Saratoga Spirit

Inside Baghdad's civil war

2007-01-15T20:07:00.000-05:00

Inside Baghdad's civil war
'The jihad now is against the Shias, not the Americans'

As 20,000 more US troops head for Iraq, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, the only correspondent reporting regularly from behind the country's sectarian battle lines, reveals how the Sunni insurgency has changed

Saturday January 13, 2007
The Guardian

An Iraqi man who was stopped by US troops while driving a car loaded with weapons in Ramadi, a Sunni-dominated area, is questioned by soldiers. Photograph: Chris Hondros/Getty Images

One morning a few weeks ago I sat in a car talking to Rami, a thick-necked former Republican Guard commando who now procures arms for his fellow Sunni insurgents.
Rami was explaining how the insurgency had changed since the first heady days after the US invasion. "I used to attack the Americans when that was the jihad. Now there is no jihad. Go around and see in Adhamiya [the notorious Sunni insurgent area] - all the commanders are sitting sipping coffee; it's only the young kids that are fighting now, and they are not fighting Americans any more, they are just killing Shia. There are kids carrying two guns each and they roam the streets looking for their prey. They will kill for anything, for a gun, for a car and all can be dressed up as jihad."

Rami was no longer involved in fighting, he said, but made a tidy profit selling weapons and ammunition to men in his north Baghdad neighbourhood. Until the last few months, the insurgency got by with weapons and ammunition looted from former Iraqi army depots. But now that Sunnis were besieged in their neighbourhoods and fighting daily clashes with the better-equipped Shia ministry of interior forces, they needed new sources of weapons and money.

He told me that one of his main suppliers had been an interpreter working for the US army in Baghdad. "He had a deal with an American officer. We bought brand new AKs and ammunition from them." He claimed the American officer, whom he had never met but he believed was a captain serving at Baghdad airport, had even helped to divert a truckload of weapons as soon as it was driven over the border from Jordan.

These days Rami gets most of his supplies from the new American-equipped Iraqi army. "We buy ammunition from officers in charge of warehouses, a small box of AK-47 bullets is $450 (£230). If the guy sells a thousand boxes he can become rich and leave the country." But as the security situation deteriorates, Rami finds it increasingly difficult to travel across Baghdad. "Now I have to pay a Shia taxi driver to bring the ammo to me. He gets $50 for each shipment."

The box of 700 bullets that Rami buys for $450 today would have cost between $150 and $175 a year ago. The price of a Kalashnikov has risen from $300 to $400 in the same period. The inflation in arms prices reflects Iraq's plunge toward civil war but, largely unnoticed by the outside world, the Sunni insurgency has also changed. The conflict into which 20,000 more American troops will be catapulted over the next few weeks is very different to the one their comrades experienced even a year ago.

In Baghdad in late October I called a Sunni insurgent I had known for more than a year. He was the mid-level commander of a small cell, active against the Americans in Sunni villages north of Baghdad. Sectarian frontlines had been hardening in the city for months - it took us 45 minutes of haggling to agree on a meeting place which we could both get to safely. We met in a rundown workers' cafe.

Kidnapped

"Its not a good time to be a Sunni in Baghdad," Abu Omar told me in a low voice. He had been on the Americans' wanted list for three years but I had never seen him so anxious; he had trimmed his beard in the close-cropped Shia style and kept looking towards the door. His brother had been kidnapped a few days before, he told me, and he believed he was next on a Shia militia's list. He had fled his home in the north of the city and was staying with relatives in a Sunni stronghold in west Baghdad.

He was more despondent than angry. "We Sunni are to blame," he said. "In my area some ignorant al-Qaida guys have been kidnapping poor Shia farmers, killing them and throwing their bodies in the river. I told them: 'This is not jihad. You can't kill all the Shia! This is wrong! The Shia militias are like rabid dogs - why provoke them?' "

Then he said: "I am trying to talk to the Americans. I want to give them assurances that no one will attack them in our area if they stop the Shia militias from coming."

This man who had spent the last three years fighting the Americans was now willing to talk to them, not because he wanted to make peace but because he saw the Americans as the lesser of two evils. He was wrestling with the same dilemma as many Sunni insurgent leaders, beginning to doubt the wisdom of their alliance with al-Qaida extremists.

Another insurgent commander told me: "At the beginning al-Qaida had the money and the organisation, and we had nothing." But this alliance soon dragged the insurgents and then the whole Sunni community into confrontation with the Shia militias as al-Qaida and other extremists massacred thousands of Shia civilians. Insurgent commanders such as Abu Omar soon found themselves outnumbered and outgunned, fighting organised militias backed by the Shia-dominated security forces.

A week after our conversation, Abu Omar invited me to a meeting with insurgent commanders. I was asked to wait in the reception room of a certain Sunni political party. A taxi driver took me to a house in a Sunni neighbourhood that had recently been abandoned by a Shia family. The driver came in with me - he was also a commander.

The house had been abandoned in a hurry, cardboard boxes were stacked by the door, some of the furniture was covered with white cloths and a few cheap paintings were piled against a wall. The property had been expropriated by the local Sunni mujahideen and we sat on sofas in a dusty reception room.

Abu Omar had been meeting commanders of groups with names like the Fury Brigade, the Battalions of the 1920 Revolution, the Islamic Army and the Mujahideen Army, to discuss options they had for fighting both an insurgency against the Americans and an escalating civil war with the Shia.

Abu Omar had proposed encouraging young Sunni men to enlist in the army and the police to redress the sectarian balance. He suggested giving the Americans a ceasefire, in an attempt to stop ministry of interior commandos' raids on his area. Al-Qaida had said no to all these measures; now he wanted other Iraqi insurgent commanders to support him.

'Do politics'

A heated discussion was raging. One of the men, with a very thin moustache, a huge belly and a red kuffiya wrapped around his shoulder, held a copy of the Qur'an in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. I asked him what his objectives were. "We are fighting to liberate our country from the occupations of the Americans and their Iranian-Shia stooges."

"My brother, I disagree," said Abu Omar. "Look, the Americans are trying to talk to us Sunnis and we need to show them that we can do politics. We need to use the Americans to fight the Shia."

He looked nervously at them: suggestions of talking to the Americans could easily have him labelled as traitor. "Where is the jihad and the mujahideen?" he continued. "Baghdad has become a Shia town. Our brothers are being slaughtered every day! Where are these al-Qaida heroes? One neighbourhood after another will be lost if we don't work on a strategy."

The taxi driver commander, who sat cross-legged on a sofa, joined in: "If the Americans leave we will be slaughtered." A big-bellied man waved his hands dismissively: "We will massacre the Shia and show them who are the Sunnis! They couldn't have done anything without the Americans' support."

When the meeting was over the taxi driver went out to check the road, then the rest followed. "Don't look up, we could be monitored, Shia spies are everywhere," said the big man. The next day the taxi driver was arrested.

By December Abu Omar's worst fears were being realised. The Sunnis had become squeezed into a corner fighting two sides at the same time. But by then he had disappeared; his body was never found.

Baghdad was now divided: frontlines partitioned neighbourhoods into Shia and Sunni, thousands of families had been forced out of their homes. After each large-scale bomb attack on Shia civilians, scores of mutilated bodies of Sunnis were found in the streets. Patrolling militias and checkpoints meant that men with Sunni names dared not venture far outside their neighbourhoods, while certain Sunni areas came under the complete control of insurgent groups the Shura Council of the Mujahideen and the Islamic Army. The Sunni vigilante self-defence groups took shape as reserve units under the control of these insurgent groups.

Like Abu Omar before him, Abu Aisha, a mid-level Sunni commander, had come to understand that the threat from the Shia was perhaps greater than his need to fight the occupying Americans. Abu Aisha fought in Baghdad's western Sunni suburbs, he was a former NCO in the Iraqi army and followed an extreme form of Islam known as Salafism.

Jamming

Deep lines criss-crossed his narrow forehead and his eyes half closed when he tried to answer a question He seemed to evaluate every answer before he spoke. He claimed involvement in dozens of attacks on US and Iraqi troops, mostly IEDs (bombs) but also ambushes and execution of alleged Shia spies. "We have stopped using remote controls to detonate IEDs," he volunteered halfway through our conversation. "Only wires work now because the Americans are jamming the signals."

On his mobile phone he proudly showed me grainy images of dead bodies lying in the street, their hands tied behind their backs . He claimed they were Shia agents and that he had killed them. "There is a new jihad now," he said, echoing Abu Omar's warning. "The jihad now is against the Shia, not the Americans."

In Ramadi there was still jihad against the Americans because there were no Shia to fight, but in Baghdad his group only attacked the Americans if they were with Shia army forces or were coming to arrest someone.

"We have been deceived by the jihadi Arabs," he admitted, in reference to al-Qaida and foreign fighters. "They had an international agenda and we implemented it. But now all the leadership of the jihad in Iraq are Iraqis."

Abu Aisha went on to describe how the Sunnis were reorganising. After Sunni families had been expelled from mixed areas throughout Baghdad, his area in the western suburbs was prepared to defend itself against any militia attack.

"Ameriya, Jihad, Ghazaliyah," he listed, "all these areas are becoming part of the new Islamic state of Iraq, each with an emir in charge." Increasingly the Iraqi insurgency is moving away from its cellular structure and becoming organised according to neighbourhood. Local defence committees have intertwined into the insurgent movement.

"Each group is in charge of a specific street," Abu Aisha said. "We have defence lines, trenches and booby traps. When the Americans arrive we let them go through, but if they show up with Iraqi troops, then it's a fight."

A few days later Rami was telling me about the Sunni insurgents in his north Baghdad area. A network of barricades and small berms blocked the streets around the car in which we sat talking. A convoy of two cars with four men inside whizzed past. "Ah, they are brothers on a mission," Rami said.

Like every man of fighting age, Rami was required to take part in his local vigilante group, guarding the neighbourhood at night or conducting raids or mortar attacks on neighbouring Shia areas.

But he paid $30 a week to a local commander and was exempted.

According to Rami and other commanders, funding for the insurgents comes from three sources. Each family in the street pays a levy, around $8, to the local group. "And when they go through lots of ammunition because of clashes," Rami said, "they pay an extra $5." Then there are donations from rich Sunni businessmen, financiers and wealthier insurgent groups. A third source of funding was "ghaniama", loot which is rapidly becoming the main fuel of the sectarian war

'A business'

"Every time they arrest a Shia, we take their car, we sell it and use the money to fund the fighters, and jihad," said Abu Aisha. The mosque sheik or the local commander collects the money and it is distributed among the fighters; some get fixed salaries, others are paid by "operations", and the money left is used for ammunition.

"It has become a business, they give you money to kill Shia, we take their houses and sell their cars," said Rami. "The Shia are doing the same.

"Last week on the main highway in our area, they killed a Shia army officer. He had a brand new Toyota sedan. The idiots burned the car. I offered them $40,000 for it, they said no. Imagine how many jihads they could have done with 40k."

· Names have been changed in this report.

Charter reform info on radio & TV

2006-11-01T22:52:00.000-05:00

Saratoga Springs residents: Do you have questions about the charter reform amendment on the ballot? Some TV programs are available on Channel 18 (public access). In addition, a live radio program on Saturday Nov. 4th 8-9 will have a panel discussion with caller questions concerning charter reform. Here are the details:

Thurs. Nov 2st , 3:00 to 3:30 pm on TimeWarner Ch 18: Good News & Real Facts on City Budgets and Charter Reform. Rick Thompson interviews former New York State budget director Mark Lawton about budget savings from Charter Reform. (Rebroadcast)

Sat. Nov. 4th, 8:00 to 9:00 am on Moon Radio, 1160 AM. Live on Saturday's radio show "The Senior Forum" we will have a panel discussion and take callers questions about the upcoming change in Saratoga's government. We will also be discussing Mike Lenz's recent flip-flop on the charter change and what his motives could have been.

Mon Nov 6th, 7:00 to 8:00 pm on TimeWarner Ch 18: Conversations on Good Government and Charter Reform. Moon Radio broadcasting personalities Rick Thompson and Lynn Goodness interview Saratoga Mayor Val Keehn, 2005 Charter Commission Member Pat Kane, and 2006 Charter Commission Member Rory O'Connor on Charter Reform.

For additional information: Move Saratoga Forward

Belive and Blame

2006-10-02T11:41:00.000-04:00

09.25.2006
Belive and Blame
Justin Frank
Huffington Post

George W. Bush is an untreated alcoholic. There can be no medical or psychiatric doubt about that. But it is not only President Bush who shows typical characteristics of what AA calls the "dry drunk" syndrome; his inner circle, which includes many in the media, behaves like the typical family of a dysfunctional drinker.

Such families live in constant fear - often masked by denial and bravado - that their alcoholic father will start drinking again if he is under too much stress. And one major stress that untreated alcoholics cannot deal with is criticism. They become defensive immediately, before attacking or hiding. And their family moves into high-gear protection mode.

Whenever things get tough for the Bush administration they use the same strategy - blame Bill Clinton. This is the strategy that will emerge in response to the classified National Intelligence Estimate report that found that the Bush-led Iraq war has invigorated Islamic radicalism and worsened the global terrorist threat. I'm waiting for bumper stickers to appear saying "Blame Bill".

This behavior of blaming anyone but dad is so typical and predictable that it shouldn't be surprising to those who are members of such families, or those who have alcoholic friends. What concerns me is that the media is once again shielding Bush.

In response to the intelligence report, Senator Ted Kennedy said,
"How many more independent reports, how many more deaths, how much deeper into civil war will Iraq need to fall for the White House to wake up and change its strategy in Iraq?"

I think the damning report matters not, and the White House will keep its same two-fold strategy: continue to occupy Iraq by force, since Bush's "beliefs" trump his own government's intelligence; and repeatedly blame Bill Clinton for whatever bad news comes its way.

Find out the facts about charter reform

2006-10-02T11:38:00.000-04:00

Find out the facts about charter reform at these events:

October 3, 2006: 7pm Get the Facts series. Library Community Room (commission members will speak and answer questions)
October 5, 2006: 7:30 pm Interlaken presentation (commission chair Beth Hershenhart will speak and answer questions)
October 12, 2006: 7pm Get the Facts series. Library Community Room (commission members will speak and answer questions)
October 19, 2006: 7pm Get the Facts series. City Hall 3rd floor (commission members will speak and answer questions)
October 25, 2006: 7PM Get the Facts series. Library Community Room (commission members will speak and answer questions)

Sweeney: One of the 20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress

2006-09-28T09:17:00.000-04:00

Sweeney: One of the 20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress
Beyond Delay

Rep. John Sweeney (R-NY)

John Sweeney is a fourth-term Congressman representing the 20th district of New York. His ethics issues stem from a ski trip to New York, the exchange of legislative assistance for campaign contributions and the hiring of his wife as a campaign fundraiser.

Misuse of public funds to pay for a trip to New York

Rep. Sweeney invited 53 people to join him from January 6-9, 2006, for a “Congressional Winter Challenge” at the Lake Placid Olympic facilities. There, Rep. Sweeney and his guests enjoyed pretending to be Olympic athletes by participating in events including skiing, bobsledding and hockey, all paid for with New York taxpayer dollars. The trip appears to violate several provisions of the House gift and travel rules, including the prohibition on recreational travel.

Relationship with National Marine Manufacturers Association

In May 2006, Rep. Sweeney introduced the Boating Safety Tax Incentive Act, legislation that the National Marine Manufacturers Association (NMMA) strongly supported and even helped draft, allowing boat manufacturers to supply new boats with free safety equipment, including up-to-date lifejackets, in exchange for a tax deduction. In apparent exchange, NMMA’s PAC has supported Rep. Sweeney and contributed to his campaign committee for the past three years. In the 2006 election cycle alone, NMMA donated $4,500 to Rep. Sweeney, making him the third highest recipient of contributions from NMMA’s PAC. Additionally, NMMA has hosted fundraisers for Rep. Sweeney on its luxurious yacht, raising a total of $12,150. If Rep. Sweeney received campaign donations in return for campaign contributions he may have violated federal bribery and honest services fraud as well as violated House rules.

Employment of Spouse Gayle Ford

Rep. Sweeney has hired his wife’s firm to fundraise for his campaign, despite the fact that she has no fundraising experience and appears to have no other clients. She receives a 10% commission on the money she brings in, the campaign paid her $42,570 during the 2004-2005 election cycle, and as of April 2006, she received $30,879 for the current election cycle. Notably, records show that Rep. Sweeney has had a fundraising consultant on monthly retainer since June of 2004, who is paid $8,583 a month. The facts suggest that Rep. Sweeney is converting campaign funds to personal use in violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act and House rules.

Son Avoids Jail

Rep. Sweeney’s son, John, brutally beat another teenager, but avoided jail for his offense. The ethics committee should investigate whether the young man received special treatment because of his father’s position in violation of House rules.

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The Potential Collapse of Oil Prices Makes Restraint of Gasoline Consumption Key to Controlling CO2 Emissions

2006-09-25T13:01:00.000-04:00

09.25.2006
The Potential Collapse of Oil Prices Makes Restraint of Gasoline Consumption Key to Controlling CO2 Emissions
Raymond J. Learsy
Huffington Post

We are all becoming well aware of the dangers of an impending and catastrophic climate crisis. The State of California, only recently with bipartisan cooperation, passed laws committing to sharp reductions CO2 emissions. So too have some 295 American cities. Al Gore has warned that we are near the tipping point of climatic catastrophe.

The "Scientific American" has published a prominently featured article recently, whose lead sentence is "The debate on global warming is over." There is a growing consensus throughout the land that emergency solutions are needed. That we owe forceful action now to the planet, and to future generations.
Yet there is rarely a balanced discussion on the issue of automobile fossil fuel emissions, perhaps the most serious CO2 contaminant extant. Yes, there are a plethora of solutions put forward from downsizing our cars, to switching to bio-fuels, hydrogen powered engines, electric powered and hybrid vehicles, and on. All of which will take time, years perhaps, before they have a serious impact. But never or at least rarely ever, has there been a serious discussion on curtailing the availability of gasoline and thereby moderating our driving habits almost overnight. Why is this issue taboo? We did it during World War II, successfully, and with a great sense of shared purpose.

The issue of constricting gasoline consumption is now becoming urgent. We are all well aware that gasoline consumption has been somewhat curtailed by the recent high price of gasoline. Crude oil is the largest component by far, in the construct of gasoline prices. And the price of crude oil has been falling sharply.

In the last four weeks the price of crude oil has fallen some $18/barrel from over $78/bbl to just shy of $60/bbl, its steepest dollar decline in fifteen years. The price of gasoline has inched down correspondingly. Lower prices of gasoline clearly encourage greater consumption, and in turn result in greater CO2 emissions.

Consider the following. When natural gas prices were escalating we were forever advised
that crude oil's price increases were simply keeping in tandem with the direction of natural gas
prices. Yes, they are different markets, but that they are fundamentally energy components, made the argument persuasive.

Last December the price of natural gas touched an all time high of $15.78 per million British Thermal Units. Last Friday the closing price for natural gas was under $5.00 per mBtu. This represents a retracement in price of over two thirds from last December's highs. An equivalent percentage drop in crude oil prices would bring the price of crude to $26/bbl, not far from where they were over three years ago.

Will the price of oil drop in the same magnitude as it has for natural gas. I do not know. Certainly the fallout from the Amaranth and MotherRock Hedge Fund implosions forced significant selling in natural gas on the commodity markets. As regards oil, who knows whether there are not similar positions that yet need to be liquidated. Or whether there are hedge funds out there who played the contango card (betting that prices will be significantly higher in the future- an enormously successful trade over the past few years) having purchased physical spot crude oil at prevailing prices and storing the oil in the hope of cashing in on the contango premium. Instead they may now be faced with the prospect of being forced to sell in a steeply declining market.

And then there are other anecdotal issues. China in past months has been importing less oil on a monthly basis than a year ago. OPEC, with a production quota of 28 million barrel/ day is shipping on average some 500,000 barrels/day less, not out of cleverness but simply because there are no takers. Distillate stocks, which include heating oil and diesel, are at their highest levels in seven years (when the price of oil was around $20 barrel). Gasoline supplies are 6.4 percent higher than a year ago. Crude oil inventories are in their upper range for this time of the year and well ahead of their five year average. And the economy appears to be slowing.

We have been so brainwashed that the above scenarios had become virtually unthinkable. I still remember late last year, and in January, CNBC trotting out industry analyst after industry analyst predicting $20 per mBtu gas or higher by end of last winter (by the way, where are the post mortems to those predictions). The conditioning by the media, the oil companies, the oil industry associations and their PR campaigns, by OPEC propagandists and their disinformation, by the peak oil cheerleaders, has been such that the thought of a major retrenchment in the price of oil has been practically expunged from our dialogue.

Will oil prices go the way of natural gas? Again I say I don't know. Certainly OPEC will do all it can to impede a significant erosion of prices. Whether they can hold the line in a well supplied market remains to be seen. But the important thing here is that it may happen, and with it a steep decline in the price of gasoline as well as the price of distillates. All of which is not bad except as it impacts our consumption of these products. Low prices will encourage greater consumption of fossil fuels and a laxness in the impetus and steps we are beginning to take to wean ourselves away from our addiction to oil.

To protect our environment, for reasons of national security, for reasons of economic rationality and self reliance we need to kick our addiction to fossil fuels for once and for all, whether the price of oil is high or low. And much better that the price be as low as possible, especially as regards our national security and our economic well being.

High prices for crude oil are in the interests of the oil companies, their hangers on and the national producers, i.e. OPEC and its adherents such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela among others.

But we need to prepare for low prices and for that reason we need to have a plan in place to cap
our consumption of gasoline and to bring it ever lower as alternative fuels and solutions take hold. In my Post "Breaking Oil's Price, Curtailing Gas Consumption, Regaining our Self Respect" 08/14/06, I had proposed a voucher program which I felt was fairer than a gas tax. Perhaps we need an emissions tax. Perhaps a straight rationing program, perhaps a combination of all these and others. But most of all we need leadership!

A very personal opinion. The only one I see out there who has enough passion and commitment on this issue, and who appears willing to take on the vested interests both in government and industry to truly effect change is Al Gore. Now the big question. Does he care enough to put himself on the line to achieve high office where together with the bully pulpit and the political clout inherent in the Presidency he could actually take in hand our addled dependency and lead us out of our increasingly ominous wilderness?

Charter Reform Fundraiser in Saratoga Springs

2006-09-15T12:52:00.000-04:00

Move Saratoga Forward is having a fundraiser on September 21st at The Inn at Saratoga from 5:30-7:30. Cash bar. Join Us! Please show your support! All donations welcome. What is Move Saratoga Forward? Move Saratoga Forward is a nonpartisan, nonprofit political action committee. Its mission is to support the charter reform proposal that Mayor Keehn's commission prepares and to help educate city voters so that they will understand – and support – this charter when it appears on the ballot in November 2006. We are Democrats and Republicans working together out of a love for our great city. Our goal is to enhance and modernize the city's government – and the government's ability to address the challenges the city faces. City services – and the quality of those services – will remain unchanged. If anything, they will be improved because of greater government accountability. What will change is the city's ability to address issues such as parking, truck traffic, affordable housing, open space, a recreation center, and cutting red tape.

For more information --- and facts not attacks --- about the charter reform --- go to movesaratogaforward.com.

Most cities in New York changed away from the commissioner form of government 50 or 60 years ago. Today only Saratoga Springs and Mechanicville retain this outdated structure. There are several hidden costs of the commission form of government, including how much the city has spent to defend law suits brought about by such matters as last year's public safety debacle involving Deputy Commissioner Erin Dreyer. The examples of other cities, such as Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that have made similar transitions, is that this charter will save Saratoga Springs residents money. In 1995 the City’s total operating budget was $16 million. Ten years later – in 2004 – it was over $29 million, up 80%. Today it is over $32 million. Why? There is currently no system of checks and balances to rein in spending. The proposed charter will change this.

Examining Bush in August

2006-08-29T09:01:00.000-04:00

08.23.2006
Examining Bush in August
Justin Frank
Huffington Post

It is still August, and therefore not too late for President Bush to have the second half of his medical check-up: psychological testing. After his press conference on Monday in which he kept talking about finishing the job while attacking Democrats for wanting an exit strategy, Bush showed even more telltale signs of a particular kind of mental disturbance which medical professionals call thought disorder.

He may be physically fit to do the job, despite his five pound weight gain. But he is not mentally fit - at least not until he is pronounced so by a group of examining psychiatrists who must do a thorough mental status exam as well as a battery of psychological tests, with special emphasis on his relationship to reality.
I had always felt that his inability to respond to crisis, as seen in his response to 9/11 and Katrina and Israel's bombing of Lebanon, was because he suffered from something called affective flooding, where overwhelming anxiety paralyzes any ability to think or even function. Such a response is similar to denial but writ large. Those who observe the president at such moments - thanks to smuggled film clips and his historic April 2004 press conference when he was asked if he had made any mistakes as president - see that he starts rapid blinking movements before his eyes glaze over and become almost fixed in a blank, mindless stare. This massive disconnection from inner self and outer world is called "splitting."

But his most recent press conference (August 21, 2006) showed that when he is in control he is not flooded in this way. Rather, his splitting takes the form of hatred of reality. I use the term hatred purposefully. When he was pushed by a few increasingly frustrated reporters, he behaves like the untreated alcoholic he is - summarily dismissing material reality.

When offered a chance to re-think the Iraq war he becomes obstreperous, using sarcasm to both mask and express his internal rage at being challenged. When back in control he patronizes members of what he calls the "Democrat" party, saying that they are "good people" and that he doesn't question their patriotism. In control he is a poor man's Cicero, saying what he's not going to say anyway. Reading between the lines, he calls his critics quitters.

All of this behavior is in the service of defending himself against reality - something he actively hates. At times, his attempts to ward off reality make him appear stupid. He is not. Rather, internal and external realities are too threatening for him to face. When asked whether he had been surprised or frustrated by all the bad news from Baghdad he didn't even understand the question. This is because the very act of facing such questions threatens to destroy his tenaciously held preconceptions. This he cannot risk; he employs various coping mechanisms to attack such questions in any way he can. Instead of acknowledging personal frustration he said that the war must be frustrating for the national psyche. But his hatred of reality required a more violent approach - the day after his conference he sent more of those poor marines back into a world of horror.

His ability to dismiss reality is profound - more than the simple method used by his mother Barbara, who said she wasn't going to watch the TV news during the war because watching body bags would spoil her "beautiful mind". No, he has a rugged inner strength - unless confronted by surprise - that enables him to dismiss and destroy personal perception.

His mental pulse needs to be taken, not just his physical one. I think that what prevents his doctors from doing so is their fear of what they'd find. Without such an examination, we are left with no medical terms to describe his mental functioning, his private global war on terror which extends to attacks on his own capacity to perceive reality. I have not examined the President, so it is not proper for me to offer a diagnosis. However, my observations lead me to believe that he is psychotic.

Two Congressional Experts Explain What Has Gone Very Wrong With Congress

2006-08-23T08:32:00.000-04:00

Two Congressional Experts Explain What Has Gone Very Wrong With Congress
By JOHN W. DEAN
FindLaw
Friday, Aug. 11, 2006
Congress is out of order. In the words of two of the most knowledgeable experts in the nation on the legislative branch, "it is broken." This conclusion is not the judgment of out-of-power partisans: Thomas E. Mann, the Senior Fellow in Government Studies at the Brookings Institute, and Norman J. Ornstein, a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, have been studying - and working with and for - Congress since 1969.

Mann and Ornstein are hands-on political scientists who have been in Washington, and immersed in the workings of Congress, for almost four decades. Regardless of who runs Congress, they will continue their work. But during the last decade, they have grown "dismayed at the course of Congress." Although the deterioration began while the Democrats were still in control, it has, under the Republicans, accelerated and approached crisis dimensions. And a dysfunctional Congress affects our democracy profoundly.

On behalf of the institution to which they have devoted their professional lives, Mann and Ornstein are now speaking out, in The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How To Get It Back On Track (Oxford University Press). I mentioned their book briefly, prior to publication, in an earlier column; now, it has been released, and it is excellent. Its timing is fortunate too, as Congressional elections will be held this November. If only Americans would listen to what the authors have to say.

Their book is not long, yet it is remarkably comprehensive. Mann and Ornstein examine both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but for purposes of this column, I'll focus on the House.

An Overview of the Problems with Today's House of Representatives

"Over a decade of Republican control, the House went from shrill opposition to a Democratic president, culminating in his impeachment, to reflexive loyalty to a Republican president, including an unwillingness to conduct tough oversight of executive programs or assert congressional prerogatives vis-à-vis the presidency - on matters ranging from the accessibility of critical information to war-making," Mann and Ornstein write.

The House's current refusal to check its same-party President is only one of many problems the authors describe. Even more basically, they note, the House has become "an institution that has strayed far from its deliberative roots and a body that does not live up to the aspiration envisioned for it by the framers." This fact has serious consequences because "[b]ad process leads to bad policy - and often can lead to bad behavior, including ethical lapses."

This, in fact, is precisely what has occurred. Consider legislative fiascos, like the way representatives broke House rules to twist arms to vote for Medicare changes that benefit special interests. Or consider the embarrassing and improper intervention by Congress into the end-of-life care controversy regarding brain-damaged Terri Schiavo. Or think of energy legislation that takes better care of energy producers than consumers. The list is long and unpleasant, for these are only few examples....

Losing our Democracy to the "New Authoritarians"

2006-08-20T08:58:00.000-04:00

Mark Green
Huffington Post

08.17.2006
Losing our Democracy to the "New Authoritarians"
READ MORE: 9/11, Wal-Mart, Iraq, CIA, James Dobson, Supreme Court, Homeland Security, Global Warming, George W. Bush
With today's federal court ruling that Bush's domestic spying program is unconstitutional, here's the first of a two-part commentary from Mark's new book, Losing Our Democracy: How Bush, the Far Right and Big Business are Betraying Americans for Power and Profit.

"Democracy can come undone. It's not something that's necessarily going to last forever once it's been established."-- Sean Wilentz in The Rise of American Democracy.

Much has been written about Bush's war for democracy abroad, but how much have you read about his war against democracy at home?
Just as the last half of the twentieth century saw a quadrupling of the number of democracies--just as, in Professor John Gaddis's view, "the world came closer than ever before to reaching a consensus that only democracy confers legitimacy."--the greatest democracy ever is being assaulted by a group of "new authoritarians" in Congress, the courts, corporations and the clergy. And leading their war on democracy is a president lauding its virtues.

President Bush does not wake up everyday wondering how to sabotage democracy. But the issue is not his intent but his actions. And connecting the dots of Bush's presidential actions reveals a clear and present danger to our constitutional traditions. While we surely haven't lost our democracy, we are now only another Bush-like presidency, another couple of Tom Coburn's in the Senate, another couple of Justice Scalia's away from losing our democracy. That's not alarmist, only descriptive.

For while there is no Great Depression or 9/11 heralding the disaster, we are moving away from rather than toward the far horizon of a better democracy. Consider five key areas:

What Rule of Law? This government invades a country contrary to the UN charter, condones torture, outs a CIA operative, ignores warrants for wiretaps, selectively leaks classified information for partisan gain, rounds up thousands of American Muslims without evidence, incarcerates hundreds at Guantánamo without charges or lawyers, and asserts the power to ignore hundreds of duly enacted laws because of an unending war on terror--and then Bush urges the world to follow his devotion to "the rule of law."

Bush views the law as largely an extension of politics, a means to an end, a speed bump to be overcome. So when he was asked about the legality of his invasion of Iraq, he sarcastically answered, "Is it legal? Oh my, I'd better call my lawyer." For 200 years after Marbury v. Madison, courts had the final say on interpreting laws and the Constitution. Then Bush aides made up a theory called the "unitary executive"--and the President in effect said that he could veto laws after signing them into law. Why? "We're at war." But a) the constitution makes the president the commander-in-chief of the military, not the country and b) since this is a war without end, the "unitary executive" is euphemism for authoritarianism.

It took the United States Supreme Court--seven of whose nine members were appointed by Republican presidents--to remind Bush that the rule of law is not a means but an end in itself. "A state of war," wrote Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, "is not a blank check for the president."

A Democracy without Voters. By the gauge of turnout, America is in the bottom fifth of democracies in the world. Compare our 48 percent average turnout of eligible voters in presidential years to Cambodia's 90 percent, Austria's 85 percent, Western Europe's 77 percent, Eastern Europe's 68 percent. If there were a World Bank category called "democracy poverty," the U.S. would be a candidate for massive international charity.

In most states, cumbersome and antiquated rules suppress the vote. The law requires that hundreds of 18 year-old graduates each find their way from high school to an election board--instead of having one election board representative go to each high school. And shutting the window for registration 30 days before an election, just when voters become aware of a contest, is foolish.

Local operatives often suppress the vote in technical or obviously discriminatory ways. Republican Ohio officials put too few voting machines in low-income Democratic precincts in November 2004, causing hours long lines and voters leaving before voting. Someone put up signs in African-American areas of Cuyahoga County telling Democrats that a) if anyone in their family voted illegally they would lose their children and b) they couldn't vote if they hadn't paid their utility bills. The spirit behind these absurd warnings was openly admitted by Michigan Republican representative John Pappageorge in 2004 when he said, "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election cycle."

One way some Southern states do this under color of law is felony disenfranchisement laws. Even though they've paid their "debt to society," ex-cons can't vote, which means that a third of black men in Alabama are excluded. Felony disenfranchisement laws are essentially another way to spell Jim Crow.

Corporate Sway. They can foreclose on our homes, decide whether we have life-saving surgery, hire or fire us, effectively shutter small towns, and decisively influence legislation. "They" are not official government, but rather the private governments called corporations.

Charles Lindblom's observation in Politics and Markets in 1971 has even more relevance today, when Wal-Mart alone has more employees than Wyoming has residents: "The large corporation fits oddly into democratic theory and vision. Indeed, it does not fit."

Not since the Gilded Age when wealthy businessmen essentially appointed U.S. Senators (before direct elections) has big business held such sway in America and Washington. An ocean of corporate lobbyists has overwhelmed the levees of power in Congress and drowned consumers and workers below sea level who couldn't flee. Nearly every proposal or law of Bush 43--from cutting job training programs, eroding the minimum wage, reversing ergonomic standards, cutting taxes on the rich and social programs for the poor--contribute to the tilt from labor to capital. And recall Phil Cooney, who came from the American Petroleum Institute to the White House where he dictated the policy that global warming was unproven, before returning to ExxonMobil.

As a result, George Bush is redistributing the wealth far more than George McGovern ever dreamed of, except up rather than down. There may be no exact point when the concentration of income and wealth becomes so extreme as to be undemocratic, but it's certainly odd when the head of ExxonMobil earned $368 million in a year, or more per hour than his workers earned per year.

Congressional Tyranny. The legislature of the world's greatest democracy is not democratic. Not even close.

First, since money rather than merit so often determines elections--and since political redistricting means few competitive elections in any event--Congressional incumbents predictably listen more to donors than to voters.

Second, the rules of this Republican Congress have essentially eliminated Democrats from our democracy. "For my purposes," said an aide to the Republican leadership, "they're irrelevant." In the House, Speaker Hastert will only schedule a bill for a vote if it has a "majority of the majority" and will hold a vote open for as many hours as necessary to secure--or importune or bribe--his way to a majority.

Third, Congress is failing its checks-and-balances function by essentially becoming a West Wing of the White House. Its "oversight" function has become literal, as Executive Branch blunders and scandals go unexamined. Hence, there are no serious hearings into a) how Bush administration incompetence pre-9/11 allowed that attack to occur, b) the willful misuse of intelligence pre-9/11, c) how the employment of so many National Guard troops have compromised homeland security, d) the level of torture in Iraq, e) the cost of the Medicare prescription drug benefit. Congress was not always such a puppy-dog: during WWII and the Vietnam war, Senators Truman and Fulbright respectively held hearings critical of these war efforts.

Religious McCarthyism. The founding fathers understood that the "establishment clause" in the very first amendment both protected government from religious intolerance and religion from government interference. That is, pluralism is patriotic, allowing all to practice their religion free from the kind of interference the original American settlers fled.

This is something today's far religious (f)right profoundly misunderstands. From radicals like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell outside of government to Tom Coburn within--his office said he'd like to impeach and imprison the judges who ruled against Terry Schiavo's parents--these people seek an American theocracy where democratic dissent is deemed sacrilegious. We're not talking about a few kooks but religious power houses who can speed-dial White House decision-makers. Indeed, when Gary Bauer was asked who the head of the Religious Right was in America, he answered, "President Bush."

The results of this marriage are both profound and pathetic: stem cell research is thwarted, and the National Parks Service issues brochures at the Grand Canyon challenging the scientific consensus about the age of the canyon in favor of a "young earth" great-flood interpretation.

Extremism posturing as democracy may be shocking, but it's not surprising, not if one thinks about Bush's philosophy, experience, and base. He himself comes out of hierarchical CEO background where Ayn Rand heroes pronounce policy from Olympus, damn the consequences and shareholders. Half his base are radical Religious Rightists, who are accustomed to demanding fealty to divine or priestly pronouncements, parishioners and the poor be damned. Such business and religious leaders are accustomed to governing by catechism not collaboration, by standards far closer to autocracy than democracy. When Bush said "I am the decider" in response to a question about Rumsfeld and Iraq, he was betraying his true view of the democratic conversation.

One more ingredient added to this stew makes it unusually toxic. Bush uses the catastrophe of 9/11 as a license to engage in all kinds of illegal or unprecedented behavior. But awful as that day was, 9/11 is not more important than the U.S. Constitution and over two hundred years of democratic progress. We can't allow that horror to license a group of phony patriots to trample on the values of our flag far more than a few fools who annually burn it.

It can happen here.

Politicos beware: You live in YouTube's world

2006-08-18T12:34:00.000-04:00

August 18, 2006 edition

Politicos beware: You live in YouTube's world
By Linda Feldmann
The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON – S.R. Sidarth never imagined his 15 minutes of fame would come from a sleepy campaign stop in the southwest Virginia town of Breaks. Or that his handiwork with a camcorder would catapult to the list of most-watched videos on the Web's most-trafficked video site. Or that The Washington Post would devote an entire article to exploring exactly what to call the 20-year-old college student's hairstyle - a mohawk or a mullet? (Answer: neither.)
Sen. George Allen (R) of Virginia also surely never imagined that the young man assigned to track his campaign appearances would cause him days of grief, simply by recording a comment that critics have called "racist" or, at best, "insensitive."

But in the brave new world of YouTube politics, almost anything is possible. And just 18 months after its launch, the website is already playing an integral role in campaigns.

Supporters of Ned Lamont, the Democratic upstart who beat Sen. Joseph Lieberman in the Connecticut primary Aug. 8, discovered that by capturing funny, embarrassing, and otherwise telling campaign moments on video and posting them on YouTube, they could reach voters in a way that's far more entertaining than over-the-top rants by bloggers.

Anyone familiar with the Mentos-and-cola phenomenon - put the candy in the soda and watch it explode - has probably already visited YouTube. But for the uninitiated, YouTube is a free site that allows people to post, watch, and share video clips. By plugging in keywords, as with search engines, users can easily find topics of interest. The searchability is key....

The Democrats Mean Business: Washington needs an entrepreneurial approach

2006-08-16T16:12:00.000-04:00

CAMPAIGN 2006

The Democrats Mean Business: Washington needs an entrepreneurial approach

BY NED LAMONT
WSJ
Wednesday, August 16, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

In the past week, my victory in the Connecticut Senate primary has been labeled everything from the death knell of the Democratic Party to the signal of our party's rebirth. Beneath all of this punditry is a question that I want to face directly: how the experience I will bring to the U.S. Senate will help Connecticut and the Democratic Party during this time of testing for our country.

I ran at a time when people said "you can't beat a three-term incumbent," because I believed that President Bush, enabled by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, had weakened our country at home and abroad. We're weaker economically, because we're more dependent on foreign energy and foreign capital. Our national security has also been weakened, because we stopped fighting a real war on terror when we made the costly and counterproductive decision to go to war in Iraq.

My confidence that Connecticut was ready for a real debate and a real choice this year was founded not only on current events but also past experience. It was my career in business that shaped my outlook, and helped prepare me to run the race I did.

In 1984, with a loan from People's Bank, I started Campus TeleVideo from scratch. Our offer was unique: Rather than provide a one-size-fits-all menu of channels, we let the customers design their cable system based on the character of the community being served.
From the moment I filled out that loan application, I've been in every part of the business--pulling cable, hiring workers, picking a good health-care plan, closing deals, listening to customers and fixing problems. It's been profitable, and it's been instructive, a quintessentially American experience. Here, entrepreneurs have the freedom to be successful in ways the rest of the world admires.

These defining lessons of my business experience are central in my campaign: identifying the challenges that face our state and offering real solutions. Something clearly worked, because the voters decided to do what our Founding Fathers envisioned; they put their trust not in a career politician but in a concerned citizen and experienced businessman who promises to rock the boat down in Washington.

Here are the four lessons of my business life that I talked about every day on the campaign trail, and that have resonated with Connecticut Democrats:

• First, entrepreneurs are frugal beasts, because the bottom line means everything. In Connecticut, voters are convinced that Washington has utterly lost touch with fiscal reality. We talked about irresponsible budget policies that have driven the annual federal deficit above $300 billion and the debt ceiling to $9 trillion. Meanwhile, the government is spending $250 million a day on an unprovoked war in Iraq while starving needed social investment at home. I am a fiscal conservative and our people want their government to be sparing and sensible with their tax dollars.

• Second, entrepreneurs invest in human resources. Our business strives to pay good wages and provide good health benefits so that we can attract employees that give us an edge in a competitive marketplace. Well-trained and well-cared-for people are essential for every business these days, particularly in a global economy. It's getting harder and harder for American businesses to compete on price, but we innovate and change better than any economy on the planet. The quality of our work force is one of America's competitive advantages--if our education system fails our children and our employers, we'll lose the future.

That's why I talked about my work as a volunteer teacher in the Bridgeport public schools, which can't afford to be open later than 2:30 p.m., schools that send children home to an empty house. That's why my campaign offered a strong alternative to standardized tests and No Child Left Behind. That's why I believe in an employer-based health-care system that covers everyone, and providing tax benefits to small businesses so they can provide insurance without risking bankruptcy.

• Third, in a market-driven economy, entrepreneurs can never lose touch with what customers, suppliers and workers are saying. A great strength of our campaign is that we embraced the grassroots and netroots, suburbs and inner cities, and used the most advanced technology to empower our door-knockers and activists. We listened hard and respectfully to what voters told us, and gave them the confidence to trust someone new.

• Finally, entrepreneurs are pragmatic. Unlike some politicians, we don't draw a false strength from closed minds, and we don't step on the accelerator when the car is headed off the cliff.

By every available metric, the "stay the course" strategy in Iraq is not a winning strategy. Changing course is neither extreme nor weak; it is essential for our national security.

We start with the strongest, best-trained military in the world, and we'll keep it that way. But here's how we'll get stronger by changing course. We must work closely with our allies and treat the rest of the world with respect. We must implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission and put in place real protections for ports, airports, nuclear facilities and public transit.

Good judgment is an essential part of good governance. But we're bogged down in Iraq, and hamstrung in the war against terror, by leaders who lacked judgment, historical perspective, openness to other cultures and plain old common sense. We offer something different.
But in the final analysis, the results of this election say less about me, and more about the people of Connecticut. They turned out in record numbers; they spoke every day with a simple eloquence and urgency about the country we love. They oppose the war and the fiscal nightmare crafted by President Bush and his allies. But their vote, finally, was one based on pragmatism and reality, on optimism and hope. And it is to these ideals and values that we plan to address my campaign in the months until November.

Mr. Lamont won the Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut last week.

Lamont victory: A triumph of new moral center

2006-08-15T12:26:00.000-04:00

Lamont victory: A triumph of new moral center
By ROBERT L. BOROSAGE
Connecticut Post

Ned Lamont's stunning upset of incumbent U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic primary race on Tuesday sends shock waves through the dead sea of American politics.
Lamont did the impossible — this virtual unknown beat in his own party's primary an 18-year incumbent with universal name recognition, a more than $9 million campaign war chest and the support of Washington insiders, the punditry and the corporate lobbies.

His victory represents a growing voter revolt against the failed policies and politics of the Bush administration and its congressional enablers, particularly the debacle in Iraq. Until a few weeks ago, Lieberman prided himself on being the president's leading Democratic ally in touting the war.

After his defeat, Democrats will show more backbone in challenging the current disastrous course and more Republicans will look for ways to distance themselves from the president.

Lamont's victory was propelled by a rising tide of progressive energy — activists who are tired of losing elections to the right and disgusted with cautious politicians who duck and cover rather than stand and fight. Until a few weeks ago, Lieberman exemplified those Democrats who establish their "independence" by pushing off the causes of their own party and embracing the right's agenda.

His voters didn't abandon him; he abandoned them long ago. After his defeat, incumbents in both parties may begin to listen more closely to their voters and less avidly to their donors.

Lamont's victory was fueled by a new generation coming into politics with a passion — and organizing over the Web. Over the past year, the Washington establishment has scorned them as extreme and mocked them for failing to win anything. After Tuesday, there will be no more "bring 'em on" challenges issued to the bloggers.

Most important, Lamont represents a new moral center in American politics — a challenge to the failed status quo and a demand for a new direction that a growing majority of Americans are searching for.

Bring an end to the disastrous occupation in Iraq and bring the troops home with honor. Change priorities to invest in our schools, in universal pre-kindergarten, in modern infrastructure. Champion affordable national health care for all.

These are not issues from the "edges of our politics," as Lieberman suggests, but ideas whose time has come.

Lieberman, in a classic sore-loser posture, refuses to accept the verdict of the voters. The man who spent the last weeks of his campaign boasting that he was a good Democrat now announces he'll form his own party and denounces partisan politics. The man who last week said he had gotten the message and would go to Washington to challenge the president's policies now says he'll go to Washington to make common cause with Republicans to "get things done."

But his brand of "getting things done" is exactly what Americans are turning against.

He joined with the president in championing the war in Iraq — got that done.

He joined with Republicans and corporate lobbies in passing corporate trade deals that have destroyed American manufacturing and undermined wages in America — got that done.

He joined with conservatives in championing the privatization of Social Security — at least he was blocked there.

He joined with CEOs in defending off the books, stock options that gave CEOs a multimillion-dollar personal incentive to cook the books and raid pension funds — got that done.

Lieberman doesn't get it. The problem isn't that things aren't getting done — the problem is that the things he was helped to produce are weakening this country abroad and undermining workers and middle-class families at home.

Lieberman's sore loser campaign will be well financed by the corporate lobbies he has served. Since he has no new ideas to offer, he'll run a nasty negative campaign of personal vilification against Lamont, trying to smear him before voters have a chance hear what Lamont has to say.

And that race will be a test for every Democratic leader. Will they come to support Lamont and the new energy, the new ideas, the new moral center that he represents? Or will they offer nominal support but stay away, refusing to challenge Lieberman's low-road campaign? Their reactions will be a true measure of who is ready to fight for a new direction for this country and who is not.

Robert L. Borosage is a veteran political strategist and co-director of the Campaign For America's Future.

The opinions expressed are the author's and not necessarily those of Connecticut Postor ConnPost.com. Please direct comments to cdauber@ctpost.com or swinters@ctpost.com.

NY-03: An Introduction to Change

2006-08-12T14:23:00.000-04:00

NY-03: An Introduction to Change
by Dave Mejias for Congress

Tue Jul 18, 2006 at 11:20:58 AM PDT

My name is Dave Mejias and I am the Democratic candidate for New York's 3rd Congressional District against Republican incumbent Peter King. I wanted to introduce myself, tell you why I am running for Congress, and why Peter King no longer deserves to represent the people of the 3rd District. I also want to ask for the support of this online community, as I see blogging to be the future of grassroots politics. I look forward to using the amazing opportunity provided by this site to speak with individuals concerning the important issues facing our country today.

Follow me below the fold for more about my background and why I think I can beat Peter King.

Dave Mejias for Congress's diary :: ::
As a member of the Nassau County Legislature on Long Island, New York, I am proud to serve as the elected representative of over 75,000 residents in Nassau's 14th Legislative District. I made history in 2003 by becoming the first Latino ever elected to Nassau County government, and my re-election in 2005 was due largely to the close connection with the community I have developed throughout my life. I was born and raised in the district I now represent, and I know firsthand the problems that my constituents face on an everyday basis because my family and I have lived under the same burdens that Peter King has failed to address.

I am a first-generation American, and the first member of my family born in the US. My father came to this country as a political refugee from Cuba, where he spent 4 years in jail as a political dissident. He watched as his brother was tortured and murdered in front of him for promoting democracy and fighting against Castro in the early 1960s. My mother fled economic strife in Ecuador during the `60s. They first met in an English class for adults here on Long Island. My father passed away when I was very young, and my mother raised me and my siblings as a single parent. I can never thank her enough for her courage and devotion to her family when we needed her the most. With her love and support, I attended State University of New York at Albany, and received my Juris Doctor from Fordham Law. I opened my own law firm at the age of 26 and have been active participant in politics ever since.

Like most Long Islanders, I have watched with dismay over the past six years as this administration, backed by the Republican Congress, has squandered the largest surplus in our nation's history and created an even larger deficit. Under the watch of the George Bush and Peter King, our middle class continues to be squeezed more and more each day. The Bush Administration, with the blank-check support of their lapdogs in Congress, led us into a misguided war without an end in sight. The Republicans continue to dismantle the social safety net, drastically under-fund public education, push for the privatization of Social Security, and ignore the desperate need for health care reform, leaving 45 million Americans with no insurance.

We suffer from record high gasoline prices and MTBE-contaminated drinking water, while oil companies stuff their pockets with our hard-earned cash. Their record windfall profits are ensured by Republican Congressmen like my opponent, Peter King, who vote against laws to combat price gouging or hold companies accountable for poisoning our natural resources. At every opportunity over the last six years, Republicans have steered this nation towards fear, war, and intolerance. I want to change that trend.

Over the next few months I will use this forum to present my positions and agenda on how to right the course of this great nation. I will discuss issues that affect Americans everyday: healthcare, education, the economy, national security. I will hold this administration and Peter King accountable for their countless failures, and present my own plan for America.

I need your help to get my message out to a larger audience. By spreading the word, we can challenge Peter King to answer for his failures on the issues that are most important to us. I look forward to hearing your comments and sharing my ideas with you. Together we can take back America and return accountability to Congress.

Thank you,

David L. Mejias
Nassau County Legislator, 14th LD
Democratic Candidate for Congress, NY-3

PS - I'm in the process of building my new website, www.daveforamerica.com, but for now please visit www.davemejias.com for information about my campaign.

Enron-by-the-Sea

2006-08-10T20:08:00.000-04:00

Enron-by-the-Sea
San Diego Press Telegram

Thursday 10 August 2006

San Diego's awful audit leaves it looking for ways to pay its pension bills.
The all-but-bankrupt city of San Diego has earned the comparison with such financial failures as Enron, WorldCom and Orange County, according to Arthur Levitt Jr., and he ought to know. He is the former chairman of the Security and Exchange Commissions and a respected figure in the field of finance.

Levitt also headed a months-long investigation by Kroll Inc., a New York risk management firm that issued its findings Tuesday. The bottom line: San Diego city officials for many years recklessly mismanaged finances; they owe taxpayers the truth about a bloated and underfunded pension system, and they must face up to the fact the city needs more revenue (tax increases, in other words).

The Koll report said city officials deliberately broke the law, disregarded fiscal responsibility, disregarded the financial welfare of residents and, oh by the way, cheated residents on their monthly sewage fees to benefit large industrial users.

You might expect that would be enough to get some politicians in trouble, and it was. The mayor resigned, along with several other officials, and a federal grand jury has indicted five city pension board members for approving a pension mess that now is sinking the city.

After the scandal become evident, San Diego voters approved a strong-mayor form of government to centralize authority and responsibility. But, the Kroll report says, the city still can't handle such basic functions as bank reconciliations, and long-range budget planning is nonexistent.

Nobody has come close to figuring out what to do about the $2 billion difference between the costs of San Diego's extravagant new pension plan and what the city can afford to pay. The new mayor, Jerry Sanders, has been pretty good with the platitudes, but his only specific commitments have been: no more borrowing to cover up the problem, and no new taxes no matter what. That doesn't leave much room for solutions.

The Kroll report clearly didn't buy the argument of San Diego's city attorney, Michael Aguirre, who argued that since the procedure for granting the big pension increases was illegal, it ought to be legal to simply roll them back. Levitt called Aguirre a demagogue, which seems about right.

San Diego evidently has a long way to go before things get better. So does Orange County, and the reference to its financial problems was timely. The county still is recuperating from a bankruptcy triggered by $1.7 billion in debt, which is beginning to look almost small compared to the current $3.7 billion deficit caused by swollen county employee pensions and retiree medical benefits.

Nobody in Orange County government has figured out what to do about its deficit either, although the county's wisest critic, Treasurer and Supervisor-elect John M.W. Moorlach, told the L.A. Times something has to give and "everything is on the table." That's at least promising.

Should taxpayers outside San Diego and Orange County give a whit about these political and financial disasters? Yes, because politicians' giveaways have created serious underfunding of pensions in state government and in many local entities.

The city of Long Beach is quick to point out that it has no unfunded pension liabilities (though growing retiree medical costs are a separate issue). And its pension enhancements aren't without cost.

After the stock market took a nose dive in 2001, Long Beach had to resume pension-fund payments at the rate of more than $30 million a year, 25 percent of which is caused by enrichment of employees' pension benefits.

At some point, voters will either have to wake up and elect more public officials like Orange County's Moorlach, or accept increased taxes or decreased services, or both.

That, plus the possibility of joining the ranks of Enron, WorldCom, San Diego and Orange County, are more than enough of a wake-up call.

U.S. Mayors Abide by Kyoto Treaty

2006-08-10T15:22:00.000-04:00

U.S. Mayors Abide by Kyoto Treaty
Posted: 08.08.05
News Hour

In an unprecedented move for local officials, over 100 mayors across the country have agreed to abide by the terms of an international environmental treaty that President Bush rejected....

Connecticut is America this Week

2006-08-07T13:33:00.000-04:00

Connecticut is America this Week
by Taylor Marsh
Huffington Post

...The analysts have it wrong
about Connecticut. But no one is more misinformed than Joe Lieberman. He has blamed the bloggers. He has blamed misinformation. He has blamed everyone, finishing with a flourish about how he "refused to sell out to the haters."

It's unfathomable that anyone who says he wants to represent the people can be so out of touch with how we feel.

Most politicians don't have the stuff of John F. Kennedy or Bobby Kennedy. They aren't moved from within to make rhetorical flourishes of great import, impact and passion. They live lives filled with great dreams, which their actions seldom let them cash, because it takes real courage to break out and actually lead. Regular politicians need cover, so when the people are afraid to stand up, speak out and push back, the politician rarely is willing to rock the boat. To do that they need the people behind them, backing them, pushing them on.

The most important decision our leaders in Washington do is decide whether to keep the peace or to make war. There is nothing more deadly serious. Our country has made many military mistakes. The American people are a forgiving group. But we long ago reached the end game on Iraq. It's just that we had no outlet through which to express and embolden our thoughts, opinions and demands, let alone a cause that galvanized our imaginations so that we once again believed we can make a difference, make a vote really count, send a message that is unmistakable.

It's really simple. The people of Connecticut, through the candidacy and voice of Ned Lamont, have found a way to stand up and push back. They're doing it with their voices, their blogs and on Tuesday they will be doing it with their votes. But they're not simply doing it for themselves. It's for all of us, every American who has had it with George W. Bush, the rubber stamping Republican incompetence, the Democrats who still can't say this war was wrong, and everyone in between who refuses to change course and do it now. Mind you, it's heartbreaking
to think of withdrawal and the aftermath of this defeat. But the time has come for this great nation to admit her mistakes, make amends and begin repairing the incomprehensible losses this war of choice has cost. Unfortunately for Joe Lieberman, he is one of the mistakes we are attempting to make right, because he didn't have the courage to do it for himself.

Many of us have been behind the people of Connecticut and Ned Lamont, with blogs like DailyKos, MyDD and Firedoglake, as well as many local Connecticut blogs, leading the way, but we've all been behind this anti Iraq war whoop meant to get the job done because the politicians refused to correct the course themselves. We've tried
to give the people of Connecticut whatever national megaphone we can to raise the entire country's collective voice about the Iraq war, so the voters and Ned Lamont would know they were not alone. That even though it was their state and their Senate seat we all had a stake in this shot. A shot to stop this war of choice in its tracks; a war that has plunged this country and the people of the Middle East into a political hurricane of uncertainty and carnage that has worldwide implications that could last for decades.

There are many issues, but life and death comes first. It's represented in the Iraq war. Connecticut is America this week. The country's great debate is in their hands.

Miracle at Qana?

2006-08-05T12:41:00.000-04:00

Miracle at Qana?
Justin Frank
Huffington Post

When Israel bombed innocent civilians - mostly children - in Qana it became clear that our world has come a long way from the miracle at Cana when Jesus turned water into wine. In a scant 2000 years, probably a little less, the horrifying and disgusting murders makes one wonder what is next for us on this planet.

It was Mary, the mother of Jesus, who asked him to perform the miracle at a small village wedding in Galilee. It was his first public performance. Who got married there is never mentioned in the Gospel according to John. It is the miracle that counts. Now we have the Bush brigade refusing to demand a cease fire just two days before Israel bombed that site. It is the murder that counts, as the names of the innocents killed in Qana were also never mentioned.
In stead of a cease fire which could have averted the Tragedy at Qana, we have another example of Christian compassion at the highest level - after all, the Bush Administration has set out to co-mingle Jesus with the Presidency - as Bush sat by yet again (remember 9/11 and Katrina?).

What would Jesus say? What would his Mother Mary ask of him? Could he convert bombs into bouquets? Could he restore life to all those innocents who perished on Sunday July 30, 2006? Bush certainly knows how to take away life - whether actively by bombing Baghdad or passively by vetoing the stem cell research bill. His destructiveness is rooted deep in his psyche - and I fear it is deeper and more powerful than the love rooted in the soul of Jesus. In fact, the White House quietly announced after hours on Friday July 28 that it was again selling arms to several Arab countries - God forbid we should only arm Israel. This behavior is anti-cease fire.

Love cannot defeat hate; it can survive hate but can't defeat it because love doesn't kill. Still, by uniting against President Bush, perhaps we can stop him from promoting even more hate.

Who’s A Friend of Israel?

2006-08-03T08:53:00.000-04:00

Who’s A Friend of Israel?
By Pachacutec

...Sun Tzu recognized that when you are fighting on unfavorable ground and outnumbered, the best thing to do is retreat and shore up your alliances. This simply represents strategic good sense. Fighting wars of occupation against poor people whose populations largely support guerillas means fighting on just such unfavorable ground. As counter-intuitive as this may seem, the best strategic choice is not to take the bait, but to stand firm within your borders, look to your defenses and shore up your alliances.

I consider it a mark of loyalty, a mark of patriotism, to point this out to my own country when we are grinding our own military into the dust, or perhaps I should say, into the sand. I consider it the act of a friend to help my friend avoid making the same mistake. I’m an American progressive, and just as I consider it imperative to criticize the acts and choices of my own country at times, so too do I see it as an act of friendship to do the same for a state like Israel.

George Bush and the Republicans lack the sense or the will to do this, and so they are not friends of Israel. Bush and the Republicans lunge from international calamity to military catastrophe, leaving naught but carnage in their wake, destroying our alliances and our fighting forces all at once. We on the left value human life and the survival of free people, and so we are willing to say to Israel, stand down, for your own survival. Shore up your alliances; look to your defenses. Israel cannot win the population war in the region and is only acting so as to solidify the strength of its enemies into the next few generations, risking the viability of the state of Israel through the current century.

Republicans are not friends of Israel. On the contrary, we progressives are friends of Israel.

Scientist publishes 'escape route' from global warming

2006-07-31T08:34:00.000-04:00

Scientist publishes 'escape route' from global warming
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
The Independent
Published: 31 July 2006
A Nobel Prize-winning scientist has drawn up an emergency plan to save the world from global warming, by altering the chemical makeup of Earth's upper atmosphere. Professor Paul Crutzen, who won a Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on the hole in the ozone layer, believes that political attempts to limit man-made greenhouse gases are so pitiful that a radical contingency plan is needed.

In a polemical scientific essay to be published in the August issue of the journal Climate Change, he says that an "escape route" is needed if global warming begins to run out of control.

Professor Crutzen has proposed a method of artificially cooling the global climate by releasing particles of sulphur in the upper atmosphere, which would reflect sunlight and heat back into space. The controversial proposal is being taken seriously by scientists because Professor Crutzen has a proven track record in atmospheric research.

A fleet of high-altitude balloons could be used to scatter the sulphur high overhead, or it could even be fired into the atmosphere using heavy artillery shells, said Professor Crutzen, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany.

The effect of scattering sulphate particles in the atmosphere would be to increase the reflectance, or "albedo", of the Earth, which should cause an overall cooling effect.

Such "geo-engineering" of the climate has been suggested before, but Professor Crutzen goes much further by drawing up a detailed model of how it can be done, the timescales involved, and the costs.....

The Diebold Bombshell

2006-07-27T11:23:00.000-04:00

The Diebold Bombshell
By David Dill, Doug Jones and Barbara Simons
OpEdNews.com

Sunday 23 July 2006

Most computer scientists have long viewed Diebold as the poster child for all that is wrong with touch screen voting machines. But we never imagined that Diebold would be as irresponsible and incompetent as they have turned out to be.

Recently, computer security expert Harri Hursti revealed serious security vulnerabilities in Diebold's software. According to Michael Shamos, a computer scientist and voting system examiner in Pennsylvania, "It's the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system."

Even more shockingly, we learned recently that Diebold and the State of Maryland had been aware of these vulnerabilities for at least two years. They were documented in analysis, commissioned by Maryland and conducted by RABA Technologies, published in January 2004. For over two years, Diebold has chosen not to fix the security holes, and Maryland has chosen not to alert other states or national officials about these problems.

Basically, Diebold included a "back door" in its software, allowing anyone to change or modify the software. There are no technical safeguards in place to ensure that only authorized people can make changes.

A malicious individual with access to a voting machine could rig the software without being detected. Worse yet, if the attacker rigged the machine used to compute the totals for some precinct, he or she could alter the results of that precinct. The only fix the RABA authors suggested was to warn people that manipulating an election is against the law.

Typically, modern voting machines are delivered several days before an election and stored in people's homes or in insecure polling stations. A wide variety of poll workers, shippers, technicians, and others who have access to these voting machines could rig the software. Such software alterations could be difficult to impossible to detect...

The Bush Administration's Adversarial Relationship with Congress

2006-07-27T11:20:00.000-04:00

The Bush Administration's Adversarial Relationship with Congress --
as Illustrated by Its Refusal to Even Provide the Number of Signing Statements Issued by President Bush
By JOHN W. DEAN
Findlaw
----
Friday, Jul. 14, 2006
This summer, the Senate Judiciary Committee has held hearings on President Bush's uses and abuses of signing statements. Technically, these are statements by the President accompanying his signing of legislation. In this Administration, however, signing statements have been used as a dodgy practice of telling the Congress to go to hell.

Rather than vetoing bills, Bush issues vague statements to try to cut them off at the knees even as he purports to give them legs. These statements say, in essence, that he may or may not enforce this or that provision of a given law, depending on whether he thinks the provision is unconstitutional.

Given Bush's extraordinarily broad claim of Presidential power, he tends to deem any law that conflicts with his plans "unconstitutional." And despite the Supreme Court's recent Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision clearly and sharply repudiating this view of his powers, Bush is likely to go right on doing so.

In truth, Bush himself does not have a clue about what he is doing, for this ploy is being guided by Vice President Cheney's office; I am told it is David Addington leading the way. Though carried out by Bush, it is best seen as another of Cheney's undertakings to enhance presidential power by neutering Congress. And it is working.

Bush's Use of Signing Statements Is Unprecedented and Unconstitutional

Bush's defenders have portrayed his actions with signing statements as standard operating procedure for all recent presidents. In particular, they have cited Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton's signing statement practices as precedents. But Bush's use of the signing statement is not only non-standard, it is egregious, and plainly itself unconstitutional.

The Constitution, and the president's oath of office swearing to uphold it, require a president to veto legislation he finds unconstitutional, and send it back to Congress so its members can correct the flaw. The system is simple and wise - and Bush is subverting it.

In over six years in office, Bush has not vetoed a single bill. Therefore, he has avoided the political costs those vetoes would have rightly entailed. Instead, Bush has issues a steady stream of signing statements claiming that the very bills he is signing have constitutional problems.....

Sagebrush Fire

2006-07-26T14:40:00.000-04:00

Justin Frank
Huffington Post

07.23.2006
Sagebrush Fire

A dear friend - a mainstream Democrat who represented her state at the 2004 Democratic National Convention - raised as an Orthodox Jew and married to an Israeli, wrote to me about her despair over events in the Middle East. I became aware that it was hard for me to discuss openly with her all my feelings - because I didn't want to have a fight, and Israel is a touchy subject.

I also realized that over time, George W. Bush has made it difficult for people with different opinions to talk to one another, to find common ground - and I'm struck by how successful that has been. And, the Arab-Israeli conflict is fertile ground for absolutist views to take root. It is already a touchy subject for many American Jews, for Americans of Arab descent, for all kinds of people.
George Bush wants to divide people. He does this because the basic process of thinking terrifies him. For Bush, any thought opens up Pandora's box, much the way psychoanalysis terrifies people already able to think but who don't want to explore the darker sides of their inner worlds. He is so far from that level of emotional development it would be laughable - if it weren't that he tragically and consistently imposes his fears on the rest of us. To him, thought is like sagebrush - ever present and in need of pruning and uprooting.

With that said, I am not sure where to get the "real" news. Some comes from Israel, and is for sure more accurate than anything produced by our own media. There is real news also from Lebanon, and the reality there is different. For example, how does one KNOW - as Israeli radio claims - that HezboIlah stores missiles in mosques? What we do know is that there is a senseless loss of life and a complete refusal of everyone to talk in any way whatsoever. The blog by Max Blumenthal recounting Israeli opposition to the bombings is heartening.

Leaders can talk too. I'm reminded of when Ted Kennedy brought Gerry Adams of the IRA over to this country. Adams was the head terrorist, the major fomenter of it all. And by legitimizing him, by bringing him out in public, he forced Adams to moderate his behavior. This was not co-opting, though could be seen as such. True, there are fundamental difference between what is going on in the Middle East and that IRA-British conflict - but the differences extend to how the two crises have been handled.

And Bill Clinton tried something similar when he brought Arafat to Washington to meet with Rabin - and the subsequent assassination of Israel's leader of detente by one of its own citizens illustrates the tragic degree of hatred and paranoia (much of it justified) there. Now it's hard even for Jews to talk to Jews, since any legitimate discussion or disagreement can be interpreted as destructive. What Israel ended up with was a right-wing government taking over (though I wonder even now how Sharon might have responded to the kidnappers had be been able to function).

The Israeli response to Hezbollah's kidnapping two soldiers, if that's what really started this round of disaster, reminds me of how WWI began; and how quickly the violence has spread, like sagebrush-fire.

The UN is nothing without the US; the US is nothing as long as Bush runs the show chewing away at his G8 dinners while winking at the cameras. He is Nero incarnate, only it is not only Rome that is burning. It is not even only the Middle East that is burning. It is our entire globally warming heat-and-rain-drenched planet.

How George Bush became a dictator

2006-07-26T09:48:00.000-04:00

How George Bush became a dictator
Posted on Wednesday, July 26 @ 10:18:02 EDT
This article has been read 1163 times.
Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

An existential choice is forced upon us. Bush told us that we were either for his regime or we were for the "evil doers". I see a different paradigm: either we are for freedom or we are for Bush. Bush is spoiling for a Constitutional showdown that will force the issue and consolidate a dictatorship beyond the ability of Americans to change -short of violent revolution.

In his latest book "Conservatives Without Conscience", John Dean paints a stark difference between Richard Nixon and George Bush. Dean recalled the day the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to hand over the infamous White House tapes. Nixon, Dean reveals, toyed with the idea of defying the high court. It was Nixon, after all, who had said that if the President does it, it's legal.

Pressured by his own party, Nixon spent a night talking to portraits and getting down on his knees in prayer with an embarrassed Henry Kissinger. By night's end, as the story goes, Nixon had had an epiphany. He would resign.

What brought him to a night of prayer was his decision to comply with an order to the US Supreme Court to turn over the secret recordings of his Oval Office conversations. They were notable for what was missing: an 18 minute gap, and also what was present: a tape recorded "smoking gun" in which then White House counsel John Dean had warned Nixon of a "cancer on the Presidency."

But, Bush, Dean points out, is not Nixon.....

The Ballad of Dumb George

2006-07-25T09:17:00.000-04:00

The Ballad of Dumb George
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Friday 21 July 2006

I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid.

- "The Ultimate Flame," author unknown
George W. Bush is a good man, word has it. He's plain-spoken, they say. A regular fella. A good guy to have a beer with, except he supposedly doesn't drink anymore.

I wish, more than anything, that he were drinking. I wish he were drinking all the time. I wish, oh how I wish, that he were stand-up-fall-down-ralphing-down-his-shirt loaded every minute of every day. It would be a comfort, simply because it would explain a great many things. Having a drunk for a president is, after all, a fixable situation. Put him to bed at Camp David for a few weeks and surround him with Secret Service agents. Let his body clean itself out. Problem solved, and really, would anyone actually notice his absence?

I don't believe Bush has gotten off the sauce, if truth be told. I know more than a few boozers who, like George, periodically show up with odd wounds on their faces they got from falling over or running into walls. The injuries that appear on George's mien from time to time can perhaps be explained away - maybe Dick Cheney is stalking the halls with a shotgun loaded with rock salt and blasting anyone, even the boss, who gets in his way - but if "George still drinks" were up on the big board at the MGM Grand sports book, I'd take the bet no matter what the oddsmakers had to say.

Having a drunk for a president is manageable. Having a stone bozo for a president, on the other hand, is a calamity of global proportions.

Let's take a walk through the last few days. George winged off to Russia for trade talks at the G-8 summit, and managed in the course of 100 hours to embarrass himself and our entire country. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is smarter than Bush by several orders of magnitude, insulted George in front of the international press corps with a tight quip about "democracy" in Iraq. No trade deal got done. The whole thing was a humiliating waste of time, captured best by all the photos of Bush and Putin together. In each and every one of them, Putin is looking at George with an expression that somehow conveyed disgust, disdain and awe simultaneously.

Putin's disgust and disdain are easily understood - the poor guy was trapped in a room with our knucklehead president for hours, after all - but the awe requires notice. What, Putin must have thought, is this fool doing running a country?

After that came the much-noted open-mike gaffe, during which George dropped an s-bomb while discussing the Middle East crisis with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The cussing doesn't trouble me - those who know say that John F. Kennedy swore like a sailor whenever he talked shop - but the rest of the scene was like something out of a high school cafeteria. Bush sat there, talking with what looked like seventeen doughnuts stuffed into his gob, while poor Tony tried to discuss matters of life and death....

Democracy in Crisis - Interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

2006-07-20T21:34:00.000-04:00

Democracy in Crisis - Interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
BradBlog.com

Tuesday 18 July 2006

An Exclusive Interview for The BRAD BLOG [1] as Guest Blogged by Joy [2] and Tom Williams…
"The Republican Party, the Republican National Committee, has been using old-fashioned, Jim Crow, apartheid-type maneuvers to steal the last two national elections."
- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., (bio [3]) , wrote the article: "Was the 2004 Election Stolen [4]" where he examined the election fraud in Ohio that took place during the last Presidential Election. He also has written a book "Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush & His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking our Democracy [5]". Mr. Kennedy, along with Mike Papantonio have filed a "qui tam" lawsuit [6] against some of the voting machines companies, in an effort to save our Democracy.

I've long had a deep respect for Robert F. Kennedy for his dedicated work as an environmental advocate. Tom and I enjoyed interviewing him and were moved by his passion and dedication to our country and our Democracy. We spoke to him via phone at his office at Pace University's Environmental Litigation Clinic in White Plains, New York, which he founded, about the election of 2004. This was an experience to remember...

BRAD BLOG: In your book, "Crimes Against Nature," you said that Bush won the 2004 election because of an information deficit caused by a breakdown in our national media. You go on to say that "Bush was re-elected because of the negligence of-and deliberate deception by-the American press." Your recent article in "Rolling Stone" seems to suggest that your opinion has changed, focusing more on the fraud and deception in Ohio with the computerized voting machines. What was the most important thing that made you suspect fraud and decide to investigate the 2004 election?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Well, my opinion hasn't changed, that the press has been negligent, and that the large amount of support for the President, and for the people that did vote for the President, that large numbers of them would not have done so, had they known the truth about his policies, and his record. You say my opinion changed, but it hasn't changed.

You know I've known this for many years, because of my anecdotal experience. I give about 40 speeches a year, in red states to Republican audiences, and I get the same enthusiastic responses from those audiences as I get from Liberal college audiences. The only difference is, is that the Republicans often say to me, "How come we've never heard this before?" I made the conclusion many years ago that there's not a huge values difference between Red State Republicans and Blue State Democrats. The distinction is really informational. 80% of Republicans are just Democrats who don't know what's going on. And my anecdotal conclusion was confirmed by a survey done immediately after the 2004 election called the PIPA [7] report, which tested Bush supporters and Kerry supporters based upon their knowledge of current events. It found that among Bush supporters, they were widespread in its interpretations, or there were factual errors in the way that they viewed Bush's major public policy initiatives.

For example, 75% of the Republican respondents believed that Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center, and 72% believed that WMD had been found in Iraq. And most of them believed that the war in Iraq had strong support among Iraq's Muslim neighbors and our traditional allies in Europe, which of course is wrong. The Democrats as a whole had a much more accurate view of those events. And then PIPA [8] went back twice to these same people. The first time it went back to the people that had these misinterpretations, and asked them where they were getting their news, and invariably they said talk radio and FOX news. And PIPA went back a third time, and made inquiries about their fundamental values, and it did start with a string of hypotheticals:

"What if there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? What if Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with bombing the World Trade Center? What if the U.S. Invasion of Iraq had little support among Iraq's Muslim neighbors and was largely opposed by Iraq's Muslim neighbors, and by our troops and allies in Europe? Should we have still gone in?" And roughly 80% of Dem and 80% of Rep said the same thing, "We should not." And so the values were the same. It was the facts, the information, it was the access to information that was different.

BB: Are you then adding a layer of suspicion about the direct manipulation and fraudulent counting through computerized voting?

RFK JR.: That also happened, that was another factor. Our democracy is broken. Our democracy is broken because of our campaign finance system, which is just a system of legalized bribery, which has allowed corporations and the very wealthy to control the electoral results. Let me go back and say our electoral system is broken for three reasons, in three large respects: The first is our campaign finance system, which is a system of legalized bribery, and which has allowed corporations and the very rich to control the results of our electoral process. Number two is the failure of the American press and that is also a function and result of corporate control, as I showed in my book. Number three is the election system itself, which is broken. We've privatized it and allowed four large corporations to count our votes on machines that don't work.

But also the Republican party has inculcated a culture of corruption. The Republican party has adopted a strategy of denying votes to blacks and other minorities, and to other people more traditionally Democratic, suppressing Democratic vote and fraudulently expanding Republican vote. And this is happening all over the country. I would urge you to read Greg Palast's latest book, Armed Madhouse [9]. He does for the national elections what I did for the Ohio election, which is to synthesize the information that's out there into a readable document, in which he shows exactly how this election was stolen-not just in Ohio but in many other states as well.

BB: Have any of your expert witnesses or anyone referred to some of the stringent requirements in the gaming industry which uses computerized slot machines, poker machines and so forth involving the levels of certification and disclosure of the security requirements of its vendors?

RFK JR.: Well, you see this was just another corporate boondoggle that gave the most venal mendacious corporations charge of our most sacred public trust, which is the right to vote. These corporations were making hundreds of millions of dollars. The machines, as it turns out, were manufactured by wireless companies and were just a cheap piece of junk that cost less than $100 to manufacture, and they were selling them for $2400 apiece. And they were using Jack Abramoff and other corrupt lobbyists to persuade federal officials to pass the federal act to appropriate the money and then to persuade state and local officials to purchase the defective machines.

BB: Jack Abramoff was involved in this?

RFK JR.: Oh yes. Jack Abramoff, and Bob Ney [10](R-Oh), the principle figure in the Abramoff scandal and he's the author of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). And Diebold contributed millions of dollars to these guys, including hundreds of thousands of dollars to Abramoff to lobby on behalf of HAVA, and to lobby states like New York and the other states, to adopt the Diebold machines.

BB: So HAVA was "created specifically to disenfranchise voters and verfication"?

RFK JR.: HAVA was written specifically to require the states to buy Diebold machines. I mean one company basically had control of the whole legislative process. That's why HAVA has a provision in it that discourages vote verification by paper ballots. Both Republicans and Democrats tried to reform the HAVA, saying of course we should have paper verification of the vote. Paper verification would allow you to go in, make your vote on the electronic machine, and you get a receipt that is a copy of who you voted for and you are allowed to examine that receipt. You deposit it in a locked box in the voting area. That way, if there's ever any question, if you need to count, you can count the papers, and see if it compares to what the machine says.

But Bob Ney fought tooth and nail against that provision because Diebold made a machine that does not provide a paper ballot. And he went so far, because Diebold contributed a million dollars to an organization that purportedly protects the rights of blind people. And in exchange for that, that organization got one of its officers to testify on Capitol Hill at the HAVA hearings, that blind people in America did not want paper ballots - voter verified ballots - because it would deprive someone of the right to vote secretly. Now the other organizations that support handicapped rights and rights of the blind, do not take that position. This was a position that that organization adopted after accepting a million dollars from Diebold. The whole operation was corrupt and now Bob Ney is going to jail for it.

BB: Also, speaking of those guys, election officials in several states, most notably Ken Blackwell in Ohio and Bruce McPherson here in the state of California, appear to be be deliberately flaunting established law and procedures as well as direct court orders, and they seem to be just "getting away with it". How can that be?

RFK JR.: Well, again, it's because of the failure of the American press. This is the most important issue in American Democracy and the press isn't covering it. So the politicians who want to fix the elections, and who want these fraudulent machines, can get away with it, don't take a position because it gets no traction in the press.

BB: But then why didn't people like Kerry want to contest the results?

RFK JR.: You'd have to ask Kerry.

BB: Why hasn't the DNC done anything about this?

RFK JR.: You'd have to ask the DNC.

BB: We watched Howard Dean on television having a hack demonstrated to him by Bev Harris [11], and he doesn't seem to say anything... I guess we'll have to ask them! But there seems to have been a pattern here in the leadership of the Democratic Party....What I was getting to in those questions was not for you to interpret the actions of the those in the DNC and so forth, but there seems to be a pattern in the leadership of the Dem Party that shies away from direct conflict in this....

RFK JR.: The Democratic leadership on this issue has been abysmal. And particularly since this is a civil rights issue and it's a racial issue. The machines themselves are kind of a distraction because the machines are recent innovations. The Republican Party, the Republican National Committee, has been using, old-fashioned, Jim Crow, apartheid-type maneuvers to steal the last two national elections.

BB: Like in Georgia, who were trying to establish the Poll Tax again...

RFK JR.: And this has been happening all over the country. If you look at who's being denied the right to vote, on absentee ballots, on provisional ballots, it's Hispanics, it's Blacks and it's Native Americans, and the Democratic Party ought to be touting this as the biggest civil rights issue of our time. But they are ignoring it, and that really is shocking. It's shocking that the Republicans are not up in arms about this too, because this should not be a partisan issue. This is a fundamental basis of our American value system, which is representative Democracy. For a party that claims to speak for "American Values" to ignore the fact that other members of the party, that the leadership of the party is involved in an active national campaign to stop black people from voting, and to steal elections, shows the moral bankruptcy of everybody in that party!

Why aren't Republicans standing up and speaking on this issue? Why isn't Republican leadership standing up and speaking on this issue?

BB: California just recently went to Diebold machines, all over the state. If California "goes" Republican, do you think we will be able to say, ok, there's no doubt anymore?

RFK JR.: Listen: all I can say is that the Diebold machines are among the worst. They break down, they are easily hacked, Diebold uses fraudulent misrepresentations to sell the machines, and they should not be part of our voting system.

BB: Are there any plans on a national or state level to contest suspicious results this time around?

RFK JR.: They make it very difficult to contest crooked elections. Nebraska is one of several states that have now passed laws, and I believe Florida is one of those states, that prohibit counting paper ballots in votes that were originally counted by machines. The only way that you can count votes is the original way in which they were counted. And so, of course, that makes it easy to fix any election and make sure that nobody has the right to challenge it.

Many other states, including Ohio, have made it impossible for anybody to challenge an election, even if it was obviously fixed. And these kinds of initiatives are happening all over the country. Why would any state legislature vote for such a rule unless they were Republicans who felt that elections would be fixed in their favor? Why would any American vote for such a rule? It is completely anti-American and un-American. We should be encouraging Americans to vote and encouraging EVERY American to cast a vote and to make sure that every vote is counted. And both parties should be working toward that.

But instead you have a Republican party that is trying to suppress votes and trying to defraud the public. And you have a Democratic party that is like the deer in headlights. And the Democrats are never going to win another election if they don't fix this issue because they are starting out every election with a 3 million vote deficit, and those are mainly the black voters in this country and who no longer have their votes counted.

And you know, this may sound shrill, but look at the facts. And I challenge anyone who says that this is shrill and inaccurate to read Greg Palast's book, to read my article, to look at the facts, because the facts are infallible.

BB: Do you think we are going to need a reaction like they are having currently in Mexico?

RFK JR.: Well, I wish the Democratic Party had the cojones that the Mexican opposition party has! They're saying "We're not gonna stand for our elections being stolen anymore!" It's great for these (our) political leaders to stand up and say "I will gracefully concede" but what does that mean for the rest of us? We are getting stuck with these governments that are absolutely running our country into the ground.

BB: You said in your recent interview with Charlie Rose, that this is the worst Presidency we've ever had, and they've ruined our reputation in the world. So if you had your ideal President, what kind of things would he or she need to do to restore our credibility?

RFK JR.: Well the first thing we need to do is to restore American Democracy.

Number One: Fix the campaign finance system to get corporate money out of the electoral process. Corporations are a great thing for our country. They drive our economy but they should NOT be running our government because they don't want the same thing for America that Americans want. Corporations don't want democracy, they want free markets, they want profits, and oftentimes the easiest path to profits is to use the campaign finance system to get their hooks into a public official and to use that public official to dismantle the marketplace to give them monopoly control and a competitive edge and to privatize the commons-to steal our air, our water, or our public treasury, and liquidate it for private profits.

Number Two: We have to fix the press: restore journalistic ethics in this country, and that is by bringing back the fairness doctrine and strengthening the FCC. The Fairness Doctrine was abolished by Ronald Reagan in 1988, and it recognized that the airwaves belong to the public; that the broadcasters can be licensed to use them to make a profit, but they use them with the proviso that their primary obligation is to advance democracy and promote the public interest. They have to inform the public because a democracy cannot survive an uninformed public. As Thomas Jefferson said, "An uninformed public will trade a hundred years of hard-fought civil rights for a half an hour of welfare." And they will follow the first demagogue or religious fanatic that comes along and offers them a $300 tax break.

Number Three: We have to fix our electoral system so that every vote is counted. Those are the first three things that any President should do, Republican or Democrat, to restore American Democracy.

BB: Now all these state laws that are being put in place could be trumped by Congress...

RFK JR.: Of course, we should have a federal law that creates federal standards for elections. All federal elections have to be verified by paper ballots. Election officials, whose job is to ensure the integrity of federal elections, cannot simultaneously serve as campaign managers or candidates who are participating in that contest. Many states already have that rule, but Florida and Ohio do not. It's a formula for corruption!

BB: In summary, how optimistic or pessimistic are you about our ability to get our country back?

RFK JR.: Well, you know, my attitude is that I don't try to predict the future, I can only say that those of us who care about this country have to keep fighting, and whether you think you're gonna win or lose, you gotta just keep slugging and you gotta be ready to die with your boots on, because that's what our forefathers did, they started a revolution, and they put their fortunes and their lives at stake. And we need to summon the same kind of courage from our generation, and demand that kind of courage from our leadership.

BB: And we have to get that message out to the Democratic leadership as well.

RFK JR.: And that's what you guys are doing....

--------

Article printed from The BRAD BLOG: www.bradblog.com

URL to article: www.bradblog.com/?p=3079

URLs in this post:
[1] The BRAD BLOG: www.BradBlog.com
[2] Joy: http://fancypantselitist.blogspot.com
[3] bio: www.waterkeeper.org/mainpresident.aspx
[4] Was the 2004 Election Stolen: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen
[5] Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush & His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking our Democracy:
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060746874/airamericarad-20/104-4412599-7091110
[6] lawsuit: www.bradblog.com/?p=3065
[7] PIPA: http://astro.berkeley.edu/~aleroy/Report10_21_04.pdf
[8] PIPA: http://astro.berkeley.edu/~aleroy/Report10_21_04.pdf
[9] Armed Madhouse: www.gregpalast.com/
[11] Jack Abramoff, and Bob Ney : www.bradblog.com/?p=2262
[11] Howard Dean on television having a hack demonstrated to him by Bev Harris: www.bradblog.com/?p=911

Triumph of the Authoritarians

2006-07-16T10:48:00.000-04:00

Triumph of the Authoritarians
By John W. Dean
The Boston Globe

Friday 14 July 2006

Contemporary conservatism and its influence on the Republican Party was, until recently, a mystery to me. The practitioners' bludgeoning style of politics, their self-serving manipulation of the political processes, and their policies that focus narrowly on perceived self-interest - none of this struck me as based on anything related to traditional conservatism. Rather, truth be told, today's so-called conservatives are quite radical.

For more than 40 years I have considered myself a "Goldwater conservative," and am thoroughly familiar with the movement's canon. But I can find nothing conservative about the Bush/Cheney White House, which has created a Nixon "imperial presidency" on steroids, while acting as if being tutored by the best and brightest of the Cosa Nostra.

What true conservative calls for packing the courts to politicize the federal judiciary to the degree that it is now possible to determine the outcome of cases by looking at the prior politics of judges? Where is the conservative precedent for the monocratic leadership style that conservative Republicans imposed on the US House when they took control in 1994, a style that seeks primarily to perfect fund-raising skills while outsourcing the writing of legislation to special interests and freezing Democrats out of the legislative process?

How can those who claim themselves conservatives seek to destroy the deliberative nature of the US Senate by eliminating its extended-debate tradition, which has been the institution's distinctive contribution to our democracy? Yet that is precisely what Republican Senate leaders want to do by eliminating the filibuster when dealing with executive business (namely judicial appointments).

Today's Republican policies are antithetical to bedrock conservative fundamentals...

Vanuatu is world's happiest country: study

2006-07-14T08:17:00.000-04:00

Vanuatu is world's happiest country: study
Wed Jul 12, 11:08 AM ET
LONDON (AFP) - The tiny South Pacific Ocean archipelago of Vanuatu is the happiest country on Earth, according to a study published measuring people's wellbeing and their impact on the environment.

Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominica and Panama complete the top five in the Happy Planet Index, compiled by the British think-tank New Economics Foundation (NEF).

The index combines life satisfaction, life expectancy and environmental footprint -- the amount of land required to sustain the population and absorb its energy consumption.

Zimbabwe came bottom of the 178 countries ranked, below second-worst performer Swaziland, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ukraine.

The Group of Eight industrial powers meet in Saint Petersburg this weekend but have not much to smile about, according to the index.

Italy came out best in 66th place, ahead of Germany (81), Japan (95), Britain (108), Canada (111), France (129), the United States (150) and Russia, in lowly 172nd place.....

Two Stories Tell the Tale

2006-07-10T12:47:00.000-04:00

Two Stories Tell the Tale
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Thursday 06 July 2006

Iraq is a part of the war on terror. Iraq is a central front on that war.
- George W. Bush, statement from Baghdad, 6/13/06
Two different stories boiled over in the last few days, each of which tells us too many sorry things about where we are as a nation. North Korea flopped several missiles into the Sea of Japan, including one that could reportedly reach the West Coast of the United States, and a discharged American soldier has been accused of raping an Iraqi teenager and shooting her and three members of her family.

The missiles in North Korea are of fundamental importance to both American national security, and the security of the Pacific region. In an irony of global proportions, the rogue government of North Korea declared to the United States and the world that it possessed nuclear weapons on April 24, 2003. This was, of course, a little more than a month after the Bush administration initiated the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Three years later, we are still mired in the bloodbath of Iraq, having found no weapons of mass destruction and having failed to establish anything even remotely resembling a democracy. A nation that was no threat to US security was smashed to flinders, and has since bloomed into a real and growing national security threat.

The influential journal Foreign Affairs recently polled 100 leading foreign policy experts on the efficacy of the so-called "War on Terror," and 86 of them declared the thing to be a comprehensive failure. We are far less safe now, they reported, thanks largely to what we have done in Iraq. "When you strip away the politics, the experts, almost to a person, are very worried about the administration," said Joe Cirincione, vice-president of the Center for American Progress. "They think none of our front-line institutions is doing a good job and that Iraq has made the terror situation much worse."....

The Democrats must now say "We Do Not Concede" in the U.S. as it's being said in Mexico

2006-07-09T12:07:00.000-04:00

The Democrats must now say "We Do Not Concede" in the U.S. as it's being said in Mexico
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
July 7, 2006

Lopez Obrador is saying in Mexico what the Democratic Party should have been saying in the United States since November 2000: WE DO NOT CONCEDE. And no Democrat should ever again be nominated for any public office without first pledging to guarantee a full and thorough recount, as is being attempted in Mexico.

We do not yet know the final official outcome of the Mexican presidential election. We do know the vote casting and counting have been plagued with some of the same kinds of intimidation, theft, fraud and electronic manipulation that have become the staples of Rove-run elections here in the United States.

The Mexican outcome is hugely important for a wide range of reasons. The Mexican presidency in the hands of a leftist like Lopez Obrador would have a major effect on the immigration issue currently being used by the Bush/Rove Republicans to whip up racist division and diversion. A leftist victory would also underscore the sea change in Latin American politics being led by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and other populists rising from the southern grassroots.

The pattern in the Mexican election is all too familiar to those of us who've seen GOP thefts in Ohio 2004 and elsewhere. The left/liberal candidate is ahead in the polls going into the election. But at the last minute, there's a shift. The exit polls still show the left/liberal victory. But somehow there are "computer glitches" and other "problems" that miraculously shift the final vote to the right, as with George W. Bush in the 2000 and 2004 elections, both of which were decided by fraud, theft and manipulation.

Mexico would seem to be headed down the same dismal path, with one world-class difference: THE LEFT ACTUALLY STOOD UP!

Smelling a familiar rat, Lopez Obrador has challenged the vote, and demanded every single ballot cast be counted by hand. It's all about that old thing called democracy.....

Here We Come. . . Roots Project

2006-07-09T09:12:00.000-04:00

Here We Come. . . Roots Project
By Pachacutec
Firedoglake

Here come the Roots. . .

Okay, I’m not here to engage in grassroots or netroots triumphalism. We’re way behind in the game and the other guys still have us outgunned. But we’re making some progress, and I wanted to highlight a few things for everybody.

I’ve spent a lot of time this week working on the beta development of our new Roots Project site, and I have to say, it’s going to be awesome. We’re not ready to take it to Broadway yet, but this could provide some seriously game-changing infrastructure for progressives all around the country. You have not heard much from me on Roots Project lately because I have not wanted to promote a new round of recruiting while we’re getting so close to a new home and organizational system. Stay tuned!

Having said that, just because you have not heard a whole lot from me about Roots Project lately, doesn’t mean it’s been dormant or inactive. Quite the opposite. Most of the work going on now is the quiet work of collaborating and organizing around what I think of as the small, significant things that build a movement. Let me give you just a few examples, but please understand, there’s no way I could tell you about all of it, because there’s so much going on I can no longer keep up!

Recently, we held a conference call open to all Roots Project members with the author of the excellent book, 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Fight the Right. We’ve adopted it as our Roots Project field manual and I highly recommend it to everyone. It begins from a framework of progressive values, and then very succinctly outlines a broad range of actions anyone can take anywhere in the country to propel the development of progressive values into the culture and politics. Blue state, red state, purple state, whatever: it doesn’t matter. I firmly believe political change follows cultural movements, and this book helps people shape and capture those movements to promote progressive politics. It’s an excellent book, and it was a great author discussion and conference call.

Massachussetts group members have been getting together socially, even gathering this past week to watch the Lieberman-Lamont debate together.

Groups all over the country, including Washington State, Pennsylvania, Virginia and California are getting involved with local Drinking Liberally chapters to network with other progressives in their communities.

Fini Finito of the Indiana group, aka the "Hoosier Roots Project," has been putting together podcasts with original content and interviews for all our members, and has set up a Roots Project MySpace page. On July 4th, he attended a local community event where he set up a table by the parade stand, with official support, to register voters and tell people about the Roots Project.

In Illinois, group members have been studying candidates in every congressional district to see who really is a progressive in need of support. That’s what led us to connect them with Howie Klein for his excellent Blue America series installment in support of the John Laesch campaign.

Of course, members of every group across the country (forty-three states) have been pressuring their senators and congressional representatives on net neutrality.

Some groups are setting up local blogs focused on matters pertinent to their states. SchumerWatch is one, as is this new one from Massachussetts (by first time web designer selise - give her mad props!). Not to be outdone, fellow Massachussetts traveler RevDeb is working on her own site, Progressive Pulpit. I’m sure there are other blogs by many Roots Project members, and this is just a small sample, a tip of the iceberg. The important thing to note is that this is what progressive infrastructure development looks like. Imagine every state propelling its own Lamont-like, people-powered movement! It’s the little things that win championships, as they say in the sporting world, and it’s these little things that change the direction of the country.

That’s how the Connecticut progressive movement built itself up, even before the advent of online political organizing or blogs. But with the new tools available to us, we can now do so much more, learning from each other in real time as we try new things all across the country.

So, heads up, America: here we come. The pearl clutching establishment media is waking up to us (after getting up from the fainting couch), as is the nasty, faithless, rageful, narcissistically self-absorbed and whiningly entitled Rape Gurney Joe, who wants to have it both ways and can’t play by the rules.

Many people in our comment threads are also involved in Roots Project groups. I hope they’ll offer us all more updates on what’s going on close to the ground. Otherwise, feel free to chat in the comments section about any little things you may be doing. Share successes. Tell funny stories. Swear and cuss and give Joke Line fits. Hey, after all, it’s FDL Late Nite!

Occupation: The inconvenient truth about Iraq

2006-07-06T08:58:00.000-04:00

Occupation: The inconvenient truth about Iraq
Posted on Thursday, July 06 @ 09:48:38 EDT
George Lakoff
Smirking Chimp

We've begun with global warming. Now the U.S. and its military allies need to face another inconvenient truth, this one about Iraq: This is an occupation, not a war.

The war was over when Bush said "Mission Accomplished." A war has one army fighting another army over territory. U.S. fighting men and women defeated Saddam's military machine three years ago.

Then the occupation began. Our troops were trained to fight a war, not to occupy a country where they don't know the language and culture; where they lack enough troops, where they face an anti-occupation insurgency by the Iraqis themselves; where most of the population wants them out; where they are being shot at and killed by the very Iraqis they are training; and where the U.S. has given up on reconstruction and can't do much positive good there.

The Occupation Frame fits a politically inconvenient truth. Most people don't want to think of our army as an occupation force, but it is. An occupying army can't win anything. The occupation only helps Al Qaeda, which Iraqis don't want in their country since Al Qaeda attracts foreigners who have been killing Iraqis.

Our nation has been held trapped in a fallacious War Frame that serves the interests of the Bush administration and the Republican Party. The term "cut and run," used to vilify Democrats, is defined relative to the following frame:

There is a war against evil that must be fought. Fighting requires courage and bravery. Those fully committed to the cause are brave. Those who "cut and run" are motivated by self-interest; they are only interested in saving their own skins, not in the moral cause. They are cowards. And since those fighting for the cause need all the support they can get, anyone who decides to "cut and run" endangers both the moral cause and the lives of those brave people who are fighting for it. Those who have courage and conviction should stand and fight.

Once the false frame is set, it is hard to use any pure self-interest frame that ignores the just cause of fighting evil. That is the trap the Democrats have fallen into. Their proposed slogans evoke self-interest frames: John Murtha's "stay and pay" and John Kerry's "lie and die" have an X-and-Y structure that evokes, and thus reinforces, "cut and run."

These, as well as Senator Jack Reed's "The Republican Plan to Be in Iraq Forever," are self-interest frames that accepts the "cut and run" frame and says it is in our interest to leave. We "pay," we "die," we are stuck there forever. As long as Democrats accept the war-against-evil frame, any self-interest framing will be treated as immoral -- acting as a coward, letting evil win out, and endangering our troops.

The Cut-and-Run Frame put forth as a reason why we cannot withdraw from Iraq fits a gallant war. It does not fit a failed occupation. When you have become the villain and target to the people you are trying to help, it's time to do the right thing -- admit the truth that this is an occupation and think and act accordingly. All occupations end with withdrawal. The issue is not bravery versus cowardice in a good cause. The Cut-and-Run Frame does not apply.

In an occupation, there are pragmatic issues: Are we welcome? Are we doing the Iraqis more harm than good? How badly are we being hurt? The question is not whether to withdraw, but when and how? What to say? You might prefer "End the occupation now" or "End the occupation by the end of the year" or "End the occupation within a year, " but certainly Congress and most Americans should be able to agree on "End the occupation soon."

In an occupation, not a war, should the president still have war powers? How, if at all, is the Supreme Court decision on military tribunals at Guantanamo affected if we are in an occupation, not a war? What high-handed actions by the President, if any, are ruled out if we are no longer at war?

Telling an inconvenient truth takes some political courage.

Democrats Abandon RFK's Courage

2006-07-03T10:10:00.000-04:00

Jeffrey Buchanan
Huffington Post
07.02.2006
Democrats Abandon RFK's Courage

While many current Democrats count Robert F. Kennedy as a hero, most would benefit from studying the courageous words he delivered forty years ago this month. In a speech to students at University of Cape Town in South Africa, exactly two years to the date before his untimely death, RFK told the world how to be heroic.

His words embodied the greatest ideals of the Democratic Party; the enduring support of human rights and the equality of justice, ideals that have been squeezed out of today's Democratic agenda.
At the height of apartheid in South Africa and the civil rights movement at home, Kennedy forcefully gave his case for supporting human rights declaring, "We must recognize the full human equality of all of our people before God, before the law, and in the councils of government. We must do this, not because it is economically advantageous, although it is; not because of the laws of God command it, although they do... We must do it for the single and fundamental reason that it is the right thing to do."

He boldly challenged a generation to never bend from its hopes and beliefs for political expedience and warned not to fear your own futility because, "Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

Today's Democratic leaders are reluctant to stand up for the ideals of human rights, replacing them with the less than courageous mantra of "Anything But Bush."

When asked why Democrats no longer speak about human rights despite U.S. torture scandals at Guantanmo and Abu Ghareb, revelations of clandestine U.S. prisons in Europe, domestic spying at home and not to mention the crisis in Darfur, Democratic National Committee chairman Governor Howard Dean admitted that the Party no longer speaks up about human rights issues at a breakfast hosted by the American Prospect.

"There are an enormous number of issues," said Dean explaining that human rights emergencies are not alarming enough to be campaign issues. Dean went on to say, "in the immediacy of trying to figure out how to communicate with the American people about why they should vote for the Democrats it gets dropped."

When later asked what the Democratic Party stance is on the United States' foray into torture and human rights abuses at Guantanmo Bay Prison, Dean responded, "We don't have a Democratic Party position. I've never had a discussion about it with [Harry] Reid and [Nancy] Pelosi."

Dean, a former doctor, is diagnosing an illness of the political system. Most Democrats have remained silent on potentially thorny human rights issues like the rights of detainees, the equality of gay families, or millions of Americans living in poverty in favor of taking "bold" stands where polls show a ready-made consensus among voters on the failures of the GOP and the Bush administration, topics like gas prices, or "the culture of corruption." Even on issues like a minimum wage increase, Democratic leadership stop far short of calling for a wage that would allow workers to lift their family out of poverty and live with dignity.

Dean went on to say the he believes discussing issues like human rights requires educating voters and in Dean's vision, "campaigns in general are not very good occasions for education."

Democrats are unwilling to educate voters and take on conservative myths that human rights and social justice amount to undeserved handouts. Human rights only ensure equal access to the minimum level of support and freedom an individual needs to live their lives with dignity. Admitting that our fellow men and women deserve to live with dignity is not a renunciation of personal responsibility.

Instead of investing in developing community leaders to enlighten voters about party principles like human rights, Democrats have decided to do things on the cheap. They instead save their money for last minute strategies of half hearted voter education and "Get Out To Vote" efforts just before Election Day. This strategy is incapable of shaping what voters actually believe so Democrats must rely on campaign points that reiterate what people already think. The Party has lost faith in the ability of community leaders to shape minds and they have lost the courage to lead and stand for platforms that actually strike out against injustice and make a "ripple of hope."

This is very different than the long term commitment by the GOP to training leaders among the evangelical Right. Their efforts are now paying off with a groundswell of committed volunteers and even two-way communication in determining policy.

While Democrats may ignore principles of human rights, Republicans are certainly not blameless. During their time controlling the Congress and the White House everyone from Human Rights Watch to the Iranian President has questioned the United States' commitment to human rights. Most Democrats fear challenging the administration on its record of abuses will lead to being labeled as either soft on the terrorists or in favor of big government. In the mean time, administration officials have gotten away with breaking international laws, tarnishing our image abroad, and breaching principles enshrined in our Constitution without enlisting the ire of the a Democratic Party.

Even after a national tragedy, top Democrats have failed to stand up for the human rights of displaced victims of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina. Sure some point to Katrina as a defining political moment, emphasizing Bush and FEMA's ineptitude, but they often ignore the continuing human tragedy. The Bush administration has denied the legal rights guaranteed to internally displaced people by international laws adopted by the United States. Thousands of families have not only lost loved ones and had their lives shattered by this disaster and the Bush administration's disastrous response but now they have been scattered across the country and systematically denied the right to return home or to have a say in how their neighborhoods are rebuilt, rights guaranteed to them under international law. Real leadership, in either party, ready to listen and partner with the impoverished disenfranchised Americans displaced by this tragedy has yet to materialize.

It takes true leadership and moral courage to challenge people to open their eyes to the problems that exist in the shadows. Robert Kennedy was determined to bring attention to racism in South Africa and in the United States, to the inhumane conditions in farmworker camps in California or our decaying inner city slums. Sure it was easy for people to turn away from his difficult message but he had the courage to confront not just those who opposed change but those who were initially indifferent. He was able to capture people's imagination by turning a seemingly bleak message into a brilliant challenge of the American spirit.

Democrats need to reflect on RFK's words summon the moral courage to challenge voters to stand with justice. If they will not acknowledge the injustices that are occurring even in our own country, then they will continue becoming the party of elections, not principles. Thankfully it is not too late. Democrats will not always be able to depend on voters reacting to corruption and illegal actions by the GOP to win support; they need substance and uniting principles beyond reaction. Democrats can once again stand up for their ideals and strike out against injustice and begin to make a ripple of hope.

It's Now or Never

2006-07-01T22:48:00.000-04:00

07.01.2006
It's Now or Never
Justin Frank
Huffington Post

George W Bush is like the cork floating on the ocean, bobbing with the waves but ultimately never really affected by them. Paradoxically he is the most powerful man on earth, the self-proclaimed “decider” who acts like a fraternity boy. But I don’t think he’s acting. Rather, Bush seems stuck in a time warp.

For Bush at Yale (1964-68) the Vietnam War was background noise easily drowned out by heavy drinking, partying, and branding pledges with hot coat hangers. While many of his classmates were arguing about the war or protesting in the streets, Bush bragged about how he kept his focus on what was most important.
Fast forward to June 30, 2006 and we see that the only thing different about George Bush now is that he is standing up, not lying drunk on a fraternity house floor. Pledge-master no more, he is our President whose hands-on branding of pledges has given way to outsourced torture of people he doesn’t like. But the party continues, this time in Graceland. And Bush and his Elvis wannabe friend from Japan were eagerly followed by an enabling press – over 300 strong – which is always looking for a good time.

This time there is no war in Vietnam; it is in Iraq and is presided over by this self-same party animal. To keep things parallel Bush had to start a war – it makes partying that much more fun. Luckily for outgoing (in more than one sense) Prime Minister Koizumi, the people Bush is bombing are brown and not yellow. And flag-draped body bags are being carried back to America once more.

Al Gore 3.0

2006-06-29T21:00:00.000-04:00

Al Gore 3.0
The man who won the presidency in 2000 is looser and more outspoken than ever. Is his global-warming movie a warm-up for a third run at the White House? (From the July 13-27, 2006 issue of ROLLING STONE) BY WILL DANA

Page 1 2 3
See images of planetwide damage caused by global warming and share your thoughts here.
It is probably not fair to say that global warming excites Al Gore, but get him going on the subject and he becomes possessed by the spirit of a Holy Rolling preacher, swelling and quaking in his chair, hitting high notes, speaking in tongues. We are meeting in a cramped waiting room outside two TV studios in midtown Manhattan. Gore is spending the afternoon here, knocking off a dozen or so interviews with broadcast outlets across the country, one after the other, intimations of the apocalypse sandwiched between the local-anchor happy talk and car-dealership ads in markets like Houston and Kansas City.

Gore is in the middle of an exhaustive campaign to promote An Inconvenient Truth, a surprise hit that transposes to film a lecture about global warming that he has given more than a thousand times in the past six years. (An accompanying book of the same title is climbing the best-seller lists.) But while Gore's message may be grim -- in a nutshell, a warming climate threatens civilization, and if the human race wants to survive, we've got about ten years to start turning things around -- Gore himself seems funnier, warmer and more relaxed than he ever did during his political years. You used to think: I wouldn't mind taking a class from this guy. Nowadays, you wouldn't mind having a beer with him. His recent appearance on Saturday Night Live, when he addressed the nation as president and boasted that gas prices were so low that the government had to bail out the big oil companies, was the single funniest moment on the show all season.

Gore's renewed visibility has only fueled speculation that this is all part of a carefully orchestrated plan to launch his third bid for the presidency. Although Gore refuses to rule it out, he suggests that he's having too much fun, and is too engaged in his various business interests, to subject himself to the endless slog of political life.

It's not unreasonable to hope that Gore runs, but the dream of a Gore candidacy also underscores the pathetic core of today's Democratic Party: It has become so unusual to hear a mainstream Democratic politician speak from a sense of conviction that when one does, people practically start begging him to run....

American Dream' turning into a nightmare

2006-06-28T12:17:00.000-04:00

American Dream' turning into a nightmare
Jun. 27, 2006. 01:00 AM
RICHARD GWYN
Toronto Star

That American CEOs last year earned 262 times the average pay of their own workers is no big deal. It's always possible that some of them actually earned all that money, or at least some of it.
What is, surely, something of a big deal is that according to Corporate Library in Washington, the chief executives of the 11 largest companies in the United States earned a combined $865 million over the past two years at the same time as their shareholders lost $640 million.
What, potentially, is an even bigger deal, is that one of the main activities of American executives these days is figuring out ways to cut the pay of their workers while at the same time hanging on to all they have.
Recently, General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner declared that it was time for the government to become "more proactive on health care."
What Wagoner meant was that Washington should take over much, if not all, of GM's health-care costs, which starts at $1,500 for each car the company makes and is a major reason it's close to bankruptcy....

One Percent Madness

2006-06-28T08:31:00.000-04:00

One Percent Madness
By Robert Parry
Consortium News
June 27, 2006

Author Ron Suskind’s account of Dick Cheney’s “one percent doctrine” – the idea that if a terrorist threat is deemed even one percent likely the United States must act as if it’s a certainty – supplies a missing link in understanding the evolving madness of the Bush administration’s national security strategy.

A one-percent risk threshold is so low that it negates any serious analysis that seeks to calibrate dangers within the complex array of possibilities that exist in the real world. In effect, it means that any potential threat that crosses the administration’s line of sight will exceed one percent and thus must be treated as a clear and present danger.

The fallacy of the doctrine is that pursuing one-percent threats like certainties is not just a case of choosing to be safe rather than sorry. Instead, it can suck the pursuer into a swollen river of other dangers, leading to a cascading torrent of adverse consequences far more dangerous than the original worry.

For instance, George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq may have eliminated the remote possibility that Saddam Hussein would someday develop a nuclear bomb and share it with al-Qaeda. (Some intelligence analysts put that scenario at less than one percent, although Bush called it a “gathering danger.”)

But the U.S. military invasion of Iraq had the unintended consequence of bolstering the conviction in North Korea and Iran that having the bomb may be the only way to fend off the United States.

The unending scenes of bloodshed in Iraq also have inflamed anti-American passions in other Middle East countries, including Pakistan which already possesses nuclear weapons and is governed by fragile pro-U.S. dictator Pervez Musharraf.

So, while eradicating one unlikely nightmare scenario – Hussein’s mushroom cloud in the hands of Osama bin-Laden – the Bush administration has increased the chances that the other two points on Bush’s “axis of evil,” North Korea and Iran, will push for nuclear weapons and that Pakistan’s Islamic fundamentalists, already closely allied with Osama bin-Laden, will oust Musharraf and gain control of existing nuclear weapons.

In other words, eliminating one “one-percent risk” may have created several other dangers which carry odds of catastrophe far higher than one percent. Bush now must decide whether to swat at these new one-plus-percent risks, which, in turn, could lead to even greater dangers....

Bush Is Not Incompetent!

2006-06-26T15:51:00.000-04:00

Bush Is Not Incompetent!
By George Lakoff, Marc Ettlinger and Sam Ferguson
The Rockridge Institute

Monday 26 June 2006

Progressives have fallen into a trap. Emboldened by President Bush's plummeting approval ratings, progressives increasingly point to Bush's "failures" and label him and his administration as incompetent. For example, Nancy Pelosi said "The situation in Iraq and the reckless economic policies in the United States speak to one issue for me, and that is the competence of our leader." Self-satisfying as this criticism may be, it misses the bigger point. Bush's disasters - Katrina, the Iraq War, the budget deficit - are not so much a testament to his incompetence or a failure of execution. Rather, they are the natural, even inevitable result of his conservative governing philosophy. It is conservatism itself, carried out according to plan, that is at fault. Bush will not be running again, but other conservatives will. His governing philosophy is theirs as well. We should be putting the onus where it belongs, on all conservative office holders and candidates who would lead us off the same cliff.

To Bush's base, his bumbling folksiness is part of his charm - it fosters conservative populism. Bush plays up this image by proudly stating his lack of interest in reading and current events, his fondness for naps and vacations and his self-deprecating jokes. This image causes the opposition to underestimate his capacities - disregarding him as a complete idiot - and deflects criticism of his conservative allies. If incompetence is the problem, it's all about Bush. But, if conservatism is the problem, it is about a set of ideas, a movement and its many adherents.

The idea that Bush is incompetent is a curious one. Consider the following (incomplete) list of major initiatives the Bush administration, with a loyal conservative Congress, has accomplished:

Centralizing power within the executive branch to an unprecedented degree
Starting two major wars, one started with questionable intelligence and in a manner with which the military disagreed
Placing on the Supreme Court two far-right justices, and stacking the lower federal courts with many more
Cutting taxes during wartime, an unprecedented event
Passing a number of controversial bills such as the PATRIOT Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Medicare Drug bill, the Bankruptcy bill and a number of massive tax cuts
Rolling back and refusing to enforce a host of basic regulatory protections
Appointing industry officials to oversee regulatory agencies
Establishing a greater role for religion through faith-based initiatives
Passing Orwellian-titled legislation assaulting the environment - "The Healthy Forests Act" and the "Clear Skies Initiative" - to deforest public lands, and put more pollution in our skies
Winning re-election and solidifying his party's grip on Congress
These aren't signs of incompetence. As should be painfully clear, the Bush administration has been overwhelmingly competent in advancing its conservative vision. It has been all too effective in achieving its goals by determinedly pursuing a conservative philosophy.

It's not Bush the man who has been so harmful, it's the conservative agenda.

The Conservative Agenda

Conservative philosophy has three fundamental tenets: individual initiative, that is, government's positive role in people's lives outside of the military and police should be minimized; the President is the moral authority; and free markets are enough to foster freedom and opportunity.

The conservative vision for government is to shrink it - to "starve the beast," in Conservative Grover Norquist's words. The conservative tagline for this rationale is that "you can spend your money better than the government can." Social programs are considered unnecessary or "discretionary" since the primary role of government is to defend the country's border and police its interior. Stewardship of the commons, such as allocation of healthcare or energy policy, is left to people's own initiative within the free market. Where profits cannot be made - conservation, healthcare for the poor - charity is meant to replace justice and the government should not be involved.

Given this philosophy, then, is it any wonder that the government wasn't there for the residents of Louisiana and Mississippi in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Conservative philosophy places emphasis on the individual acting alone, independent of anything the government could provide. Some conservative Sunday morning talk show guests suggested that those who chose to live in New Orleans accepted the risk of a devastating hurricane, the implication being that they thus forfeited any entitlement to government assistance. If the people of New Orleans suffered, it was because of their own actions, their own choices and their own lack of preparedness. Bush couldn't have failed if he bore no responsibility.

The response to Hurricane Katrina - rather, the lack of response - was what one should expect from a philosophy that espouses that the government can have no positive role in its citizen's lives. This response was not about Bush's incompetence, it was a conservative, shrink-government response to a natural disaster.

Another failure of this administration during the Katrina fiasco was its wholesale disregard of the numerous and serious hurricane warnings. But this failure was a natural outgrowth of the conservative insistence on denying the validity of global warming, not ineptitude. Conservatives continue to deny the validity of global warming, because it runs contrary to their moral system. Recognizing global warming would call for environmental regulation and governmental efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Regulation is a perceived interference with the free-market, Conservatives' golden calf. So, the predictions of imminent hurricanes - based on recognizing global warming - were not heeded. Conservative free market convictions trumped the hurricane warnings.

Our budget deficit is not the result of incompetent fiscal management. It too is an outgrowth of conservative philosophy. What better way than massive deficits to rid social programs of their funding?

In Iraq, we also see the impact of philosophy as much as a failure of execution.

The idea for the war itself was born out of deep conservative convictions about the nature and capacity of US military force. Among the Project for a New American Century's statement of principles (signed in 1997 by a who's who of the architects of the Iraq war - Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby among others) are four critical points:

We need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future.
We need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values.
We need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad.
We need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
Implicit in these ideas is that the United States military can spread democracy through the barrel of a gun. Our military might and power can be a force for good.

It also indicates that the real motive behind the Iraq war wasn't to stop Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, but was a test of neoconservative theory that the US military could reshape Middle East geo-politics. The manipulation and disregard of intelligence to sell the war was not incompetence, it was the product of a conservative agenda.

Unfortunately, this theory exalts a hubristic vision over the lessons of history. It neglects the realization that there is a limit to a foreign army's ability to shape foreign politics for the good. Our military involvement in Vietnam, Lebanon, the Philippines, Cuba (prior to Castro) and Panama, or European imperialist endeavors around the globe should have taught us this lesson. Democracy needs to be an organic, homegrown movement, as it was in this country. If we believe so deeply in our ideals, they will speak for themselves and inspire others.

During the debate over Iraq, the conservative belief in the unquestioned authority and moral leadership of the President helped shape public support. We see this deference to the President constantly: when Conservatives call those questioning the President's military decisions "unpatriotic"; when Conservatives defend the executive branch's use of domestic spying in the war on terror; when Bush simply refers to himself as the "decider." "I support our President" was a common justification of assent to the Iraq policy.

Additionally, as the implementer of the neoconservative vision and an unquestioned moral authority, our President felt he had no burden to forge international consensus or listen to the critiques of our allies. "You're with us, or you're against us," he proclaimed after 9/11.

Much criticism continues to be launched against this administration for ineptitude in its reconstruction efforts. Tragically, it is here too that the administration's actions have been shaped less by ineptitude than by deeply held conservative convictions about the role of government.

As noted above, Conservatives believe that government's role is limited to security and maintaining a free market. Given this conviction, it's no accident that administration policies have focused almost exclusively on the training of Iraqi police, and US access to the newly free Iraqi market - the invisible hand of the market will take care of the rest. Indeed, George Packer has recently reported that the reconstruction effort in Iraq is nearing its end ("The Lessons of Tal Affar," The New Yorker, April 10th, 2006). Iraqis must find ways to rebuild themselves, and the free market we have constructed for them is supposed to do this. This is not ineptitude. This is the result of deep convictions over the nature of freedom and the responsibilities of governments to their people.

Finally, many of the miscalculations are the result of a conservative analytic focus on narrow causes and effects, rather than mere incompetence. Evidence for this focus can be seen in conservative domestic policies: Crime policy is based on punishing the criminals, independent of any effort to remedy the larger social issues that cause crime; immigration policy focuses on border issues and the immigrants, and ignores the effects of international and domestic economic policy on population migration; environmental policy is based on what profits there are to be gained or lost today, without attention paid to what the immeasurable long-term costs will be to the shared resource of our environment; education policy, in the form of vouchers, ignores the devastating effects that dismantling the public school system will have on our whole society.

Is it any surprise that the systemic impacts of the Iraq invasion were not part of the conservative moral or strategic calculus used in pursuing the war?

The conservative war rhetoric focused narrowly on ousting Saddam - he was an evil dictator, and evil cannot be tolerated, period. The moral implications of unleashing social chaos and collateral damage in addition to the lessons of history were not relevant concerns.

As a consequence, we expected to be greeted as liberators. The conservative plan failed to appreciate the complexities of the situation that would have called for broader contingency planning. It lacked an analysis of what else would happen in Iraq and the Middle East as a result of ousting the Hussein Government, such as an Iranian push to obtain nuclear weapons.

Joe Biden recently said, "if I had known the president was going to be this incompetent in his administration, I would not have given him the authority [to go to war]." Had Bush actually been incompetent, he would have never been able to lead us to war in Iraq. Had Bush been incompetent, he would not have been able to ram through hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. Had Bush been incompetent, he would have been blocked from stacking the courts with right-wing judges. Incompetence, on reflection, might have actually been better for the country.

Hidden Successes

Perhaps the biggest irony of the Bush-is-incompetent frame is that these "failures" - Iraq, Katrina and the budget deficit - have been successes in terms of advancing the conservative agenda.

One of the goals of Conservatives is to keep people from relying on the federal government. Under Bush, FEMA was reorganized to no longer be a first responder in major natural disasters, but to provide support for local agencies. This led to the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. Now citizens, as well as local and state governments, have become distrustful of the federal government's capacity to help ordinary citizens. Though Bush's popularity may have suffered, enhancing the perception of federal government as inept turned out to be a conservative victory.

Conservatives also strive to get rid of protective agencies and social programs. The deficit Bush created through irresponsible tax cuts and a costly war in Iraq will require drastic budget cuts to remedy. Those cuts, conservatives know, won't come from military spending, particularly when they raise the constant specter of war. Instead, the cuts will be from what Conservatives have begun to call "non-military, discretionary spending;" that is, the programs that contribute to the common good like the FDA, EPA, FCC, FEMA, OSHA and the NLRB. Yet another success for the conservative agenda.

Both Iraq and Katrina have enriched the coffers of the conservative corporate elite, thus further advancing the conservative agenda. Halliburton, Lockhead Martin and US oil companies have enjoyed huge profit margins in the last six years. Taking Iraq's oil production off-line in the face of rising international demand meant prices would rise, making the oil inventories of Exxon and other firms that much more valuable, leading to record profits. The destruction wrought by Katrina and Iraq meant billions in reconstruction contracts. The war in Iraq (and the war in Afghanistan) meant billions in military equipment contracts. Was there any doubt where those contracts would go? Chalk up another success for Bush's conservative agenda.

Bush also used Katrina as an opportunity to suspend the environmental and labor protection laws that Conservatives despise so much. In the wake of Katrina, environmental standards for oil refineries were temporarily suspended to increase production. Labor laws are being thwarted to drive down the cost of reconstruction efforts. So, amidst these "disasters," Conservatives win again.

Where most Americans see failure in Iraq - George Miller recently called Iraq a "blunder of historic proportions" - conservative militarists are seeing many successes. Conservatives stress the importance of our military - our national pride and worth is expressed through its power and influence. Permanent bases are being constructed as planned in Iraq, and America has shown the rest of the world that we can and will preemptively strike with little provocation. They succeeded in a mobilization of our military forces based on ideological pretenses to impact foreign policy. The war has struck fear in other nations with a hostile show of American power. The conservatives have succeeded in strengthening what they perceive to be the locus of the national interest - military power.

It's NOT Incompetence

When Progressives shout "Incompetence!" it obscures the many conservative successes. The incompetence frame drastically misses the point, that the conservative vision is doing great harm to this country and the world. An understanding of this and an articulate progressive response is needed. Progressives know that government can and should have a positive role in our lives beyond simple, physical security. It had a positive impact during the progressive era, busting trusts, and establishing basic labor standards. It had a positive impact during the new deal, softening the blow of the depression by creating jobs and stimulating the economy. It had a positive role in advancing the civil rights movement, extending rights to previously disenfranchised groups. And the United States can have a positive role in world affairs without the use of its military and expressions of raw power. Progressives acknowledge that we are all in this together, with "we" meaning all people, across all spectrums of race, class, religion, sex, sexual preference and age. "We" also means across party lines, state lines and international borders.

The mantra of incompetence has been an unfortunate one. The incompetence frame assumes that there was a sound plan, and that the trouble has been in the execution. It turns public debate into a referendum on Bush's management capabilities, and deflects a critique of the impact of his guiding philosophy. It also leaves open the possibility that voters will opt for another radically conservative president in 2008, so long as he or she can manage better. Bush will not be running again, so thinking, talking and joking about him being incompetent offers no lessons to draw from his presidency.

Incompetence obscures the real issue. Bush's conservative philosophy is what has damaged this country and it is his philosophy of conservatism that must be rejected, whoever endorses it.

Conservatism itself is the villain that is harming our people, destroying our environment, and weakening our nation. Conservatives are undermining American values through legislation almost every day. This message applies to every conservative bill proposed to Congress. The issue that arises every day is which philosophy of governing should shape our country. It is the issue of our times. Unless conservative philosophy itself is discredited, Conservatives will continue their domination of public discourse, and with it, will continue their domination of politics.

Voting Rights Act nailed to burning cross

2006-06-25T07:47:00.000-04:00

Greg Palast: 'Voting Rights Act nailed to burning cross'
Posted on Friday, June 23 @ 10:02:44 EDT

Behind the "Delay" in Renewing Law is Scheme for Theft of '08

White Sheets Changed for Spreadsheets

Greg Palast

Don't kid yourself. The Republican Party's decision yesterday to "delay" the renewal of the Voting Rights Act has not a darn thing to do with objections of the Republican's White Sheets Caucus.

Complaints by a couple of Good Ol' Boys to legislation has never stopped the GOP leadership from rolling over dissenters.

This is a strategic stall -- meant to de-criminalize the Republican Party's new game of challenging voters of color by the hundreds of thousands.

In the 2004 Presidential race, the GOP ran a massive multi-state, multi-million-dollar operation to challenge the legitimacy of Black, Hispanic and Native-American voters. The methods used broke the law -- the Voting Rights Act. And while the Bush Administration's Civil Rights Division grinned and looked the other way, civil rights lawyers are circling, preparing to sue to stop the violations of the Act before the 2008 race.

Therefore, Republicans have promised to no longer break the law -- not by going legit... but by eliminating the law.

The Act was passed in 1965 after the Ku Klux Klan and other upright citizens found they could use procedural tricks -- "literacy tests," poll taxes and more -- to block citizens of color from casting ballots.

DE-CRIMINALIZING THE "CAGING" LISTS

Here's what happened in '04 -- and what's in store for '08.

In the 2004 election, over THREE MILLION voters were challenged at the polls. No one had seen anything like it since the era of Jim Crow and burning crosses. In 2004, voters were told their registrations had been purged or that their addresses were "suspect...."

Global Warming Skeptics Engage In Denial And Spin Over New Academy Report; Gore Responds

2006-06-24T12:32:00.000-04:00

Global Warming Skeptics Engage In Denial And Spin Over New Academy Report; Gore Responds
Think Progress

The National Academy of Sciences released an important report yesterday detailing the fact that the Earth’s temperatures in the last few decades have been the warmest in recorded history, raising concern about the impact of global warming. Warming skeptics have responded with their typical denial and spin.

Electricity Daily (sub. req’d), which covers news from the perspective of the electricity industry, reported:

The NAS report casts serious doubts on the conventional scientific wisdom of man-made climate warming, particularly as described by political advocates such as former Vice President Al Gore. … Those who argue that solar activity drives global climate, not CO2, will take heart.

In fact, the report specifically states that “human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming.” Moreover, as ThinkProgress noted, the report factored in the natural variations in temperature — volcanic activity, solar radiation, etc. — and concluded that these can’t explain the warming trend.

Another well-known skeptic, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), zeroed in on a study conducted by climatologist Michael Mann that is reviewed in the NAS report. Through his famous “hockey stick” graph, Mann argued that recent years have been the hottest on record in the last millennium. Inhofe responded:

Today’s NAS report reaffirms what I have been saying all along, that Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ is broken.

In fact, the NAS report “largely vindicates” Mann’s central thesis, stating it is “plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th Century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium.”

As House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) said, “There is nothing in this report that should raise any doubts about the broad scientific consensus on global climate change…or any doubts about whether any paper on the temperature records was legitimate scientific work.” But science has never stood in the way of global warming skeptics. The NAS report is no exception.

On a conference call that Al Gore held with bloggers this afternoon, I asked him for a response to the claims made by Electricity Daily and Sen. Inhofe. He said that global warming skeptics “will seize on anything to say up is down and black is white.” Gore explained that science, by nature, thrives on uncertainty and tries to eliminate it; politics, on the other hand, is vulnerable to being paralyzed by uncertainty. When science and politics converge, Gore argued, the chance for “cowardice is high.”

So When Will President Bush `Cut and Run'?

2006-06-23T16:06:00.000-04:00

So When Will President Bush `Cut and Run'?
Margaret Carlson
Bloomberg
June 22, 2006

...Before the congressional Republicans insult those looking for a course correction in Iraq, they should read the latest book in the growing body of literature on the Iraqi war, ``The One Percent Doctrine,'' by Ron Suskind, author of an earlier book in which Bush's first Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, said the administration was set on invading Iraq long before it stumbled onto the idea of yoking Saddam Hussein to 9/11.

Suskind starts by rewinding to that moment, when if attention had been paid, 9/11 might have been stopped. The opening anecdote puts a lie -- yet again -- to the oft-repeated claim that no one could have imagined al-Qaeda launching an attack domestically.

Bush Is Briefed

A CIA analyst told Suskind of flying to Crawford, Texas, during Bush's month-long vacation to brief him personally on the Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled ``Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S,'' a memo prepared when there had been increasing intelligence traffic about an impending terrorist attack. After listening, Bush dismissed the staffer, saying, ``All right. You've covered your ass, now.''

When you hate government, everyone in it is an ass-covering, dreck-producing bureaucrat. Bush returned to his mountain bike. No one pushed the urgency of tracking al-Qaeda traffic. Tapes of operatives discussing a possible 9/11 attack sat in the in-box of the National Security Agency, untranslated until after the attack.....

GOP Kills Bill to Police Halliburton

2006-06-23T13:12:00.000-04:00

GOP Kills Bill to Police Halliburton
By Bob Geiger
AlterNet

Tuesday 20 June 2006

Republicans in Congress have made it clear they're willing to fight for military contractors' right to lie, cheat and defraud taxpayers.
I suppose it's old news at this point that the Bush administration lied us into the Iraq war and that the cost of this mess will be fully realized by the next generation when Bush leaves office with the biggest budget deficit in U.S. history.

And, while Democrats have been complaining for years about the GOP-led Congress abandoning its oversight of the executive branch's wrongdoing, a vote that took place in the Senate last week shows how the Republican desire to ignore fraud and abuse extends right into killing legislation that would help stop defense contractors from ripping off the American people.

In an effort to stop companies like Halliburton and its subsidiaries from cheating our troops and stealing from Americans, Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), introduced S.AMDT.4230 and attached it to the Defense Authorization bill currently being debated in the Senate. The bill was intended to improve contracting "by eliminating fraud and abuse and improving competition in contracting and procurement."

"I think when you are at war, when a massive quantity of money is being pushed out the door, that we ought to decide to get tough on those who would be engaged in war profiteering," said Dorgan in fighting for his amendment last week. "I dare say that never in the history of this country has so much money been wasted so quickly. And, yes, there is fraud involved, there is abuse involved, and it is the case that there is a dramatic amount of taxpayers' money that is now being wasted."

Dorgan's bill - cosponsored by 17 Democrats and called the Honest Leadership and Accountability in Contracting Act of 2006 - was tabled by a roll call vote of 55-43, effectively rejecting the amendment. Every single Senate Republican voted against the measure to make the contracting process honest and impose penalties on those who break the law.

And just what were the stern rules that the GOP didn't think their buddies at Halliburton should have to live with? The text of the legislation spelled out that Bush and Cheney's defense-contractor buddies would be in trouble if they did any of the following:

"Executes or attempts to execute a scheme or artifice to defraud the United States or the entity having jurisdiction over the area in which such activities occur."

"Falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact."

"Makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statements or representations, or makes or uses any materially false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry."

"Materially overvalues any good or service with the specific intent to excessively profit from the war or military action."

The measure called for those found guilty of violating the law to be imprisoned for up to 20 years and be subject to a fine of up to $1,000,000 - a drop in the bucket for these guys - or a percentage of their ill-gotten gains.

And Senate Republicans still saw fit to reject penalizing companies engaging in overt war profiteering and fraud despite Dorgan spending a considerable amount of time on the Senate floor trotting out example after example of the hideous abuse that has been occurring in Iraq.

"What we have discovered is pretty unbelievable," said Dorgan last week. "We have direct testimony from physicians, Army doctors, and others about providing nonpotable water for shaving, brushing teeth that is in worse condition as water than the raw water coming out of the Euphrates River."

"Let me describe some of the firsthand eyewitness issues in Iraq," Dorgan continued. "Brand new $85,000 trucks that were left on the side of the road because of a flat tire and then subsequently burned. 25 tons, 50,000 pounds, of nails ordered by Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), the wrong size, that are laying in the sands of Iraq. 42,000 meals a day charged to the taxpayers by Halliburton and only 14,000 are actually served."

After telling the amazing tale of the KBR Halliburton subsidiary ordering hand towels for soldiers embroidered with the "KBR" logo, to allow them to double the price of the towels, Dorgan told one Halliburton whistleblower's story of his company serving food date-stamped "expired" to American troops rather than throwing it away.

"[Halliburton was] serving food at a cafeteria in Iraq for the soldiers, and a man named Roy who was the supervisor in the food service kitchen said that the food was date-stamped 'expired,''' said Dorgan. "In other words, it had a date stamp, which meant the food wasn't good anymore, and he was told by superiors that it doesn't matter. Feed it to the troops. It doesn't matter that they had an expired date stamped - feed it to the troops."

But apparently the support-the-troops types on the Republicans side of the aisle only support them until their major contributors are caught feeding them possibly-tainted food before they go into battle - at that point, I guess the love is gone.

The best the Republicans could offer in response to Dorgan was a lame statement by Senator John Warner (R-VA), Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, who said that his committee is on the case and that "the organization is now in place to try to monitor the situations the Senator has enumerated."

There was no mention from Warner of where the hell his committee - and the GOP - have been for the last four years with all of this going on.

I'll leave you with one other Dorgan horror story in which he describes a massive amount of money paid to four contractors to install air-conditioning in a Baghdad building.

"The contract goes to a subcontractor, which goes to another subcontractor, and a fourth-level subcontractor," said Dorgan "And the payment for air-conditioning turns out to be payments to four contractors, the fourth of which puts a fan in a room. Yes, the American taxpayer paid for an air-conditioner and, after the money goes through four hands, there is a fan put in a room in Iraq."

I guess that's fiscal conservatism Republicans can truly embrace.

And Yet It Does Move…

2006-06-23T09:20:00.000-04:00

And Yet It Does Move…
By Dover Bitch
Firedoglake

On this day in 1633, Galileo Galilei was forced by the Catholic Church to recant his endorsement of Nicolaus Copernicus’ claim that the earth revolves around the sun. He was threatened with torture and sentenced to life in prison, finally ending up with a life sentence of house arrest after promising never to mention his ideas ever again.

How far we have come. Today, nobody gets tortured and the people in power embrace science… just not in America.

Legend has it that Galileo got his sentence commuted to house arrest by keeping his cool, but never truly abandoning his beliefs. "Eppur si muove," he supposedly said of the earth. "And yet it does move."

And now, 373 years later, it is clear the earth itself was keeping its cool back then as well. The National Research Council released a 155-page report today, in which they claim:

Surface temperature reconstructions for periods prior to the industrial era are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that climatic warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence.

…

In summary, large-scale surface temperature reconstructions are proving to be important tools in our understanding of global climate change. They contribute evidence that allows us to say, with a high level of confidence, that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries.

If you haven’t seen Al Gore’s "An Inconvenient Truth" yet, go see it. You will leave the theater knowing both that we can rise to this challenge and also that we never will as long as we’re putting people like George Bush in power.

Bush was willing to say that we, as a nation, are "addicted to oil." But our leaders are addicted to money from the oil industry. Next week, another film will be released: "Who Killed the Electric Car?" The documentary shows how companies like GM built electric cars in response to zero-emission legislation in California, only to put them in a giant shredder as soon as the federal government came to the oil industry’s rescue and overruled the state legislature. The cars were destroyed before any real attempt was made to market them to the public.

On Tuesday, the Smithsonian removed a GM EV1 — one of the only surviving models in existence — from public display. The museum and GM deny it has anything to do with the film. What is replacing the EV1? A robotic SUV.

They’ve destroyed their electric cars and are instead promoting their existing gas-guzzlers, like the Hummer, by offering $1.99 per gallon gas cards. How’s that working out for them? While the Smithsonian was spiriting away the EV1, GM’s debt rating was downgraded "deeper into junk territory."

Simply stated, there are no good economic arguments against trying to save the planet. As Gore says, all it takes is "political will." But that will is sorely lacking in Washington. Just today, friend to Jack Abramoff and oil, Richard Pombo (R-CA), pushed a bill through his House Resources Committee, "a measure that partially lifts a 25-year-old federal ban on offshore drilling and lets Virginia and other coastal states determine if they want to drill close to shore."

We have to get responsible people back in office. The shortsighted GOP is incapable of addressing the grave problem undeniably facing the planet. General Motors, the Republicans in Congress and the oil industry are pretending that the electric car isn’t a viable option.

And yet it does move.

Update: Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in I.M. Pei’s magnificent facilities in Boulder, Colorado, also released a study today, in which they conclude that global warming was responsible for half of the increase in hurricane strength in 2005. The science is in. The time for action is now.

Fluorescent bulbs and the Revolution

2006-06-23T09:17:00.000-04:00

Zack Exley

06.22.2006
Fluorescent bulbs and the Revolution
Huff Post

Thanks to Al Gore, now everyone knows the planet is doomed if we don't take IMMEDIATE ACTION. What kind of action? Start using fluorescent light bulbs. Drive a Prius. Encourage your mayor to put solar panels on city hall. Yeah, right.

Al's a hero for what he's accomplished over the last several weeks. And it's not his fault that there are no credible solutions to global warming on the table. I blame academia. Rare leaders like Gore, who are willing to address the biggest problems, have been left solutionless by a two-generation moratorium on big-picture, long-term thinking among our greatest economists and social thinkers.

I saw Barack Obama hit the same brick wall a few weeks ago speaking on global warming. He started out saying, "We need a mobilization of resources on the scale of WWII." I was ready to enlist in the Obama army. But when it came to specifics, he too had to default to fluorescent bulbs, Priuses, etc....

This problem spans virtually all big issues: in John Edwards' search for real solutions to poverty, academia offers him little more than higher education subsidies and mixed income housing. On health care, it's just as bad. I once witnessed a room full of U.S. Senators alternately beg and berate a panel of top health care policy experts for solutions they could tell their constituents about. After 45 minutes the experts had said nothing convincing, or even intelligible.

This affliction is not limited to mainstream Democratic politicians. On global warming, the Left's biggest, boldest idea is the Apollo Alliance. It calls for $30 billion in new investment each year for ten years for renewable energy and industrial retooling. Can $30 billion per year fundamentally transform our society? No. Thirty billion dollars is 0.0024% of U.S. GDP -- or, to put it another way, about 70 seconds of the national workday. Think about that on a personal level: you can't keep your house clean in 70 seconds a day, let alone transform your life.....

The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light

2006-06-21T09:49:00.000-04:00

The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light
By Barton Gellman,
a Washington Post staff writer who reports on intelligence and national security
Washington Post
Tuesday, June 20, 2006; C01

THE ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE

Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11

By Ron Suskind

Simon & Schuster. 368 pp. $27

This is an important book, filled with the surest sign of great reporting: the unexpected. It enriches our understanding of even familiar episodes from the Bush administration's war on terror and tells some jaw-dropping stories we haven't heard before.

One example out of many comes in Ron Suskind's gripping narrative of what the White House has celebrated as one of the war's major victories: the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al-Qaeda's chief of operations even after U.S. and Pakistani forces kicked down his door in Faisalabad, the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics -- travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques.

How could this have happened? Why are we learning about it only now? Those questions form the spine of Suskind's impressively reported book.

In interviews with intelligence officers, Suskind often finds them baffled by White House statements. "Why the hell did the President have to put us in a box like this?" one top CIA official asked about the overblown public portrait of Abu Zubaydah. But Suskind sees a deliberate management choice: Bush ensnared his director of central intelligence at the time, George J. Tenet, and many others in a new kind of war in which action and evidence were consciously divorced....

Al Gore On Charlie Rose-Best Interview Yet

2006-06-20T10:35:00.000-04:00

Al Gore On Charlie Rose-Best Interview Yet
by Patriot for Al Gore
Tue Jun 20, 2006 at 06:36:03 AM PDT
Daily Kos

The interview Charlie Rose did with Al Gore last night (6.19.06) was without a doubt the very best interview I have watched him on yet. He delved deeper into the actual issue of climate and other foreign policy matters than any other "cable" interviewer has to date. I was thoroughly pleased with his questions regarding solutions to the climate crisis, the political process regarding it, the mindset of the current administration, and the background to the Iraq War and its reasons which really is in concert with this administration's ideologies on all issues.

Mr. Gore did a fantastic job of discussing the science behind this issue, his dealings with scientists regarding their retiscence to make matters regarding this issue public, and also with bringing across his dedication to solving this crisis. He truly believes this is urgent, and I truly do believe it is as well. There was just so much in this one hour that passed by so quickly that I will only touch the surface, because I don't want to give too much away in case you didn't see it last night, as I believe it is going to be rebroadcast this afternoon on PBS at 1:30PM EST.

I believe he started with how his slide show got started in 1989 when he first presented it, and moved on to explain his passion for this issue, his work on it all of these years, the movie and book, the responsibility of corporations and other entities regarding it, the religious and spiritual aspects of it, and giving hope that it can be solved based on the Montreal Protocol and other work to heal the ozone layer in years past that to date has been successful. He also discussed his plan to train 1000 people in Nashville to carry this slide show on. He also talked more in depth about the ice sheets in Greenland, peer reviews that dispute companies like EXXON, the think tanks they support, CEI, and other foreign policy matters including Peak Oil, and Dick Cheney's plan to secure oil reserves in the Middle East.

Again, it was in my judgement the BEST interview he has done on this topic to date. He was firmly in his element, and I couldn't be happier for him, or us...because I know that as long as he remains in the public eye on this issue in whatever capacity he believes is best to get this message out, the world will benefit from it.

However, one thing from this interview that I do wish to mention is a quote Mr. Rose read to him that was his in which he stated that the poiltical system was nowhere near being where it has to be to face this... and then reiterating that based on scientific warnings that we only have about 10 years to really work for a solution and in changing our own behavior. That tells me regarding his answer, that he is also very disillusioned with the response from the political community on all sides regarding this issue, and believes the best best way to now counter their inaction is to go around it by informing and empowering the people to action.

I personally believe that is also the best way to handle this, and I think he is brilliant and brave for doing it this way. I also don't see what other choice we have when our political process remains the way it is now, with corporate benefactors taking precedence in buying policy over those "elected" (and I use that word loosely) doing what is right. I simply can't praise this interview enough, and perhaps that is because up until now I have become tired of the same questions being asked of him in the same order. This interview was not like that at all, and he actually discussed things he has not discussed in other interviews.

Please watch it if you get a chance, or check back at the site for the link to the video after it is shown again. You will not be disappointed, especially if you truly care for our coming together to solve this crisis.

Historians say Bush is sinking fast

2006-06-19T09:35:00.000-04:00

Historians say Bush is sinking fast
Posted on Sunday, June 18 @ 08:27:54 EDT
This article has been read 2211 times.
Allan Powell, The Herald-Mail

With increasing frequency, articles are being published which compare the performance of George W. Bush with that of earlier presidents. But there is a very real difference in the present ranking system and what was used on previous presidential studies.

Earlier studies of presidential performance used categories which had been accepted for many years: excellent, above average, average, below average and failure. At least two of the recent articles rank Bush only in relationship to presidents who have, by common agreement of recognized historians, been judged to have been poor presidents. In other words this study is judging the worst of the worst.

Examples of low-ranking presidents are James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Warren Harding and Richard Nixon. A 2004 study conducted by George Mason University in a survey of 415 presidential historians concludes that George Bush should now be included in this list - or worse, designated as "the worst."

A summary of the results are as follows: Eighty percent considered Bush's first term a failure, half of all respondents considered it the worst since the Great Depression, more than a third said it was the worst in 100 years and 11 percent ranked his first term the "worst ever."

But, more damaging than the original study are follow-up opinions. One professor avers that, "When I filled out that survey, I said Bush was the worst since Buchanan (1857-61), but things have gotten worse and now I'd have to consider him the worst ever."

The criteria used by these historians by which to grade the performance of each president were: Fiscal management, economic stewardship, success in handling change and crises and how our international interests were promoted...

Down for the count on Election Day '04'

2006-06-19T08:26:00.000-04:00

Bob Herbert
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)

I REMEMBER FIELDING TELEPHONE CALLS on Election Day 2004 from friends and colleagues anxious to talk about the exit polls, which seemed to show that John Kerry was beating George W. Bush and would be the next president. As the afternoon faded into evening, reports started coming in that the Bush camp was dispirited, maybe even despondent, and that the Kerry crowd was set to celebrate. (In an article in the current issue of Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes, "In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry."). I was skeptical.

The election was bound to be close, and I knew that Kerry couldn't win Florida. I had been monitoring the efforts to suppress Democratic votes there and had reported on the thuggish practice (by the Jeb Bush administration) of sending armed state police officers into the homes of elderly black voters in Orlando to "investigate" allegations of voter fraud.

As far as I was concerned, Florida was safe for the GOP. That left Ohio.

Republicans, and even a surprising number of Democrats, have been anxious to leave the 2004 Ohio election debacle behind. But Kennedy, in his long, heavily footnoted article ("Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"), leaves no doubt that the democratic process was trampled and left for dead in the Buckeye State. ...

Swing Ideas, not Swing Voters

2006-06-18T10:27:00.000-04:00

Swing Ideas, not Swing Voters
By Kenneth S. Baer and Andrei Cherny
The Democratic Strategist
June 2006

At this spring's exclusive Gridiron Dinner, Senator Barack Obama - according to reports, as the dinner is closed press - offered up a complaint common in Democratic circles. "You hear this constant refrain from our critics that Democrats don't stand for anything. That's really unfair," he said, "We do stand for anything." As they say in the Catskills, the line killed. But the problem it refers to has been killing Democrats for years.

Since the end of the Clinton years, the Democratic Party has been adrift - without a coherent agenda or public philosophy. According to a poll conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research earlier this year, only 29 percent of Americans believe that Democrats have a better sense than Republicans of what they stand for as a party (while 51 percent say that Republicans have a better sense than Democrats). As Stan Greenberg has put it, the American public believes Democrats have "no core set of convictions or point of view."

Part of that is expected: when you lose the White House, a party loses a de facto leader who can impose message and ideological discipline. But there is more to it. The world has profoundly changed since President Clinton sat in the Oval Office: globalization has accelerated at a torrid pace as have the technological innovations fueling it, the country has become more diverse and more dispersed, changing family arrangements and workplace structures have deeply affected how people see the world, and the attacks of September 11th have brought to the surface a simmering war with radical Islamist terror.

Yet Democrats have not put forward a vision of where the country should go, where it should lead the world, and why. And absent that vision, no get-out-the-vote effort, re-messaging exercise, or charismatic candidate will help Democrats win the White House and, just as importantly, become a vibrant progressive force for years to come. That is why if Democrats want to win in 2008 and beyond, they must invest in the intellectual infrastructure that underpins a modern political movement. They need to develop coherent responses - rooted in the party's deepest beliefs about democracy, liberty, equality, and justice - that respond to the new realities that America faces....

It's All About Bush

2006-06-18T09:33:00.000-04:00

It's All About Bush
by mcjoan
Daily Kos
Sat Jun 17, 2006 at 06:29:19 PM PDT

Purely as a discussion counterpoint to georgia10's strategy post, I want to posit an alternative idea for these midterm elections: it's all about Bush and Iraq.

The dirty secret of politics is that going negative works, particularly in midterm elections. If ever we had the makings of a "throw the bums out" mood in the electorate, it's this year. In light of that, consider this advice for Democrats from tristero:

Remember: Bush really is incompetent. And the American public sees it now.
Remember: Bush really has governed above the law. And the the American public understands that now.

Remember: Bush has bogged this nation down in an insane war. And the American public understands that now.

Remember: Bush does not have a genuine plan to deal with Iraq, nor is he capable of creating and implementing one. People are dying because he doesn't know what he's doing. And the American public understands that now.

Remember: Bush's supreme callousness and negligence led to the hiring of the incompetents in charge of FEMA during Katrina. And the American public knows it.

Remember: This is one helluva unpopular president. The American public has very good reasons for disliking him and his policies so intensely. They are all but begging you to stand up and refuse to go along with his incompetent, extremist, and unlawful behavior.

Focus on Bush. Everything else is detail.

All the policies and ideas the Democrats will labor over between now and Labor Day mean absolutely nothing as long as the Rubber Stamp Republicans hold the Congress. Until Democrats stand up and strongly repudiate everything that has made this Republican Congress and this Republican President so wildly unpopular, we're just going to be lumped in with the other bums.

Draw that contrast. Make Bush and his war the albatross on the neck of all Republicans. Everything else, as tristero says, is detail.

Corporate Democrats

2006-06-17T10:22:00.000-04:00

Published on Friday, June 16, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Corporate Democrats
by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

If you wonder why things never change in Washington, look no further than a report released yesterday by Russ Baker's Real News Project (www.realnews.org).

The report documents 25 corporate Democrats -- corporate consultants with strong ties to the Democratic Party leadership inside the beltway.

"Although establishment Democrats are, by and large, still more skeptical of the corporate agenda than Republicans, they have become strikingly less so," Baker writes. "This has led to the creation of a kind of permanent corporate governance structure that is truly bipartisan. Many of the firms employing Democratic operatives have them working side-by-side with Republicans -- often the same Republicans they go up against in political campaigns. In some cases, a so-called conservative Republican and a so-called liberal Democrat are full partners in the same firm."

Case in point: Jack Quinn.

Jack Quinn served as Vice President Gore's Chief of Staff, and later as Counsel to President Clinton. Now he is a partner in a political consulting and lobbying firm with Republican insider Ed Gillespie -- Quinn Gillespie -- and together, "they have represented clients who want to drill in fragile areas of Alaska, put the screws to already beleaguered American creditors, and prevent the introduction of more healthy dairy substitutes in school lunches," Baker writes.

Democratic consultants know no bounds when it comes to the corporate feeding trough. They work for companies pushing genetically modified organisms, for Big Pharma, for credit card companies and for gambling companies.

Here are the 25 Corporate Democrats profiled in Baker's report.

They'd make a great set of trading cards -- representing Democrats who have traded in their ideals to push the corporate agenda:

Name: Edward Ayoob
Firm: Barnes & Thornburgh
Democratic connection: Former legislative counsel to Senator Harry Reid - (D-Nevada)

Name: Bill Andresen
Firm: Dutko Worldwide
Democratic connection: Former chief of staff to Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman - (D-Connecticut)

Name: R. Lane Bailey
Firm: Golin/Harris
Democratic connection: Chief of staff to Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) for 12 years.

Name: Michael Berman
Firm: Duberstein Group
Democratic connection: Well-connected veteran Democrat

Name: John Breaux
Firm: Patton Boggs
Democratic connection: Former Democratic Senator from Louisiana

Name: Leslie Dach
Firm: Edelman Worldwide
Democratic connection: Former media consultant to Bill Clinton and John Kerry

Name: Ingrid Duran
Firm: D&P Creative Strategies
Democratic connection: Worked for the House Banking Committee under Democratic control.

Name: Carter Eskew
Firm: Glover Park Group
Democratic connection: Al Gore's chief media advisor in 2000.

Name: Phil Goldberg
Firm: Shook, Hardy & Bacon
Democratic connection: Aide to several Democratic members of Congress

Name: Joel Johnson
Firm: Glover Park Group
Democratic connection: Worked in the Clinton White House Name: Marshall Matz
Firm: Olsson Frank & Weeda
Democratic connection: Was George McGovern's nutrition expert.

Name: Richard Mintz
Firm: Brunswick Group
Democratic connection: Worked in Clinton's Transportation Department and was staff director for Hillary Clinton during the 1992 campaign.

Name: George Mitchell
Firm: Piper Rudnick
Democratic connection: Former Democratic Senator from Maine

Name: Mark Penn
Firm: Burson-Marsteller
Democratic connection: Principal pollster for Bill Clinton

Name: Ronald Platt
Firm: Buchanan Ingersoll
Democratic connection: Michigan state director for Gore-Lieberman

Name: Anthony Podesta
Firm: Podesta Mattoon
Democratic connection: Bill Clinton's chief of staff

Name: Heather Podesta
Firm: Blank Rome
Democratic connection: Counsel to the late Congressman Robert Matsui (D-California) and to Earl Pomeroy (D-North Dakota) as well as a staffer for former Senator Bill Bradley (D-New Jersey)

Name: Jack Quinn
Firm: Quinn Gillespie
Democratic connection: Chief of staff to former Vice President Al Gore.

Name: Thomas Quinn
Firm: Venable
Democratic connection: Worked on Democratic Presidential campaigns from Edward Kennedy in 1980 to John Kerry in 2004.

Name: Jody Powell
Firm: Powell Tate
Democratic connection: President Jimmy Carter's press secretary

Name: Steve Ricchetti
Firm: Ricchetti Inc.
Democratic connection: Former deputy chief of staff to Bill Clinton

Name: Anne Urban
Firm: Venn Strategies
Democratic connection: Economics adviser to Senator Joseph Lieberman-- (D-Connecticut)

Name: Anne Wexler
Firm: Wexler and Walker Public Policy Associates Democratic connection: Top policy aide in the Carter administration

Name: Howard Wolfson
Firm: Glover Park Group
Democratic connection: Former spokesperson for Hillary Clinton

Name: Andrew Young
Firm: Goodworks International
Democratic connection: President Carter's ambassador to the United Nations

Baker concludes that Democrats have increasingly belied their long-assumed commitment to the little guy and the average American by "cozying up to the money trough."

"Once the Democrats turned into the opposition, key Clinton figures found a home in offering their advertising, public relations and arm-twisting skills to industry trade associations and corporations," Baker writes in the report. "They retained their links to the party, and have lived a kind of dual life ever since, moving effortlessly from corporate work to campaign work and back. The friendliness with big business has escalated under the reign of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who has assembled his own so-called 'K Street Cabinet' -- named after the street where the lobbying hordes are headquartered."

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor. Mokhiber and Weissman are co-authors of On the Rampage: Corporate Predators and the Destruction of Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press).

© 2006 Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

African-American Voters Scrubbed by Secret GOP Hit List

2006-06-16T22:00:00.000-04:00

African-American Voters Scrubbed by Secret GOP Hit List
by Greg Palast
Democracy Now!

Friday 16 June 2006

Palast, who first reported this story for BBC Television Newsnight (UK) and Democracy Now! (USA), is author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse.

The Republican National Committee has a special offer for African-American soldiers: Go to Baghdad, lose your vote.

A confidential campaign directed by GOP party chiefs in October 2004 sought to challenge the ballots of tens of thousands of voters in the last presidential election, virtually all of them cast by residents of Black-majority precincts.

Files from the secret vote-blocking campaign were obtained by BBC Television Newsnight, London. They were attached to emails accidentally sent by Republican operatives to a non-party website.

One group of voters wrongly identified by the Republicans as registering to vote from false addresses: servicemen and women sent overseas.

[Greg Palast's discussion with broadcaster Amy Goodman on the Black soldier purge of 2004.]

Here's how the scheme worked: The RNC mailed these voters letters in envelopes marked, "Do not forward", to be returned to the sender. These letters were mailed to servicemen and women, some stationed overseas, to their US home addresses. The letters then returned to the Bush-Cheney campaign as "undeliverable."

The lists of soldiers of "undeliverable" letters were transmitted from state headquarters, in this case Florida, to the RNC in Washington. The party could then challenge the voters' registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballot being counted.

One target list was comprised exclusively of voters registered at the Jacksonville, Florida, Naval Air Station. Jacksonville is third largest naval installation in the US, best known as home of the Blue Angels fighting squandron....

Incivility in the House of Unrepresentatives: Washington Post Reporter Juliet Eilperin Scrutinizes the People's House

2006-06-16T09:38:00.000-04:00

Incivility in the House of Unrepresentatives: Washington Post Reporter Juliet Eilperin Scrutinizes the People's House
By JOHN W. DEAN
FindLaw
Friday, Jun. 02, 2006
Currently, about two-thirds of America disapproves of the job the Congress is doing. In a few months, however, they can do something about it when they elect the 110th Congress.

What is to be blamed for this overwhelming displeasure with Congress? While Congress-watchers are aware of the source of the problem, few others understand more than the fact that in the House, rancor has replaced reason - at the expense of Americans.

The U.S. House of Representatives is the true battlefield of contemporary national politics. Since 1994, Republicans have controlled the House, and since that time Juliet Eilperin has been covering the House for States News Service, Roll Call, and the Washington Post. (In 2004, she began covering the global environment for the Post.)

Eilperin thus is uniquely qualified to write about the House, and the title of her new book nicely sums up her take: Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship Is Poisoning the House of Representatives. The book is her account of "how the House of Representatives became the House of Unrepresentatives."

It would be difficult to be more fair and balanced than Eilperin has been; nonetheless, she acknowledges, at the outset of her report, her view that Republicans "have failed to live up to their own promises of reform" - their 1994 contract with America "to reclaim the House for the American people." While she finds both Republicans and Democrats at fault for the current state of affairs, her journalistic analysis of the "dysfunctional" House holds Republicans responsible, in particular, for failing to honor their promises.

But this is not a polemic or effort to castigate either party. Rather, Eilperin wants those who are not familiar with the partisanship and incivility to understand what it is doing to "the people's house." Accordingly, she seeks to explain why she believes it is occurring, and to consider what, if anything, can be done....

The Other Cheney Behind the Scenes

2006-06-15T16:01:00.000-04:00

The Other Cheney Behind the Scenes
By Robert Dreyfuss
The American Prospect

Tuesday 13 June 2006

Since 2005, Dick Cheney's daughter Elizabeth has held a powerful position guiding Middle East policy. And like father, like daughter: Liz is a key player in the push for regime change in Iran and Syria.
At the very heart of U.S. Middle East policy, from the war in Iraq to pressure for regime change in Iran and Syria to the spread of free-market democracy in the region, sits the 39-year-old daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney. Elizabeth "Liz" Cheney, appointed to her post in February 2005, has a tongue-twisting title: principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs and coordinator for broader Middle East and North Africa initiatives. By all accounts, it is an enormously powerful post, and one for which she is uniquely unqualified.

During the past 15 months, Elizabeth Cheney has met with and bolstered a gaggle of Syrian exiles, often in tandem with John Hannah and David Wurmser, top officials in the Office of the Vice President (OVP); has pressed hard for money to accelerate the administration's ever more overt campaign for forced regime change in both Damascus and Teheran; and has overseen an increasingly discredited push for American-inspired democratic reform from Morocco to Iran.

With the unspoken support of her father, Cheney has kept a hawk's eye on Iraq policy within the department, intimidating opponents of the neoconservative axis within the administration. And, less visibly, according to former officials who've worked with her, she has made her influence felt in choosing officials, selecting (or blocking) the appointment of ambassadors and other foreign service officers, and weighing in on other bureaucratic battles at the department.

Now, according to the Financial Times of London, Cheney is coordinating the work of a new entity called the Iran-Syria Operations Group. The unit was established "to plot a more aggressive democracy promotion strategy for those two 'rogue' states," reported the Times. In February, the State Department announced that Cheney would oversee a $5 million program to "accelerate the work of reformers in Syria," providing grants of up to $1 million each to Syrian dissidents.

And in the current fiscal year, she will oversee a similar, $7 million regime-change grant program for Iran, though funding for that effort is expected to grow to at least $85 million soon, to include both a propaganda program and support to Iranian opposition groups. "She came in knowing very little about the Middle East," says Marina S. Ottaway, senior associate and co-director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has worked with Liz Cheney on democratic reform issues. "She had a mandate to do democracy promotion, but she had very little familiarity with the subject.... They deliberately picked a person who was not a Middle East specialist, so that the conventional wisdom, well, let me rephrase, so that real, actual knowledge of the issues in the region wouldn't interfere with policy."...

Another failed photo-op

2006-06-14T08:31:00.001-04:00

Another failed photo-op
June 14, 2006 07:47 AM
The Rant
By DOUG THOMPSON
Capitol Hill Blue

President George W. Bush jetted off in the dark of night for a clandestine visit to Iraq - a grandstanding photo-op by a coward who refused to fight in war when his country called.
I've always found Bush's swaggering "war-time president" persona the height of political hypocrisy. This is, after all, the same George W. Bush who hid out in the Texas Air National Guard to avoid going to Vietnam and who later became the "Commander in Chief" who sends members of the National Guard and Reserve to their deaths in his lies-based invasion of Iraq.

MSNBC correctly labeled Bush's trip to Iraq the "mission not-quite accomplished photo op," a clever play on his disastrous "mission accomplished" debacle on board an aircraft carrier three years ago when he prematurely claimed the Iraq war a victory.

Back then a gullible electorate and complaint press played into Bush's hands and his poll numbers took a jump. Not now: Too many lies, too many setbacks, too much evidence that Iraq is a quagmire from which there may be no escape. Bush can't jump start his polls with a publicity stunt. He's been to that well too often.

But the President is desperate and the Republican Party is so afraid of losing control of the House in November that political strategists are willing to try anything to, even if it means putting the President of the United States into just the kind of war he tried so hard to evade as a young man.....

Another failed photo-op

2006-06-14T08:31:00.000-04:00

The Tipping Points

2006-06-13T13:44:00.000-04:00

The Tipping Points
By Daniel Yankelovich
Foreign Affairs

May/June 2006 Issue

From Bad to Worse

Terrorism and the war in Iraq are not the only sources of the American public's anxiety about U.S. foreign policy. Americans are also concerned about their country's dependence on foreign energy supplies, U.S. jobs moving overseas, Washington's seeming inability to stop illegal immigration, and a wide range of other issues. The public's support for promoting democracy abroad has also seriously eroded.

These are a few of the highlights from the second in a continuing series of surveys monitoring Americans' confidence in U.S. foreign policy conducted by the nonprofit research organization Public Agenda (with support from the Ford Foundation), of which I am chair. The first survey, conducted in June of last year, found that only the war in Iraq had reached the "tipping point" -- the moment at which a large portion of the public begins to demand that the government address its concerns. According to this follow-on survey, conducted among a representative sample of 1,000 American adults in mid-January 2006, a second issue has reached that status. The U.S. public has grown impatient with U.S. dependence on foreign countries for oil, and its impatience could soon translate into a powerful demand that Washington change its policies.

Overall, the public's confidence in U.S. foreign policy has drifted downward since the first survey. On no issue did the government's policy receive an improved rating from the public in January's survey, and on a few the ratings changed for the worse. The public has become less confident in Washington's ability to achieve its goals in Iraq and Afghanistan, hunt down terrorists, protect U.S. borders, and safeguard U.S. jobs. Fifty-nine percent of those surveyed said they think that U.S. relations with the rest of the world are on the wrong track (compared to 37 percent who think the opposite), and 51 percent said they are disappointed by the country's relations with other countries (compared to 42 percent who are proud of them).

As for the goal of spreading democracy to other countries, only 20 percent of respondents identified it as "very important" -- the lowest support noted for any goal asked about in the survey. Even among Republicans, only three out of ten favored pursuing it strongly. In fact, most of the erosion in confidence in the policy of spreading democracy abroad has occurred among Republicans, especially the more religious wing of the party. People who frequently attend religious services have been among the most ardent supporters of the government's policies, but one of the recent survey's most striking findings is that although these people continue to maintain a high level of trust in the president and his administration, their support for the government's Iraq policy and for the policy of exporting democracy has cooled....

Crucial Issues Not Addressed in the Immigration Debate: Why Deep Framing Matters

2006-06-12T12:07:00.000-04:00

Crucial Issues Not Addressed in the Immigration Debate: Why Deep Framing Matters

by George Lakoff, Sam Ferguson
Constructive critics of our paper The Framing of Immigration have suggested that we say more about immigration and American workers. We do that here. Other critics have misframed framing and attacked us for engaging in it. We respond.
Crucial Issues Not Addressed in the Immigration Debate:
Why Deep Framing Matters

By George Lakoff and Sam Ferguson
The Rockridge Institute
Our recent article, The Framing of Immigration, was about issues that are outside the frame of the “immigration problem” but are crucial to understanding immigration. The “immigration problem” frame points the finger at immigrants and administrative agencies as being “the problem.” This grossly oversimplifies a hugely complex set of issues involving the suppression of wages in the US economy and the “cheap labor trap” for workers here; the failure to crack down on illegal employers; the economic and political conditions that force immigrants to leave and the role US foreign policy has had in creating or perpetuating these conditions; the major contributions immigrants make to our economy without gratitude or proper recognition; and the humanitarian crisis caused by economic and political refugees.

These are real problems that largely go unframed — and thus unconsidered. Frames structure the way we think, the way we define problems, the values behind the definitions of those problems, and what counts as “solutions” to those frame-defined problems. If the problems are the immigrants and administrative agencies, all solutions involve those parties — building hi-tech walls, hiring more agents, calling in the National Guard, identification cards, stiff citizenship requirements, a “temporary worker” program with no rights for workers. As we noted, other frames allow us to see other problems, other causes, and other solutions.

Why the narrow framing of issues? Part of the answer comes from the difference in the way conservatives and progressives argue about causation. Conservatives tend to argue politically in terms of direct causation, while progressives are open to seeing systemic causation. Consider what is happening to low-to-middle income American workers. Our economy is structured to consider relatively unskilled labor as a resource, whose cost is to be minimized so that productivity and profits can be maximized. The more productive workers responsible for higher profits see wages stay the same or go down as profits go up. If they are replaced by illegal immigrants who work for even less, the immigrants are blamed, not the illegal employers who hired them, nor the economic system driving down wages. Conservative ideology sees the social safety net as immoral as well as wasteful. As conservatives, in hundreds of ways small and large, attack the safety net and take money out of the system for it through tax policy and the war in Iraq, American workers get squeezed more and more. Who is blamed? Not conservative ideologues ultimately responsible for the squeeze, but impoverished immigrants who receive modest benefits. In both cases, the visible immigrant present on the scene is taken as the direct cause, when the deeper causes — the ones that can't be cured by an immigration bill —are systemic and go undiscussed.

The situation of American workers and the status of our social safety net are in disastrous shape. Framing matters here, as Lakoff has argued in his article on the framing of the living wage issue. We do not believe that by expelling several million people, currently living in the shadows, that the problems of American workers will be solved, or that the social safety will miraculously recover. The reasons for this plight, as we have seen, are varied, complex, and deep-seated. When undocumented immigrants are scapegoated, attention is diverted from more fundamental causes. Why hasn't the government raised the minimum wage in nearly a decade? Why are the hundreds of billions of dollars being used to wage an unnecessary war instead being used to provide Americans with meaningful work? Or, with a national healthcare system? And why has nearly ten percent of Mexico's population been willing to face death to move north?

What is particularly sad to us is to see progressives accept the conservative framing of the issue.

Our job at Rockridge is to point out how the deep framing of values and issues is currently being done, what is left out, and how reframing can allow us to see otherwise hidden realities. We are concerned with reality. We are committed to showing how hidden realities can be framed so that they can be seen and openly discussed.

Frames are mental structures that allow us to understand the world. They are pre-linguistic — in the realm of concepts, not words. Framing is about characterizing values, concepts, and issues. Frames define the underlying problems, and by reframing one can point out when the real problems lie elsewhere.

Take the needed reframing of immigration from Mexico as a humanitarian crisis. An excellent article performing such reframing is “Dead in Their Tracks,” by Marc Cooper in the LA Weekly, February 22, 2006, which recounts the important humanitarian work of the Samaritan Patrol — a church group helping immigrants in need of medical care — and the harassment and arrest of the Samaritan Patrol by the Border Patrol.

One of the most basic results in cognitive science is that, for the most part, the use of conceptual frames is unconscious. Even people who are good at conceptual framing may not even be aware they are doing it. Marc Cooper is a good case in point. The effective reframer of “Dead in Their Tracks” attacked us last week for engaging in his own skilled but unconscious activity — “framing.” Cooper writes proudly, “Last year I bashed linguist and amateur political analyst George Lakoff for his absurd suggestion that "progressives" should concentrate on what he called "framing" of the issues. … Man, was I ever right to call him out.”

Our job at Rockridge is to make the public conscious of the framing in political discourse — including their own framing. Marc Cooper is a good example of what goes wrong when you engage in framing but are not aware of what you are doing. Cooper repeatedly misframes framing “as a matter of simple wordplay” (in The Atlantic Monthly, March 15, 2005). Lakoff, and the staff of the Rockridge Institute in general, talk about framing in terms of values, principles, and deep frames (that is, fundamental ideas that go across issue areas), and advise progressives to become conscious of their own deepest values and to use framing honestly and effectively to say what they really mean.

So called “tort reform” is a good example. Lakoff, in an interview on the Rockridge website discusses “tort reform” as an attempt by the Right to destroy the civil justice system, which is the last resort the public has when corporations, lacking regulation, harm the public. In the civil justice system, trial lawyers function as police and prosecutors and their fees pay for the detective work and the preparation of the case — and the capping of fees would de-finance the system and remove the public's last resort in dealing with corporate malfeasance. Lakoff recommends that progressive tell the public about this reality and that a term like “public protection attorneys” would better fit the role of protecting the public than merely “trial lawyers.” Cooper misses Lakoff's point that introducing such terms depends upon effectively and honestly characterizing the nature of the civil justice system — a deep reframing. Just introducing the words in the absence of the deep framing would have no effect and couldn't possibly work.

What happens if someone seriously and deeply misframes framing as the mere use of words, as “spin”? Can you just correct him by telling him what framing really is? Cognitive science tells us the answer: Probably not. The frames will trump the facts — even if the subject matter is framing itself.

The misframing of framing, whether by Rush Limbaugh and George Will or by Marc Cooper, is a fact we must deal with. Our approach to clarify the cognitive science is to distinguish deep versus surface frames. Deep frames are mental structures through which we conceptualize our values, principles, and fundamental ideas. Surface frames are the frames that are evoked by words and slogans, like tax relief or the culture of corruption. The surface frames only make sense given the deep frames. The Right has been much better at getting their deep frames out there, which is why they have so much more success with their surface frames.

The Iraq Effect

2006-06-11T19:30:00.000-04:00

The Iraq Effect
Zarqawi’s death is good news, but America’s war in the Middle East still looms large over U.S. politics. Just ask Joe Lieberman.
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
Updated: 1:29 p.m. ET June 9, 2006
June 9, 2006 - The death of the top-ranking operative of Al Qaeda in Iraq is a welcome moment of clarity in a war desperately in search of a rationale. Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi personified the face of evil and was controversial even among jihadists for staging large-scale attacks on civilians. The news out of Iraq has been gloomy for so long that Zarqawi’s demise, along with the agreement on the remaining cabinet ministers to fill out the new government, may buy some time with the American public, and give President Bush the breathing space to figure out what to do next when he meets with his advisers at Camp David next week.

Bush was subdued and didn’t overplay his hand when he stood in the Rose Garden early Thursday morning to commend U.S. forces for the successful bomb attack on the house where Zarqawi had been meeting with his lieutenants. The Jordanian-born Zarqawi led the foreign jihadists in Iraq and incited the sectarian violence against the Shia-majority population. His death is a major symbolic blow for the insurgency and a big win in the propaganda war for the West. But the carnage and the mayhem that defines Iraq today will not stop with Zarqawi’s passing, a reality that Bush acknowledged, along with a reflection of lessons learned from earlier victories that turned out to be less than enduring.

Weeks ago Karl Rove said Iraq “looms over everything.” That’s true not only for Bush but also increasingly for Democrats. Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, who was Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, is facing the first serious challenge in his 18-year Senate career. According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, Lieberman’s margin of victory dropped eight points in the last month, from 65 to 57 percent, and his favorable rating among Democrats slipped to 49 percent, a red flag for the upcoming Aug. 8 primary. Wealthy telecommunications executive Ned Lamont polled just 19 percent a month ago against Lieberman; he’s now at 32 percent and the darling of a growing antiwar movement to take back the party. The primary is in the dead of summer when only the most passionate turn out, which bodes ill for Lieberman, a Bush ally on the war and a middle-of-the-roader on most issues.

Here’s the dilemma for Lieberman: He could lose the primary, but if he ran as an independent, he would win. He polls much higher among all voters than Democrats. To get on the ballot as an independent, Lieberman needs 30,000 signatures, which would be no problem. The catch is that under the rules, he would have to present them on Aug. 9, the day after the primary. But if he starts to gather signatures now, he likely loses the primary.

“It’s like saying to Democrats, ‘I’m going to run anyway.’ It’s a slap in the face and an admission of weakness,” says Matt Bennett with Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. On the other hand, if Lieberman doesn’t follow through on a fallback position, “He’s gambling with his Senate career,” says Bennett. Party regulars worry that if Lamont is their candidate, he could lose and take Democratic House challengers with him. Republicans have an appealing local district attorney waiting in the wings if Lamont is the candidate. History shows from George McGovern to Howard Dean that doves are not rewarded at the ballot box. If Lieberman were to lose the primary, or to start collecting signatures, it would be evidence of the power of the antiwar grass roots—something the Democratic leadership has been working hard to keep a lid on.

The death of Zarqawi is a reminder of how fast things can change in a war Americans still want to win....

Overselling Terror

2006-06-09T10:04:00.000-04:00

Overselling Terror
By Robert Parry
Consortiumnews.com
June 9, 2006

The killing of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq and the arrest of 17 suspects in an alleged terror plot in Canada have buoyed George W. Bush’s political prospects by refocusing America’s attention again on the terror threat, much as the orange color-coded warnings did from 2002 until Election 2004.

But the recent developments in Iraq and Canada have obscured other new evidence that points toward a very different reality: that the Islamic terror threat was never as severe as Bush made it out to be after the 9/11 attacks and that it has been fading ever since.

While Bush has sought to frighten the American people with apocalyptic visions of Islamic terrorists establishing an empire that “spans from Spain to Indonesia,” the new intelligence data actually reveals al-Qaeda as a largely dissipated force that now exists more as an inspiration to violence than as an organized movement.

Indeed, since 9/11, with Osama bin-Laden on the run and many other al-Qaeda leaders captured or killed, leading theoreticians of Islamic terror have jettisoned the idea of a tightly organized movement that could take territory or even mount coordinated attacks.

Instead, these strategists have been reduced to encouraging scattered acts of crude violence by home-grown terror cells that can manage to scrape together their own resources, make their own plans and launch attacks far less sophisticated than those on 9/11.

While still capable of some horrific acts of violence, like the Madrid train bombings in 2004 or the London subway bombings in 2005, these self-motivated cells would seem to represent more of a police challenge than a justification for putting the U.S. government onto a perpetual war footing with a President exercising total – or “plenary” – authority.

In fact, it could be argued that the excesses of Bush’s “war on terror” – the invasion of Iraq, the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, alleged torture at Guantanamo Bay and secret CIA prisons – have become the central organizing tool and the chief motivating force for the emerging shape of Islamic terrorism...

Pissypants Crowd Fears Gore

2006-06-09T09:06:00.000-04:00

Pissypants Crowd Fears Gore
By Pachacutec
Firedoglake

They used to mock him. Now they’re giving him the shrieking orc treatment. The bedwetting team is scared. . . witless. . . of Al Gore and his new movie, An Inconvenient Truth (which you can pledge to see here).

Search for blog entries mentioning Al Gore at Technorati to see how HUGE the buzz is around him now. You’ll see a lot of cheering, enthusastic welcoming of Gore back to the public scene, mixed in with heaping septic mountains of flying wingnut feces. I could provide you with links to show how unhinged and terrified the right wing is of Gore, but I don’t link to them. You know the usual sites and suspects. Technorati will help you see what I’m talking about.

Why do they fear Gore?

Well, for one, he is telling the truth. His message is popular and timely in the post-Katrina era. The energy lobby is furiously lying like Mike McCurry to step on Gore’s message. Gore is the last Democrat to win the national popular vote, and the highest total Democratic vote getter ever. He’s looking relaxed, focused and fearless, and though he says he’s not running for president, insiders seem to doubt him and outsiders are trying to draft him.

What’s more, his signature issue - taking action to avoid global calamity in the form of irreversible climate change - is a potential political game changer. It gives people something far more genuine to fear, and bedwetters are all about harnessing fear to promote their political ends. They don’t want their monopoly challenged....

Incivility in the House of Unrepresentatives: Washington Post Reporter Juliet Eilperin Scrutinizes the People's House

2006-06-08T08:51:00.000-04:00

Incivility in the House of Unrepresentatives: Washington Post Reporter Juliet Eilperin Scrutinizes the People's House
By JOHN W. DEAN
Findlaw
----
Friday, Jun. 02, 2006
Currently, about two-thirds of America disapproves of the job the Congress is doing. In a few months, however, they can do something about it when they elect the 110th Congress.

What is to be blamed for this overwhelming displeasure with Congress? While Congress-watchers are aware of the source of the problem, few others understand more than the fact that in the House, rancor has replaced reason - at the expense of Americans.

The U.S. House of Representatives is the true battlefield of contemporary national politics. Since 1994, Republicans have controlled the House, and since that time Juliet Eilperin has been covering the House for States News Service, Roll Call, and the Washington Post. (In 2004, she began covering the global environment for the Post.)

Eilperin thus is uniquely qualified to write about the House, and the title of her new book nicely sums up her take: Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship Is Poisoning the House of Representatives. The book is her account of "how the House of Representatives became the House of Unrepresentatives."

It would be difficult to be more fair and balanced than Eilperin has been; nonetheless, she acknowledges, at the outset of her report, her view that Republicans "have failed to live up to their own promises of reform" - their 1994 contract with America "to reclaim the House for the American people." While she finds both Republicans and Democrats at fault for the current state of affairs, her journalistic analysis of the "dysfunctional" House holds Republicans responsible, in particular, for failing to honor their promises.

But this is not a polemic or effort to castigate either party. Rather, Eilperin wants those who are not familiar with the partisanship and incivility to understand what it is doing to "the people's house." Accordingly, she seeks to explain why she believes it is occurring, and to consider what, if anything, can be done.

The 1994 Shakeup of the House: Republicans Win Control, and Make Changes

Republicans won control of the House in 1994, after forty years in the political wilderness and several decades of trashing the Democratic leaders of the House, and portraying the body itself "as an evil institution." Newt Gingrich and other backbenchers relentlessly and endlessly attacked for over a decade, charging Democrats with misfeasance, malfeasance and nonfeasance - or worse. Republicans promised they would do better if given a chance to lead.

Once in control, the GOP leadership made fundamental changes in the operations of the House. None was more dramatic than eliminating the powerful fiefdoms of committee chairmen who had obtained their posts though seniority alone, under both Democratic- and Republican-controlled Congresses. Under the new Republican rule, chairmen were to be selected by the leadership based on a combination of seniority and willingness to play ball with the leadership....

Peaceable Assembly

2006-06-07T08:35:00.000-04:00

Monday, June 5th, 2006 at 6:00 pm
Peaceable Assembly
By diogenes
Firedoglake

Ever since Reagan fired the air-traffic controllers, unions have faced the most hostile environment of any organization in America. The legal, political and cultural environment has resulted in a decline of union membership from 16% in 1989, to 8% of private sector jobs in 2004. And that’s down from the 1950’s high water mark of 36%. Why and how that happened gives insight into the AFL-CIO/SEIU split we see in labor. Let’s look at the why’s and how’s.

You can’t talk about the legal environment without consulting The Source – the US Constitution. The First Amendment says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” Consider how easy it easy to “peaceably assemble” as a church or corporation.

When I was a kid, many found Southern Baptists to be insufficiently conservative. As a result, a Free Will Baptist delegation was invited to discuss a new church in our area. The first cottage prayer meeting was held at our house. Shortly thereafter, property and a building was leased, and voila! – a new church was born. Minimal paperwork, few regulations, no government interference. Easy as falling off a log. Just like the First Amendment says.

A professor of mine formed a Delaware corporation, the sole asset of which was his sailboat. Why? If one of his sailing guests were injured, they could only sue the corporation, not my professor. He recouped the filing and maintenance costs in reduced insurance premiums. To form a corporation, you basically send the right papers to the state, pay the fee and you’re off and running. Easy as falling off a log. The state can’t stop you. And forming a proprietorship is even easier.

Contrast that with forming a union. Opposed by business and government, citizens fought and died for the right to “peaceably assemble” as a union. When’s the last time anybody died forming a church or company?....

Stand Up for Democracy With Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

2006-06-06T19:25:00.000-04:00

Stand Up for Democracy With Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
By Thom Hartmann
Common Dreams

Sunday 04 June 2006

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has written a brilliant new article about the biggest political story in the history of the United States: An American politician illegitimately took the office of president by outright theft and fraud. Although such high crimes and misdemeanors have been rumored in previous elections, none in the history of the republic have been so thoroughly documented. George W. Bush is not the legitimate president of the United States.

Schoolchildren read (in the few remaining civics classes in America) about the multiple pollings and tense standoff that led to Thomas Jefferson's election as president in "the Revolution of 1800," because newspapers of the day looked into and reported on such things. But - unless we speak out - odds are that few will read about what happened in Ohio in 2004 in future history books, because modern newspaper editors are increasingly corporate appendages, and many of today's "reporters" worry more about currying favor with institutional power than investigating stories that may inconvenience or upset their "sources."

Kennedy's story - "Was The 2004 Election Stolen?" - broke on Thursday, June 1, 2006, when Rolling Stone magazine put it on their website and it appeared on other websites including www.commondreams.org. It hit the newsstands soon thereafter. In the article, Kennedy lays out the details of exactly how the Republican Party, in several states but particularly in Ohio, engaged in a criminal conspiracy to both steal the 2004 election and to cover up the evidence of that theft.

The subtitle of the article lays out Kennedy's foundational premise: "Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House." And that's just the beginning of the story, which includes ballot-box stuffing, electronic voting machine manipulation, "caging" in defiance of a court order banning Republicans from the notorious practice, threats and intimidation of Democratic voters by imported Republican goon squads, and multiple illegal uses of the office of the Secretary of State to disenfranchise Democratic voters.

The Republican rebuttals/attacks have already begun, starting with a particularly tragic hit-piece in one of the higher-profile "online magazines" that claims to authoritatively quote so-called but unnamed "experts" who doubt Kennedy's sources, and takes a clip of Ohio law so out of context as to essentially reverse its meaning in support of the Republican talking points....

I Know a Secret That George Bush Doesn't, and That's Why He's Imploding towards Oblivion

2006-06-06T15:23:00.000-04:00

Robert J. Elisberg

06.06.2006
I Know a Secret That George Bush Doesn't, and That's Why He's Imploding towards Oblivion

....Here's the secret I know, that George Bush hasn't figured out -

His base is not going to desert him.

They can whine, complain, bully, cry and petulantly threaten to stay home all they want, but by now it has become so mind-numbingly obvious that George Bush could do anything, and they would not ever, never, ever desert him.....

And because he hasn't figured this out, that's why he's going to crash into oblivion.

Everyone else has deserted him, yet still he panders to his base: he's promoting a Constitutional Amendment against gay marriage. He says Americans should only sing the National Anthem in English. And that creaky relic flag-burning gets dragged out of musty corners of the attic. All this, even while his poll numbers plummet lower than TV ratings for NHL hockey. Just to play to his base.

Incidentally, they don't call it "base" for nothing.

He is going in debt spending political capital he never had, just to play to his base. Which is Never Going to Desert Him.

Just think - if he wanted to, George Bush could approve stem cell research and Global Warming initiatives, and win back moderate Republicans. All the while keeping his base, since they aren't going to desert him.

He could even roll back his tax cuts, bring home the Troops from Iraq, create a National Health Care program, reduce industrial carbon dioxide emissions, and support public financing of elections, and get liberal Democrats to support him. And still not lose his base. Since they aren't going to desert him.

George Bush could regain that amazing 90% approval rating he once had - and do so for building a Great America, not because he happened to be in office when airplanes rammed into a building - creating a devastatingly-powerful support to last many decades to come.

George Bush has every politician's greatest dream in the palm of his hands, a solid base that will never leave him, from which he can build and do anything he wants...and he doesn't know it....

Rushing Towards a Constitutional Crisis

2006-06-04T15:10:00.000-04:00

05.30.2006
Rushing Towards a Constitutional Crisis
By Gary Hart and Joyce Appleby
HuffingtonPost.com

We are in the midst of a political crisis that goes right to the heart of our constitutional government. Yet, without a depression or civil war on the horizon, we have been slow to respond to this threat to the future of our democracy

The Founding Fathers made interpreting the Constitution easy.

Gouverneur Morris, the delegate tasked with polishing its prose, preferred clear expression. Where the framers wished to be specific, he made the document transparent. Where they preferred to be vague, he produced felicitous phrases like the famous "necessary and proper clause." Where they utterly failed to anticipate a development like the emergence of political parties, there was an amendment process that could separate the elections of president and vice president, as did the 12th.
However easy to interpret, sustaining a consensus around any particular interpretation of the Constitution has proved more difficult. Our Supreme Court justices have never failed to fill up their docket. Against this background of successive and contending interpretations of the Constitution, it's important to distinguish between differences of opinion and a crisis. The differences arise over how to apply the Constitution in specific cases. When a development threatens the heart of our Constitution, a crisis looms. And it does so now with a president who explicitly and consistently works to extend his power in a way that upsets the balance of authority among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of our government....

Unseen Al Gore Campaign video

2006-06-02T15:31:00.000-04:00

Unseen Al Gore Campaign video
Unseen Al Gore Campaign video

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

2006-06-01T20:43:00.000-04:00

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Rolling Stone
Thursday 01 May 2006

Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted - enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
The complete article, with Web-only citations, follows. For more, see exclusive documents, sources, charts and commentary.

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush - and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in "tinfoil hats," while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as "conspiracy theories,"(1) and The New York Times declared that "there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale."(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots - or received them too late to vote(4) - after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment - roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. "We didn't have one election for president in 2004," says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. "We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities."

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004....

A state of emergency

2006-06-01T12:20:00.000-04:00

A state of emergency

Bush is a danger to the constitution in his wartime capacity as commander in chief

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday June 1, 2006
The Guardian

Within the Bush administration something that senior officials call the "war paradigm" is the central organising principle. They do not use the phrase publicly, but they bend policy to serve it. After September 11 the war paradigm was instantly adopted. George Bush, who proclaimed "I'm a war president", assumed the paradigm as his natural state and right. According to its imperatives, the president in his wartime capacity as commander in chief makes and enforces laws as he sees fit, overriding the constitutional system of checks and balances. Some of the paradigm's expressions include Bush's fiats on the treatment of detainees, domestic surveillance and international law, and his more than 750 "signing statements" - interpretations of laws that he claims he can implement as he chooses.

Article continues

In the beginning, the elements of the war paradigm appeared to be expediencies, conceived as emergency measures in the struggle against al-Qaida. But their precepts were developed before September 11 by John Yoo, promoted to deputy assistant attorney general in the office of legal counsel at the department of justice, where he was tasked to write secret memos on torture, surveillance and executive power.
Once Bush approved them, the clerisy of neoconservative lawyers put them into effect. They believe fervently that the constitution is fatally flawed and must be circumscribed. The Bush administration's holy grail is to remove suspects' rights to due process, speedy trial and exculpatory evidence. The war paradigm is to be strengthened to conduct permanent war against terror that can never be finally defeated. There is no exit strategy from emergency.

In the short run, Bush's defence of his war paradigm may precipitate three constitutional crises. In the first, freedom of the press is at issue.....

Treasury Secretary Nominee Says Failure To Ratify Kyoto Undermines U.S. Competitiveness

2006-05-31T13:14:00.000-04:00

Treasury Secretary Nominee Says Failure To Ratify Kyoto Undermines U.S. Competitiveness
Think Progress

President Bush’s new nominee for Treasury Secretary, Goldman Sachs Chairman Henry M. Paulson Jr., not only endorses the Kyoto Protocol to limit greenhouse emissions, but argues that the United States’ failure to enact Kyoto undermines the competitiveness of U.S. companies. Here’s a statement from the Nature Conservancy, where Paulson serves as chairman of the board:

The Kyoto Protocol is a key first step to help slow the onslaught of global warming and benefit conservation efforts…Until the United States passes its own limits on global warming emissions, innovative companies based here will lose out on opportunities to sell reduced emission credits to companies complying with the Kyoto Protocol overseas. Additionally, without enacting our own emission limits, U.S. companies will lose ground to their competitors in Europe, Canada, Japan, and other countries participating in the Protocol who are developing clean technologies.

Goldman Sachs, under Paulson’s leadership, argued that the danger from global warming is imminent and requires “urgent” action by government to reduce emissions:

[C]limate change is one of the most significant environmental challenges of the 21st century and is linked to other important issues such as economic growth and development… Goldman Sachs is very concerned by the threat to our natural environment, to humans and to the economy presented by climate change and believes that it requires the urgent attention of and action by governments, business, consumers and civil society to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

As a result, Paulson’s nomination is strongly opposed by a coalition right-wing groups seeking to cast doubt on climate science, such as the National Center for Public Policy Research, describing Paulson as “diametrically opposed to the positions of [the Bush] Administration.”

Neo-cons question Bush’s democratisation strategy

2006-05-31T08:50:00.000-04:00

Neo-cons question Bush’s democratisation strategy
By Guy Dinmore in Washington
Published: May 29 2006 21:52 | Last updated: May 29 2006 21:52
The Financial Times

President George W. Bush has likened the “war on terrorism” to the cold war against communism.

Addressing military cadets graduating from West Point, Mr Bush reaffirmed at the weekend that the US “will not rest until the promise of liberty reaches every people in every nation”.

But as the US struggles to assert itself on the international stage, the president’s most radical supporters now dismiss this as mere rhetoric, and traditional conservatives are questioning the wisdom of a democratisation strategy that has brought unpleasant consequences in the Middle East.

Administration officials speak privately of a sense of fatigue over the worsening crisis in Iraq that has drained energy from other important policy issues. Senior officials are leaving – not so unusual in a second term, but still giving the sense of a sinking ship run in some quarters by relatively inexperienced crew.

Neo-conservative commentators at the American Enterprise Institute wrote last week what amounted to an obituary of the Bush freedom doctrine....

The coward-in-chief dishonors those who served

2006-05-30T08:46:00.000-04:00

The Rant
The coward-in-chief dishonors those who served
By DOUG THOMPSON
Capitol Hill Blue
May 30, 2006, 04:50

....And it is a sad, cruel irony that this coward, who used the National Guard to hide from war now, more than any other President, sends members of the Guard and Reserves into Iraq to die for his war based on lies and a pre-determined political agenda.

The evidence says Bush planned a war with Iraq even before taking the Presidency in the disputed 2000 election. He talked about the need to "eliminate Saddam Hussein" during the campaign, hinted at it during his inaugural speech and then ordered the Pentagon to prepare plans for an invasion as one of his first actions as President.

When the nation reeled from the shock and horror of the 9/11 attacks, Bush showed no surprise or shock. He finished reading a children's story to a group of elementary school kids, then climbed into Air Force One and calmly told his assembled group of staff and advisors that "OK, we're at war." Within hours, targets were identified, plans readied and invasion orders prepared.

In retrospect, it was all too convenient, too prepared, too scripted. A President who wanted desperately to go to war had his excuse and the backing of a shell-shocked Congress and numbed American population.

Over the last four-and-a-half years, however, realization has replaced shock and we see more clearly how manipulation of events led to a war that was always part of the plan.

As I watched Bush deliver his Memorial Day speech at Arlington Cemetery Monday, I saw a man without an ounce of grief or remorse. Bush delivered his speech in a cold, calculated way, using a day of honor for dishonorable purposes, exploiting a time of memoriam to further his political agenda.

The debacle of Iraq will forever define the Presidency of George W. Bush as a monumental failure. But that is a political failure. Bush's loyalty lies not with the American people but with special interests that have long owned him. Those interests - the Halliburtons, the vast corporate defense industrial cabal and the mercenaries who always profit from war - got what they wanted.

They won, but America lost, and that loss will haunt this nation for many, many years.

The defining issue of our time is the media

2006-05-27T14:04:00.000-04:00

"Media Matters"; by Jamison Foser
Media Matters

The defining issue of our time is not the Iraq war. It is not the "global war on terror." It is not our inability (or unwillingness) to ensure that all Americans have access to affordable health care. Nor is it immigration, outsourcing, or growing income inequity. It is not education, it is not global warming, and it is not Social Security.

The defining issue of our time is the media.

The dominant political force of our time is not Karl Rove or the Christian Right or Bill Clinton. It is not the ruthlessness or the tactical and strategic superiority of the Republicans, and it is not your favorite theory about what is wrong with the Democrats.

The dominant political force of our time is the media.

Time after time, the news media have covered progressives and conservatives in wildly different ways -- and, time after time, they do so to the benefit of conservatives.

Consider the last two presidents. Bill Clinton faced near-constant media obsession with his "scandals," while George W. Bush has gotten off comparatively easy.

Even many members of the media have stopped contesting this painfully obvious point, instead offering dubious justifications. Bill Clinton's "scandals" made for better stories than George Bush's, we are told, because they were simpler and easier for readers and viewers to understand. "Sex sells," while George Bush's false claims about Iraq are much harder to explain.

This excuse is simply nonsense.

First, what's so hard to understand about this? George Bush and his administration systematically distorted available intelligence to lead the nation to war on false pretenses. His administration has been marked by corruption, incompetence, lies, secrecy, and flagrant disregard for bedrock constitutional principles. None of that can be too complicated: Polls suggest that the majority of Americans believe all of those things.

Second, even if it were true that Clinton's "scandals" were easier for consumers of news to understand, the ease of explaining an affair would, if we had a serious and functional news media, be more than offset by the far greater importance of Bush's misdeeds.

Finally, this is such a grotesque distortion of the media's treatment of Clinton that it is difficult to explain by anything other than outright dishonesty.....

The Race to the Bottom

2006-05-27T10:35:00.000-04:00

"The Race to the Bottom"
by Shayne Munger
Daily Kos
Thu May 25, 2006 at 05:37:41 PM PDT

The Federal Reserve prepares a Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) every three years. The latest survey, released in April 2006, measures the net worth (total assets) of all households in the nation in 2004. This survey is a summary of a complete and through analysis of the individual wealth of different groups of all Americans. This latest report shows a huge inequality of wealth between a small number of households at the top of the income scale and those of us at the bottom half. In addition this report shows that this inequality is consistently growing and is becoming a permanent part of our society. This analysis reinforces my consistent contention that we are well on our way to a third world economy. It also shows that the conservatives are succeeding in their goal of dismantling all the advances in wealth and security that were gained for the average American family through the Democratic social programs of The New Deal, The New Frontier and The Great Society.

The conservatives have made the dismantling of the American social programs the main part of their agenda since FDR took office in 1933 and after he moved to smash the inequality between the American classes that was one of the main causes of the "Great Depression". These Democratic programs led to the amazing growth of the American middle class, the establishment of an economy that was the envy of the world and to the rise of the United States a superpower that it is today.

These "economic" conservatives started their grab for power with the rise of Barry Goldwater and continued with the elections of Richard Nixon, Ronald Regan, George Walker Bush and George W. Bush and also with the Republican take over of the House of Representatives in the Mid 90s. They accomplished this by using wedge issues to ally themselves with the Dixiecrats of the South and the Christian conservative movement of the "Bible Belt". These wedge issues have been used to take advantage of the racial bigotry and the belief in religious theocracy by a large portion of the American electorate from the very beginning of the conservative movement. The economic conservatives, consisting of the very wealthy and corporate and financial leaders, got people to vote against their financial and social interests by exploiting these racial fears and their religious fanaticism. They are continuing to implement this agenda and dramatically accelerating this attack on the Democratic Party's moral values under President George W. Bush and his rubber stamp, corporate controlled, Republican Congress. To make matters worse, the Republican clone Democrats from the Democratic Leadership Council have aided and abetted them in this drive to the bottom. That is the bottom line for the wealthy and the corporate executives and the bottom of the barrel for the American family. These DLC Democrats include the likes of Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton Dianne Feinstein, Evan Bayh and Rahm Emmanuel. You can see this in their support for The WTO, the Fast Track Authority for the President, NAFTA, The Chinese Trade Agreement, The Bankruptcy Bill, CAFTA and the many other unfair trade agreements that have been a disaster for the American worker, the American middle class and the American family.

So let's look at the economic impact on the wealth of all Americans as a result of this immoral agenda that is being pursued by the wealthy and corporate lobby conservatives of this country....

A Brave and Startling Truth

2006-05-25T13:38:00.000-04:00

A Brave and Startling Truth
Maya Angelou
American Poet, Author and Actress

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

This poem was written and delivered in honor of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations.

© Maya Angelou, from A Brave And Startling Truth
Published by Random House

How Bush Brewed the Iran Crisis

2006-05-25T10:19:00.000-04:00

May 23, 2006

Paranoia as Policy

How Bush Brewed the Iran Crisis

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Counterpunch

Why did the Bush regime create a crisis over Iran?

The answer is that the Bush regime is desperate to widen the war in the Middle East.

What has Iran done? Unlike Israel, Pakistan and India, countries that developed nuclear weapons on the sly, Iran signed the non-proliferation treaty. Countries that sign this treaty have the right to develop nuclear energy. The International Atomic Energy Agency monitors their energy programs to guard against the programs being used to cloak a weapons program. Until the Bush regime provoked a crisis, Iran was cooperating with the inspection safeguards. The weapons inspectors have found no Iranian weapons programs.

There is no evidence for the Bush regime's accusation that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. What the Bush regime is trying to do is to unilaterally take away Iran's right under the non-proliferation treaty to develop nuclear energy. It is the Bush regime that is violating the treaty by attempting to deny its benefits to Iran. The Bush regime is acting illegally because of its paranoid suspicion that 5 or 10 years in the future Iran will use what it has managed to learn about uranium enrichment to develop a weapons program....

The War on Jim McDermott

2006-05-24T09:43:00.000-04:00

The War on Jim McDermott
Republican Leaders in D.C. Want to Destroy Seattle's Defiantly Liberal Congressman. In the Process, They May Destroy the First Amendment.
BY ELI SANDERS
The Stranger

....What concerns McDermott most these days is the story's ending, which is still unwritten. It could very well take place at the U.S. Supreme Court. It has the potential to land McDermott in significant financial peril. And it could lead to new restrictions on the ability of the press to print stories, like the 1971 Pentagon Papers series, that rely on illegally obtained information.

THE PHONE CALL

The Republican legal crusade against McDermott has its roots in a 1996 ethics charge that bedeviled former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. At the time, McDermott was the ranking Democrat on the House ethics committee and Gingrich, the mastermind of the 1994 "Republican Revolution," which gave Republicans control of Congress for the first time in 40 years, was facing complaints over his use of a college course for political purposes. To settle the complaint, Gingrich agreed to pay a $300,000 fine and promised not to publicly minimize, or "spin," the charge against him.

"That was the genesis of this phone call," McDermott says, referring to a conference call that Gingrich held in secret with Republican leaders shortly after the settlement. "Essentially, he was encouraging them to figure out how to spin it," McDermott says—a direct violation of his agreement with the ethics committee.

We are sitting in McDermott's ground-floor suite in the Longworth House Office Building as he recounts this episode, a picture of Mahatma Gandhi on the wall to his left, along with a framed magazine cover showing him holding a "Bush Lied" placard. On a large bookshelf built into the wall nearby sit old copies of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a totem from his days working as a psychiatrist. Other books trace his passions: AIDS, history, politics, Africa, social health. Maps of Iraq and Afghanistan are tacked up here and there, and on the coffee table is a book titled simply Guantánamo.

McDermott, 69, has an extremely expressive face; the corners of his mouth move from near the top of his cheekbones to his jaw line depending on his mood, and his nimble gray eyebrows can be deployed to great dramatic effect. Deep wrinkles only add to the expressive potential.

With 17 years in Congress, there isn't much in politics that shocks McDermott anymore. But what happened after Gingrich secretly broke his promise still leaves McDermott smirking with incredulity. "If you wrote it in a script for a Hollywood movie," he says, "they'd laugh you out of the studio."

Gingrich's secret conference call involved several members of the Republican House leadership, and as it happened, one of those leaders, Boehner, the congressman from Ohio, was driving through Florida at the very moment his colleagues needed him to be on the phone. So Boehner pulled into the parking lot of a Waffle House and joined the conference call on his cell. The date was December 21, 1996.

Not far away, a Florida couple, John and Alice Martin, were messing around with their police radio scanner and happened to pick up the call as the Republicans were talking about how to spin Gingrich's ethics charge. Being Democrats who followed politics, they realized whom they were hearing and decided to make a tape for posterity. Then, realizing what they had heard, they decided to tell their congresswoman, Karen L. Thurman. She, in turn, encouraged them to give the tape to McDermott because of his position on the ethics committee....

His Adequacy hits out over climate change

2006-05-23T17:16:00.000-04:00

His Adequacy hits out over climate change

Charlotte Higgins
Monday May 22, 2006
The Guardian

It was a disorienting sight: the man whom many feel should be US president attired in impeccable evening dress, surrounded by Tinseltown's finest and occupying a platform at the Cannes film festival, just like Tom Hanks, Penélope Cruz and Audrey Tatou before him.
In fact Al Gore's demeanour served to demonstrate the intimacy between politics and showbiz, and, if anything, he outdid Hollywood at its own game. Whereas stars such Hanks usually exhibit self-deprecation, Mr Gore opted for the big entrance, sweeping in to applause.

Article continues

The conference moderator inquired how Mr Gore should be addressed. "Your Adequacy," replied the former vice-president. Hanks himself could not have delivered the line more smoothly. The new Gore radiates a supple charm that many felt he lacked in the 2000 campaign.
Mr Gore was in Cannes for the European premiere of An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary on the "planetary emergency" of global warming, the issue to which he has devoted himself since his election defeat. The film, directed by Davis Guggenheim, splices material from Mr Gore's own roadshow - an awareness-raising talk - with chat about his family, conversion to the environmental cause, and how the presidency slipped from him.

Responding to speculation that he might run for president again, he replied: "I don't plan to be a candidate again."

He was much less guarded about the US administration's approach to the environment. "The [American] people are way ahead of the politicians on the issue of global warming ... I believe there is a chance that within two years Bush and Cheney will be forced to change position. You can only create your own reality for so long. Mother Nature has joined this debate with a strong voice; Hurricane Katrina was a wake-up call."

He said political and climate systems moved at a glacier's pace."Then suddenly [they] move swiftly when a tipping point is crossed. The whole point [of this film] is to try to move the USA and the world past that tipping point, beyond which the political system stops moving in a slow and frustrating way and actually engenders sudden and dramatic change." He added: "We are at the fork in the road. Down one path lies the point of no return, beyond which the environment degrades, threatening human civilisation. In the other direction lies hope ... those politicians left behind will be out of office." The crisis demanded "an ethical solution right now".

He is positive about the solutions. If the US accepts the successor to the Kyoto treaty, if an effort is pursued with China and India on board, if alternative sources of energy are researched - there is, he thinks, still a chance to avert the worst.

How Does President Bush Compare with Other Wartime Presidents With Respect to Free Speech Issues?

2006-05-21T12:41:00.000-04:00

How Does President Bush Compare with Other Wartime Presidents With Respect to Free Speech Issues?
By JOHN W. DEAN
FINDLAW
Friday, May. 19, 2006

Lately, the Bush Administration has been talking of using the Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute the New York Times and the Washington Post. Yet these veteran newspapers' "crimes" consist merely of publishing Pulitzer-Prize-winning articles on the CIA's secret prisons, and the NSA's secret surveillance programs.

Not even Nixon sank so low. He might have initiated criminal prosecutions against the Times for printing the Pentagon Papers, yet did not.

And in other respects, the Bush Administration makes Nixon look like a piker when it comes to free speech, as well as other civil liberties issues: Its electronic surveillance of American citizens has been done in utter defiance of the law.

Does the "war on terror" justify the Administration's incursions on civil liberties? Putting this Administration's actions in historical perspective suggests the answer is a resounding no....

We Can Be Heroes

2006-05-21T11:42:00.000-04:00

Saturday, May 20th, 2006 at 8:45 pm
Late Nite FDL: We Can Be Heroes
By Pachacutec
Firedoglake

...Ned Lamont’s victory last night was our collective victory in the netroots and grassroots. His is the first major campaign wholly conceived and developed through our movement....

If Past Is Prologue, George Bush Is Becoming An Increasingly Dangerous President

2006-05-15T07:48:00.000-04:00

If Past Is Prologue, George Bush Is Becoming An Increasingly Dangerous President
By JOHN W. DEAN
FINDLAW
----
Friday, Apr. 21, 2006

President George W. Bush's presidency is a disaster - one that's still unfolding. In a mid-2004 column, I argued that, at that point, Bush had already demonstrated that he possessed the least attractive and most troubling traits among those that political scientist James Dave Barber has cataloged in his study of Presidents' personality types.

Now, in early 2006, Bush has continued to sink lower in his public approval ratings, as the result of a series of events that have sapped the public of confidence in its President, and for which he is directly responsible. This Administration goes through scandals like a compulsive eater does candy bars; the wrapper is barely off one before we've moved on to another.

Currently, President Bush is busy reshuffling his staff to reinvigorate his presidency. But if Dr. Barber's work holds true for this president -- as it has for others - the hiring and firing of subordinates will not touch the core problems that have plagued Bush's tenure.

That is because the problems belong to the President - not his staff. And they are problems that go to character, not to strategy.

Barber's Analysis of Presidential Character

As I discussed in my prior column, Barber, after analyzing all the presidents through Bush's father, George H. W. Bush, found repeating patterns of common elements relating to character, worldview, style, approach to dealing with power, and expectations. Based on these findings, Barber concluded that presidents fell into clusters of characteristics.

He also found in this data Presidential work patterns which he described as "active" or "passive." For example, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were highly active; Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan were highly passive.

Barber further analyzed the emotional relationship of presidents toward their work - dividing them into presidents who found their work an emotionally satisfying experience, and thus "positive," and those who found the job emotionally taxing, and thus "negative." Franklin Roosevelt and Reagan, for example, were presidents who enjoyed their work; Thomas Jefferson and Richard Nixon had "negative" feeling toward it.

From these measurements, Barber developed four repeating categories into which he was able to place all presidents: those like FDR who actively pursued their work and had positive feelings about their efforts (active/positives); those like Nixon who actively pursued the job but had negative feelings about it (active/negatives); those like Reagan who were passive about the job but enjoyed it (passive/positives); and, finally, those who followed the pattern of Thomas Jefferson -- who both was passive and did not enjoy the work (passive/negatives)....

Labor and Netroots

2006-05-14T11:11:00.000-04:00

Labor and Netroots
By diogenes
Firedoglake

(Inspired by an AlterNet article on John Edwards and his support for labor unions as part of his anti-poverty strategy, reader diogenes was inspired to write the following piece which echoes what Markos and Jerome say in Crashing the Gate: there is an extremely important bridge that needs to be built between between the netroots and labor. They seem to be fighting may of the same foes — JH)

... CCD’s [Country Club Democratic (CCD) ‘leadership’] would rather eat their children than heed their membership. They dread us more than Republicans – they have more in common with Republicans. Unions are not going to listen to dues-paying members – the leadership has more in common with the CEO’s. CCD’s are counting on us to remember the Nader factor, hold our noses and vote for their guy – then on to business as usual on the cocktail weenie and corporate jet circuit. They are not going to accommodate us, or cede an inch.

We know Feingold gets this. Dean gets it. Edwards gets it, too. I can’t tell you how smart I think it is for Edwards to bypass the leadership, and address the roots. If you want to engage unions in the netroots, forget the hierarchy. Talk to local legislative and grievance committee members – they are already activists. They’ve already butted their heads against the corporate and union hierarchy, and are ready for alternatives. So are their members. These are the folks that do the dirty work of voter turn-out.

Hooking up net activists and union activists is a huge piece of the puzzle, and good on FDL for talking responsibility into their own hands, and making things happen. If we’re going to have a democracy, we’ve got to pitch in.

Bush Beats Out Nixon: Least Liked President Ever

2006-05-13T08:44:00.000-04:00

The most despised president in history
Posted on Saturday, May 13, 2006
Bush Beats Out Nixon: Least Liked President Ever
David Swanson
Smirking Chimp

This day has been long coming. The graphs have shown it would soon be upon us: Now, here we are. With this new Harris poll, available through the Wall Street Journal, President Bush claims the titlelong held by Richard Nixon: Least Liked President Ever (or at least since there have been polls). And this data comes to us from before USA Today reported on Bush's NSA secretly monitoring our phone records.

Bush's approval rating is now at 29%, and disapproval at an astonishing 71%. Well, it's astonishing that it took so long to get there. But it's also record-setting. The best Nixon could do was 66%. Nobody else comes close. Bush is breaking new ground.

Among Democrats, 10% approve of the job Bush is doing. But that's just those wacky Democrats (although a fair number of Republicans have switched parties during Bush's reign). Among Independents, support is surely much higher. Well, not really. It's actually at 19%.

It turns out that it's only Republicans holding Bush up at 29%. A whole 67% of Republicans approve of him. 67% -- When I was in school that was a D minus.....

We have to take action

2006-05-12T12:28:00.000-04:00

...We have to take action.

This is our moment. Our public servants are there to follow the will of the people. If the people want George Bush to stop breaking the law, then the people must, and can, make him stop.

So, here are some first suggestions to help citizens stand up to the Bush administration: Click here

Killing the CIA

2006-05-12T10:09:00.000-04:00

Killing the CIA

In Goss, Bush found the perfect hatchet man to take vengeance on a despised agency. Now Goss is gone, scandal looms -- and the CIA is ruined.

By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon

...After the brief interim appointment of CIA professional John McLaughlin, on Aug. 10, 2004, almost three years to the day after the Aug. 6 presidential daily briefing on bin Laden, Bush named Porter Goss the new director of central intelligence. The president was looking for someone to rid him of the troublesome agency. In Goss, he thought he had discovered the perfect man for the bloody job, but the nature of the task undid Goss, and in his unraveling another scandal unfolded.

In the absence of any reliable evidence, CIA analysts had refused to put their stamp of approval on the administration's reasons for the Iraq war. Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, personally came to Langley to intimidate analysts on several occasions. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his then deputy secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, constructed their own intelligence bureau, called the Office of Special Plans, to sidestep the CIA and shunt disinformation corroborating the administration's arguments directly to the White House. "The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made," Paul Pillar, then the chief Middle East analyst for the CIA, writes in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs. "The process did not involve intelligence work designed to find dangers not yet discovered or to inform decisions not yet made. Instead, it involved research to find evidence in support of a specific line of argument -- that Saddam was cooperating with al Qaeda -- which in turn was being used to justify a specific policy decision."

But despite urgent pressures to report to the contrary, the CIA never reported that Saddam presented an imminent national security threat to the United States, that he was near to developing nuclear weapons, or that he had any ties to al-Qaida. Moreover, analysts predicted a protracted insurgency after an invasion of Iraq. Tenet, despite the lack of cooperation from the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, acted as backslapper for the administration's policy.

The White House was in a fury. The CIA's professionalism was perceived as political warfare, and the agency apparently was seen as the center of a conspiracy to overthrow the administration.....

....The militarization of intelligence under Bush is likely to guarantee military solutions above other options. Uniformed officers trained to identity military threats and trends will take over economic and political intelligence for which they are untrained and often incapable, and their priorities will skew analysis. But the bias toward the military option will be one that the military in the end will dislike. It will find itself increasingly bearing the brunt of foreign policy and stretched beyond endurance. The vicious cycle leads to a downward spiral. And Hayden's story will be like a dull shadow of Powell's -- a tale of a "good soldier" who salutes, gets promoted, is used and abused, and is finally discarded.

No president has ever before ruined an agency at the heart of national security out of pique and vengeance. The manipulation of intelligence by political leadership demands ever tightened control. But political purges provide only temporary relief from the widening crisis of policy failure.

New Condominium Project Goes Solar

2006-05-12T09:49:00.000-04:00

May 10, 2006

Brockton, MA, USA: New Condominium Project Goes Solar
http://www.solarbuzz.com/News/NewsNAPR643.htm

A $6 million project is breaking ground this week in Brockton, Mass., and will be the first all-solar, new condominium construction project in New England, according to Johnson Square Builders, the developer. Each of the townhouses at Johnson Square Village will have its own designated PV (photovoltaic or solar) systems that will save residents nearly $600 a year on energy costs.

Johnson Square Village will comprise seven residential buildings for a total of 26 townhouses. Each unit will feature an 18-panel, 3.24 kilowatt (kW) solar array that will harness the sun's energy to power appliances, computers, TVs and other electronics. The PV systems are expected to generate 4,212 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, based on New England's climate.

According to Conservation Services Group (CSG), designer of the PV systems, solar output on each home will provide more than 60 percent of the home's electrical usage. Townhouses at Johnson Square Village will be priced starting at $214,900, which includes the entire cost for the PV system. The model home and the first building are scheduled for completion this July. The remainder of the project will be completed by early 2007.

Support for the Johnson Square Village project is provided by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MTC) and CSG. Last month, the MTC awarded Johnson Square Builders a $458,300 grant from the Renewable Energy Trust to help defray the cost of the panels and the installation.

According to Trust Director Warren Leon, "This project addresses two critical needs in the Commonwealth -- housing and energy -- by creating healthier new, affordable homes for families and generating clean electricity that produces no harmful emissions. Working with partners like the City of Brockton, CSG and Johnson Square, we hope to change the way homes, schools and businesses are built, so that green construction becomes the standard throughout Massachusetts."

CSG CEO Stephen Cowell said, "This project dispels the myth that solar is too expensive for most people to own. Through the MTC's grant, we are able to design a project that is affordable and will help residents cut energy costs. Most importantly, by purchasing a home at Johnson Square Village, residents will be supporting the PV industry in Massachusetts."

Brockton Mayor James Harrington is excited that his city is hosting the first new, 100 percent solar condo project in the region. He said, "Brockton, throughout its history, has always been at the forefront of innovation and discovery. We are thrilled that Johnson Square Village chose Brockton to bring forth such a noteworthy project that will once again elevate our great city into the pantheon of history."

Johnson Square Village will be ENERGY STAR®-rated, meeting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) guidelines for maximum energy efficiency.

The project will also be LEED®-certified. (LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design and is a program of the U.S. Green Building Council.) In addition to featuring solar energy, Johnson Square Village will have high efficiency heating systems with programmable controls and double paned low-e windows.

Another environmental feature of the project is a rain water containment system that will be used for irrigation. ENERGY STAR-qualified homes are at least 15 percent more energy efficient than a standard built home, but depending on the installed energy features, these homes can often save significantly more energy.

"Combined with the savings realized from generating solar energy, residents will be saving more than 50 percent on their energy costs every month," says John Livermore, ENERGY STAR Homes program manager at CSG.

Johnson Square Builders, LLC, is based in Brockton, Mass. CSG, of Westborough, Mass., administers the ENERGY STAR Homes new construction program and also trains builders, electricians and technicians on how to install and maintain PV systems.

The PV panels are manufactured by Evergreen Solar, Inc., of Marlborough, Mass. The homes at Johnson Square Village are listed through Premier Properties of Brockton and financed by the Community Bank of Brockton.

Parricide at the CIA?

2006-05-12T09:09:00.000-04:00

Parricide at the CIA?
By Mark Schmitt
TPM Cafe

...We all take it for granted that Bush’s feelings about his father had something to do with the compulsion to invade Iraq. It could have been the genuine loyalty of a loving son -- Bush supposedly said of Saddam, "he tried to kill my father," sufficient proof that Saddam was evil. Or it could be a lot more complicated, such as a desire to prove to his withholding father, after decades as the inadequate older son, that he could accomplish something, something that had eluded the father himself. Or perhaps to stick it to the father for his perceived loss of nerve in not finishing the job. It’s all fodder for the psychobiographer in every one of us.

But why wouldn’t a similar analysis apply equally, or moreso, to the CIA? The elder Bush was director of the CIA when W was in his late twenties, roughly the period when he had the legendary confrontation with his father over his drinking and general loser-ness, and challenged the father to fight him, "mano a mano." The CIA building is named after his father. And I believe there is some reason to think that the elder Bush’s connection to the Agency predates his appointment as director (without buying the LaRouchite theory that places Bush 41 on the grassy knoll in Dallas). The CIA is a presence in the Bush family life in much the way that Yale is, another institution toward which Bush 43 holds a weird hostility -- and, of course, those two institutions are themselves linked.

I don’t have a very specific theory here, but it seems natural to wonder whether this almost inexplicable hostility to the CIA as an institution has some deeper roots in Bush’s complex relationship to his father.

Now is the time for a left-right alliance

2006-05-11T08:39:00.000-04:00

Now is the time for a left-right alliance
May 10, 2006

A rebel alliance already exists that could stop Bush administration attacks on the Constitution

Thomas R. Eddlem
Antiwar.com

I'm currently a life member of the John Birch Society and formerly served on the staff of the organization for 13 years.

So why should any left-winger reading this care a fig about what I have to say?

Because of a conversation I had with another conservative magazine writer recently. In frustration at the unconstitutional excesses of the Bush administration, I blurted out to him: "The only people doing any good out there are the people at Air America." I expected to shock him with the statement, but his two-word reply shocked me: "And MoveOn.org."

We were both exaggerating for effect, but fact is, as my journalist friend continued, "We probably only disagree on, maybe, 25 percent of the issues." I'd have put the percentage a little higher, though I tacked an ending onto his sentence: "...and those issues aren't especially important right now."

When Air America started, I told myself and my friends that it would fail because it would be redundant. The Left already controls all the television networks besides Fox, along with most of the major newspapers. But here we are a year later, and the most penetrating news analysis on television is - and I'm not exaggerating here - Jon Stewart's Daily Show on Comedy Central....

Someone who needs help

2006-05-10T11:13:00.000-04:00

A Day in the Life

by jurassicpork

Mon May 08, 2006 at 09:03:17 PM PDT

....So, let's pick a particular, something and someone not so remote and untouchable, something or someone identifiable that touches on several abstract but still-salient issues. What we need is a synecdoche, a small particular that's representative of a larger whole.

Here's one: Let's review a day in the life of 71 year-old Lee Sevilla and her little dog Sandy.

Every morning at seven, she wakes up and walks her dog. Then she goes to the bathroom to groom herself. If it's a work day for the 71 year-old, she goes to work. If not, she'll drive to Playa and take in a million dollar ocean view. Later, she'll go to the local library and dabble on her laptop and make prints to order for $60 apiece. At night, she walks Sandy again before retiring for the night.

Sounds idyllic, no? If that fails to tug at your heart strings, then some context is called for. Now let's play tug-o-war with those heart strings:

Substitute the expected bed with a driver-side bucket seat of a Dodge Neon. You heard me right. She's been living in one car or another since the Clinton administration, eight years ago this Christmas Day, to be more exact, which was the day the son who'd been putting her up had committed suicide.

The bathroom she uses is one at a nearby Chevron gas station (she has to take sponge baths). Every Sunday, she goes to church then treats herself to a $45 a night motel room that affords her the only bed and bath she'll see all week.

Her job pays $10 an hour but only for sixteen hours a week. Between this, her Social Security check and her tiny print business, she still makes far less than she needs for even a modest apartment. "If I could figure out how to make another $500 a month, I think I'll be fine," she says. Look at the sentence again then remember her age. At 71, she's already nine years past the point where many women begin collecting their social security. Why should anyone in their seventies have to scratch for another $125 a week just to stay off the streets?

Even with a heart condition, she doesn't go to the doctor because she can't afford the Medicare co-pays. It stands to reason that her dog of ten years, perhaps named after Little Orphan Annie's dog, hasn't been to a vet in a while.....

...I don't know why this hadn't occured to me earlier. There are many bloggers, obviously, who are adept at setting up paypal accounts. So far, this blog posting has been seen (mainly thanks to Mike Finn at Crooks and Liars. Belated thank you to Mike.) by over 1000 people. Odds are it'll be seen by at least another thousand more. If just 125 of us would agree to have a dollar taken out of our bank accounts or if we can be trusted to mail a dollar a week in, that would be enough money to set up Lee Sevilla and her dog Sandy in a small apartment. Add to that an occasional print order and I imagine that would guarantee that she would eat well, too (with no kitchen in which to cook, I imagine that's she's eating out every night except when she makes spaghetti on her hot plate at the Motel 6 every Sunday). If any bloggers reading this know how to set up a paypal account that she can access (I'll write to Lee to see if she's amenable to the idea of me setting up an internet-based email account for her, like Yahoo, for instance), let me know so we can hammer out the details. Flowery prose and hand-wringing can't be deposited at the bank but money from a paypal account can. My email address is Crawman2@yahoo.com, if you haven't already seen it on my profile. Thank you whatever you decide to do. Anyone who wishes to buy prints and/or hand-drawn postcards from Lee can send a photo or other request to Lee Sevilla at P.O. Box 5484, Playa del Rey, CA 90296 (Read article for information on how to order/help.)

Bush & Nixon photo finish

2006-05-09T21:16:00.000-04:00

Jonathan Schwarz:
Bush & Nixon photo finish

Six months ago I graphed Bush and Nixon’s approval and disapproval ratings against each other. Then I did it again last week. I wasn’t planning to update it for a while—but the newest Gallup poll shows Bush’s approval rating dropping from 34 to 31%, and his disapproval rating rising from 63 to 65%.

While Bush’s approval rating is still a bit higher than Nixon’s at a comparable point, his disapproval rating now exceeds or equals that of Nixon’s in every Gallup poll except one. This sole exception is the final poll in July, 1974 just before Nixon left office, when Nixon’s disapproval rating was a single point higher at 66%.

What’s really remarkable is this is WITHOUT any congressional investigation of Bush’s misdeeds, plus an economy far better (as much as it sucks for many) than in summer 1974. So Bush really has nowhere to go but down. This one is going to make sporting history.

See Graphs

Why the anger?

2006-05-09T21:11:00.000-04:00

An Open Letter to Richard Cohen
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 09 May 2006

....Why the anger? Because that lesson didn't take, at least with this crowd. Why the anger? Because millions of people are staggered by the idea that, yes Virginia, we have to go through this again. We have to watch soldiers slaughter and be slaughtered for reasons that bear no markings of truth. We have to watch the reputation of this great nation be savaged. We have to watch as our leaders lie to us with their bare faces hanging out.

Why the anger? It can be summed up in one run-on sentence: We have lost two towers in New York, a part of the Pentagon, an important American city called New Orleans, our economic solvency, our global reputation, our moral authority, our children's future, we have lost tens of thousands of American soldiers to death and grievous injury, we must endure the Abramoffs and the Cunninghams and the Libbys and the whores and the bribes and the utter corruption, we must contemplate the staggering depth of the hole we have been hurled down into, and we expect little to no help from the mainstream DC press, whose lazy go-along-to-get-along cocktail-circuit mentality allowed so much of this to happen because they failed comprehensively to do their job.

George W. Bush and his pals used September 11th against the American people, used perhaps the most horrific day in our collective history, deliberately and with intent, to foster a war of choice that has killed untold tens of thousands of human beings and basically bankrupted our country. They lied about the threat posed by Iraq. They destroyed the career of a CIA agent who was tasked to keep an eye on Iran's nuclear ambitions, and did so to exact petty political revenge against a critic. They tortured people, and spied on American civilians.

You cannot fathom anger arising from this?...

Orphans of the Storm

2006-05-09T08:23:00.000-04:00

Orphans of the Storm
By IRWIN REDLENER
New York Times
Published: May 9, 2006

IF you thought that the government's response to last year's Hurricane Katrina was a shocking display of mismanagement and incompetence, you should see what's happening to the displaced children of families now trapped in FEMA's trailer parks and other shelters.

Brian Cronin

Hurricane Katrina and the floods that followed destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes, forcing out more than one million people. Some families have found housing and jobs in communities that could accommodate the influx, but a far bleaker reality faces the rest.

FEMA has not released exact numbers, but school officials estimate that displaced children from Louisiana alone number more than 125,000. Most of their families were living in poverty before the hurricane. Now they subsist in tiny trailers, hastily assembled by the government in remote fields with few dependable services, little access to community resources and no sense of when they will be able to return to some version of normal life.

Several recent studies, including one by Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health and the Children's Health Fund, reveal that unmet health care needs among these displaced families are far worse than any of us imagined.

One in three children in FEMA-subsidized shelters has at least one chronic illness like asthma requiring medical care. Half of the children who had access to medical care before the storm no longer do. And although nearly half the parents in the shelters report that their children exhibit symptoms of emotional or behavioral disorders, the evaluation and treatment they urgently need is almost impossible to secure.

Health isn't the only problem for those languishing in FEMA shelters. Nearly one in four school-age children is either not enrolled in school or misses 10 days of class every month. Many who do attend school in their temporary host communities find the classrooms overcrowded, the staff exhausted and stress levels unbearably high.

Thanks to the hard work of local officials and Congressional delegations from the affected states, billions of dollars will be available to repair levees, rebuild communities and re-establish the economy of the Gulf Coast. But this will take years, far too long for the children who are now suffering and waiting in FEMA's shelters. They urgently require an emergency relief package that directly addresses their most pressing health care needs.

For $100 million — a small fraction of the billions allocated for reconstruction — the government could support a force of at least 200 pediatricians and family doctors, 100 specially trained mental health workers, 25 mobile medical units and a much strengthened school-based health care network throughout the gulf region. It could also put vital health care information in a computer database and set up virtual access to medical centers for children who can't get to specialists' offices.

We are watching the worst children's health crisis in modern American history unfold in the gulf area. After the trauma of Hurricane Katrina, this secondary disaster — again under the auspices of the United States Department of Homeland Security — may have far more serious consequences. Thousands of children are now seemingly abandoned by a federal government still unable to function effectively when it counts the most.

Irwin Redlener is the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia and the president of the Children's Health Fund.

The Worst President in History?

2006-05-07T21:55:00.000-04:00

The Worst President in History?
SEAN WILENTZ
Posted Apr 21, 2006 12:34 PM
Rolling Stone

One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush
Flashback: Bush in '99 -- We Warned You!

George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty -- and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.

Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure."....

Gas Ache

2006-05-07T08:52:00.000-04:00

Gas Ache
America needs an Apollo-scale program to shift to renewable energy and more efficient vehicles.

By Robert Kuttner
Web Exclusive: 05.01.06
The American Prospect
America needs an Apollo-scale program to shift to renewable energy and more efficient vehicles. Politicians of both parties, particularly Republicans, are scrambling to deal with the voter pain of $3-a-gallon gasoline. President Bush wants a $100 tax rebate to help consumers pay for more costly fuel and more tax credits for people who buy (mostly Japanese-made) hybrid cars. He has revived the recurring Republican idea of drilling in Alaska's wilderness. He proposes to suspend federal purchases for the national petroleum reserve. ''Every little bit helps," Bush said, rather pitifully. Next, he'll be wearing Jimmy Carter's sweaters.

Democrats' ideas include the proposal by Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey to suspend temporarily the (industrial world's lowest) federal gas tax of 18.4 cents a gallon to be offset by an excess-profits tax on oil companies, a federal investigation of price gouging, and demands that Bush ''jawbone" his chums at the oil companies and in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon wants oil companies to start paying long-avoided royalties for petroleum drilled on federal lands.

The oil companies, meanwhile, are practicing damage control. Their full-page newspaper ads show (accurately) that oil profits as a percent of sales are modest. But wait a minute: the higher the retail price, the higher the profit -- and the percentage stays the same. They could make the same claim if gas went to $10 a gallon. Their profits relative to invested capital are off the charts. ExxonMobil just released its first-quarter profits: more than $8 billion -- its highest ever. ExxonMobil CEO Lee R. Raymond, who recently retired, was paid $400 million last year.

The oil companies argue that the main culprit is temporary bottlenecks in refining capacity (caused in part by those pesty environmental regulations) and that their astronomical profits are necessary because much of their boodle gets plowed back into oil exploration. But that's exactly the problem. The political and financial dominance of the oil industry, and the related premise that we mainly need more drilling, just reinforces the national illusion that we can keep running our economy on fossil fuels.....

Ridicule and Contempt

2006-05-06T09:06:00.000-04:00

Ridicule and Contempt
By Sidney Blumenthal
The Guardian UK

Thursday 04 May 2006
An imperial president is smothering the system of checks and balances, imperiling free speech.

The most scathing public critique of the Bush presidency and the complicity of a craven press corps was delivered at the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner on Saturday by a comedian. Bush was reported afterwards to be seething, while the press corps responded with stone-cold silence. In many of their reports of the event they airbrushed out the joker.

Stephen Colbert performed within 10 yards of Bush's hostile stare and before 2,600 members of the press and their guests. After his mock praise of Bush as a rock against reality, Colbert censured the press by flattering its misfeasance. "Over the last five years you people were so good - over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out ... Here's how it works: the president makes decisions ... The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spellcheck and go home ... Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!".

The day after Colbert's performance, the New York Times published a front-page story on the latest phase of the administration's war on the press. Bush is weighing "the criminal prosecution of reporters under the espionage laws". Since the Washington Post exposed the existence of CIA "black site" prisons holding detainees without due process of law and the New York Times disclosed the president's order to the National Security Agency to engage in domestic surveillance without legal court warrants, the administration has applied new draconian methods to clamp down.

"Has the New York Times violated the Espionage Act?" asks an article in the neoconservative journal Commentary by Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior editor, that lays out the case for prosecution. When the Post and Times won Pulitzer prizes for their stories, William Bennett, a former Republican cabinet secretary and now a commentator on CNN, said: "What they did is worthy of jail."

At Bush's orders dragnets are being conducted throughout the national security bureaucracy in search of press sources. And the FBI subpoenaed four decades of files accumulated by recently deceased investigative journalist Jack Anderson in an attempt to exhume old classified material.

Bush takes a different attitude on his own leaking of secrets. Dozens of National Security Council documents were leaked to journalist Bob Woodward for his 2002 encomium, Bush At War. Vice-President Cheney and his staff leaked disinformation to reporters to make the case that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD. And Bush and Cheney authorised Cheney's then chief of staff Lewis Libby to leak portions of the national intelligence estimate on Iraq's WMD to sympathetic reporters in an effort to discredit a critic, former ambassador Joseph Wilson.

In January, two officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (the so-called Israel Lobby) were indicted for receiving classified material from a Pentagon official who was imprisoned. The Aipac officials are being prosecuted as if they were reporters receiving leaks; if convicted under the 1917 Espionage Act, the precedent would be ominous.

Some in the press understand the peril posed to the first amendment by an imperial president trying to smother the system of checks and balances. For those of the Washington press corps who shunned a court jester for his irreverence, status is more urgent than the danger to liberty. But it's no laughing matter.

--------

Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of The Clinton Wars.

The Central Political Issue of Our Time

2006-05-04T11:12:00.000-04:00

The Central Political Issue of Our Time

by Seneca

Wed May 03, 2006 at 02:42:22 PM PDT

I start from the precept that the universe is an organic whole in which all individuals have a part to play. Justice, duty, and virtue are determined by the part we play in the cosmic totality. The essence of being human is to be rational and social -- we must think and act and at the same time be responsible and accountable for what we think and do.

As a people, Americans have been woefully short on both counts for many years. H.L. Mencken once said: "The typical American of today has lost all the love of liberty that his forefathers had, and all their disgust of emotion, and pride in self-reliance. He is led no longer by Davy Crocketts; he is led by cheer leaders, press agents, word-mongers, uplifters. ... the only way to success in American public life is in flattering and kowtowing to the mob."

But that's only part of the problem.
Seneca's diary :: ::

Tom Frank has the essence of what I want to say in his book "What's the Matter With Kansas": the terminal stupidity of the Democrats is largely to blame for the "backlash" that puts those whose economic status should make them vote Demoratic vote Republican instead. All this is due to the Democrats' abandonment of the groups and of the fundamental issue of economic justice that comprised their coalition of voters and their agenda of ideas through the post-WW II era. They have sold out and simply become Republican "light," conceding the economic ground.

Not until Democrats return to an earlier view, one articulated by a Republican president, will they begin to lead. Democrats need to look back at Theodore Roosevelt, who said: "The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means."

From this much follows. The central issue in politics is and ought to be seen as where to draw the line here -- how much of the public's burden is fairly carried by the rich now?

But Democrats appear merely to have bought into the Republican game of hiding in plain sight using culture wars and social issues to mask the real political issues of our times, which IMHO are fundamentally economic in nature: energy policy, health care, jobs, pensions, trade policy and this country's crumbling sanitation and transportation infrastructure -- and all of this flowing from the continuing laissez faire looting of the country, the growing divide between haves too much and haves not enough.

The problem at the center of all this is the headlong fall into laissez faire capitalism, which we escaped from with great pain in the post-Civil War era. Learning nothing from our own history, we are doomed to repeat a lot of it....

Comparing Bush to Hitler

2006-05-04T08:36:00.000-04:00

Comparing Bush to Hitler
By DOUG THOMPSON
May 4, 2006, 06:56
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Compare George W. Bush to Adolph Hitler and you piss off some people, inflame others who either agree or disagree, and start a debate over when criticism of a public official goes too far.

"You go too far with the Hitler comparison," reads a typical email from one of the Republican lemmings who still think Bush has some redeeming qualities. "It's unfair."

Perhaps, but unfair to whom? I'm not sure it's possible to be unfair to Bush, the man who promised "the most ethical administration in history" but delivered, instead, the most corrupt, scandal-ridden, dishonest government I've seen in 40 years of writing about, or working in, politics.

Perhaps it is unfair to Hitler. Adolph was, after all, a powerful public speaker with an incredible command of his native language. Dubya is a pathetic speaker who has trouble stringing enough words together to form a simple declarative sentence.

Yet such comparisons become more and more evident. Hitler rode roughshod over the laws of his country, ignored civil liberties, called those who opposed him "unpatriotic," and created a powerful secret police that spied on citizens of Germany.

Sound familiar? It should. Bush routinely ignores the laws of the land, tramples on civil liberties, calls those who oppose him "unpatriotic," and has created the powerful, secretive Department of Homeland Security to spy on citizens of his country....

John Sweeney Paid Wife on Commission for Fundraising

2006-05-03T16:38:00.000-04:00

John Sweeney Paid Wife on Commission for Fundraising
By Paul Kiel - March 22, 2006, 2:00 PM
TPM Mukerraker

Rep. John Sweeney (R-NY), like Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA), paid his wife on commission for campaign fundraising, a highly unusual arrangement that means that the Sweeneys benefitted personally from every contribution. Ethics experts we spoke to earlier this week about Doolittle's wife said that they'd never heard of a similar arrangement. Well, we found one. And it might explain why the Justice Department recently examined Sweeney's financial records.

Like Doolittle's wife, Sweeney's wife Gayle Ford had no known prior fundraising experience before working for her husband's campaign. Her rate, 10 percent, was more modest than Julie Doolittle's 15 percent, but her company Creative Consulting has made a substantial income since 2003 from Sweeney: $49,209 in fees variously described as "fundraising" or "consulting" on FEC reports.

Details of the Sweeneys' arrangement come from a piece last year in Albany's Times Union. Sweeney's spokesperson Melissa Carlson confirmed those details and told us that there was nothing remarkable about his wife's work, saying that a number of members of Congress have family members on their payroll. She also said that the 10 percent fee was standard for what people in the business make, and that Sweeney's wife "knows the people in the community in our district" and only does fundraising there - they have another fundraiser who works in D.C.

It's true that a number of Members have family on the payroll, but this is the only example that we could find, besides Doolittle, of a family member being paid on commission.

There is another respect in which the Sweeneys resemble the Doolittles. Doolittle has refused to disclose Julie Doolittle's other clients, but the ones we know about are Jack Abramoff and Ed Buckham, two lobbyists. And Gayle Ford's only other work was for Powers, Crane, & Co., a lobbying firm. Also known as PCC Consulting, the Albany-based firm represents a number of clients lobbying the federal government. How much Ford earned from that work isn't disclosed in House records.

Last year, two aides from the Justice Department pulled the financial disclosure records of Rep. John Sweeney, along with those of a number of other lawmakers and aides. The others made sense as possible subjects of interest in the Abramoff investigation, but Sweeney didn't. What was the Justice Department investigating? We couldn't figure it out.

Carlson had no explanation for why the Justice Department might be examining Sweeney's records, only saying that "they are public records, anybody's free to examine them" and that "many people do look at them."

Now, are we sure that this is why the Justice Department is looking at Sweeney? No. But it's been repeatedly reported that lawmaker's arrangements with their wives interest investigators, as with Tom DeLay's wife Christine, who worked for DeLay and for Buckham.

And certainly this is a stronger explanation than idle curiosity.

Dollar Starts the Big Slide Against Major Currencies

2006-05-02T12:27:00.000-04:00

Dollar Starts the Big Slide Against Major Currencies
By David Smith
The Sunday Times UK

Sunday 30 April 2006

The dollar has embarked on a big decline that will see it fall against all leading currencies, according to analysts.

The plunge is being prompted by America's $800 billion (£438 billion) current-account deficit, they say.

The dollar has been under pressure following last weekend's meeting of G7 finance ministers and central bankers, which emphasised "global imbalances" and said currencies should reflect economic fundamentals. Then China raised its key interest rate to 5.85%, its first hike for months, and Ben Bernanke, the new Federal Reserve chairman, hinted that American rates would pause at 5% after a rise in May.

Analysts say that without interest-rate support, the dollar will be weighed down heavily by America's imbalances.

"I think this is it," said Tony Norfield, global head of currency strategy at ABN Amro. "The dollar has been supported by high yields but markets are saying that is no longer enough. The question for policymakers is going to be how to manage the dollar's decline. It won't be a one-way street but the fall is likely to be biggest against Asian currencies."

The euro has already risen to an 11-month high of more than $1.26, while the dollar is at a three-month low of 113.70 against the yen. The Canadian dollar, known by traders as the "loonie", rose to a 28-year high on Friday, boosted by a hike in Canadian interest rates.....

A rogue president

2006-04-30T11:05:00.000-04:00

A rogue president: Bush has claimed authority to disobey over 750 laws since taking office
Posted on Sunday, April 30, 2006.
President cites powers of his office

Charlie Savage, The Boston Globe

WASHINGTON -- President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, "whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.

Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush's assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty "to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to "execute" a law he believes is unconstitutional.

Former administration officials contend that just because Bush reserves the right to disobey a law does not mean he is not enforcing it: In many cases, he is simply asserting his belief that a certain requirement encroaches on presidential power.

But with the disclosure of Bush's domestic spying program, in which he ignored a law requiring warrants to tap the phones of Americans, many legal specialists say Bush is hardly reluctant to bypass laws he believes he has the constitutional authority to override....