In The Electoral Trash Can [/b]
"If the vote is stolen here, it will be stolen in Rio Arriba County," a New Mexico politician told me. That's a reasoned surmise: in 2000, one in 10 votes simply weren't counted—chucked out, erased, discarded. In the voting biz, the technical term for these vanishing votes is "spoilage." Citizens cast ballots, but the machines don't notice. In one Rio Arriba precinct in the last go-'round, not one single vote was cast for president—or, at least, none showed up on the machines.
Not everyone's vote spoils equally. Rio Arriba is 73 percent Hispanic. I asked nationally recognized vote statistician Dr. Philip Klinkner of Hamilton College to run a "regression" analysis of the Hispanic ballot spoilage in the Enchanted State. He calculated that a brown voter is 500 percent more likely to have their vote spoiled than a white voter. And It's worse for Native Americans. Vote spoilage is epidemic near Indian reservations.
Votes don't spoil because they're left out of the fridge. It comes down to the machines. Just as poor people get the crap schools and crap hospitals, they get the crap voting machines.
It's bad for Hispanics; but for African Americans, it's a ballot-box holocaust. An embarrassing little fact of American democracy is that, typically, two million votes are spoiled in national elections, registering no vote or invalidated. Based on studies by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and the Harvard Law School Civil Rights project, about 54 percent of those ballots are cast by African Americans. One million black votes vanished—phffft!
There's a lot of politicians in both parties that like it that way; suppression of the minority is the way they get elected. Whoever is to blame, on Tuesday, the Kerry-Edwards ticket will take the hit. In Rio Arriba, Democrats have an eight-to-one registration edge over Republicans. Among African American voters...well, you can do the arithmetic yourself.
The total number of votes siphoned out of America's voting booths is so large, you won't find the issue reported in our self-glorifying news media. The one million missing black, brown and red votes spoiled, plus the hundreds of thousands flushed from voter registries, is our nation's dark secret: an apartheid democracy in which wealthy white votes almost always count, but minorities are often purged or challenged or simply not recorded. In effect, Kerry is down by a million votes before one lever is pulled, card punched or touch-screen touched.
... Today's Electoral Vote Predictor 2004: Kerry 298 vs. Bush 231 ... [Map of the USA] ...
[b]... Electoral Vote Predictor 2004: Kerry 298 vs. Bush 231 ...[/b]
[b]Nov. 1 New polls:[/b] AZ CO FL GA IN IA KY ME MI MN NV NM NC OH OK PA SC TN WA WI
[b]Legend:[/b]
Blue - Strong Kerry (91) Light Blue - Weak Kerry (139) Blue Outline - Barely Kerry (68) White - Exactly tied (9) Red Outline - Barely Bush (26) Light Red - Weak Bush (33) Red - Strong Bush (172)
I will stay up all night election night and update the site in real time. I am NOT promising to stay up until we know who the president is. I would definitely like to go to bed sometime during the month of October.
We have another bumper crop of polls today, 50 in all. Since Sept. 1, the total number of polls in the Polling data http://www.electoral-vote.com... file is 937. Toss in another 252 polls from May 24 to Aug. 31 and we have the most studied election in the history of the world. And what's the conclusion? Nobody knows. If we just look at the most recent poll in every state, John Kerry will be elected the 44th President of the United States tomorrow with 298 votes in the electoral college vs. 231 for George Bush, with New Mexico and New Hampshire exact ties. However, even if Bush carries both of these states, Kerry still wins 298 to 240. But again, a caution is in order, Kerry's margin is razor thin in Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio. Pennsylvania will probably go to Kerry. Ohio is more iffy. Bush won it in 2000 and stands a decent chance of winning it in 2004 although he trails by 2% using the average of the Zogby and Gallup polls taken Oct. 28-31. Thus after 4 years of campaigning, more money spent on attack ads than the gross national product of small countries, and an exhausted electorate, what do we have? In the immortal words of Yogi Berra: "It's deja vu all over again." The whole thing comes down to Florida. where Kerry currently holds a tenuous 48% to 47% lead according to the most recent poll, from Zogby. The reality is that everything depends on turnout, how many voting machines fail, and how much monkey business happens. Oh, yeah. And there are those 10,000 lawyers ready to do what lawyers are trained to do--file lawsuits.
If Bush picks up Florida and the two states that are tied (NH and NV), then Kerry wins 271 to 267, the same margin Gore should have lost by last time. Actually, he lost 271 to 266 because one Gore elector from D.C., Barbara Lett-Simmons cast a blank ballot in protest of D.C.'s not having representation in Congress. It could be to be a long night, especially if Bush picks up either Florida or Ohio and a couple of small Kerry states in the East or Midwest, so everything depends on New Mexico.
As I have discussed repeatedly, normally people with a cell phone but no landline are not polled. Most of these are in the 18-29 year old group. Up until now, no one has known how their absence from the polling data might affect the results. Zogby has now conducted a very large (N = 6039) poll exclusively on cell phones using SMS messaging to get a feeling of how they will vote. The results http://www.zogby.com/news/Rea... are that they go strongly for Kerry, 55% to 40%, with a margin of error of only 1.2%. If they all vote tomorrow, the pollsters are going to spend the rest of the week wiping egg from their faces. But historically, younger voters have a miserable turnout record, so the pollsters need not yet stock up on paper towels.
[b]Here are some things to remember about voting. Read carefully. Your vote could decide this election[/b].
1. Find out today where your polling place is by calling your county clerk or checking www.mypollingplace.com 2. Alternatively, call 1-866-MYVOTE1 to find your polling place. 3. Check the hours the polls are open with your city or county clerk. 4. Print the League of Women Voters' card in English or Spanish and put it in your wallet or purse. 5. Bring a government-issued picture ID like a driver's license or passport when you vote. Some states require it but if there are problems, you will certainly need it. If you have a cell phone, take it to call for help if need be. 6. As you enter the polls, note if there is an Election Protection person outside the polling place. 7. If you are not on listed as a registered voter, try to register on the spot. Some states allow that. Otherwise, talk to the Election Protection person if there is one or call 1-866-OUR-VOTE for instructions. If neither of these helps, ask for a provisional ballot, but you will need a picture ID to get one.
For other election resources, see the League of Women Voters website http://www.lwv.org/ . Your vote counts. Don't let anyone take it away from you.
For the longer term, we need voting machines we can trust. One group working on this is the Open voting consortium http://www.openvotingconsorti... . If you want to help ensure fair voting in 2006, check out their website.
[b]This optimistic forecast should[i] not [/i]make anybody complaisant ... The outcome of the election will depend upon voter turn-out ... "We the People" must exercise our moral obligation and civic duty to cast our vote on the 2nd November ... Please encourage your family members, friends and neighbors to vote for John Kerry for President of the United States of America ...[/b]
